Little details in RPGs that annoy you

[Bohrain]

I think someone mentioned this already, but characters acting in very contemporary manner. In terms of technology the cookie cutter fantasy setting is vaguely similar to 13th century Europe. But everyone living there has a very post-enlightenment mindset. Characters harp about freedom, societies resemble more nation states than feudal kingdoms and everyone identifies as part of nuclear family instead of extended family or clan sort of thing.

 

[Dodo1610]

Not being able to sit on chairs
-it's such a simple feature but it makes your game instantly more immersive.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

- Friendly/neutral person is hurt and I can't heal them using the typical way I heal my own characters.
- I can heal them and they don't even acknowledge it
- The only way to heal them is through dialogue

I think this may become my basic test(Good Samaritan test) as to whether I think an RPG allows me to engage with the world or not. It's such a simple feature, essentially comes up in almost any cRPG, and something most people would do immediately in a tabletop scenario. Yet most cRPGs fail this test.

 

[Forseti]

Game has a variety of playable races with different histories / customs but..
- the player is given no guidance on how their choice of race might inform their play
- if the player knows, they are forced to act like a generic human anyway
- worse, the game doesn't even care and race is mostly cosmetic. Why even have them then?

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

I dunno if you'd call this a little thing or not but...

Don't give me the option for evil alignments if you're never going to give the opportunity to do evil shit. Just once I want to be able to be like, "Yeah I like Lolth's policy and the Underdark way of living fuck you lamers" and switch sides halfway. Like sell out the entire party and have them become sacrifices or slaves I can then taunt for my own amusement.

I'm talkin' GYGAX DROW not these pussyboyz you got today.

 

[Red Hexapus]

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InsurmountableWaistHeightFence

I've been playing Dark Souls 2 recently. There's a passage in Shaded Woods that leads to the final area of the game, but a fallen column lies in your path. No, you cannot jump over it or destroy it, instead you have to go kill four bosses to open a path through a shrine located above.

EDIT: someday has actually mentioned it on the page I've linked, here's the quote:

You can't climb anything that isn't a ladder in Dark Souls. This can lead to ridiculous scenarios where you're blocked from moving by a ledge that only goes up to your knees. Probably the worst case was in Dark Souls II, where your main objective for the first half of the game is to get to Drangleic castle, but you are blocked from doing so by a pile of rubble that a child could easily climb over. To get around it, you need to run all over the game world to find and slay four legendary beings of immense power and acquire their souls, then head up a barely noticeable dirt path next to the rubble and use those souls to open a tiny building called the Shrine of Winter, which has an exit on the other side, allowing you to finally continue on past the rubble to Drangleic Castle. This raises the question of why the rubble even needed to exist in the game at all when the developers could have just put the Shrine of Winter where the rubble was and left it at that.

 

[vortex]

1. Progressive and pretentious writing feels very first-try effort in RPGs.
2. Meaningless crafting and economy, when crafting is level locked
   
3. When I see an orc or orc resembling race in fantasy RPG
4. When you get some cool spell and then you find out you can only use it for less then 1% cases
5. backtracking

 

[Stavrophore]

Too much interactible barrels that are filled with nothing, but occasionaly dropping something good, so the developer forces you to search every barrel.

 

[SlightlyRadioactive]

You can use magic to ressurect dead companions but you cannot ressurect dead NPCs.

 

[Chippy]

Games that don't use hotkeys for repeated skills. For example: stealth. You're playing a stealth character that's gonna be nipping in and out of stealth as often as possible - why would you frustrate the player by making it toggable only with the cursor?. I find it generally insulting that developers assume everyone only has 1 right hand that they only use in games with a mouse only.

I can play sim games or action games with keyboard and mouse, so I think I can manage tapping the stealth key with an RPG as well. But judging by how retards on Youtube play BG (like they don't know hotkeys & 'F' keys exist) I might be in the minority.

 

[King Crispy]

Games that don't use hotkeys for repeated skills. For example: stealth. You're playing a stealth character that's gonna be nipping in and out of stealth as often as possible - why would you frustrate the player by making it toggable only with the cursor?

Black Geyser is guilty of this.

 

[Chippy]

Games that don't use hotkeys for repeated skills. For example: stealth. You're playing a stealth character that's gonna be nipping in and out of stealth as often as possible - why would you frustrate the player by making it toggable only with the cursor?

Black Geyser is guilty of this.

Appreciated...I'll keep to my personal trend of not hotkeying any Black Geysers anytime soon then.

 

[Berengar]

I dunno if you'd call this a little thing or not but...

Don't give me the option for evil alignments if you're never going to give the opportunity to do evil shit. Just once I want to be able to be like, "Yeah I like Lolth's policy and the Underdark way of living fuck you lamers" and switch sides halfway. Like sell out the entire party and have them become sacrifices or slaves I can then taunt for my own amusement.

I'm talkin' GYGAX DROW not these pussyboyz you got today.

I'll add to this by just saying I dislike how evil PCs are handled in pretty much every video game.
Never seems to go as far as it should and seems like it was implemented as an afterthought or because people would say something about the alignments not being included. "Evil" might as well be a meaningless title

 

[KörangarTheMighty]

I think I mentioned this in another thread but regardless, lesser NPCs that all say variations of the same thing when questioned on any given topic annoy me. The game that comes to mind immediately with many examples of this is Inquisitor. Slight variations in vocabulary masking the exact same opinion on every topic except when involved in a quest. If you're going to allow conversation, don't half ass it. If the NPC doesn't know anything worth talking about, have it tell you that in no more than a sentence. I don't need walls of text saying "Well, x character seems to think this, but y character said this other thing, my nephew down the road said they both don't know what they're on about, so I don't really know what to say..." Just stfu and admit you don't know then!

I'll also second the people who are complaining about anachronistic speech and neologisms. It's also annoying in the other direction where you have a game set in the future or in a higher-tech reality. Recently, the term "pump the brakes" stuck out like a sore thumb to me in a sci-fi story I was reading. Cars were never a thing in that fictional world.

On the topic of melee that PorkyThePaladin brought up, I get the frustration when looking at it as a guy who's familiar with HEMA and all that went with it since the 2010s. I feel kind of similar in regard to the lack of imagination that went into some of the feats for fighter classes. From a roleplaying perspective, it's hard to be excited to play a swordsman or master who calls his moves "Power Attack, Flurry, Critical Strike, Cleave" etc. The only thing going for it is that it's comprehensible for dumb normies. "I swing hard!" "I flail my weapon around in front of my face." It's just boring af when you got the druid over there on his turn saying: "The riverbed rumbles and the flow reverses as I summon a wall of water that suddenly gushes forth upriver taking the form of stampeding white horses, crushing all Black Riders within four squares!"

At the same time I get it. Over-complexity slows shit down too much. Grappling mechanics would be cool but I don't know how I'd implement it. Something I enjoyed that added a bit of flavor were the lightsaber forms in KotOR II. It wasn't much but it did go a long way with me. Maybe if melee combat had certain forms and stances in other D&D videogames that unlocked different animation sets and stats it would alleviate the issue a bit. For tabletop, I always like when the GM occasionally asks the player to describe what he's doing when he attacks or kills something. I don't think there's any harm in getting players to learn some more interesting terminology in feats at least.

 

[Red Hexapus]

You can use magic to ressurect dead companions but you cannot ressurect dead NPCs.

Oof, that reminds me of another thing that have always annoyed me and I think this mostly happens in jRPGs. When a party member is knocked out/killed during a fight you can raise them up. When the main protagonist is knocked out: game over.

 

[Baldanders]

Not being able to sit on chairs
-it's such a simple feature but it makes your game instantly more immersive.

Accidentally sitting on chairs and being forced to watch a sitting/standing animation is infinitely worse.

 

[Infinitum]

Grid inventories. Looks like shit, you can't tell what's in it at a glance and drag-and-drop and inventory tetris is just a worse version of clicking.

 

[Bigg Boss]

Grid inventories. Looks like shit, you can't tell what's in it at a glance and drag-and-drop and inventory tetris is just a worse version of clicking.

When I first saw it in Diablo I thought it was the best. I still do. Everything is right there to see and touch, you don't need to scroll, it generally works fine for certain games.

I hate when RPG's give you a timed quest that is not a timed quest. I realize people dislike them but that might be because they make the world feel real so you can't wander off and teabag for three hours picking up flowers while the world is on fire.

 

[Pentium]

• Hidden gameplay mechanics not even covered in the manual - Fallout 1/2 aimed shot crit chance formula
• Ridiculous animations - backstab/riposte in DS/ER with huge weapons
• Invulnerability frames - backstab/riposte/estus
  
• Skills usable under completely improper conditions - D2 Sorceress calls a meteor from the skies that lands at the bottom level of a dungeon
• Useless filler skills/stats/whatever
  
• Reactive inventory management - Throne of Darkness throws your items around the inventory grid as you hover above them with another held (super annoying)
• Stupid armors - sexualized female armors which hide the tits and pussy under a piece of metal yet leave all vital organs and arteries happily exposed; pauldron fetish; "spiky" armors...
• Stupid weapons - overdone fantasy weapons that would never work
• Skeletons moving with no diffculties without any muscles on them
  
• Picturesque effects - draws a gay rainbow over half of the screen with one sword swing

Could go on and on...

 

[Bigg Boss]

• Hidden gameplay mechanics not even covered in the manual - Fallout 1/2 aimed shot crit chance formula
• Ridiculous animations - backstab/riposte in DS/ER with huge weapons
• Invulnerability frames - backstab/riposte/estus
  
• Skills usable under completely improper conditions - D2 Sorceress calls a meteor from the skies that lands at the bottom level of a dungeon
• Useless filler skills/stats/whatever
  
• Reactive inventory management - Throne of Darkness throws your items around the inventory grid as you hover above them with another held (super annoying)
• Stupid armors - sexualized female armors which hide the tits and pussy under a piece of metal yet leave all vital organs and arteries happily exposed; pauldron fetish; "spiky" armors...
• Stupid weapons - overdone fantasy weapons that would never work
• Skeletons moving with no diffculties without any muscles on them
  
• Picturesque effects - draws a gay rainbow over half of the screen with one sword swing

Could go on and on...

That meteor was ported in from the astral realm.
Skeletons move with magic.

 

[FriendlyMerchant]

Power attack makes perfect sense in the context of fighting some kind of construct or beast, something with defensive technique in the area of extremely basic to nonexistent.

Or you can use your brain and a specialized weapon.

 

[Pentium]

That meteor was ported in from the astral realm.

I don't even know where to start to argue against this laughable bs so let's just see what the D2 manual says:

Skeletons move with magic.

Yeah, yeah, I expected some nerd to come up with this horrible cliché.

So, since there is oviously no way the skeleton could make a move on its own, or even hold together without any ligaments etc., what you basically need to do is to animate its every single move with your magical powers, right? Which has nothing to do with necromancy - reviving the dead capable of some basic control of their own body via the rests of brain and muscle system, controled by the will of the summoner or a spirit bound to the remains - that's just pure telekinesis. So instead of just making the weapons levitate or creating an astral weapon or whatever concievable magical effect much easier to achieve, you're going to waste your powers to animate pointless skeletons cuz you're a badass skeleton master nerd and need some pals down in the catacombs for you necrophilic pleasures. Skeletal liches become even more absurd in this regard.

 

[Harthwain]

Skeletons move with magic.

Yeah, yeah, I expected some nerd to come up with this horrible cliché.

So, since there is oviously no way the skeleton could make a move on its own, or even hold together without any ligaments etc., what you basically need to do is to animate its every single move with your magical powers, right? Which has nothing to do with necromancy - reviving the dead capable of some basic control of their own body via the rests of brain and muscle system, controled by the will of the summoner or a spirit bound to the remains - that's just pure telekinesis. So instead of just making the weapons levitate or creating an astral weapon or whatever concievable magical effect much easier to achieve, you're going to waste your powers to animate pointless skeletons cuz you're a badass skeleton master nerd and need some pals down in the catacombs for you necrophilic pleasures. Skeletal liches become even more absurd in this regard.

I like the way you think.

 

[Bigg Boss]

It just depends on the source but Jason and the Argonauts skeletons are clearly being animated with magic. Getting autistic about what force powers the skeletons is more nerdy than what I came up with.

 

[Pentium]

It just depends on the source but Jason and the Argonauts skeletons are clearly being animated with magic.

That's partially my point. If you're able to completely animate skeletons with magic, the skeletons become pointless.