Cheap Thrills for RPG Players

by Kris Schnee

One of the Playstation 2's commercials was a spoof advertising the Playstation 9, a mysterious sphere beaming virtual reality directly to your brain. While inventing computer power like that would allow for some impressive graphics, there are things RPG designers can do right now to make games more fun with much less effort. Here are some easy-to-implement features which would improve the next round of RPGs on today's hardware.

Not-So-Hopeless Battles
It's common for a boss early in a game to clobber the heroes with 9999 damage attacks. Once players realize they're going to lose and that the story will go on, they have no incentive to waste powerful attacks or items, and can quit resisting. Seeing 0 damage after using your ultimate attacks isn't satisfying. Instead of giving the unbeatable boss impenetrable armor, how about giving him infinite hit points so the heroes can at least see they're doing some damage? If the heroes can do N points of damage before losing, have the boss drop a nice piece of armor or pay them a compliment as he finishes them off. Then players will have an incentive to fight hard even when destined to lose.

Sir Cyan's Minstrels
The battle theme is the most important music in an RPG. The player hears this song more than any other, so it must fit the pace of the battle system (Star Ocean 2 and Final Fantasy Tactics have good examples) and not be repetitive. The best way to have a battle theme which won't annoy players after 500 repetitions is to let the players choose one! A party of heroes deserves to hire a minstrel who learns several heroes' themes and battle songs to choose from. The minstrel doesn't have to be a real party member; call it a magic music box if you want. Selectable music adds interactivity to an RPG at little cost.

Long Item Descriptions
What if it were not just a "Healing Potion" in your inventory, but "A smoky glass bottle filled with glittering blue fluid?" Star Ocean 2 did a great job of attaching descriptive blurbs to items, making more of them than the usual two- or three-word names RPGs give them. Descriptions can be cool, as with the Veil Piercer sword ("This blade cuts not only flesh but also a warped mind. Forged by a forgotten smith,") or funny, as with the Spicy Cake ("Gak! Did you read the recipe?") Just a few lines of text per item, popping up when an item is selected, turn RPG inventory cliches into unique, memorable treasures.

New Game +
Why doesn't every new RPG have New Game +? Square's Chrono Trigger showed us how to add replay value to a game: let players who've finished the story start over with their experience and non-story items from the last play-through. Maybe they can even beat the standard "unbeatable" boss and get a special ending, but that's not necessary. The New Game + feature is simple and well worth adding to a game.

Gratuitous Interactivity
One of the problems with modern 3D backgrounds replacing the tile-based worlds in RPGs is that they are nothing but backgrounds. You don't interact with an RPG world so much as passively move through it. At the cost of four frames of animation, though, a tree could rustle as the player walks by. One line of text would put titles on those one-book bookshelves so that they'd no longer just be decorations. A little effort by RPG coders and artists would add effects like these to every new game, but today they're forgotten even in some of the best games. Star Ocean 2's detailed rendered backgrounds were non-interactive. In contrast, Grandia 2 had the heroes accidentally knocking things over in towns -- an easy way to convince players that the towns are more than still pictures.

Collateral Damage
The lightning bolt sizzles, ripping through the enemy party and leaving behind... nothing. Where's the collateral damage in RPG battles? Deus Ex may be the only RPG in which an explosion leaves char marks on the ground, even for a few seconds. Terrain damage would be easy to add, though. Let's say we make an array of 10 entries for each area in a game, with each entry recording a damage type and X and Y location. Then when someone smashes monsters with a spell called "The Shredding" (a favorite from Suikoden II), a small crater/char mark/whatever can be placed on the map, and remembered the next time the player enters that area. Storing the last 10 pieces of property damage done by the players would cost at most 30 bytes of memory per area, a small amount.

Alternate Sprites
In Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy Tactics, a big part of the gameplay was the elaborate class system. Players could change their characters to different types of warriors like knights, thieves, and wizards, and see their appearance change. In FF5 there was a sprite for every class, for each of five characters; in FF Tactics there were two sprites (male and female) for each class. This feature rewards players for their progress by making the heroes look cooler and stronger over time. Yet in most RPGs today, the heroes' appearance never changes. Why not bring this feature back? There are several ways to do it, including different weapon animations (as in FF6), a small group of sprites for only one character (FF Tactics), or simple palette-swaps (Kid Icarus!). It doesn't have to be hard to make the heroes physically reflect the power they've gained.

The Conversation Matrix
Inside FF6's airships, the heroes milled around waiting to be included in the party. When talked to, they said one thing; Sabin's main comment on the quest to save the world was "Riiiiight!" There's a way to take advantage of a headquarters area with a small group of heroes, to create a hint system and add character development. Imagine a grid showing every combination of two heroes talking. For each combination, write two or three lines of dialog. That's 100 short conversations for a game with 10 characters (if "A talks to B" is different from "B talks to A"), enough to have the characters interact without taking up too much of the scriptwriters' time.
Other variations are possible. If the player always controls one hero, the combinations become fewer and it's practical to have multiple conversations for different points in the game. Ditto if characters say the same thing no matter who talks to them. With either variation, the player could even choose from several topics like "What should we do next?" or "What do you think of [character]?" No matter how it's done, a conversation matrix would give characters more personality.

Getting A Reputation
In his editorial "Cliches And Conventions: Know Thy Enemy," Andrew Bartkus writes: "I should be able to convince the enemy that I'm not worth fighting, maybe from my sheer strength, intimidation, persuasion, or plain bribery. If we fight, I don't expect my enemy to fight to the last; if 3 of my buddies were cut down, I'd run like hell! Especially if my foe were busting out crazy magics and such."
Good idea! How about giving certain pieces of equipment and certain moves an "impressiveness factor?" Monsters who see your characters equipped with the Legendary Super Armor and using the flashiest (not necessarily the best!) spells would run away. And you could reward the player for using smart combinations of attacks -- a well-timed 3-way strike would impress the enemies a lot more than hitting Attack, Attack, Attack. Eventually the player could get a reputation from, say, all the enemies on one continent, earning pre-battle comments like "Oh no, the Light Warriors!" -- or better yet, a party name the player gives in response to the obligatory "Who are you guys!?" Other effects would include attracting rare, interesting monsters who want to see what the fuss is about, and a big drop in random, boring encounters with easy foes. With a Reputation system, players would be rewarded for showing off and would find that the monsters knew who they were.

No one can afford to create perfectly realistic worlds for RPG players to explore. A key to RPG design is to choose what elements of gameplay will make the experience most fun with minimal effort to program / draw / etc. While many of today's RPG companies have gameplay ideas beyond simple combat, none is taking full advantage of today's hardware to make improvements in gameplay. There are many things which could be done to make combat and exploration more rewarding without costing huge amounts of cash or computer power. If today's game companies stop pushing for super-detailed graphics for a moment and try taking some cheap shots at gameplay, tomorrow's RPGs will be a lot more fun.


Kris Schnee is a left-handed humanist furry sci-fi writer at MIT.