I would suggest that the player earns less exp from weak monsters, but earns more exp if he challenges himself by fighting difficult monsters. Also, each battle needs to be somewhat different. I would recommend having various immeasurables* for both the player and the opponent. The immeasurables need to be interesting enough such that each battle may require different tactics (even the boss fights), and in different situations, the optimal combination of immeasurables changes. Also, no immeasurable should be useless. Also, if the player is innovative enough, he may discover a gamebreaker combination to defeat the boss. If so, then the player should be allowed to reward himself for innovation. However, as the player levels up, he will go into different areas, where the enemies may have the proper immeasurables to counter the player, thus forcing the player to innovate further.
*http://penny-arcade....ode/power-creep
Interesting video on the power creep phenomenon.
Do you have les theoretical applications for your ideas? I'd love to see what it would look like once applied to actual design decisions.
If however the game has scalable enemies then character advancement of levels makes no difference at all, with the exception of possibly having a more customised character.
I agree with that part, and that's one of my worries. Obviously, a lot of skilled designers have chosen that path, and I'd like to know what I'm missing.
Eve prevents this by making advancement time based
How exactly is it applied in Eve? I know a lot of designers are also making that decisions now: to reward time spent playing rather than time spent towards performing "X" action.
The way to overcome this is to remove the result as the point of the action and to place it back into the action itself. People trawl dungeons in D&D because the game is fun to play, for example, and the treasure at the end is not the point of the quest but the icing on the cake. If you do not tell people what they are likely to get before they go there then they won't feel like they hve lost out, and they won't undertake the quest focused on the reward. This psychological framing is extremely important.
While most of your post discusses MMOs (and the topic was jRPGs) I find this particular section interesting. I'm having a hard time bringing the player back to having fun fighting rather than expecting the reward in a set environment. My method was for monsters not to drop any loot, merely resources (components and/or gold for example). That way, pretty much any battle is the same from the standpoint of the rewards, hence, players will choose whom they'd like to fight. The caveat is that I feel they'd settle for the easiest fights they can get...
Having a finite amount of monsters per area might overrule that though.
The second important thing is automation of resource gathering. This focuses players on setting up the infrastructure and design of resource gathering rather than the gathering itself. This reduces grind because it is a one off process that then allows for passive collection. After that you just need to refine the design, keep it maintained (minimal effort) and then focus on having fun whilst it does its thing. This removes the repition and allows players to feel like they own the system and not the system owning them.
Could a similar system be imagined for combat actually?
Grinding happens when you've mastered the skills the game requires of you at that time. So you end up using and reusing skills you've already mastered until the game decides to allow you more skills or has no more skills to offer you.
You'll use X and Y ability in an RPG until you level up allowing you to use ability Z.
In that example grinding occurs when you completely understand (or think you completely understand) ability X and Y and the game ceases to test those skills giving you the same challenge until you have satisfied the requirement of leveling up. This seems to be generally put in games to increase their play times. We still seem to sell games based on how much time your going to spend playing it, "Over 100 hours of gameplay!"
I wanted to disagree, but there is truth to what you say. I think I'm such a Chrono Trigger fan merely because the game is "as short as it can be". In other words, the designers removed everything they could until only a gem remained. As a result, though the game isn't hard, there's never really grinding anywhere to be found.
I've many times heard people complain about these, actually. "I get home from work and don't have time to do anything but eat dinner and go to bed!" is a pretty common complaint. Another grindy part of life is household chores. I personally hate doing laundry; I have to do two loads of laundry a week to keep my household running, sometimes three in winter when everyone wears more clothes. I do it because it has to be done, but that doesn't mean I don't resent it and wish I could be doing something else instead. I can't opt to play some other version of life where robots do my laundry for me, but I can certainly opt out of playing a game that makes me feel like I'm doing chores.
To top it off: a lot of people actually play games because life isn't as fun. I think its our job to make games less realistic and more fun. I really like the fact games stay away from feeding/drinking mechanisms and replace them by abstracts for example. You don't have to cook your food every so many hours and feed everyone. Most of the time, the game assumes that, if you have sufficient rations, your characters are wize enough not to ask you to micro-manage their food.
I think it is also part of the good design behind the jRPG combat system: unlike most games (action-based) where you must carry out every action, in a jRPG, you give a vague objective to carry out. Most of the time, it takes this form "Hurt" "This Guy" with "This!".
You specify nothing more and can see this being carried out.
Perhaps this could be taken one step further back, giving the player even less micro-management control over their party and relying on vague objectives?
Dragon Age's combat system allows to define small AI algorithms which I thought was the best part of the game. I think the problem with this is that it requires a lot of thinking between battles, and this makes it more complex for a game genre that is generally simpler and lacks sufficiently action that there doesn't need to be anymore slowdown.
In Dragon Age, the character you command goes realtime, which means you're not getting bored, but in the jRPG, if all actions get automated, the player ends up sitting on his ass waiting the battle through. That's probably even less entertaining than bashing the fight button!
