Are RPG players antagonistic toward combat types based on misunderstandings?

[Lurker47]

Instead, those people want something closer to Dark Souls combat, or what Kingdom Come: Deliverance is trying to do, an action combat where it's not just about reflexes, but also knowledge of the system, and tactics, or in other words, intelligent gameplay.

Dark Souls is almost solely about reflexes though- knowledgeable of the system can just be "remembering the moves of a boss" and tactics being "stay away from them until they're open" or something but that's really reductive. It's a shame that Dark Souls is being used as some sort of high achievement of great combat when it's just solidly executed and harder than usual. It's also being aggressively regurgitated despite it being completely devoid of any real thought or strategy which makes the whole series (and its clones) feel regressive.

 

[Lurker47]

One major issue for me is that there are so many variables that compose an RPG combat system:

• Amount of micromanagement
• Availability of healing
• Single-character/party-based and party size
• Relative number of enemies compared to friendlies
• Presence of NPC allies
• Importance of positioning (including existence of aggro/engagement mechanic)
• Power of buffs/debuffs (in general and relative to damage-dealing)
• Availability of buffs/debuffs (in general and relative to damage-dealing)
• Resource renewal speed
• General difficulty of combat
• Enemy/player symmetry
• Ranged vs. melee combat
• Class differences
• Combat goals
• Presence of random encounters/surprise encounters
• Presence of respawns
• Presence of combatants entering the fray midway through combat
• Existence/power of summoning
• Existence of resource management
• Levelling curve (relevance of level in combat
• Relevance of stats in combat
• Relevance of skills/abilities in combat
• Relative power of AoE/multi-target attacks versus single-target attacks
• Prevalence of consumables
• Power of consumables

,and of them the only one that gets any mention is the timekeeping mechanism

Rate my game's combat system:

• No micromanagement
• No healing
• 8-player party size
• Presence of NPC allies
• No importance of positioning (no attacks of opportunity, or disengagement penalties)
• Presence of buffs/debuffs
• Buffs/debuffs are rare or available to only high level characters
• A lucky shot from a level 1 archer can instant-kill any level 99 heavily armored knight
• AI always targets the nearest foe without concern for tactics
• Random encounters/surprise encounters
• No respawns: forced Iron-man mode (ie Perma-death)
• Unsure about combatants entering the fray midway through combat
• No Existence/power of summoning
• No Existence of resource management
• Levelling curve (relevance of level in combat) is not that great, a highly trained knight will have great difficulty fighting 3 peasants at once
• Relevance of stats in combat is not that great, a highly trained knight will have great difficulty fighting 3 peasants at once
• Relevance of skills/abilities in combat is not that great, a highly trained knight will have great difficulty fighting 3 peasants at once
• There are zero AoE/multi-target attacks, only single-target attacks
• No consumables

That sounds awful and I'm not even sure why it's an RPG.

 

[Severian Silk]

and JRPGs in general, suck balls because of their turn-based nature.

If the Final Fantasies (except for FFT, I guess) were real-time, they would still be shitty, probably.

Also, a better example of shitty turn-based combat (e.g. in terms of what a given Codexer might actually be playing right now) are roguelikes. I like single-character RPGs, but I like them like Underrail not Mega-Kewl Roguelike #431. Roguelikes are like the CoD of the indie RPG scene: there's always a new one coming out, and they all pretty much suck.

 

[sprajt]

I like any type of combat when its well done - and IMO we don't see it very often. By well done I mean tested A LOT with different players that have one in common - they want the fight to be competitive, but fair.

But this is very hard to achieve - its so much easier to create mass of dumb monsters that just follow you to kill by a basic "special" attack. Add to it fancy spells/explosions that do the same thing but look different and there you go - you have another RPG... Plus, such game can take long to finish (as its easily reusable) so people won't bash you on making the game too short. 30 hours of doing the same? Great! Especially in ARPGs/HnS where most of them are created for casuals e.g. tired players that just want to relax from dayjob and kill some zombies/monsters before bed.

That's what I think most of hardcore RPG fans don't (or don't want to) understand. For many companies it's just business as others. Games tended to reach casual players more likely when the focus on combat was not the greatest. That's why Dark Souls combat was revied really well as they actually thought about hardcore players and probably reiterated gameplay a lot even before.

 

[Iznaliu]

One major issue for me is that there are so many variables that compose an RPG combat system:

• Amount of micromanagement
• Availability of healing
• Single-character/party-based and party size
• Relative number of enemies compared to friendlies
• Presence of NPC allies
• Importance of positioning (including existence of aggro/engagement mechanic)
• Power of buffs/debuffs (in general and relative to damage-dealing)
• Availability of buffs/debuffs (in general and relative to damage-dealing)
• Resource renewal speed
• General difficulty of combat
• Enemy/player symmetry
• Ranged vs. melee combat
• Class differences
• Combat goals
• Presence of random encounters/surprise encounters
• Presence of respawns
• Presence of combatants entering the fray midway through combat
• Existence/power of summoning
• Existence of resource management
• Levelling curve (relevance of level in combat
• Relevance of stats in combat
• Relevance of skills/abilities in combat
• Relative power of AoE/multi-target attacks versus single-target attacks
• Prevalence of consumables
• Power of consumables

,and of them the only one that gets any mention is the timekeeping mechanism

Rate my game's combat system:

• No micromanagement
• No healing
• 8-player party size
• Presence of NPC allies
• No importance of positioning (no attacks of opportunity, or disengagement penalties)
• Presence of buffs/debuffs
• Buffs/debuffs are rare or available to only high level characters
• A lucky shot from a level 1 archer can instant-kill any level 99 heavily armored knight
• AI always targets the nearest foe without concern for tactics
• Random encounters/surprise encounters
• No respawns: forced Iron-man mode (ie Perma-death)
• Unsure about combatants entering the fray midway through combat
• No Existence/power of summoning
• No Existence of resource management
• Levelling curve (relevance of level in combat) is not that great, a highly trained knight will have great difficulty fighting 3 peasants at once
• Relevance of stats in combat is not that great, a highly trained knight will have great difficulty fighting 3 peasants at once
• Relevance of skills/abilities in combat is not that great, a highly trained knight will have great difficulty fighting 3 peasants at once
• There are zero AoE/multi-target attacks, only single-target attacks
• No consumables

It's not very RPG-ish; it sounds like it's from a game where combat isn't a main focus.

 

[Tavernking]

It's not very RPG-ish; it sounds like it's from a game where combat isn't a main focus.

Sounds like more of a grand-battle kinda system, not so much a ye-olde-party-based-combat system.

Both of you are correct.

 

[Lurker47]

It's not very RPG-ish; it sounds like it's from a game where combat isn't a main focus.

Sounds like more of a grand-battle kinda system, not so much a ye-olde-party-based-combat system.

Both of you are correct.

But why are skills, stats, and leveling even a thing if they don't make much of a difference?

 

[KyivAfter12am]

Random encounters/surprise encounters

A lucky shot from a level 1 archer can instant-kill any level 99 heavily armored knight

Yeah, massive fun.

 

[Iznaliu]

But why are skills, stats, and leveling even a thing if they don't make much of a difference?

Because they sound awesome?

 

[Lurker47]

But why are skills, stats, and leveling even a thing if they don't make much of a difference?

Because they sound awesome?

How silly.

 

[Tavernking]

But why are skills, stats, and leveling even a thing if they don't make much of a difference?

Because they sound awesome?

How silly.

You'll never be a god slaying hundred of human enemies, but you would have the edge on a 1v1 fight and might be able to win a 3v1 fight if you're lucky.
To explain the system, all of your attributes contribute to a single value, your 'combat roll'. If you have a combat roll of 40 and you enter a fight with an enemy with a combat roll of 20, you have a 2/3rd chance of winning that encounter. If you win the encounter, your enemy instantly dies. If you lose the encounter, you instantly die and your save is automatically deleted. So even if you're a master warrior with a combat roll of 100 verusing a peasant with a combat roll of 5, you can still technically lose.

This is all balanced by the fact that combat is entirely optional: it's an uncommon intense high-risk activity to fight an enemy, not something you do twenty times a day without caring like most RPGs do it. Gaining experience in combat safety is done by grinding on training dummies, not on any living opponents.

I know this system will get a lot of hate.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

So even if you're a master warrior with a combat roll of 100 verusing a peasant with a combat roll of 5, you can still technically lose.

Eh....

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

• A lucky shot from a level 1 archer can instant-kill any level 99 heavily armored knight
• No respawns: forced Iron-man mode (ie Perma-death)

Great design

 

[Lurker47]

This is all balanced by the fact that combat is entirely optional: it's an uncommon intense high-risk activity to fight an enemy, not something you do twenty times a day without caring like most RPGs do it. Gaining experience in combat safety is done by grinding on training dummies, not on any living opponents.

Except it also has random encouters for some reason.

I know this system will get a lot of hate.

And for good reason. "Hardcore!!!!!!!!111" stuff like this is just goofy. It reminds of me of mods like DUST for New Vegas where they just make the retarded Radiant AI do 30000x times more damage and then pretend like that's a fun or interesting "challenge". People just need to make something interesting and stop forcing hardcore stuff into everything.

If the combat isn't a huge part of the game then why make it so punishing? You could fuck up an entire run because you can lose to everything (at any time with random encounters) and it's a system you wouldn't be able to learn properly because of its scarcity and its discouragement leading to even more silly situations.

Ironmode really doesn't work with the character building and progress systems of RPG's unless you work the entire thing around it. And I know you're trying to avoid that by deemphasizing stats but I seriously can't see this system being anything more than just annoying and tedious like all of the other "hardcore" stuff pumped into games a lot of the time

 

[belowmecoldhands]

RTwP is fundamentally bad because its core feature (pause) is a cheat code that breaks game balance and reduces enjoyment.

The optimal outcome in such a system is obtained by pausing every second of every fight. Only the autist does this because it is not enjoyable.

The game must be balanced so that the non-pauser can complete it.

Therefore, anyone engaging with the core feature is receiving an intentionally undertuned experience. Enjoyment is simply a function of how willing you are to trade gameplay for an ego stroke.

TLDR: RTwP is a wisdom(maturity) check. The only way to fix it is to make pausing a limited resource, which is the definition of turn-based.

I was largely agreeing with your post until I became the devils advocate. I do that a lot. This argument can be reversed. I can argue the amount of time you spend on a turn is equivalent to how many times you pause in RTwP.

So I'd change your post like this:

RTwP TB is fundamentally bad because its core feature (pause) (depth) is a cheat code that breaks game balance and reduces enjoyment.

The optimal outcome in such a system is obtained by pausing every second of every fight spending lots of time on every turn. Only the autist does this because it is not enjoyable.

The game must be balanced so that the non-pauser non-autists can complete it.

Therefore, anyone engaging with the core feature is receiving an intentionally undertuned experience. Enjoyment is simply a function of how willing you are to trade gameplay for an ego stroke.

TLDR: RTwP TB is a wisdom(maturity) check. The only way to fix it is to make pausing depth a limited resource, which is the definition of turn-based real-time.

See, you have to add a timer to each turn so depth is limited. But this effectively makes it real-time. So we're right back where we started. In fact, we probably made things more complicated than they need to be.

You might argue TB is inherently made for autists, or niche gamers, but I'll fire back most game companies wnat to expand their audience, so these concerns of "player enjoyment" are always brought to the fore.

Long story short, every game can suffer from this without a strong modding system. Egosoft and Bethesda learned this lesson a long time ago. They make games for commonplace gamers, but enable it to be easily modded for niche audiences.

 

[Invictus]

I still think that the reason that rtwp is so badly perceived by most grognads is that always use poor examples for it; ie Pillars and IE games
For an almost perfect implementation of rtwp I would say that the Freedom Force games fit the bill perfectly; ot did require pausing but arguably less so than most rtwp games because of its cooldown system. Since there were no prebuffs it became almost a combat management system where you could nix and match your heroes abilities to account for your cooldowns; for example using aoe abilities like Diablo's fireballs or Enchantress' spells while coordinating the other heroes faster cooldown abilities kept things interesting and above all fun
Now, I recognize that a good turn based system is prefered by me to the best rtwp but a great game which uses rtwp is a great game nonetheless not in spite of using that system

 

[Iznaliu]

all of your attributes contribute to a single value, your 'combat roll'.

Then why have the attributes in the first place?