Spacebar Syndrome

When battles can constantly be won by simply holding the spacebar down and having your party use physical attacks until no enemies are left standing. How do you avoid this in your games?

I've found a few decent ways to motivate players to mix up their strategies a bit. One is to make magic actually worth casting every once in a while (i.e. make it stronger than regular attacks). Having some enemies with high physical defense and relatively weak magical defense can coerce the player into casting spells more often. Another thing is to have enemies that counter when physically attacked, but not when magically attacked.

Do you folks have any suggestions? Do you feel like this is even a problem?

It's actually a problem I've seen in professionally made games as well. In Tales of Phantasia, FF VI, and Chrono Trigger, I remember that in some areas it was possible to just hold down a turbo button (emulator) and a speed-up button to get through battles. Come to think of it, there were more battles in the entire game that could be won this way than there weren't. There were even some bosses that could be beaten this way, though those were in the minority.

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Being from the third world, I reserve the right to speak in the third person.

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Even just sticking to physical attacks, you make add strategy by giving the player meaningful choices as to which enemy he should attack first. Like, should the player try to take out an enemy that may use a debuff spell, or should he focus on the enemy that does the most damage?

I think the problem is not so much with holding down the spacebar as it is with repetitive battles. Even if you force a player to use spells and stuff, a game's still boring if he ends up using the same strategies over and over. Even a well-designed battle would get boring if the player has to fight that same battle over and over again. You'd do better coming up with lots of different and unique enemies than you would just focusing on a single battle.

I like this solution, it adds variety to the game and keeps the player on his toes. The only problem with it though, is actually designing all those unique enemies (without just doing palette swaps with negligibly swapped around stats) to populate all the different battles. Still, I like it.

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Being from the third world, I reserve the right to speak in the third person.

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Vikings tried this, and oh boy is it a lot of work. Pays off in the long run though!

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To friends long gone, and those I've yet to meet - thank you.

They disabled this in one of the dungeons added to the DS remake of Chrono Trigger, and it's rather annoying when I have to have Ayala just sit around doing nothing since she can't use magic.

And my two bits on this "hold space to win" thing, AR-PUH-GUH! really doesn't allow just spacebar holding, as that would essentially keep making you lose your turn. But since I can customize battle menus now in the nightlies, I will probably move the attack menu to the top, but even then you will be limited to about 5 attacks (at lvl 0, at least) before you have to take a turn to "rest" and recover energy. That's about the way I sorta disable the "hold space to win" deal. Though it really wasn't intended that way.

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dOn'T MiNd mE! i'M jUsT CoNtAgIoUs!!!
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Let's say that you gave the player several hundred energy (MP), or removed the energy mechanic all together, and had the attack option being the first in the list. Would the battles become spacebar-mashers? If so, then you still have a problem with boring and repetitive battles. In fact, you arguably have an even bigger problem on your hands if you're making the player deal with the whole energy rigmarole just to accomplish their most basic attacks. It's throwing a few more steps into the process to accomplish the same result.

While working on my own game, I borrowed from this energy mechanic and made it apply to special attacks. Basic attacks cost nothing to use and can be spammed easily, but are only effective in about half of the battles engaged. Special attacks run off of energy (MP), are often quite powerful, and cannot be spammed, but basic attacks gradually refill the attacker's energy, re-enabling a new assault of special attacks. This, I hoped, would encourage experimentation with each character's unique abilities to learn what the most effective attack is for each enemy. If I'm not mistaken, Tales of Symphonia did something similar, where physical attacks would slightly refill SP (SP was also given an automatic 5-10 percent refill after each battle), which encouraged experimentation with different abilities to create extremely powerful combos and chains and allowed for easier leveling of techniques.

Anything with action-paced battles that require careful timing to dodge enemy attacks or empower your own (including many of the Tales of games, the Mario RPGs, and Mother 3) will inevitably succeed in not being boring. Unfortunately, this doesn't much apply to us, the OHRRPGCE, or any other easy-to-find game making engine. It's a tricky thing to code, but the results are so satisfying!

I don't want to derail the thread, though, so back to things relevant to OHR games. I second the earlier suggestion of including a wide variety of enemies. This doesn't always require designing a brand new enemy every time - for us, I think it's acceptable to use palette swaps. You can make an "undead" version of just about anything by dyeing it purple and red and brown (for zombies) or white and blue (for ghosts), then make it so that physical attacks will never kill them - something extra needs to be used to proceed, like a spell of fire or light, or equipping a holy artifact, or aiming for the head, or running away, or waiting for the game to go from night to day.

I'm workin' on it. Sorta. Not much at the moment, but I will be trying to get some more interesting...ness in the game. I'm not really proud of AR-PUH-GUH!, but I really did try, and now that I'm more learned I'm going to be trying to improve the thing.

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I've found that by removing random battles altogether, I never have to worry about the spacebar syndrome. Having all enemies be relevant to the story or interesting boss battles is usually enough to keep players interested.

Other than that, making it fun to look at an attack animation and offering new equipment and skills at a steady pace goes a long way. The real issue how to handle randoms. When done well, they should offer the player something more than hero experience and a worn spacebar.

I've said it approximately 43457 times. Random battles, if they are meant to challenge a player, are about resource management. If you don't want your game to have this element to affect survival, you may well want to avoid randoms altogether. If you DO want this element, then the point is to have randoms where constantly attacking with free attacks is inefficient. The player will lose more HP this way than if he carefully chose what enemies to eliminate first, or when to use special attacks to his advantage.

In other words, moving menus around is irrelevant. The concern with randoms is to make sure that certain choices are more efficient in the LONGTERM than others. This means that the single random battles can still be short, and no single battle will punish the player for inefficiencies, but if the player is consistently doing the equivalent of spacebar holding, he will not survive the dungeon as a whole.

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I am Srime

I try and think about things this way:

The player has generally formed a party, right? And that party generally includes different roles: someone to do physical damage, someone with variable types of magic, someone to recover lost HP, and so on.

The enemies should be treated in a similar fashion. If you're assailed by a group of bandits, let's say, it doesn't make too much sense for every encounter to just be the same physically-damaging bandits over and over. They would have some bandit medics in their employ, maybe a few who do unique things like nerf your AIM or DEX with crossbows instead of just slashing you with handaxes, and so on.

Even monsters might follow a similar pattern, like say a pack of wolves travels with a Wolf Lord who can howl and double their attack and speed or some such.

Granted, there will be exceptions to this kind of arrangement, like perhaps a colossal lion just attacks the party on its own in the assumption that its excessive brute strength will be sufficient to overcome the party dynamics, but for the most part, every random battle should present some kind of unique challenge in terms of what the enemies are capable of doing, not just individually, but in concert with one another.

To put it another way, take a note from D&D and try designing ENCOUNTERS rather than individual monsters.

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I never thought of it that way. That is some excellent advice.

Most indeedy. Though in retrospect, having DMed a few games, I guess I should have realized it sooner Great advice, here's me retooling and redoing a bunch of Legacy encounters.

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Being from the third world, I reserve the right to speak in the third person.

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I want to put my stamp of agreement on Harlock's entire post as well as this paragraph:



In addition, I'd like everyone to remember 2011's Fight Battle Contest, where participants were challenged to make a battle that used only the basic Fight command. If you can make battles interesting with just the Fight command, you're doing well.

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Mega Tact v1.1
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Indeed, I wrote two pieces of a three piece-article for Hamsterspeak almost exclusively on what Harlock is describing. However, I feel the need to voice the point of my third piece as well. If you plan on having dungeons (or dangerous overworlds) with random battles, there is a third layer that is just as important as these layers. I mean, what are we essentially saying here?

First layer - single enemies
If battles only ever occur against one enemy at a time, then this is all that needs to be considered. However, if the player has access to more than one hero, it seems only fair that the adversary should have the same luxury, at which case designing single enemies is not the point.

Second layer - single encounters
If battles only ever occur in relative isolation (and/or the player's resources are restored after a single battle), then this is all that needs to be considered. Then roles in battle is precisely what is needed to keep single encounters engaging and fun, as Harlock (and others) points out. But if certain areas are intended to feel wild and dangerous, as though the player is 'on his own' far from outside help, then single battles might not be enough.

Third layer - multiple/random encounters
If multiple battles will occur in succession, and especially if the author has no direct control over how many (ie, randoms), then cumulative effects of battles can be as important as balancing single encounters. Furthermore, what might be fun battles in isolation might become frustrating or boring in succession, simply from their length.

As a recent example, I would cite Drag Sector. This was a game that clearly put a LOT of thought into single encounters, and made clear use of the concept of roles. However, the game also wished to make deep space dangerous with random encounters. The result, in my opinion, was too many battles that required too many tactical arrangements in succession. This wasn't because of a lack of variety - many of the random encounters had different flavors to them because of the wonderful variety of roles in each encounter. Instead, it was because using random encounters requires a third layer of balancing that I don't believe Drag Sector accomplished.

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I am Srime