Weekly Discussion on RPG Genre's flaws [Week 3 : Attrition]

Michel Mony · 2012-07-14T01:08:55

Hi, As a reference: Week 2 Week 1 --- [font=times new roman,times,serif]I've always been a big fan of the snes-era RPGs and thought about creating a series of discussions based around the flaws of the genre and how they could be assessed. [/font] [font=times new roman,times,serif]The discussion itself should be based around the topic that has been selected for that week (obviously).[/font] [font=times new roman,times,serif]Feel free to discuss either:[/font] [font=times new roman,times,serif]- The Problem (helping identify the root cause of why this isn't fun)[/font] [font=times new roman,times,serif]- The Solutions (either games you know who have found a workaround, or ideas of your own)[/font] [font=times new roman,times,serif]Whatever you feel like discussing here, please make sure that you add sufficient explanation/arguments to your logic as I take this intellectual exercise seriously and believe others will too.[/font] --- This week's topic: Attrition. During last week's discussion, it became obvious that we should discuss this. The general idea that RPGs need some form of difficulty, and that artificial difficulty (in the sense of tougher battles) would result only in grinding which, in some directions, leads to a lack of fun. We've discussed potential ways to adress this, and one that was raised by the introduction (re-introduction should I say) of the attrition. As a quick portrait, I'd like to quickly describe two important eras of jRPG design in regard to attrition: 1 - Late Nes / Early Snes era games (Dragon Warrior) In this era, the party's inventory is fairly limited and items that allow to restore some stats are a few and generally hard to purchase. This arguably feels like Zelda: A Link to the Past (4 bottles of restorative items max). In this era the focus is a lot about the journey. The game assumes battle will be relatively easy, but it expects you to make mistakes: spend more magic points than you should, or attempt to save on MPs but taking more hits than you should. The end result is that a bad strategy is punished by having to journey back to town and begin anew, fully stocked up. Choosing when to heal is strategic. 2 - Later era (Final Fantasy Series) In this era, the inventory size has dramatically improved and curative items are many and cheap. In this era the focus is a lot more about individual battles though they are fairly easy too. Each battle resolves in the player having to use many curative items to restore to full. There isn't really choosing when to heal as you should always be pretty much full for the next battle although you'd certainly avoid spending a 100 hp regen item when 25 hp away from your cap. So my question to you all is, how can attrition become a fun obstacle to overcome to add a layer of challenge not currently felt through battles themselves? Feel free to supplement with games that use attrition in a different way. Please note as well that I've restricted myself to attrition of combat, by lack of other references. If you know of other jRPGs that perform attrition in different ways (aside from damaging floor for example) feel free to discuss.

Game Design and Theory Game Design

Started by Orymus3 July 08, 2012 05:47 PM

31 comments, last by Orymus3 11 years, 9 months ago

Tiblanc

560

July 12, 2012 07:28 PM

That said, I see how it can apply to changing monsters every so often, but I don't see how it correlates to attrition per se.
Care to elaborate?

It's not related in any direct way. That was a comment about ways to figure out how long is long enough. If you set the target at 30 minutes and a battle lasts 2 minutes, then you should aim to have at most 15 encounters before progression. That can then be used to figure out the dungeon length, encounter rate and encounter danger level.

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Orymus3

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July 12, 2012 08:58 PM

I'm leaning towards preset encounters ala Chrono Trigger myself, as I believe they, not only allow you to control that flow, but more importantly allow to make it more realistic and give player choices (encounter or not).
Note that I will not make a weekly discussion about random vs scripted encounters as I have yet to see someone that'S convinced that random encounters are genuinely better...