Name a common RPG design flaw you despise, and why.

This might be more of an OHR Game thing, and it might be overly specific, but it drives me absolutely insane. One of the things I hate the most in RPGs is when you're controlling the main character, and you go to leave the house, or put your books in your locker or whatever, and he's like "No... I should talk to Tanya first!".

I should specify that I don't have a problem if Tanya calls you every time you try to put your books in your locker, or if your mom demands you tell her good-bye before you leave. What I specifically hate is the player character ceasing to be my agent in the game's world, and deciding on his own volition to ignore what I want and do what he wants. He can be my pawn, he can be another character's pawn, but he's a pawn and I should never have to do what he wants to do. Unless this is a weird Japanese robot-training RPG, at which point his character having free-will is probably the whole point, but I digress.

People always bitch about "But thou must!", but that's a necessary evil. If you don't like the story the game is going to tell, hopefully it's not too late to get your money back. But the king strong-arming you into the quest described on the back of the box is way different than the player character actively refusing to do it in character.

It's interesting too, because this is forgivable in adventure games. Having a narrator to give you text like "There's nothing west of here but trouble." lets you know that that's for factual, and not just King Graham's personal opinion. Resident Evil did the same thing, if you try to just leave the front door after you've been chased by dogs into the mansion. Beautifully handled! A seperate narration/puzzle solving kind of dialogue pops up that you REALLY shouldn't do it, and then if you try again you open the door... and get attacked by a dog! Future attempts then have a reason to deny you. This would be a terrible sin against gaming if Jill was standing there with her glitched out grenade launcher full of acid rounds, having already killed a giant snake and a giant shark and not needing any more information on what's going on, and she breaks character to say "No, I should REALLY go look for a helipad. I want to escape in a helicopter!".

The OHR game I'm talking about here is obviously Bloodlust. I reviewed it recently, and in the opening scene there's a bit where something has obviously killed your family and made a major mess of your house. The obvious action is to get the hell out, but when you go to the door the hero stops and is like "No, I should check the other rooms first". It's taken me a while to realize it, but what frustrates me about that scene is that as a horror game, there's a million scarier ways to keep someone from leaving the house till they've seen the mandatory story bits. "Something's sealing this door shut... it won't open!" is a million times spookier and doesn't steal any confidence from the Player-Player Character relationship.

I vaguely remember the original Virtual School doing this because almost everything wasn't finished, and that was frustrating too. Don't make the player like, HAVE to answer to his bully or go find his love interest. If it's that important, have a second option where they come to you, it's a way more interesting way to introduce the character. I think it ties into something I complained about somewhere, where the bigger deal the characters make of something, the less I personally try to think of it.

Meaning that if Sheamus refuses to leave school until he's talked to Becky, it's like when Mom makes you go somewhere with your little brother, like "Oh great, BECKY'S coming along, it's gonna be a party now", where if you leave school without Becky and she pops up all testy like "Hey! I thought we were going to walk together." and starts giving you the business about other girls you're like "Man, way to show some backbone, I like this Becky".

Basically, designers should try to remember the players tend to be a little rebellious. If you're giving them a choice, you should be mindful that the one they take isn't always going to be what you intended. Having a narrator gives you a way of denying the players more outlandish schemes without violating the fourth wall or making the Player Character control the Player.

If the story needs Becky to tag along, then Becky can show some brass and tag along regardless of whether or not you invited her. Alternate cutscenes like this are a great way to make a game feel polished. That said, you have to be careful. Becky deciding she wants to fight aliens too is great and establishs her character; Becky deciding to ignore the mean old white man and eating the apple he told her not to, thus creating sin and temptation is not. Sometimes the player is going to see through your traps, and you must be very careful if you're going to force them to fall into it anyway. A small reward for choosing right might be in order, and you're going to want to be careful to not make them resent the character who goofed up, or make them resent him. Might be fun!

Just remember that the main character goes where the player makes him go, the Main Character doesn't get to make the player make him go places. I think that's what it boils down to.

This immediately made me think of inane, false-choice YES/NO prompts in Dragon Quest. I wouldn't say it's a design issue I really hate since it has no drawbacks to answering wrong, it just makes me think "what is the point??" every time I see it. Even more disconcerting is the number of times I've seen it aped by DQ clones, it's like nobody stopped to think "you know, this adds nothing to the gameplay or dialogue..."

Giz, where was this rant during the days of HamsterSpeak? These are some excellent points you're making. I actually want to go through my games and hunt down any instance where the heroes are rebelling against the player now. (I can think of two places this happens in my games.)

My RPG pet peeve is lack of exploration and all-around laziness. I hate it when a character says he's doing something via asterisks or parentheses rather than actually doing it. Just script the action. It's easy and doesn't take that much time to do. With exploration, it's less of a hate when a game doesn't give me incentive to explore, but it does increase my love for it when it does. I like when my imagination can be ignited. Pique my curiosity and I'll thank you for it (if the discovery at the other side isn't lame).

My other pet peeve is closely related to the above. Sparse or empty towns bore me to tears. I don't care if the town is built in tight quarters or sprawls a 200x200 land mass (though, yikes if it's the latter). I do care whether or not it gives me more than just the standard Weapons/Armor/Items shops to explore. Some towns offer ticky-tacky homes (usually empty) and stock castles (which all seem to follow the same design principles). Some don't offer even that much. Put some thought and/or imagination into your towns. Give them a theme. Give them an industry. Give them a religion. Give them a secret. Give them a gathering center or a post office or a horse rental shop or anything that keeps them from being the same dang place I visited at the other end of the long enemy-infested hill (or the same place I visited in the last game I played). Your town is important because it's a refuge and restocking area, but why am I continuing with your game if that's all your game is: battle, rest, battle, rest, etc.? If your story is awesome, then I'll put up with carbon stock design schemes, but more often than not, the story isn't awesome, for that's also carbon stock.

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Yeah, I was obviously thinking more of Terra choosing to get a Genji Glove or a Gauntlet by talking to Banon and less of the Dragon Warrior kind of thing. My only theory on why that's still around is that RPG designers think it's funny, or it's setting you up for that troll at the end where the bad guy's all "You should join me!" And you say yes and you get a game over.



That's just the thing, this is a rant, aka an angry guy saying crap to other guys. HamsterSpeak deserved to be way more professional, and it's harder to do that. I can go crazy and say a bunch of stuff and maybe it sounds right and maybe it doesn't, but when I sit down and try to polish that I just get all self-concious and delete the whole thing.

I love both of your pet peeves because it's such simple stuff, just a little extra effort that makes such a huge difference, makes a game shine so much. And when a game doesn't do that, cuts corners, "insert cutscene here" kinda stuff it just kills the whole thing.

I hate it when the player-character takes control as well. In fact, this goes along with my preference for the silent player-avatar. But yeah, the player-character speaking out to 'direct' the player always feels terrible to me, and I don't think I ever really thought about it before. I'm not sure if this is laziness or poor writing.

I don't mind the 'fake choice' anywhere near as much. I think the reason is that, usually, the asker is not very important to me. In fact, the one 'fake choice' that I can remember kind of turning me off was in Dragon Warrior IV, where one of your party members is the one asking.

Of course, the best 'fake choices' are the ones with some humor built into the wrong choice's response.

I will say, in terms of a 'reason' for these fake choices, I'll claim that it's a simple case of trying to create the illusion of control for the player (especially in the silent avatar case). It's not actually that different from something like the beginning of FF6, where Terra and company roll into Narshe to get the Esper. There are a few branches in the path, but they're effectively pointless because their armor is too damn big (good thing the Esper was in the mines). One could ask what is the point of even allowing the player to control the walking at this point, ESPECIALLY since the story could have easily allowed Vicks and Wedge to be in control. That could have worked, but I think it's harmless to allow the player to control the walking and experience the illusion of control of the characters.

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Narshe's a neat example. I think not having the ability to wander around would've made that segment feel really claustrophobic, especially with the follow-up of being chased into the mines and fighting off the army with the Moogles and whatnot. That little glimmer of choice made a world's difference to my first impression of that game.

@Foxley: In regards to what was said about dead-ends, and the players expectation of treasure. I personally think the best way to resolve this problem in my own game is making all the dead-ends have no treasure, this is because I never want my player to feel like they must traverse down every knook and cranny of my map. When I add treasure to a dungeon, I like to do one of two things:

1) Put the treasure chest right where the player can see it, but just out of reach. I want the player to see that it's there, but make the player have to figure out a puzzle to get to it.

2) Make the treasure only appear once some sort of event is triggered. I usually like to do something that relies on how observant the player is (or how lucky the player is). For example: have a series of stone tiles in a hallway, one of the tiles is raised 1 pixel above the rest so that it appears out of place, when the player steps on it a chest appears or a wall opens revealing the treasure.

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Hmm, it seems this threads has gone a bit beyond simply listing gripes. The design discussion going on here is pretty interesting, I guess I'll chime in.

First, we got "Correct Path Bad, Dead-End Path Good."

I don't personally mind this. The only real reason this would be a problem is if you think you need to get every single item in the game. Once you get past that, things become better.
What worries me are the alternatives suggested here. if you take everything of value and put it in a straight line then why even make turns or forks in the road at all? Just straight lines with a series of monsters you have to get by in order to finish the level.


Flavorless side-questing.

This is really a W.o.W. sort of thing. It's a bit upsetting that W.o.W. is considered the norm when it comes to MMOrpgs. Too many of these new mmo's copy W.o.W.'s design in the worst ways. Other than mmorpgs, I don't think this even exists let alone is a problem.


Grinding.

To me the reason grinding exists is because levels exist. Level exists because dungeons and dragons had leveling and rpg's are all roughly based off of that. However, when you switch over to a video game with an infinite amount of monsters who all give a fixed amount of experience your players can easily out level all the bosses and fly through the game unchallenged. The solution some early game developers came up with is to have monsters sharply escalate in toughness so as to assume players are going to go out and level up furiously when they get a chance. This of course forces everyone to level like crazy, but at the time it seemed like a fair solution. This problem was actually solved in D&D itself with a monster experience to player level chart that stops giving players experience from monsters when they out level them by enough. There are other solutions to grinding, but some of them aren't that great, like taking leveling out completely.

One thing that's also absent in JRPG style games is gaining large amounts of experience for completing quests. Generally, only beating a boss will give you big experience payoffs, but in order to beat a boss you might need to do the prerequisite grinding. I haven't played tabletop D&D before, but I've played a bunch of D&D games for PC and most if not all of them had big EXP payouts for completing sidequests or story related quests.

One of the flaws that I despise are overly easy/hard games. In some games, like Pokemon for instance, you don't even NEED to train at all. Just spam every enemy with your best attack and heal every once and a while. And in other games, like FFIII, no matter how long you grind on the hardest available enemies, you still don't seem to have more than a 5% chance of beating the next boss. I'm not trying to say that they should make the bosses pathetically easy, but maybe just tone down that ATK stat a leeeeetle bit.

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This is a super interesting flaw to address. One of the many tricky parts of an RPG is that you have no way to judge how long the player is going to be in each area, and no way of measuring their enthusiasm for exploring that area. We've all gone into a new place in a game and been like "Whoa... there's gotta be secrets around here!" or got hung up on a sidequest that isn't relevant yet. That kind of stuff means more wandering around, means higher level, means when we get back on track we're overly prepared. Or, you might absolutely HATE an area and all of its enemies, run away from every battle and make a beeline for the boss, who slaughters you because the developer thought you'd have solved a bunch of sidequests first.

It reminds me of something I hate in RPGs, which is when the enemies "adapt" to whatever your level is. I know Final Fantasy Tactics just does a flat "You're level 17, so the enemy will be Level 17(plus or minus)" and that was a game with hideous load times and menus between each battle, so grinding was really a grind for not much of a reward. Add in that exploit to dupe equipment, that exploit to get unlimited Job Points for almost every class and it's no wonder that a lot of people don't like to play the game "fair".

You see it more often in modern stuff too, Fallout 3 checks what level you are when you enter a dungeon for the first time, and then tailors the enemies inside to be a challenge to you at that time. Subsequent visits use the first check, so the guys in the Mini Mart are ALWAYS going to have either pitchforks or bazookas, even if that stuff is no longer remotely dangerous to you.

An open-world makes that kind of thing more necessary, you want someone to have a sense of freedom. Fallout New Vegas rebelled against the scaled-enemies, but then uses super-powered enemies around the starting town to funnel you a certain way for the sake of "story". Nobody wants to get railroaded.

It's a tough task. You don't want to punish people who like to wander around, but you don't want to coddle anyone either. I think I could forgive scaled-encounters more if they were justified in story. These aren't the same raiders you fought before, only stronger! These are a stronger group of raiders who chased out the first group after you broke 'em up! Holy shit, a DRAGON moved into that cave and ate all the wolves! Something that makes the world feel alive, rather than that damned Ocarina of Time bunny hat guy who is always EXACTLY a second faster than you! Fuck that guy!

I don't envy the guys who made Pokemon, by the way. Think of all the things you'd have to balance. People could trade for a great pokemon and storm through the game, so you gotta have badges to make them respect you. You've gotta account for the three kinds of starter pokemon, which gives you a general difficulty arc. You have to account too, for what kind of pokemon are available up to each gym. Not to mention TMs and HMs giving Pokemon different, possibly game-breaking moves and trying to piece it all together. On top of all that, it's a kids game, so it can't be too frustrating. That said, you point out the obvious flaw. If you've got enough healing/MP items, the whole thing feels cheap and it doesn't feel like there's a funner alternative to that technique.

It all reminds me of stuff I've been reading about for blackjack. Each casino has like a million little rules that tweak the game more or less towards the casino or the player's advantage. Little stuff like blackjack paying off 3/2 rather than 2/1, whether or not the dealer stands on 16 or 17, can all make a big difference towards whether or not you're gonna make money in that casino. They put a lot of thought into whether or not people are going to have a good time, and so should we.