Random Encounters

The staple of modern RPG fighting is the random enemy encounter. Designers hate them, players hate them, everybody hates them. But if it truly is the bane of RPG gaming, what has kept them around for so long? Because the random enemy encounter, when done well, is not random but strategic. This adds a great depth to those games whose creators know how to use the tool correctly.

RPG fighting, when done well, is a strategy encounter. If the only justification for random enemy encounters your designers can come up with is that they are necessary to make a game longer, they need to re-examine why they have persisted for so long. Final Fantasy is full of examples of gripping strategic RPG gameplay. Wall in your characters to reflect healing spells onto the undead. Falcon units off of the screen, then cast earthquake to damage everyone left. Lunar featured movement squares which played a strategic role in every battle. Grandia had a real-time fighting system that forced the player to decide between waiting for combined attacks or doing faster individual ones. Aside from the initial encounters, there are also long-term effects from fighting that must be balanced. All fighting has an associated cost in life, mana, and items, but pays off in gold and experience. Do you dart the glass sword now to top off the boss or do you rely upon your Phoenix Downs and save it for the next one? Do you level up your mighty axe which has +12 to goblins or the spear of light which gives a +3 to the undead? Use your fragile armor of perfect protection now or use up your spare cash on the mighty armor of swiss cheese? Done right, RPG's are resource management sims.

Xenogears is an example of a game that mitigated the random enemy encounter into a less random and less consuming part of the game, but kept the strategic importance and managed to make every encounter feel significant.. Xenogears was a revolutionary game (and still is), whose dungeons alternated between having A: no enemies, B: very few random enemies, and C: frequent once-only battles at fixed locations. In a no-enemy area, free exploration was encouraged. In a light enemy area, the area was created on a grandiose scale, allowing the player to enjoy the scale of the architecture and the scale of the resulting battle. The once-only battles at fixed locations were truly special, in that the designers were always planning the strangest, most relevant spots to spring battles upon you. This gave the enemy the illusion of intelligence without requiring much additional programming. In addition, the jumping aspect of the game made non-battle exploration actually fun. That, and having the two different modes of fighting made Xenogears one of the most enjoyable RPG's to date (right up to the point where they ran out of money, and the game degraded).

Any game can take a fun genre and turn it into boring drivel if the developers don't focus on the right things. The winning strategy in Star Ocean 2, for example, consisted of buying forgery papers, spending hours clicking on "make fake money," and finally spending hours clicking on "photograph fake money." Eventually, you would have all of the resources you would need, but the mechanic to get there was no fun.

One of the ways to change the system would be to expand the concept of "attack." When swordfighting in the real world, you have head shots, body shots, leg attacks, limb attacks, etc. If you hammer away at one portion of the body, the enemy will expect that and block accordingly. The player should set their guard after an attack, in any of the 8 control pad directions. Swordfighting should be as intricate as spellcasting.

Likewise, enemy encounters should be fewer and stronger. I'm not advocating the return of the infinite boss syndrome (2+ hours for Final Fantasy 8... What were they thinking?), But a battle with faceless drones should take longer than the loading screen... that way they wouldn't be faceless drones. Think of them as mini-mini bosses, with one or two per explorable area.

RPG's in recent years have plummeted in difficulty, which makes encounters more of an annoyance than a challenge. Sure, this opens things up to more players, but that also makes the game busywork. What was wrong with selectable difficulty levels? To balance this out, the designers should reduce the significance of death. Return the player to the last checkpoint with all of their items intact, and expect this to happen several times.

Another of the ways to change the system would be to have a target level associated with every area. If a player were to go to the second level with too few exp, for example, they would be given more to help them catch up. However, if they were dominating in an area, they receive fewer. That way players are discouraged from camping, and can explore what they are interested in without unbalancing the game.

Finally, players should be encouraged to consume resources, not horde them. Items should be more effective the fewer you have, and lighter players should evade attacks more frequently. Characters should not be able to carry more than 5 of any one thing at a time, preventing them from having ungodly amounts of potions and forcing them to plan their attack between towns. Prices should spike the more demand there is, causing the player with 15 potions (5 on three characters) to pay significantly more for the last 5 than a player buying their 1st 5.

There is quite a lot that can be done to make RPG fighting fun, and frequently it is. Sadly, even big-name games make foolish mistakes sometimes... Final Fantasy 8's draw system was a real snore, and encouraged going slowly, hording resources, and taking few risks. But mistakes are mistakes, not a larger flaw with the design of RPG's.

I support the concept of randomized enemy encounters in RPG's. But if we are to progress, we should focus on the gameplay and learn from our efforts in the past. There are many things that work, but hoping it all comes together without original planning isn't one of them.