Fairness in RPG gameplay

[Wolf Kanno]

I've never once said that death or game over should be taboo in games. Not sure why you make that assumption . On the contrary, I think the possibility of death should most of the time be present, and I think that death should be punished in a way that makes you really want to not die, to the point where you won't hesitate for very long before using some of your rarest and most valuable items to avoid death, if possible.

You misunderstand me, I never directed that statement at you specifically, I meant it in general as I often meet RPG fans who are honestly there only for the plot and could care less about the gameplay. I should have been clearer. Other than that, I actually agree with your sentiments about death in an RPG be more significant.

The main difference between us seems to be in what manner this death or game over should happen. You think randomly with no warning or subtle clues is fine, I don't.

I don't mind subtle clues if they were actually subtle. Most game designers tell the player the clue as if trying to explain it to a four year old. I mean a good first third of the bosses in FFX have the game explaining to you how to beat them in the most blatant way possible. Even the first boss battles in VI and VII has the game directly telling you that the boss has a pattern and powerful counterattack instead of just letting you figure it out yourself that attacking the shell or while the tail is up is a very bad thing. Go back to a game like FFIV where many bosses actually do have powerful counter moves and not one word of any help about it. Instead the player had to figure out about getting around it.

And it is true that the rarity of useful status debuffs makes people not even consider the possibility of it being useful. I'm currently playing FFX2, and every single encounter with a reasonably large HP pool I've met so far have been immune to demi, even the monster families that were susceptible to Demi in FFX. What this does to people is to reinforce certain patterns in our heads. Repeatedly using spells that do nothing but waste turns is not something that make you more likely to win encounters. In time, after not using a certain spell for perhaps 80 hours, you simply forget that they exist, and start boosting other parameters that *always* give the desired effect, such as strength or magic power. There are no monsters (at least in FFX-2) that are resistant to both physical and magical attacks, so the efficient player focuses on these stats to progress at the rate they desire, instead of focusing on game mechanics that only work once or twice in the entire game, and aren't sufficiently much more powerful the few times they are useful to be worth even spending mental power on remembering that they exist.

What makes it even dumber is that by making gravity an element, you can easily make bosses stronger or weaker to it to not make it overpowered and dealing 20 times the normal attack damage, yet no one does this. It's all just another side effect of a stupid one-bit resistance system. however, even a 2-bit resistance system (four values, absorb, nul, halve, normal) is a bit too little for my tastes. A 300 point scale (-100% to +200% damage) such as used in FF8 makes for a lot greater fine tuning of resistances, both for bosses and for characters. Bosses could be made to take 1% gravity damage, and that could still end up being 50% more of what a normal attack does at that point in the game.

While I agree that changes should be made to make all roles relevant, I feel your solution sounds awfully complicated from a game design standpoint and involves more math than I would care to utilize in my games. I kind of prefer the 2-bit system overall, once you go into MMO style Percentage bases, I quickly lose interest. Course I don't particularly care for the debuff/buff roles in games but I've never been much of a team player either.

I have no real issue with fairness in RPGs or games in general but I come from the world view that life is not fair, so why should games be?

This makes no sense. Games are created by a person, and that person creates his own world with it's own rules. Games can be fair for that very reason as it is separate from real life. The impossible made possible.

Now let's introduce the word fun. Unfair games tend to be not fun. Fair games do. Also mind the difference between unfair and challenging. Gameplay can be unfair and therefor challenging, but it probably isn't much fun. Gameplay can also be fair and challenging, and that is what I consider potentially fun.

Yet why should it be bad that they choose to make an unfair game as well? You are trying to place a personal value judgment on someone's choice which is not in line with your own. I grew up playing arcade games, I am used to brutally hard games designed to steal my money and cheating A.I. but I also get immense satisfaction getting good enough to win and I do find that fun.

Fun is something different for everyone and not everyone cares or notices if the game is stacking the odds in its favor. Of anything, trying to reverse some of the cheap difficulty of the older RPGs has caused the genre to shift 180 degrees in the other direction, with games mitigating death and challenge to pathetic levels.

Demon's Souls/Dark Souls itself is only difficult because it works on Arcade rules of trial-and error gameplay with some customization 101 elements for flavor. I'd still argue some deaths in the game are cheap the first time around but each death is a learning experience and after awhile it just becomes the natural order of things and you stop seeing it that way.

The issue here is how are we even defining unfair? If it's just RNG then even I can agree it is cheap difficulty but withholding information is not in my book since most bosses or enemies don't exactly forward their move-set to you. Even in the Souls series, it is not like the first time you deal with a boss you are going to know they are only weak to magic, or one of their moves is too fast to dodge or too strong to block without proper stats and gear. So even those first deaths that teach you that information can be considered cheap if we're being technical about this. Even super bosses in RPGs tend to work on the principles of being overpowered but absolutely predictable but the only way you will ever know this is either consulting a guide or trial-and-error gameplay and I often find that too many people consider trial and error gameplay to be cheap and terrible difficulty when it really isn't. A bit unfair at times, yes, but it is up to the player whether you are going to just give up cause you feel the game is unfair or simply persevere and see it as a learning experience, which is what it is.

Trying to make a RPGs fair is a balancing act and the real issue here is that most people can't agree on the actual challenge level and what constitutes as fair and unfair and then trying to make it accessible without just letting the game telegraph to the player how to win. It isn't helped by the fact the genre itself sort of was designed from the beginning to be difficult by blindsiding the players, dating all the way back to the days of D&D.

[black orb]

While Dark Souls is pretty fair overall

>>> Which part of Dark Souls was exactly fair?
The part where you get raped by multiple reaper ghosts that appear from nowhere, or the part where you get stomped by giant demons in a lake of magma, or maybe the pitch black cavern filled with giant skeletons from hell?..

[Mirage]

I kind of prefer the 2-bit system overall, once you go into MMO style Percentage bases, I quickly lose interest.

That's where my interest begins to peak.

I don't really think what I suggested is very complicated. It's pretty straightforward if you ask me! Maybe I just like maths. I might be a bit of a number cruncher.

[Wolf Kanno]

Math was my weakest subject in school.

[Jibril]

there are 4 rules to death in games

death to rng is bad
death causing excess progress loss is bad
death to unknowable variables is bad (e.g. dark souls 2: open that one door in iron keep and you're dead)
death as a means to teach game mechanics is good as long as it adheres to the previous 3 rules

the dark souls example is that after the first few areas, you should know how to manage stamina, roll, parry, backstab and space properly. at that point you have all the tools you need to beat the game. the rest is learning what enemies and bosses do so that you know how and when to utilize your tools, which will probably result in many deaths, but dark souls (1) goes out of its way to trivialize the ramifications of death and make it part of the game. bonfire to bonfire is a megaman level.

in a sense, dark souls is more fair than most other games because it gives the enemy a similar set of tools to the player, which means they can punish you very harshly for mistakes the same way you can punish them. the only "unfair" advantage they have over you is sheer numbers, but that's honestly easy to work around if you play carefully.

it doesn't always succeed in maintaining that balance of fairness (see bed of chaos, the dragon bridge) but it gets closer than most games.

[VeloZer0]

I also want to throw out another point about trial-and-error death mechanics. They should be largely consistent through the game. If the game is about lots of trial and error I don't get upset about seeing the game over screen, it's part of the challenge of the game. The problem is that when there are just a few circumstances of trial and error interspersed with a more laid back main game.

It really breaks things up when I'm making my way through a game and all of a sudden I get owned by an unforeseen difficulty spike.

[Spooniest]

I'm fighting this boss in a tower in FFVI. The battle is long, magic only, and I fight for survival. Finally I deplete the boss' HP and I celebrate my victory. Until I find out the hard way this boss is programmed to cast Ultima upon defeat. I ask myself; how is this a fair fight?

The thing about JRPGs are that they're hard unless you know what you're doing. If you already know how to beat the bosses, they're a cakewalk, and you can complete a game at a much lower level than normal, but if you're not schooled on various boss strategies, you'll be pummeled mercilessly.

Did you know that Mog's "Specter" dance step can cause KatanaSoul to kill itself? I didn't! I used to slug it out with that guy every time.

[Mercen-X]

It really breaks things up when I'm making my way through a game and all of a sudden I get owned by an unforeseen difficulty spike.

That's a good point.

It's like playing a game like, I don't know, Jak and Daxter wherein all of the gameplay is pretty much the same and then, for some reason, just to be random, they toss a situation that requires quick reflexes, precision timing, dexterity and aim... when through out the whole game you needed none of these things thus you haven't learned them. I don't know, I can't think of the game, I know I've played one like that though.

Anyway, addressing status ailments: I don't think KO/Stone should be an accessible spell. Enemies spam these spells just as much as a player might but the game would be broken if the player did the same. Someone pointed out that the game would be easy if you could spam a death spell until it stuck and if for some reason you died instead, you could just reload your last save and try again. But, well, that pretty much applies to any boss battle. You think it would be any less aggravating to sit there for twelve hours mashing the x button casting death spells that never take hold and resetting the game every time you die until the death spell finally works..? What idiot would waste so much of their life doing such a thing? Another option could be that the "massive" experience you would normally gain from a boss battle would become 0 if you used a death spell to win. But I'm way off my original point.

I don't mind the idea of bosses being immune to certain skills, be they debuffs, magic/summons, or physical attacks (or special attacks) as long as there is a story explanation for it. Not every boss needs an explanation. If you're fighting a boss based on a god (Thor/Jupiter/Zeus/Raiden/Indra what-have-you) or near-to, obviously you'd expect them to have otherworldly immunities. But characters that are pretty much just normally encountered creatures in-game that happen to be on some kind of muscle-juice..? Yeah, being bigger doesn't magically make you immune to everything. You're going to have give me a smaller pill to swallow. Tell me Captain Haggar has a magical coin which has cursed him with immortality but makes him a brittle skeleton. Translate as Immune to DEATH, can be shattered to dust by physical attacks. Tell me that Brynhildr has a magic ring that bestows her a perfect shield to protect her from magic spells. I don't care if you tell me about it after the battle, as long as you tell me why they had to be such a pain in the ass.

[CAST VOX]

Also I think bosses/enemies in RPG's have a lot missed potential in the way they hardly use status effects on the player. Child of Light was one of the first I have played where enemies really used debuffs/buffs to their advantage and I had some really challenging battles because of this.

Pfft, get real. It's all about dat Scarmiglione, Sunbro. XD
Song of Curse wrecked my trout the first time I fought him. Imagine fighting him without a healer.

Honestly, I prefer where the boss is unique as opposed to being super-powerful.
Bosses like Cagnazzo, Gogo, and the Octomammoth top Sephiroth any day of the week. It's really neat when the boss will change depending on how you attack them, or change up their strategy and force you to change your strategy.

The Death spell is something of a holdover from FF's D&D roots. It's useful when up against non-bosses that are resistant to physical attacks; it's faster than buffing and debuffing, and more MP efficient than spamming their weakness.
My favorite spell is Scourge. What's that? A screen full of annoying yet non-threatening monsters? smurf that noise, just cast Scourge. Instant mass death.

[Mercen-X]

Yes. I liked Lost Number on Final Fantasy VII and Carry Armor. Lost Number made either physical attacks or magic pretty much useless depending on the last thing you used before he changed. Carry Armor would hold one or two of your party members hostage, causing damage to them and forcing you to focus on his main body rather than striking his arms because you would hurt them too. Though, obviously, if they're hostages, they're not of much use anymore so you might as well attack the arms until they're destroyed and get the party member back. Then, if they're down, you can just revive them. I also liked the Final Fantasy XII version of Demon Wall constantly pressing in on you, forcing you to fight while contending with a time limit.

[LozKing]

I think developers get a certain satisfaction in dotting their game with unfairness and randomness. It certainly makes a game more interesting on your first playthrough. Although just silly on your second.