I think our views differ a bit. To me exploration is something you do to discover more narrative, to discover more loot, to find more companions, to find more monsters to fight, to tick off a component in a quest, or just to nudge the map completion counter. If you have to add a mechanic to make it not-boring, then I think your issue is that your geographic scope has grown beyond your narrative scope. This largely stems from my view that a JRPG is meant for narrative. If there isn't a narrative reason for a region (which means no companions to be found, no personal or cultural understanding to be gained) and there is no combat in that region (no leveling to be had and little or no loot outside of boxes), and no quest sent me here, save perhaps as a connection between two areas that actually have a point, why did you add that region to the game? As a user, it would just strike me as filler to make your game artificially larger and of course I'd get bored with it, necessitating some extra mechanic. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the intent of the question or the nature of your game; I'm just running off of my experience with JRPG. That being said, let's see if we can't come up with something.

Most of the thoughts that first come to mind are less of a direct mechanic so much as a passive utility. For example, suppose your game worked like Chrono Trigger in that enemies were something you actually saw wandering around. If you borrowed the idea of the surface material type affecting combat bonuses, you could have a swampy region where exploring to find a small patch of dry land as a "safe" region would be beneficial. Players could lead enemies toward this point such that they start combat while standing on land while the enemy is still in the swamp conferring a bonus to them. You could also use traps to cause enemies to enter combat with negative buffs. Say, the player scouts ahead and spots a hefty ogre that might be a bit of a fight, but the game then pans from the ogre to a pitfall trap without showing how to get there. They then have the option of just fighting the ogre outright or trying to find the trap and lead the ogre into it.

You could also have an auto-scrounging system running as the player wanders around. Rather than forcing the player to click on everything in the hopes that they figure out the designer's devilish design and find which drawer in the room of cupboards actually works, have the player automatically grab nearby low-level items or crafting components. Suppose that healing items in your game are expensive. The player can buy them if they want, but wandering around grasslands means they have a random chance of gathering the herb components necessary to make one. If each tile can only give up so components before becoming barren, the player will necessarily wander farther afield. This in itself isn't a particularly exciting mechanic, but it does incentivize moving around a bit.

Or perhaps your game is set in a sky-island. The evil wizard Foo is draining the world of its magic and so the island is losing its stability. You can turn this into a mechanic by making sections of the ground only able to hold so much "weight". This works to provide a potential danger (the player can fall through, though making the ground shake a bit before this happens would help keep the player from getting annoyed with dying unexpectedly), a potential combat trick (lead enemies onto the ground and watch them plummet), as well as an obstacle (the ground has fallen out; now we have to find another way around). You'd obviously have to either make this only happen in certain areas or guarantee that there is at least one (perhaps initially hidden) route that cannot fall. This also allows for such novel items akin to Link's hookshot, some sort of glider, or a sky-walk skill that can be learned eventually.

If your game is set in space, exploration is a pretty easy one with space ships. Finding routes that get around space pirate regions, discovering unknown planets, and resource management. This is easy to make more annoying than entertaining, though. Especially since we're focusing on 2D JRPG, this approach would be... hm. Doable, but I'd have to think on it.

I'm sure I could spout off other things, but it starts to depend too much on the game's context. And I still don't think it's so detached from the reasoning. If there's no combat and no narrative, and you don't have a strong backstory purpose to the mechanic -- "Oh, didn't you know? Prof. Flazzlebazzle made our feet toxic, so we always have to walk a different path or we'll end up poisoning the earth and that'd be bad." -- I think most mechanics you can come up with will come off as cheap eventually. At least in a more typical JRPG system. Flinging around with the hookshot in Zelda is just fun, but the whole point of those games is item-based adventuring.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the intent of the question or the nature of your game; I'm just running off of my experience with JRPG

Well, from experience, including my own, people do get bored from fighting over and over again. Don't misunderstand me here, but no matter how cool the battle system is, once in a while, you want to do something else. If the game is crafted in such a way that you alternate fighting with that something else, it is a better experience overall.
Here's an example:
Action/Adventure games sometimes delve into platforming vs combat. Take the Prince of Persia series for example. There's a lot of both in there, and the pacing between environmental travelling and actual combat makes it even more worthwhile.
I'm looking for a similar mechanic without hybridizing the jRPG too much (i.e. I don't want to turn it into a shooter).

Most of the thoughts that first come to mind are less of a direct mechanic so much as a passive utility. For example, suppose your game worked like Chrono Trigger in that enemies were something you actually saw wandering around. If you borrowed the idea of the surface material type affecting combat bonuses, you could have a swampy region where exploring to find a small patch of dry land as a "safe" region would be beneficial. Players could lead enemies toward this point such that they start combat while standing on land while the enemy is still in the swamp conferring a bonus to them

In fact, I am. I'm also using light against undeads, etc. I've really emphasized the aspect of 'non-random encounters' to the extreme, hoping that this section of the gameplay (which generally precedes fighting) allows the player to seek strategic advantage. Thanks for pointing it out, I feel clever now ;)

You could also use traps to cause enemies to enter combat with negative buffs. Say, the player scouts ahead and spots a hefty ogre that might be a bit of a fight, but the game then pans from the ogre to a pitfall trap without showing how to get there. They then have the option of just fighting the ogre outright or trying to find the trap and lead the ogre into it.

Do you mean, actually carrying around traps and setting them up, or using the environment against foes. I.E. there's a tree branch hanging low and the player is prompted to stretch it if pressing the action button nearby, effectively creating some primitive form of trap?

You could also have an auto-scrounging system running as the player wanders around. Rather than forcing the player to click on everything in the hopes that they figure out the designer's devilish design and find which drawer in the room of cupboards actually works, have the player automatically grab nearby low-level items or crafting components. Suppose that healing items in your game are expensive. The player can buy them if they want, but wandering around grasslands means they have a random chance of gathering the herb components necessary to make one. If each tile can only give up so components before becoming barren, the player will necessarily wander farther afield. This in itself isn't a particularly exciting mechanic, but it does incentivize moving around a bit.

I think it comes with a severe drawback: treasure chests. If you auto-grab nearby stuff, you lose that ompf moment right before you press the action key.
Besides, its better to hide the path than the actual reward.
When you hide the path, you're basically telling the player 'I bet you can't reach that treasure chest' which challenges them into finding a way. It's inclusive, and the player might feel compelled to prove you wrong, and insodoing, explore the area and get the item.
When you hide the reward, you're basically not saying anything, but thinking to yourself 'I bet you don't know I exist' and unless the player was prompted to find this item by an online walkthrough, this is wasted gameplay (like the hidden objects in the staircases of FF4, which were probably a bug but meh)

Or perhaps your game is set in a sky-island. The evil wizard Foo is draining the world of its magic and so the island is losing its stability. You can turn this into a mechanic by making sections of the ground only able to hold so much "weight". This works to provide a potential danger (the player can fall through, though making the ground shake a bit before this happens would help keep the player from getting annoyed with dying unexpectedly), a potential combat trick (lead enemies onto the ground and watch them plummet), as well as an obstacle (the ground has fallen out; now we have to find another way around). You'd obviously have to either make this only happen in certain areas or guarantee that there is at least one (perhaps initially hidden) route that cannot fall.

That's interesting, although, I'd be for a less immediately lethal approach. Having characters falling off to their death for exploring is a bit too punitive. In fact, it's like telling them 'eh, there's only one path to go by the way' which would reduce exploration to a mere 'find the right path' and I like a slightly less linear approach as it encourages exploration.

This also allows for such novel items akin to Link's hookshot, some sort of glider, or a sky-walk skill that can be learned eventually.

Once again, these items are great, but they work only in a time-sensitive environment ala action/adventure (precisely Zelda) where combat is ongoing. In a jRPG, even when mobs walking about, the urgency is far from being the same. A fight may be triggered, but you'll have all of your attention dedicated to either using the hookshot (out of fight) or fighting to the best of your abilities (in the fight). In action/adventure, you are split between the two, and must constantly weight their respective priority to achieving your goal. I think that's the reason why a hookshot or any similar action-based mechanic doesn't fit so well in the jRPG genre.

I think most mechanics you can come up with will come off as cheap eventually. At least in a more typical JRPG system

I beg to differ. I was struck by these thoughts in the past, but after careful analysis and problem-solving, I've come to the conclusion that any gameplay problem can be solved with something cool. It just needs sufficient thinking. More than half of the time, I've realized that the problem is in how the question itself is being laid down. It generally poses a restriction that is not required but prevents from thinking outside of the box. This is the main reason why I'm exposing my thought process to the community: so they can see the weakness in my reasoning and point it out, further enabling me to refine the question, and thus, find a more suitable approach to fix the issue.

Thanks for your reply!

Why not have "tool" items like the hookshot? There are outside of battle Terrain puzzles of course, but inside battle there could be destructible terrain objects with the monsters that you could use to pull one of your guys across the battlefield for a quick melee attack versus having to wait a turn or so for your guy to have to run up to the enemy for the initial attack.

I think this would complexify the battle system which should be rather straightforward to be effective.

I have only read about RH, but from what I have heard your party doesn't move at all. Instead you use the abilities of your party to move enemies around to gain advantage over them (such as stacking a lot of them on the same tile to damage all of their meaty HP meters with a powerful single-target attack).

Yes, it is combo oriented, and you learn to voluntarily skip your turns to stack all of your heroes at once and do more dmg to all. Essentially, you're accepting to receive dmg now to finish the fight earlier.

Finally, on the subject of battling on a potentially falling section of a sky castle, you could have a short timer visible on screen like FF6 did for escaping the floating continent. If you get into a battle on one of these sections, make most of the enemies easy enough to beat with a little time to spare to step off the falling section. Some battles, though, will take too long, and the party will die every time even when hasted. Let the player figure out that targeting the party and all enemies with a slow spell will actually slow down the timer enough to allow you to win the battle and get to more stable ground.

That could work, but this isn't a widespread solution. I think there's a way to come up with one or 2 mechanics that are 'evergreen' (can be used anywhere and not feel redundant). After all, fighting is just one such evergreen mechanic which never feels out of place. There's a strong culture behind it, and it is genre-defining, but its just one mechanic.

Hope these points get you thinking. I have enjoyed reading these discussions very much.

Don't forget to upvote people if that's the case

So basically, there is no exploration on the main path? That sounds restrictive. I think the player explores the game whenever they're not fighting (in fact once could argue they even explore the battle system everytime they're shown new enemies).

I would argue that there is no or almost no exploration in main paths for most games.

One reason being if you are told to go at a certain place you are aware of where you go and you have a goal. This ''mission'' is what is on your mind and not exploration.
I would'nt call going from point A to objective B exploration because you are looking for something specific. When you're exploring you're consciously deciding to go in a direction rather than a place your mind is not focused on any objective but finding on something new that you are not aware it exists or are unsure of what lies somewhere.

As for combat, if you want to have a equivalence of exploration you need to remove redundancy from the combat system as much as possible. In fact the only games I know who give a sense of exploration or discovery in combat would be Demon's Souls and Dark Souls. The reason being that when you discover a new enemy you don't know AT ALL how this enemy will attack you and you cant read his moves therefore you have to ''explore'' his behavior to discover how to kill him.

Well, I upvoted you because you asked and were courteous to me. I usually don't bother with social point mechanics unless I feel strongly about a post in a thread I am participating in (those other threads seem to have gone by the wayside).

I wasn't specifically referring to me If you enjoy these discussions, chances are there's more than a single person contributing. Be sure to send the love.

1.) The first point you made in the last posting about a hookshot complexifying the battle system... erm, well, part of your reaction stems from my fudging in a response to the weekly discussion on the overuse of Attack. The core idea I really would want to convey now is that the attack command could have a variable 'casting time' attached to it. When normally entering into a battle (coming into enemy's visual range versus preemptive strike with a sword or getting meleed by the enemy in an ambush) selecting Attack will usually take longer to execute than a ranged attack or spell. However, after the first melee attack is made Attack becomes the "quickest" option. Cast time for Attack will increase again if the target or PC decides to use a spell or ranged attack. The goal of this system is to make the normally no-cost Attack action have more situational use (the enemy just took a stab at my wizard, so now is the time for my warrior to strike! Versus the enemy has been firing off some arrows. I could have my warrior take him out with his mighty sword, but he would be at the risk of dying before delivering the blow. Should I wait for the enemy to risk a rush at my party?). This was an interesting mechanic in FF13, but there were other mechanics in action in those battles, so this suggestion may not be good after all.

So essentially, you're making this a 'strategic' jrpg battle system with position but no actual movement. While the above explanation would be insufficient to cover all use cases, I think you're on to something. Determining the distance between two units based on the actions they've last taken (melee or ranged) could really improve strategic flow.
The main problem I see is that you're sort of leaving out the main portion of this strategic element: being able to have tankers protect your glass cannons. If your system essentially boils down to this: character is considered back row unless 1 - he uses melee or 2 - an enemy has used melee on him and he hasn't replied with ranged yet, you're not able to have people interfere.
Complexifying this would require thinking about a way to make it user intuitive, which just isn't there (yet). That said, this relates more to discussion Week 1, so I'll stop there. Feel free to revive the old thread or start a new one based around this idea. It has enough merit to be discussed if anyone is serious about undertaking such a system.

What I mean is just because an interesting solution (slow all of time rather than just a few enemies/party members) is used only a few times doesn't make it redundant or any less interesting.

I was affraid of the redundancy not of the solution, but of the problem. There's only so many areas where you can have falling platforms before it gets old. The fact that you cleverly slow them down isn't what's wearing you down.

Um, now that I'm done going off on a tangent, I would say to study Final Fantasy 3 (Famicom is what I emulated but you could probably just watch some Youtube let's plays) for exploration I really loved just as greatly as that in my Zelda games collection. It has a vast world map that you actually need to use the limited mapping spell to keep you on track, good use of vehicles, and many towns, castles, and caves to explore with hidden treasure rooms and treasure rooms hidden inside those (this really cut down on the compulsion to grind with a few quick advances in equipment and money. I called it feel-good gameplay. FF4, 5, and to somewhat lesser extent 6 and 7 would continue to provide awesome hidden treasure).

They've made it for the nintendo DS too (and I own a copy of it). They've added an exploration mechanic where, once you've revealed an entire map (explored all of it) you get an item. This is true for all levels everywhere, and the further in the game, the better the loot (they've added it to ff4 ds remake as well following the success of this mechanic). While this is artificial, it does increase the worth of exploration, and so long as you don't get the bonus, you get the feeling you're missing on something. While it does indicate clear feedback (you have or haven't seen everything here) it feels a bit too narrow. I liked the idea at first, but it should've been less evenly applied so as to keep players on their toes. Also, the rewards should've been more interesting than actual items falling from the void. Opening secret passages for example.

I would argue that there is no or almost no exploration in main paths for most games.

I think the issue is that we refer to exploration as two different concepts. To me, exploration is everything you do on your journey (which obviously means stuff occurs on the main path). For this discussion, I wanted to take fighting out, because we know fighting is a big big BIG portion of the exploration in an RPG (it is the main obstacle to progression). I wanted to delve into alternate solutions.
Early on, it was revealed that most people believe exploration stems from the player's need to go out the beaten path. Given that I'm not a native, I'll agree that my choice of word (exploration) is probably faulty, hence this confused discussion. Could we call it navigation then perhaps?

As for combat, if you want to have a equivalence of exploration you need to remove redundancy from the combat system as much as possible. In fact the only games I know who give a sense of exploration or discovery in combat would be Demon's Souls and Dark Souls. The reason being that when you discover a new enemy you don't know AT ALL how this enemy will attack you and you cant read his moves therefore you have to ''explore'' his behavior to discover how to kill him.

I agree with you. These mushrooms got me wondering (as they weren't hostile at first).

@KenjiSenpai: I would counter that exploration and "discovery" are two different things. My favored example would be Final Fantasy 3. Just because I am told that an evil spirit in such and such cave needs to be defeated does not make me feel any less like an explorer when getting to that cave (I just hop in my airship and land on the cave side of a lake) and then going through the cave. It is something my party has never done before. For them it is an exploration. Every treasure and piece of dialogue is a "discovery." Whether this is true for the player depends on if they have memory of a previous playthrough and their mindset (mine varies a little bit from yours).

that too

I wholly agree with you on combat that facillitates (versus killing you outright for doing something "wrong") and allows ("hey, doing this works, too!") exploration is wonderful. Just recently I saw this video:



I can't remember the site I first found that on, but most of the people said how stupid it was. It is true that this makes the fight a lot easier, but I think this is BRILLIANT! For being board and doing something completely unexpected, you reap an awesome reward. That is never something to pass up when you can sneak it into the game design.

I like to think there is a different between emergent gameplay (using in-game mechanics in such a way that you find a workaround something that was unforeseen by the developer) and using an actual 'bug' (which is the case in this video, obviously). I think emergent is much more rewarding, and players will sense the difference. It's good to cheat a game, but it needs to make sense. This video makes none. But if you're to kill a boss that you can never be in contact with, but can both produce poison and food and have access to a steward, poisoning him would be as legitimate an action as hiring an assassin.

Second, how are you so sure that is a bug and not an Easter egg?

I don't know. It looks like a fishing rod. I think emergent gameplay is there to reward the player that explores the logic of gameplay mechanics laid before them. Using the fishing rod in a boss battle against anything that doesn't look like a fish doesn't sound like a 'clever use of game mechanics' to me. You just stumble accidentally on this by trying everything. This isn't really creative. I'd really love to hear what was the intent behind these and whether they were bugs or not... Then again, as a publisher, its easier to say it was an easter egg than a bug in most cases... (Red Dead Redemption flying t-poles, I'm looking at you!)