Deleted Member 16721
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I'm generally in favour of having fewer fights overall, but making them more interesting and meaningful. This doesn't have to entail getting rid of "trash mobs" altogether, but they still need to be spaced out and spiced up, so that combat doesn't feel repetetive - if you're fighting through the tenth room of bugbears, you're gonna commit suicide. Variety does help here, provided that different kinds of enemies throw different stuff at you, and aren't just varied in terms of statistics and models. I want my party-building and resource management skills to be tested, but I don't want it to feel like grinding (as in, doing the same thing over and over again, like in most MMOs), because by God, I hate grinding with a fiery passion. Which is why I can't help but disagree with this statement:
I'd like to limit grind as much as possible. Now, I don't want all "story-based encounters", as you term it, but a nice between them and more generic encounters. I think too much of either is bad, but still, I think having an overwhelming majority of trash encounters to be far, far worse.
Well, if everything is important and story-based, that can get old quick, too. The casual encounters P) are designed to break things up a bit. Fight a little, talk a little, do a little town stuff, etc. You don't want to go through 10 straight rooms of the same encounters, obviously, but it seems like "trash mobs" anymore is thrown around loosely to describe pretty much 90% of RPG combat content.
By "grinding" I mean the RPG-grind from level 1 (peasant with rags) to level 99 (God-like fighting universe-devouring dragons). There needs to be a strong sense of progression in there in a natural, emergent way, and combat helps provide that. So yes, there needs to be a balance, but that balance should not be removing every duplicate encounter and/or going as far to remove every duplicate-that-adds-something-subtle-but-new-to-change-things encounter as well. Just my 2 cents.