Ultimately this goes back to my original question: How do you reconciliate RPG and strategy? I've yet to play a game where my characters do not become god in the endgame. If an answer is found to this question, and the answer doesn't kill the fun in an RPG, you are on your way to make the next big hit.

That depends on your definition of fun. Over the year, fun for me changed from increasing an array of numbers through time investment to figuring out what was going on in the head of the designer when he crafted that boss. I blame time constraints on that one.

Becoming god or not is a matter of playing with numbers. Simply add a 0 here and there and your numerical advantage disappears and you are no longer considered a god. Disgaea is the perfect example of numbers for the sake of numbers. The end game was all about figuring the most efficient way to make your numbers grow so you could surpass whatever number was required to beat a specific boss. There was hardly any strategy involved in the combats. If your numbers exceeded a threshold, you won. If they were under, you lost. If they were close, you might be able to do something to alter the outcome, but it was a narrow range.

The way to reconcile strategy and RPG is to make the numbers have a small impact on the outcome. FFX achieved this by adding locks in the sphere grid. They were constraining characters to a predetermined stat range for a given encounter. Until you reach the end game where you can unlock everything and become god, it provided diverse and challenging encounters where you had to use each character based on their strengths and abilities. You couldn't brute force your way out of them by grinding because your progress was stopped by these locks. FF13 also did it using a similar technique. It was incredibly linear, but the boss fights were superbly crafted where you had to cleverly configure your paradigms and equipment set because you couldn't play the numbers game. Again, it all broke down when you reached pulse because your effective power range varied too much which led to too easy or too hard encounters.

This is the same thing Orymus detailed in his post. By creating bosses with effects that are independent of numbers, you end up with unique and strategic encounters. However, this can be hard to do since higher numbers give more margin of error up to the point where the special effects don't matter anymore. This needs to be finely tuned through some means.

In my opinion, the key here is to tightly control how powerful the player can be at every point in the game. You can't appeal to both crowds. Either the grinders will stone you for removing their ability to grow powerful enough to plow through the game or those who seek mind games will eventually go on a sidequest and be permanently overleveled, making the rest of the game boring for them.

Indeed. But how do you determine what is an "acceptable challenge"? Some players might not enjoy the gameplay but is invested enough in the story to do the bare minimum just to get to the next cutscene. Some likes to gain god-level-powers and (might) ignore the main storyline for most of their gameplay time. You can design your encounters to encourage the "cutscene chasing" player to invest abit more in the gameplay by making them step up to the challenge, but is there a way to make it continuously challenging for the "power chaser" who deviates from the main storyline time and again to get the next level of power?
Yes, you can implement level-scaling difficulty to make sure the encounters do not become too easy, but level-scaling can only do so much, especially when equipment becomes involved. In fact, I daresay most of the gamebreakers are equipment.

Like I said above, you can't cater to both crowds. It's like trying to create a chick flick with explosions and hot russian spies in tight leather to please guys at the same time. You need to figure out which crowd you target and design the game accordingly.

... MMO ...

I can see where you're coming from now. MMOs are pure numbers games. The whole point of MMOs is to cater to grinders by allowed them to push their numbers higher and higher and cash in at the same time. Since the whole point of the game is to grind, it makes sense to figure out the most effective way to grind from the start. Look at korean MMOs with cash shops. They offer you reduced grinding time in exchange for money. While they claim to have RPG in their genre name, the same principles do not apply to single player RPGs because the focus is generally story and exploration instead of stat growth.

Ultimately, I believe Diablo's rune system is helping moving from numbers to strategy, hence my initial thoughts on this.
The tagline for my project was "bring back gameplay into RPGs" and evolve into a number of founding values, including "bring strategy to RPGs".
However, another founding principle stated that I couldn't be overly original and needed not reinvent the wheel entirely. I can evolve systems, but not make drastic changes that would make rpg-ers think it is not a retro-rpg logical evolution.
You could say I'm trying to cater for both crowds, but this is an obvious attempt to move away from pure grinding into a territory where the player has a choice to make to overcome the game:
grind or think. With a strong emphasis on thinking obviously.
Bosses are meant to enforce this. Instead of being numbers-gate that you can only beat if you have been grinding, they will be thinking-gates that will only be achievable, yes, once certain numbers are reached, but also, only once you've figured a nice strategy to overcome them. The idea of rule-breaking helps a lot here.

With that said, I wouldn't want to have you believe I'm not interested in this discussion regarding rpgs vs strategy, as I'm pretty much very interested in this debate, though I'd like to remind you that the thread's initial topic was about skills and how to give the players a chance at customizing their effects so that they can choose from a pool of customized skills and say "THIS, is my strategy to overcome this obstacle".

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@ Orymus[/font]
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1) I'm not too sure I understand, is that supposedly bad? (I haven't played much of ff7 if that is what you are referring to).[/quote]
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[color="#1c2837"]It depends. They thing about these "Meter Attacks" is that their power levels are tied to how fast the characters can charge up their "Meters". If your skills are as powerful as these "Meter Attacks" without the "Meter Limitation", they can quickly break your game.


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[color=#1C2837][size=2]I really want the player to have access to nearly all skills in the game (save a few ones that would rely purely on choices). The strategy won't come from choosing the right path, but from making the right micro-decisions before and after a fight[color=#1C2837][size=2][/quote]
[color=#1C2837][size=2]

[color=#1C2837][size=2]Would you allow your players to stick to their skill build (and subsequently win all their encounters with their preferred build), OR do you want them to keep switching their skill build and experiment with new skills for each new "dungeon"(?).
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[color="#1c2837"]Both of you raised something interesting in your posts:
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...Most random encounters are just that: weaklings you can kill easily but which will have a toll on your global hp, thus, your overall resource. They only force you to go back, not to think...
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...Becoming god or not is a matter of playing with numbers...
...The way to reconcile strategy and RPG is to make the numbers have a small impact on the outcome...
...Again, it all broke down when you reached pulse because your effective power range varied too much which led to too easy or too hard encounters....

...By creating bosses with effects that are independent of numbers, you end up with unique and strategic encounters. However, this can be hard to do since higher numbers give more margin of error up to the point where the special effects don't matter anymore...

...In my opinion, the key here is to tightly control how powerful the player can be at every point in the game...

...MMOs are pure numbers games...
...While they claim to have RPG in their genre name, the same principles do not apply to single player RPGs because the focus is generally story and exploration instead of stat growth...

Which I think its fair to sum up as the following:
1) RPG is a number game. (Corollary: MMO is more balanced compared to single-player RPGs)
2) Weak encounters are used to feed power to the characters. (To generate larger character-numbers so that designers can create more content)
3) The flow of power from the game to the character. (And how to control that flow)
4) Why can't monsters have the same stats as the players? (Think about this for abit. If player-characters have strong stats, copying the character's stats should make the monsters a good challenge, but monsters more often than not have arbitrary stats independent of the character's stats. Why?)
5) Skills with "effects independent of numbers". (All RPG skills either fall into three category of "Damage", "Disable" and "Buff", or a combination of the categories. Notably the "Disable" category is independent of numbers, and they remain useful throughout the game if the enemies are not immune to it. More often than not, they are, which renders that skill quite useless in the encounter. Otherwise they are quite powerful.)

Other things to note:
1) The power of "Disable"-type Skills. "Damage"-Skill is inseparable from the number-game. "Buffs" (arguably) rely on and manipulates the number-game as well. That leaves you with "Disable" for those number-independent-skill. "Disables" can be extremely potent in and of itself. I think this is one of the reasons why all bosses in RPG games are status immune. If they were to be affected by disables (especially the stunning type) they become nothing more than a punching bag with tons of HP for players to beat on.
2) Computer AI and Enemy-Setup. More often than not, the AI randomly pick a member in your party to unload their damage on. They do not co-ordinate their attacks to focus fire on one party member until it dies before moving on to another. They ignore your healers and let them revive your fallen party members time and again. Imagine for one moment that the monsters are programmed to always target your healers first, and leave your tanks alone until they are the last member standing. That would make things abit more challenging. Throw in a couple of disables into their attack-cycle and you've got a challenging fight going on. If the enemy have one high-DPS-character in their party, you might just lose the encounter completely.


This leaves you with one question: Designing Skills to fit Encounters, or Designing Encounters to fit Skills?
In the former, skill selection should never be the reason why players fail an encounter. In fact, most skill builds should allow players to solve the encounters. In the latter, you are specifically making encounters which requires a certain skill to solve, somewhat like a "Question-Answer" session. Lets take your Ice Cave scenario as an example. In the cave, Fire-Based skill build is the most effective means to clear that particular level. If I were to go in that cave with a Water-Based skill build, what happens? Will the result be (a) I die and fail to clear the level with my Water-Based build; or (b) I manage to clear the level with my Water-Based build.

I think one way to handle "skill effectiveness" is via "skill synergy". In the above example of "Fire-Based Build" and "Water-Based Build", each build should have something unique to their build which displays each build's inherent strengths and weakness. A "Fire-Based Build" would have the highest amount of damage compare to all other elements. A "Water-Based Build" is more of a crowd control and survival build. You could have something like this:

Fire-Based Build
Skill 1 - Fireball: Deals X Damage to target. Target suffers from "Burning" debuff. ("Burning" = Damage-Over-Time Debuff)
Skill 2 - Incinerate: Deals X Damage to target. If target is suffering from "Burning", target takes X more Damage.
Skill 3 - Sparks: Deals X Damage to target. Target suffers from "Pyrophobia" debuff. ("Pyrophobia" = Reduce target's Fire-Resistance)
Skill 4 - Fire Touch: Deals X Damage to target. If target is suffering from "Pyrophobia", target takes X% more damage from the next Fire-Element Attack.

Water-Based Build
Skill 1 - Waterball: Deals X Damage to target. Target suffers a "Wet" debuff.
Skill 2 - Chill: Slows target's Attack Speed. Also, if target suffers from "Wet" debuff, reduce target's Move Speed. Target suffers a "Cold" debuff.
Skill 3 - Freeze: Stun target for X seconds. If target is suffering from "Cold" debuff, target is stunned for another X second. While stunned, target suffers a "Freeze" debuff.
Skill 4 - Ice Break: Deal X Damage to target. If target is suffering from "Freeze" debuff, reduce target's ATK by X%.

When the builds are setup in the above way, the Ice Cave can render the Water-Based build less effective by having all the encounters within the cave to be immune from "Wet", "Cold" and "Freeze" debuff. That way, the Water-Based build should still be able to go solve the Ice Cave, but they are using the least efficient method to clear it.

Also, to ensure that the Fire-Based build is the most viable choice to clear the Ice Cave encounter, you should give the encounters within the Cave sufficient amount of HP. When I say sufficient HP, I meant for it in a way that monsters will die to a complete "Fire Combo" (Fire Combo = When players activate Skill 1 to Skill 4 in sequence), but other build would need to do a "Full Combo" + additional attacks before the monster goes down. The Water-Build would survive the encounter, but they would do that at a somewhat large cost. (Ineffective combos, low damage output, survival power cut in half).

[quote name='taneugene' timestamp='1312567136' post='4845116']
Ultimately this goes back to my original question: How do you reconciliate RPG and strategy? I've yet to play a game where my characters do not become god in the endgame. If an answer is found to this question, and the answer doesn't kill the fun in an RPG, you are on your way to make the next big hit.

That depends on your definition of fun. Over the year, fun for me changed from increasing an array of numbers through time investment to figuring out what was going on in the head of the designer when he crafted that boss. I blame time constraints on that one.

Becoming god or not is a matter of playing with numbers. Simply add a 0 here and there and your numerical advantage disappears and you are no longer considered a god. Disgaea is the perfect example of numbers for the sake of numbers. The end game was all about figuring the most efficient way to make your numbers grow so you could surpass whatever number was required to beat a specific boss. There was hardly any strategy involved in the combats. If your numbers exceeded a threshold, you won. If they were under, you lost. If they were close, you might be able to do something to alter the outcome, but it was a narrow range.

The way to reconcile strategy and RPG is to make the numbers have a small impact on the outcome. FFX achieved this by adding locks in the sphere grid. They were constraining characters to a predetermined stat range for a given encounter. Until you reach the end game where you can unlock everything and become god, it provided diverse and challenging encounters where you had to use each character based on their strengths and abilities. You couldn't brute force your way out of them by grinding because your progress was stopped by these locks. FF13 also did it using a similar technique. It was incredibly linear, but the boss fights were superbly crafted where you had to cleverly configure your paradigms and equipment set because you couldn't play the numbers game. Again, it all broke down when you reached pulse because your effective power range varied too much which led to too easy or too hard encounters.

This is the same thing Orymus detailed in his post. By creating bosses with effects that are independent of numbers, you end up with unique and strategic encounters. However, this can be hard to do since higher numbers give more margin of error up to the point where the special effects don't matter anymore. This needs to be finely tuned through some means.

In my opinion, the key here is to tightly control how powerful the player can be at every point in the game. You can't appeal to both crowds. Either the grinders will stone you for removing their ability to grow powerful enough to plow through the game or those who seek mind games will eventually go on a sidequest and be permanently overleveled, making the rest of the game boring for them.

Indeed. But how do you determine what is an "acceptable challenge"? Some players might not enjoy the gameplay but is invested enough in the story to do the bare minimum just to get to the next cutscene. Some likes to gain god-level-powers and (might) ignore the main storyline for most of their gameplay time. You can design your encounters to encourage the "cutscene chasing" player to invest abit more in the gameplay by making them step up to the challenge, but is there a way to make it continuously challenging for the "power chaser" who deviates from the main storyline time and again to get the next level of power?
Yes, you can implement level-scaling difficulty to make sure the encounters do not become too easy, but level-scaling can only do so much, especially when equipment becomes involved. In fact, I daresay most of the gamebreakers are equipment.

Like I said above, you can't cater to both crowds. It's like trying to create a chick flick with explosions and hot russian spies in tight leather to please guys at the same time. You need to figure out which crowd you target and design the game accordingly.

... MMO ...

I can see where you're coming from now. MMOs are pure numbers games. The whole point of MMOs is to cater to grinders by allowed them to push their numbers higher and higher and cash in at the same time. Since the whole point of the game is to grind, it makes sense to figure out the most effective way to grind from the start. Look at korean MMOs with cash shops. They offer you reduced grinding time in exchange for money. While they claim to have RPG in their genre name, the same principles do not apply to single player RPGs because the focus is generally story and exploration instead of stat growth.
[/quote]

Remove the grind. Make MMOs fun again. I don't think an overly elaborate game with a zillion quests where everyone becomes the hero is the way to go. Keep it simple, keep it fun, keep it fresh. Lessen the power of gear and the grind will shrink, but you need to have content that provides enjoyment beyond leveling up. Provide meaningful PVP where players can compete without being fully maximized is key. Provide a PVE portion of the game that continues to interact with the PVP portion, but make sure to keep them separate to an extent, PVE can happen in PVP areas, but PVP can't necessarily happen in PVE. Lessen the power curve that generally has level 1s being inept and level 50s being overly dominant. Be a part of something larger, that is more important than yourself

PVP becomes more enjoyable for a wider audience as they don't necessarily have to grind for days/weeks/months to be able to compete/help their friends.

Gear is still of value, but it isn't your raison d'etre. It is an advantage, but even those in the most basic of gear can still compete.

Balancing becomes easier because the overall power of a character doesn't become exacerbated as you level up and find new gear. You don't have to worry about someone dealing 10 damage at level 1 to dealing 10,000 damage at level 50. Designing gear and balancing classes(ranged/melee/etc) against each other becomes easier if the difference in power is lessened.

Which I think its fair to sum up as the following:
1) RPG is a number game. (Corollary: MMO is more balanced compared to single-player RPGs)
2) Weak encounters are used to feed power to the characters. (To generate larger character-numbers so that designers can create more content)
3) The flow of power from the game to the character. (And how to control that flow)
4) Why can't monsters have the same stats as the players? (Think about this for abit. If player-characters have strong stats, copying the character's stats should make the monsters a good challenge, but monsters more often than not have arbitrary stats independent of the character's stats. Why?)
5) Skills with "effects independent of numbers". (All RPG skills either fall into three category of "Damage", "Disable" and "Buff", or a combination of the categories. Notably the "Disable" category is independent of numbers, and they remain useful throughout the game if the enemies are not immune to it. More often than not, they are, which renders that skill quite useless in the encounter. Otherwise they are quite powerful.)

1) Not all RPGs are about numbers. You could split them in 4 categories :
- Tabletop RPGs : They are about creating a story lived by characters. The combat system is often secondary and made in a way that the game doesn't revolve around it.
- Western RPGs : Fallout, Mass Effect, Elder Scrolls, Dragon Age, etc. While these have levels and stuff, they hardly matter because the focus is on story and a mountain of choices. You will barely notice power upgrades.
- Japanese RPGs : Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, etc. These are usually linear and tightly controlled. They usually have constant and visible progression(get a new sword, do 50% more damage).
- MMORPGs : The story and character development has been thrown out the window in favor of gear acquisition.

The higher ones have a combat system like the others, but it's designed in a way that it barely matters how powerful you get. There is a progression, but it does not determine your success rate. Content is never blocked because you lack the proper strength. This is why I say they are not pure numbers games.

2) That's one way to see it. I see it as a way to create attrition although it often fails in that regard.

3) I'm not even sure what that means

4) Monsters can have the same stats than the players. SRPGs have been doing it forever. The reason why they scale differently in traditional RPGs is because you want your monsters to kill the player characters in a few hits to create tension, but you want the monsters to survive a lot more hits so the tension aspect can come into play.

5) Some bosses are vulnerable to these attacks, but since 99% of them are not, we never think about using them.

Other things to note:
1) The power of "Disable"-type Skills. "Damage"-Skill is inseparable from the number-game. "Buffs" (arguably) rely on and manipulates the number-game as well. That leaves you with "Disable" for those number-independent-skill. "Disables" can be extremely potent in and of itself. I think this is one of the reasons why all bosses in RPG games are status immune. If they were to be affected by disables (especially the stunning type) they become nothing more than a punching bag with tons of HP for players to beat on.
2) Computer AI and Enemy-Setup. More often than not, the AI randomly pick a member in your party to unload their damage on. They do not co-ordinate their attacks to focus fire on one party member until it dies before moving on to another. They ignore your healers and let them revive your fallen party members time and again. Imagine for one moment that the monsters are programmed to always target your healers first, and leave your tanks alone until they are the last member standing. That would make things abit more challenging. Throw in a couple of disables into their attack-cycle and you've got a challenging fight going on. If the enemy have one high-DPS-character in their party, you might just lose the encounter completely.

The point of an AI is to provide an adequate challenge to the player, not simulate a real opponent. A game where your healers would always be focus fired would be hard, but boring. Creating randomly changing situations is a good way to create an interesting battle and you can get that by randomly targeting party members. A good example is a boss which always attacks every party member. You end up casting Cure on all your characters every turn until it dies. It's about as boring as you can get.

This leaves you with one question: Designing Skills to fit Encounters, or Designing Encounters to fit Skills?
In the former, skill selection should never be the reason why players fail an encounter. In fact, most skill builds should allow players to solve the encounters. In the latter, you are specifically making encounters which requires a certain skill to solve, somewhat like a "Question-Answer" session. Lets take your Ice Cave scenario as an example. In the cave, Fire-Based skill build is the most effective means to clear that particular level. If I were to go in that cave with a Water-Based skill build, what happens? Will the result be (a) I die and fail to clear the level with my Water-Based build; or (b) I manage to clear the level with my Water-Based build.

If you can clear it with your water based build, that would make it amazingly easy for the fire based build unless the power difference between the 2 is minimal, at which point you might as well remove that feature since it doesn't bring anything to the game. In my opinion, that's worse than not allowing water based build to beat the level.

I think the logical evolution of console RPGs would have been unique mechanics to encounters. For example that FFX Seymour battle inside Sin where he has 4 rotating discs which determines which elements he uses and is vulnerable to. There are a lot of ways to add tactical depth with these. You could have one where the boss does little damage, but summons creatures which hurt. If you don't have AoE, you are in for a world of hurt. As long as you diverge from the race to 0 HP as the main win condition, you can have skills do more stuff since their worth will be based on the situation rather than how much DPS they can dish out. In the latter, there is always 1 optimal skill so it's a matter of spamming it over and over again until everything explodes. With a system like this, skill planning is important, but execution is important too. The best way to handle this would be to always place the player in lose-lose situations. Do something and risk being bashed on the head or do something else and risk the boss healing up. The extra effect you add to your skills with a Diablo 3 system would be good there since it would limit your skill choice to a handful in combat. The way they are configured would make one of the 2 losing choice a winning choice, so you don't get the "must play exactly how they wanted me to play" syndrome.

For example, you're in that ice cave. Your fireball can add a burn effect or explode. The boss summons ice crystals which blasts you or nukes you. The boss regenerates and defends when he has crystals active, except if he's burning. You can either blast away the crystals to prevent regeneration or burn him. If you blast the crystals, you save yourself some incoming damage from the crystals but must deal with the occasional nuke. If you prevent his regeneration, you can control the fight better, but you suffer from constant incoming damage from the crystals. Depending if you have the burn or explode add-on on your Fireball skill, the choice becomes clear.

1) Not all RPGs are about numbers. You could split them in 4 categories :
- Tabletop RPGs : They are about creating a story lived by characters. The combat system is often secondary and made in a way that the game doesn't revolve around it.
- Western RPGs : Fallout, Mass Effect, Elder Scrolls, Dragon Age, etc. While these have levels and stuff, they hardly matter because the focus is on story and a mountain of choices. You will barely notice power upgrades.
- Japanese RPGs : Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, etc. These are usually linear and tightly controlled. They usually have constant and visible progression(get a new sword, do 50% more damage).
- MMORPGs : The story and character development has been thrown out the window in favor of gear acquisition.

The higher ones have a combat system like the others, but it's designed in a way that it barely matters how powerful you get. There is a progression, but it does not determine your success rate. Content is never blocked because you lack the proper strength. This is why I say they are not pure numbers games.

My bad. Should have added "turn-based" at the front.



2) That's one way to see it. I see it as a way to create attrition although it often fails in that regard.


If developers stop treating these encounters as "power food" for the player's character and make each encounter outstanding in and of itself, then the encounters would be more challenging. Good AI helps.


3) I'm not even sure what that means

By this, I mean the amount of power the character can obtain within the game-limits. It is a one-way street, thus a flow from game(world) to character. Once power is given to them, you cannot take it back from the characters (usually, save for plot points that forcefully takes them away for one reason or another).



4) Monsters can have the same stats than the players. SRPGs have been doing it forever. The reason why they scale differently in traditional RPGs is because you want your monsters to kill the player characters in a few hits to create tension, but you want the monsters to survive a lot more hits so the tension aspect can come into play.

Not exactly. They can have the same Level, but never the same Stats. Your equipment boost your stats way past what you should naturally have at your current level. They cannot copy that part of your Stats, meaning you are still ahead of the encounter in terms of power. For traditional RPGs, that is exactly why power trumps strategy in those games. If you die in a couple of hits, no amount of strategy can save you. Having said that, I would like to point out the special accomplishment of those players who've made "Challenges" in FFX where they restrict how much power they will use. That is truly one-of-a-kind Strategy-RPG. I know I just shot myself in the foot about power > strategy when I bring that up, but that is the only game where pure strategy actually allows player to progress. (Now that I think about it, that can be a good case study for our current discussion)



5) Some bosses are vulnerable to these attacks, but since 99% of them are not, we never think about using them.

Which renders about a quarter to half of your skills useless in boss encounters. What real choices do you have if the game forces you to mainly use attack-spells and "Heal", "Heal", "Heal"? They have given you basically worthless skills to waste your skill points. You hardly use them in normal encounters because those common mobs die in a couple of hits (or 1 hit, if it comes to that) and you can't use them in boss fights. I think that in itself is poor skill design or poor pacing.



The point of an AI is to provide an adequate challenge to the player, not simulate a real opponent. A game where your healers would always be focus fired would be hard, but boring. Creating randomly changing situations is a good way to create an interesting battle and you can get that by randomly targeting party members. A good example is a boss which always attacks every party member. You end up casting Cure on all your characters every turn until it dies. It's about as boring as you can get.

But making their patterns would mean they would not be as challenging. The OT intend to make available information to the players before the encounter. That means you can prepare for what is coming up next. If you know the next level is going to be Ice Cave, you are likely to stack on Ice-Resistance Armor and equip Fire-Element Weapons. If you randomize the enemy's attack patterns, their attack becomes even more ineffective because the damage is spread out across the board. Random is never a good thing if you want a strategically challenging game. Its just like playing Chess against computers. If their moves are random, you can clearly see that and they are easily beaten. If they calculate their every move (like any good Chess programmes should), they provide a much more interesting challenge. Why should it be any different in an RPG? Especially when you are seeking a strategic challenge?



If you can clear it with your water based build, that would make it amazingly easy for the fire based build unless the power difference between the 2 is minimal, at which point you might as well remove that feature since it doesn't bring anything to the game. In my opinion, that's worse than not allowing water based build to beat the level.

There is a difference between "optimum" and "amazing ease". Optimum means you can clear the stage without much difficulty. That does not mean there is a great deal of power difference between the Fire-Build and other elements. However, taken in this particular context, the Fire is simply the "best build" to employ against the Ice Caves. The examples I've given clearly states that monsters die to a full fire-combo, whereas other elements might need a full combo + an additional hit or two. Water Element might need one-and-a-half combo to down the same monsters due to resistance and what not for this particular stage.



I think the logical evolution of console RPGs would have been unique mechanics to encounters. For example that FFX Seymour battle inside Sin where he has 4 rotating discs which determines which elements he uses and is vulnerable to. There are a lot of ways to add tactical depth with these. You could have one where the boss does little damage, but summons creatures which hurt. If you don't have AoE, you are in for a world of hurt. As long as you diverge from the race to 0 HP as the main win condition, you can have skills do more stuff since their worth will be based on the situation rather than how much DPS they can dish out. In the latter, there is always 1 optimal skill so it's a matter of spamming it over and over again until everything explodes. With a system like this, skill planning is important, but execution is important too. The best way to handle this would be to always place the player in lose-lose situations. Do something and risk being bashed on the head or do something else and risk the boss healing up. The extra effect you add to your skills with a Diablo 3 system would be good there since it would limit your skill choice to a handful in combat. The way they are configured would make one of the 2 losing choice a winning choice, so you don't get the "must play exactly how they wanted me to play" syndrome.

I don't really consider that tactical depth. All the disk does is switch the type of spells that is effective against it. Different spells, same damage. You must also consider how late in the game he appeared. At that point in time you've probably obtained Element-Proof/Element-Eater Armor for atleast one of your character. And then there is Yuna's Null-elements for further protection and Kimahri's Mighty Guard Overdrive. The only thing he has which is of any threat is Ultima, which can be easily avoided by sacrificing an Aeon. You can even predict when an Ultima is coming (after Dispel). (Sidenote: The one appearing in Mt. Gagazet was more of a threat in comparison)

There are other ways to add depth, such as positioning (FFT, Disgaea and Grandia to some extent). Sad to say most turn-based RPG force you to stand face-to-face against the monsters. Adding a game-board to battles can result in more strategic varieties compared to one-time gimmicks like Seymour's Four-Disk.

Most games where the boss actually rely on a summon, the summon is something incredibly powerful that you cannot ignore it, and must deal with it first before taking on the boss. AoE spells do pitiful damage compared to single-target spells. They also costs more than single-target spells, and you risk emptying your MP before the summons die. You are better off targeting those summons one by one. They go down much faster that way. If the summons deal small amounts of damage that even your squishy mage can take a few hits before they need to heal, there is no danger in the first place, and all you need to do is unleash all your ammo on the main boss. In the event that they are moderately powerful, the boss re-summons them the moment they die, so what you are doing is actually counterproductive. Again, aiming for the boss provides the quickest solution. If the summons are as powerful as the boss, you're screwed unless you can overpower them in the first place. For healing minions, it depends on how much they heal. More often than not, they heal less than your damage. Its still more advantageous to attack the boss in this situation. Unless those healers can block attacks directed towards the boss. (Like our friend Seymour in Macalania Temple! Not only does he have healer-minions, his minions can block attacks against the boss, and the boss can summon Anima, capable of can one-hitting your characters. With AoE. In that scenario you really have no choice but to defeat the two minions + the summon before you can touch the boss)

Regarding D3, they intend to make those normal mobs feed power into the character. You do not need to be strategic to kill those mobs. Something else that came up when I was digging up more info on D3's Runestone system: it could be worse than a skill-point based system. Why? From what little info available regarding those Runestones, they are random drops from mobs. Their rarity has yet to be determined. It makes any skill upgrade you had in mind luck-dependent, potentially restricting your choices rather than expanding it. IF they make the Runestones drop regularly, fair enough, no such restrictions exist. If the Runestones (especially the last two "grades") are as rare as those endgame equipment, you are going to have a problem. How big of a problem that becomes depends how large of a boost each of these Runestones provide to a skill.


For example, you're in that ice cave. Your fireball can add a burn effect or explode. The boss summons ice crystals which blasts you or nukes you. The boss regenerates and defends when he has crystals active, except if he's burning. You can either blast away the crystals to prevent regeneration or burn him. If you blast the crystals, you save yourself some incoming damage from the crystals but must deal with the occasional nuke. If you prevent his regeneration, you can control the fight better, but you suffer from constant incoming damage from the crystals. Depending if you have the burn or explode add-on on your Fireball skill, the choice becomes clear.

The Ice Cave consists of other mobs, and I think the OT wants to make each and every encounter equally meaningful. Unless every mob in appearing in the Ice Cave have the same/similar ability as the final boss and they are all stopped by the "burn" effect, you cannot justify that Fire-Attacks are the optimum choice in such a place simply because the boss has a weakness to "Burning". For Fire-Attacks to be the optimum choice in the Ice Cave, it must have some advantage over other elements when specifically used in that Cave. The advantage should be applied against both normal mobs and the boss.

Most of the issues you pointed are fixed by good design and math. For the Ice Cave example, you introduce the player to particularities bit by bit. Show him the baddies the boss will summon and teach him they pack a punch but are weak and a good target for AoE. Then show him some other baddies with the regeneration ability and teach him to use burn effects to stop it. He'll gear up accordingly so when the boss comes around, he'll be prepared somehow.

As for tactical decisions, that's where math comes into play. As long as you have a secondary method to inflict pain, you can create situations which are more effectively dealt with a specific skill set and others with another skill set. I've never said previous games had it right. In fact, all of them fail at varying degree. Getting it perfectly correct is impossible, but you can try and get it decent at least.

For the rest, I have a feeling this is the blind men describing the elephant, so it's probably better to leave it like that since it's out of topic anyways.

Which direction should your design focus on? Either you make the players fail in the Ice Cave for selecting the wrong Element (i.e. Anything that is not Fire-element), or you allow the player to solve Ice Cave with whatever they picked. Maybe we are focusing on the wrong aspects.

What if instead of an "optimum" build which the players must use to clear the Ice Dungeon, you penalize players for picking the "wrong" choice (i.e. Water-Skills in the Ice Cave)? That means every other element except Water will stand a chance to clear the Ice Dungeon with varying difficulty. Players who picked Water must necessarily fail, but having one "wrong choice" is better than having one "correct choice". You allow for player-creativity in the former. Picking the "good choice" (Fire) allow the player to clear the Ice Cave with all the advantages you suggested. This results in a two-fold (or is that three-fold?) strategic variance. The first strategic choice is to avoid the "wrong choice" at all cost. The second is to pick the "good choice" which allows player to solve the encounter with ease. The third is for players to use their chosen-element (that is neither Fire nor Water) and apply them in such a way to allow them to solve each encounter within the Ice Cave.

I agree that all of them fail in varying degree, but was that intentional? After all, RPGs want players to immerse themselves in the world and story. Difficult battles are secondary, and they are normally found in places which are isolated from the main storyline (hidden dungeons, mini games, etc). Players who seek these challenges will have maxed out their characters, customizing them to absorb alot of damage while dishing out maximum damage. Monsters hidden away from the main storyline are usually designed with maxed out characters in mind to challenge the powers that the player have obtained with their effort. At the end of the day, which do you prioritize, the story or the battles?

Try as I might to stay on topic, the amount of interesting sub-threads raised waiting to be explored is just too tempting.

If some element is better at AoE and some other stops regeneration, you get the same effect, but you now have 2 element build that work instead of just fire. This is the same thing than allowing customization of the same skill into 2 different paths except with different flavor. Not picking the wrong choice and picking one of many good choice is the same thing in my opinion.

For the difficult end game battles, they are easy to create filler and not part of the main game challenge. They are made on purpose to make the player grind for numerous hours to create the illusion of a longer game. In reality, they took very little time to create and the player has been repeating the same actions for hours just to get to the point where they are beatable. Most players will never bother with them. If you expect players to seek out these challenges and claim it was a challenging game, you will be disappointed. They won't say "the game was a cakewalk, but thank god there were some uber bosses!". They will rather say "boring game, didn't even bother with optional bosses". That's why you need to challenge them during the main game.

This "off-thread" aparte makes me think of Deus Ex (The Conspiracy, 1999).
In it, you had roughly 4 builds you could go with;
1 - Tanker/Shooter
2 - Stealthy (Close-Quarters)
3 - Stealthy (Sniper)
4 - Hacker

Every level could be beaten by any of these 3, and level design supported heavily each type.
However, each of these builds had a rough time in every level, but at a different moment.
What this meant is that the game forced you out of your comfort zone once in a while.
For example, You could be that big tanker-type of player, and the game allowed you to enjoy that, but once in a while, there was some big fatty you just couldn't deal with, thus you had to either resort to hacking or stealthily avoid the obstacle in some way (off-class).

What I mean by this example is that the game let you choose your strategy, and supported it in many different ways. But it didn't let you direct the game altogether.

In RPG terms, there were many viable ways to overcome levels and bosses (there weren't really bosses, but I'm transposing to this game) with varying difficulties.
In the example of the ice cave boss, this means that most strategies should be able to achieve victory, tough, differently.

Obviously, the aggressive build would have to find a way to deliver a lot of damage in a short amount of time (fire-based spells directed at the enemy).
A more defensive/controlling build should debuff the attacks or buff defenses allowing to tank longer, thus being able to reduce the battle's difficulty to an acceptable level where the player has control over the flow.
A tricky build would probably attempt to use a status effect that has a very subtle effect on the boss. I'm thinking about something like confusing the crystals so that they turn against their master both refusing to attack the players and dealing damage back at their master).
etc.

If you see where I'm getting at, I'm thinking Magic The Gathering here.
You have 5 colors, each with their own psychology, but each color finds a way to win, but the tools are very different.
Many of their strategies are a damage race, while others are board control. 3 of them use a 'standalone victory condition clause' (Decking, poison counters).
Basically, every strategy has its strengths and weaknesses, and each is equally entitled to win (more or less) based not only on the general strategy (color) or its micro-strategy (build within that color) but also based on the mastery of both.

Flowing back to RPG, this means that a fighter build would generally have (color) offensive abilities. But within these skillsets, a few archetypes should be perceived; i.e. Self-buffing skills that increase a stat after dealing damage, debuffing skills that mimic crippling the opponent, vicious strikes with critical hits and slow-recharging powerhouse hits.
The first player choice would be to choose which skills they want to equip.
A player that is suboptimal and neither knows what he is about to face nor realizes the synergy between each of his skills would probably pick whichever sounds good.
A player that wants to be aggressive would probably pick quick crippling blows that end the battle quickly.
etc.

Depending on how familiar they are with this strategy subset, and how natural it feels to them, they may perform well or poorly (which is the 2nd layer: skill).

Of course, none of this makes sense if the skillsets of the other characters doesn't fit-in.
You wouldn't want to pair an aggressive warrior with a tank-heavy friend. One tries to end it quick, while the other is giving ground to the enemy and slowing the pace of the battle, that is an unlikely duo to survive a well-crafted boss battle. However, if all characters embrace a similar strategy, that strategy has a lot more chance to succeed.



To get back on topic, however, the best idea so far would be to inject crystals into skills, which isn't very different from how Diablo III proposes to implement that system.
The general idea here is to add a layer of customization to skills that is elegant and simple to deal with without having to change the gameplay dramatically.
Are there other suggestions to make it a tad more original? I like the idea of equipping stuff onto skills, but its a bit meh at this stage.