What Irks you about RPGs?

[DigiTan]

This topic's a follow-up on DarkAuron's Bringing RPGs closer to perfection. ...Sort of a chance to rant and rave about anything that's lacking, cliché, or annoying in general about RPGs. This is geared more toward single-player handheld/console RPGs, but any RPG in general will do. Character issues, aggravating quests, grinding for exp, and just about everything else is fair game.

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One things that's always bugged me in turn-based battle was the random number generation. Naturally, an attack's failure rate should involve some random element, but using a fixed "miss" rate allows the same move to repeatedly fail an unnatural number of times. (Playing SNES games, I've seen melee moves fail up to 12 consequetive times). That's sort of excusable in calc games due to limited space; but it appears to be done in a lot of large consoles as well. You can say I'm not a fan of the die-roll aspect of it.

For realism, I'd rather lower the failure rate with each consecutive miss. Give it an initial accuracy rate and ramp up the accuracy as the character adapts to the situation. Anyway, thats enough from me.


So what everybody's take?

[Arcane Wizard]

When I played a paper n pencil RPG we used dices a bit more realistically. Yes the roll decided success or failure, but the number that needed to be rolled for succes could be influenced to deviate from standards by all kinds of specific attributes that came into play in the present scenario. Like, if the tools you could use for something where all of excellent quality, or you put in some extra study before doing it, or advantages like higher grounds in combat, all gave a slight bonus. Negotiating while drunk gave penalties, with someone you had socialised with before, bonusses. This encouraged using resources and being creative in finding resources as well as teamplay and planning. (my character knew to read and had high intellegence, so if anyone needed to learn it, I could help and it would be easyer or if I was drunk and failed to explain it well it would be harder, stuff like that)

Furthermore, the difference between the required number and your actual result from the dice roll determined the severity of success or failure. This was partially already present in most dice rolls for social interaction as defined by the rulebooks but we extended it to everything.

The realism came in that, for example, if you where very trained in something you couldn't do it that horribly wrong any more. If you're an expert armoursmith you're not going to burn down your whole shop when you make a mistake, and when you do succeed you are capable of much better results than a novice. (roll 25 when 60 was required = nicely made armour or faster made armour or at less costs etc. roll 99 and yeah its a sucky armour but some repairs and it might still work. if you ahd to roll 30 and rolled 99 you probably hacked your arm off or something )

Anyways, I loathe:

level systems
japanese mythology, art, character, and story design
final fantasy fanboys
stuff that has already been done

[Super Speler]

[IAmACalculator]

Teh list of irkage:

1. Tedious quests that are no fun and give not-worth-it rewards (for only 9999 of this rare item, you can get this totally worthless thing that you happen to need on your quest!)
   
2. Monster battles every five steps (better to put the monsters on the map, so they can be avoided)
   
3. Obnoxious battle music
   
4. Generic cliché medieval stuff (frying pans of doom are so much better than broadswords of destruction)
   
5. Repetitive/bad story lines
   
6. Impossible bosses
   
7. Stale, boring, non-interactive battle system
   

This is why I want to get Mother 3, which has none of these things (now if only it were in English).

[tr1p1ea]

I also dislike the 'battle every few steps' element found in some turn-based rpgs. Im making a very short RPG in BASIC (with xLIB) and i wish to avoid this completely.

[Rezek]

[Liazon]

After installing calcrogue 89 on my 89 titanium, i've become hooked.

I think a 3D computer version in semi real time should be made should be designed. Something that incorporates the ideas and strategies necessary to get far in calc rogue. Namely, the enemies can flank you, area spells, degenerating skills, equipment can get damaged, there's just so much good stuff about calc rogue 89!!

btw, what do I do after i give the dwarves the illuminite?

[Babyboy]

[DigiTan]

Oh right, one minor thing that always bugged me is slow-moving text. A alot of games like Earthbound would let you speed up the typewriter effect, but a few others force you to wait until the entire speech is up. Leads to a lot of furious button-tapping on my end.

I have to give Earthbound my thumbs up for avoidable enemies. They could even run from you in certain situations.

[Weregoose]

• Rooms with puzzles in them where, once you screw up, there's no resetting or fixing them—ever
  
• Enemies that "come back from the dead" whenever you scroll to reveal their spawn points
  
• [font="courier new"]not(Click[font="courier new"])
  

[DigiTan]

Aw man, now I feel bad for not checking that game out in November. Most of the games with on-screen enemies I played had a mix of spawning points and random enemies. Only thing was, in Chrono Trigger they were hard to avoid no matter what. I mean, you had a chance to turn back if you wanted, but it was hard to sneak by. Still, I think it was well done.


The thing I probably hate the most are bosses unlimited "heal" capabilities. So a boss heals back to 100% after I take down most of their HP.. Fair enough, I wouldn've done the same thing. But when it happens 5, 10, or 15 times; that starts to reflect bad game balancing. Especially when you can't reliably counteract the heal.

[Arcane Wizard]

- A lack of danger from weak/"low level" enemies. (inherit flaw of level based systems)

When I charge a cave full of goblins I want to know in the back of my mind that any one of them can get a lucky hit in and kill me in a single blow. Critical Hit! Kapow!

Lack of non-combat skills.

[IAmACalculator]

[Arcane Wizard]

What's the point of leveling up if that means you as a player are not even needed any more because your character can't even be harmed by anything any more?

I prefer the "realism" of skill-based systems. Slight physical progress that doesn't make you totally invulnerable from what you started out as + great skill development so your playing skills have more impact on gameplay = fun.

If I want to beat a game without any skill on my part I'll play a popular RPG.

[IAmACalculator]

I guess you're right. Strategy and skill should be the most important part of an RPG.

[elfprince13]

As much as I love the original pokemon games (blue and red version) one thing that always irked me was the the level system that meant I could one-hit K'O every single pokemon in the elite four.

Also, avoidable enemies are nice, but not always appropriate (like in a swamp).

[Sage Orator]

I loved the glitch in those games...made it fun when you were playing it for the seventh time.

[elfprince13]

there are several. I can catch mew, gengar, nidoqueen, and nidoking in Lavender Town without a gameshark or any such device.

Getting 30 pokemon to level 100 sort of takes the fun out of it though :|

which is why I dont hugely like the level system unless all enemies you face are within a few levels of your own.

[Sage Orator]

Not if it's the seventh time. Plus you can use the same one to actually capture like a level 141 Chancey.

Grinding annoys the heck out of me, so does random chances of hitting. They tell you there's a 10% chance and it takes fifty to hit.

[elfprince13]

no, this is a completely different cheat. *hint* its in Lavender Town.