Hard RPG combat

[someone else]

Picture this:
The hero is facing a opponent of equal stats.
Both have 10HP, with 50% chance of each winning initiative.
They can attack with a 80% chance to-hit and can do 5-10 points of damage each.
If the hero dies, he will have to reload, if the hero wins, he can save game and fight the next 200 battles exactly like this.
There is nothing the player can do to influence the combat, except drink a potion that heals 5HP.

Is this fun? Challenging?

Or ?

 

[Excommunicator]

Challenging by the conventional definition, but in reality just tedious and boring. Not fun. Like Dragon Age.

 

[Jocund]

I wouldn't call that challenging. Like Excommunicator, I'd call it tedious.

Challenging combat should award attention to detail, strategy, and thinking, and punish the player if they try to mindlessly plow through. What you've described is mindless and up to chance, with the player having essentially no influence on the outcome.

 

[RK47]

I agree, now you know why not many people can stomach Lionheart.

 

[Baron]

Shitheads forget the greatest games in the 80s were tedious and boring as fuck. Pong, Pacman, Invaders. Don't be attacking the progenitor games for not being up to your fuckin' high falutin' 21st century popamole standards. In 1983 Wizardry I was the shit.

 

[ever]

Absurdly, I can't think of a single computer role playing game ( no hybrids ) I have played where the combat does not devolve to this at any point. In fact, in many of them the combat is like this all the time - even some role playing game codex "tactical" combat favorites like Knights of the Challice" or the Goldbox games.

This is because once you have the optimal strategy for the encounter, and it still doesn't work, then it's just a matter of saving and reloading till it does.

On the other hand in real time strategy games there is *emergent gameplay*, and in these games it never comes down to this - there is no optimal strategy.

Similarly in the squad level combat category an encounter lasts for long enough and is on a large enough grid for this to never be a problem.

In action role playing games Diablo I and II, this isn't a problem either, although you'd think it would be.

So, to put it simply, without emergent gameplay ( all role playing games played on a small grid in turns, where the outcome can be decided in the first three or four turns, necessarily lack emergent gameplay ) the player eventually finds and optimal set of things to do, usually he will have won the combat before finding the optimal solution. If however it so happens that the optimal solution is not working he has two choices: grind or save and reload till the dice rolls go his way.

 

[I.C. Wiener]

There is nothing the player can do to influence the combat, except drink a potion that heals 5HP.

Very . Video games are supposed to be interactive. There is no fun or challenge in only being able to drink a potion, that would be incredibly boring at best.

Shitheads forget the greatest games in the 80s were tedious and boring as fuck. Pong, Pacman, Invaders. Don't be attacking the progenitor games for not being up to your fuckin' high falutin' 21st century popamole standards. In 1983 Wizardry I was the shit.

They were tedious and boring (in someone else's opinion) for different reasons. In this example the game plays the important parts by itself. In Pong, every important element of the game is under the player's control. This example is basically a series of coin flips.

 

[Charles-cgr]

I suppose it can be true of recurrent one on one battles but in party based games with group encounters the optimal strategy has to be determined against a wide variety of alternatives. Which monster do you attack first? Which ones do you immobilize and how? What special attributes do your party members have and how resistant is each enemy to those spells / skills /specials?

Repeat with each encounter that opposes you to different enemy party constitutions. That's potentially a lot of strategy to consider.

Not exactly the same as a mindless clickfest with one to three buttons to choose from.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Hard rpg combat is shit because it distracts me from my immershun, my story and my c&c.

 

[JarlFrank]

The OP reminds me mostly of jRPG combat and the reason why I hate it: you have too few options in combat and in the end it becomes tedious and boring.

While in most dungeon crawlers the player has enough options to not have it all come down to pure luck. You can cast heal, mass heal, curse, bless, many other kinds of buffs and debuffs, offensive spells, group spells, immobilizing spells, etc etc. In some games you might even be able to pick different types of melee attacks.

Yes, luck is a factor, but tactics and clever use of available resources is usually more important and will win or lose the combat for you.

 

[Falkner]

What? You can do all those things in most jRPGs.

 

[PorkaMorka]

This is part of why blobbers and JRPGs are such bad genres.

RPGs are a variant of wargames and as such they really only work as games when there is ample room for the player's tactics and/or strategy to determine victory. And no, use Fire on the Ice monster doesn't cut it.

If they're purely an exercise of stat vs stat then there isn't much you can do if the opponents get too powerful, except grind or quickload spam and hope to get lucky. And if (as is more likely) the opponents get too easy they'll turn into an exercise in thoughtless menu clicking. Basing victory primarily on stats and luck doesn't make for a particularly enjoyable long term experience unless the devs are really good at tuning opponent stats.

Of course you can implement room for tactics and/or strategy in blobber and JRPG style combat, but it's a lot harder as the entire element of positioning is usually eliminated. That's a big hurdle to overcome.

Hard RPG combat is the only worthwhile RPG combat though... if the combat is easy and your decisions don't matter, think about what you're doing; picking options from a menu and then watching animations. If it doesn't matter which menu option you picked then you're barely playing a game at all anymore.

P.S. Action RPGs don't count they're not RPGs

 

[Destroid]

The fight with the mother deathclaw in FO1 could be a bit like this because it was very easy to get there before your character was really ready. Of course, the sensible thing you should do is wander off and get some more xp or better gear and come back later.

 

[Zomg]

The typical squad tactics RPG is a squad tactics strategy game that has been ruined by RPG mechanics and tropes. They add nothing. Deal with the fact that you only like RPG mechanics because you like autistic grinding.

 

[PorkaMorka]

The typical squad tactics RPG is a squad tactics strategy game that has been ruined by RPG mechanics and tropes. They add nothing. Deal with the fact that you only like RPG mechanics because you like autistic grinding.

Exploration and adventure elements, (slightly) increased emphasis on story and characters, increased emphasis on pre-built scenarios linked to the narrative (as opposed to randomly generated ones), greater detail in building, customizing and equipping your dudes...

There is a lot to be gained from switching your squad tactics game into the RPG sub genre, it's not our fault the Devs tended to botch it much of the time.

For example, there is a reasonable case to be made that part of the reason JA2 was even better than X-com was because of the increased RPG elements. And considering how good X-com was that's an achievement.

 

[Azrael the cat]

That was never how the old 'hard combat' crpgs worked.

In Wizardry - the epitime of those games, the difficulty came from logistics and party design, eg:
- Decisions about when to multiclass, such that the rest of the party has to 'carry' temporarily underpowered characters for a while in order to reap long-term benefits.
- Getting the right mixture of spells and gear to minimise and control risks against various kinds of spells, traps and insta-kill abilities.
- Working out how far you can push into the dungeon on your current crawl, while still leaving yourself enough spells/hp/resources to make it back out to recuperate.
- managing to map out the dungeon despite the devious tricks in your way, eg teleports to rooms that look identical from where you're standing, trapdoors to lower and more dangerous floors, one-way stairs, mirror rooms where moving north takes you south, squares that rotate 90 degrees with no visual que to tell you what happened (you find out something like that must have happened when your map fails to add up). And that tied back into logistics - get yourself lost exploring a level, and suddenly you're going to be in serious danger of running out of spells/hp/healing/resources before you can find your way back out.

It was never ever about trading blows. The percentage element was also always about controlling the odds - knowing that there'd be 'x' odds of fire, 'x' odds of opponents with insta-death skills, 'x' odds of encountering monsters that can summon etc, and designing your party build to control those odds and turn them in your favour. THAT is where the tactics and the fun came from. Mind you, I'm not going to get all uppity about this - hand-mapping was kind of crucial for that sort of 'logistics challenge' crpg to work, and despite growing up on them, I can't actually get myself to go back to hand-drawing game maps on graph paper.

 

[Destroid]

Perhaps if there was an ingame mapping tool, but you still had to do it manually?

 

[Zomg]

For example, there is a reasonable case to be made that part of the reason JA2 was even better than X-com was because of the increased RPG elements. And considering how good X-com was that's an achievement.

Vanilla JA2 is grossly inferior to X-Com; 1.13 is maybe arguable just because of huge interface improvements. And the stuff that is clearly wrong in X-Com (AI, goofy mechanics like Psi, goofy sighting mechanics in general, interface and feedback) has nothing to do with RPGs.

 

[Jaesun]

Hard rpg combat is shit because it distracts me from my immershun, my story and my c&c and gay elf sex.

 

[PorkaMorka]

Picture this:
The hero is facing a opponent of equal stats.
Both have 10HP, with 50% chance of each winning initiative.
They can attack with a 80% chance to-hit and can do 5-10 points of damage each.
If the hero dies, he will have to reload, if the hero wins, he can save game and fight the next 200 battles exactly like this.
There is nothing the player can do to influence the combat, except drink a potion that heals 5HP.

Is this fun? Challenging?

Getting back to the original post, it's instructive to look at how Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup handles this.

There are many opponents like you describe, where you'll have a chance of death if you just walk up to them and trade attacks. Since there is no reloading and huge numbers of opponents, doing this too often will end your game sooner or later.

In order to survive the player has to either

a) evade the opponents who are too risky to fight, using either cautious play or a variety of scrolls, potions, wands and character abilities available for evasion, most of which are limited use and all of which drain resources

or

b) use additional abilities or items to gain an advantage and win the fight, out of a huge number character abilities or consumables that may or may not be available, many of which are limited use and all of which drain some resource.

If you waste too many of your resources, you can end up in a situation where you don't have enough left for a given challenge and you're likely to die and end your game.

Thus, the player is constantly thinking about which ability to use to minimize the risk of death, but also about making sure he saves some of his resources for later. This creates an incentive to use a broad spectrum of abilities and forces the player to constantly think about his moves.

Thus creating something we call "gameplay", something that many RPGs lack.

Vanilla JA2 is grossly inferior to X-Com;

Strongly disagree, although I'll grant that reasonable people could prefer X-com. I found X-com a bit too samey due to the limited variety of missions and their random nature. It was fun but after a while it turned into a bit of a slog.

X-com didn't necessarily suffer from not being a full RPG, but at the same time I felt like almost all of the RPG elements that JA2 added in were improvements. The characters, the dialog, the slight focus on a story, the additional detail on character skills and equipment, the exploration and adventure elements.

Although I guess there was at least one downside to JA2 going full RPG... having to search all those damn cupboards.

 

[el Supremo]

Picture this:
The hero is facing a opponent of equal stats.
Both have 10HP, with 50% chance of each winning initiative.
They can attack with a 80% chance to-hit and can do 5-10 points of damage each.

And why exactly the stats are equal? Does every opponent the hero meets mirrors his stats? If so, it is indeed
Stat based combat can be fun as long as player can tinker with hero's stats.

 

[Mastermind]

Challenging by the conventional definition, but in reality just tedious and boring. Not fun. Like Dragon Age.

More like Fallout. I've been in a similar scenario many times in Fallout. Dragon Age battles were usually pretty clear cut and required a chance in tactics if you fucked up. With fallout you could savescum your way through almost anything.

 

[sser]

I don't see the problem. The excitement and fun can still totally be there. I was about ready to drop a nuclear bomb on my F9 reload key in Risen but every fight was still intense for me.

Of course, if you have a problem, play a roguelike or something else. I have two games I play a lot of where defeat cannot be solved by a quick-load. Mount & Blade, where I lose all my shit and have to scavenge from the ground up again. And Shiren the Wanderer, where my long-term investment +20 blade was rusted by infinitely dispersing blobs, then I was turned into a rice bowl as I ran away from a horde of monsters, I almost escaped, but then a tank blew a hole through the wall and killed me. Now I restart. From the beginning with nothing. I think this sort of gameplay could work with Risen or something like KotC, but it would be killer...

However, I do remember reading a story of someone doing an iron-man run of BG2 and having one of their characters killed really late in the game and doing a horrified scream because of it. I tried it myself and screamed a bit when Minsc got turned into stone and obliterated.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

The typical squad tactics RPG is a squad tactics strategy game that has been ruined by RPG mechanics and tropes. They add nothing. Deal with the fact that you only like RPG mechanics because you like autistic grinding.

Exploration and adventure elements, (slightly) increased emphasis on story and characters, increased emphasis on pre-built scenarios linked to the narrative (as opposed to randomly generated ones), greater detail in building, customizing and equipping your dudes...

There is a lot to be gained from switching your squad tactics game into the RPG sub genre, it's not our fault the Devs tended to botch it much of the time.

For example, there is a reasonable case to be made that part of the reason JA2 was even better than X-com was because of the increased RPG elements. And considering how good X-com was that's an achievement.

I think he meant combat mechanics and tropes such as zillion HP characters, becoming a demigod, easy healing, etc.

 

[7hm]

I don't see the problem. The excitement and fun can still totally be there. I was about ready to drop a nuclear bomb on my F9 reload key in Risen but every fight was still intense for me.

Of course, if you have a problem, play a roguelike or something else. I have two games I play a lot of where defeat cannot be solved by a quick-load. Mount & Blade, where I lose all my shit and have to scavenge from the ground up again. And Shiren the Wanderer, where my long-term investment +20 blade was rusted by infinitely dispersing blobs, then I was turned into a rice bowl as I ran away from a horde of monsters, I almost escaped, but then a tank blew a hole through the wall and killed me. Now I restart. From the beginning with nothing. I think this sort of gameplay could work with Risen or something like KotC, but it would be killer...

However, I do remember reading a story of someone doing an iron-man run of BG2 and having one of their characters killed really late in the game and doing a horrified scream because of it. I tried it myself and screamed a bit when Minsc got turned into stone and obliterated.

Permadeath works due to random. Permadeath in games that aren't random is fucking booooooring.