A low-monster world

[Warlyte]

Average RPG: Enemies show up on the player's quest and act as obstacles. The player deals with them as they go along. While rewards like EXP and items make it feel worth their time, too many battles can become a nuisance unless purposely grinding.

This concept: Enemies are not common at all. In fact, part of the game is just tracking them down. The rewards are obviously bigger to factor in this extra effort. Does this seem feasible? My fear is that, done badly, dungeons and other areas would just grow larger than necessary and have little to fill them out. How would one counter this?

 

[JGreene]

I've seen a lot of games that lean more towards focusing on the story and such, with a lesser focus on combat. If your dungeons feel meaningless without those random encounters, you can always add puzzles to keep the player interested. If your game has a sort of monster hunter aspect to it where you need to hunt rare creatures, there's nothing wrong with that either.

 

[michaelmartin341]

I tried to make a game like this, it turned into a boss rush type. Every encounter was meaningful, but there weren't very many and so a lot of skills went underused and unused even. Could you have certain areas a little more populous maybe? Dungeons would be full of monsters, while on the overworld they would be few and far between. You could add things such as crafting, mining, and fishing, to give the player a tangible reward for exploring the overworld. Dungeons are a good place to add puzzles to break up monotony, and the player will have something interesting to focus on without being accosted by random encounters every so often.

 

[Richard H.]

My game is like this. I'm translating my novels into RPG form and creating more of a visual novel with minor battling and rpg elements. Most of the battles will be story related at first, and human enemies, as there arent monsters in this world...yet. So a lot of the XP will be rewarded through various degrees in conversations, investigations on the map, and such. To compensate there are lots of food items to find in the world as well that boost statuses, as well as equipment quests to forge weapons and armor for better stat boosts. The difficulty then for a novel game might be fairly difficult if you skip all the exploration and go dialog to dialog, but if you answer more strongly to certain questions theres better EXP in it for you, plus Persona style stat increases for being Bold or Charming, etc. So low monsters/battles isn't an issue, if thats your thing.

 

[chungsie]

you can still have hazards that aren't battle oriented. Such as puzzles that prevent damage from say spikes or lava, like having water added to an area that is full of magma to make obsidian or something. You could also have more interpersonal oriented tasks.

 

[Richard H.]

you can still have hazards that aren't battle oriented. Such as puzzles that prevent damage from say spikes or lava, like having water added to an area that is full of magma to make obsidian or something. You could also have more interpersonal oriented tasks.

The easiest way to do that without a plug in be to have the 'healed' layer under neath an event that has the volcanic tile animated, and when its cooled by the water have an animated burst of smoke/vapor over each tile that cascades down, deleting each event and triggering a new event page for 'cooled' etc. I've done it that way before to some success. Have the tile set as same as character and on event touch have a text window saying its impassible, etc. That way when its erased, set the event to below character and they can walk over it.

 

[bgillisp]

You don't have to give out high EXP though. The old Gold Box games (and even Baluder's Gate 1) had huge gaps between levels, but the game was capped at a really low level too (6 - 8 roughly). That would work if you want leveling up to really mean something in your game too.

 

[EseQueL]

It will be so linear and feels boring. Unless you can make every battle unique. Imagine putting a Bosh Rush mode in an RPG.

 

[Basileus]

An unsatisfying answer would be "It depends on the rest of your game". A more satisfying answer will require some information about what kind of game we are talking about here:

• What is the plot of your game? Typical RPG plots involve going places to do things. Going places is exceptionally boring so something needs to happen. If you don't have battles periodically popping up, then what do you have planned to keep the player from getting bored in between walking around and talking to people?
• What are the core mechanics of your game? Typical RPGs feature the combat system as the core gameplay mechanic and thus use combat encounters as much as possible. Games like the Legend of Zelda series can use fewer monster fights and sub in weird puzzles no matter how little sense it makes for a puzzle to be there since puzzles are core to the gameplay experience (and because it's kind of obvious by now that the goddesses are messing with Link).

Please for the love of God do not implement a crafting/mining/fishing system just to give the player things to do. There are so many Minecraft-clones cluttering the market that it is overused and just plain unnecessary. In Minecraft the entire point of the game is to build things, so having a system to collect resources and create components needed to build things works. In games like RPGs and shooters the entire point is to stab/shoot things, so having a crafting system can only serve to stab/shoot things better or the system is useless. And even then it only works when the upgrades are worth it - if what you have works, then tedious crafting for incredibly minor boosts to efficiency are not enjoyable.

And if combat is scarce already, then you REALLY don't want a heavy crafting system. There's no point to getting new upgrades if you aren't using the gear you already have. So unless combat is frequent, then you are either asking the player to upgrade things they haven't even gotten to use yet, or the crafting system goes a long time between uses and feels like even more of a chore.

If your game is really heavy on story, then you can just tell the story. But you still need something for the player to actually do in between these infrequent "hunts".

 

[Warlyte]

I may have overstated the point, haha. It's just that in a dungeon, there might only be a couple of enemies per room. And there may be a bit of hunting, like with Golden Sun's Djinn. Tracking them, luring them from their dens, maybe some puzzles or just plain chasing them. I guess I'm just afraid that by adding that much exploration I'm inviting in big empty spaces.

 

[michaelmartin341]

@Warlyte Big empty spaces, punctuated by interactive encounters sounds really good actually. If you introduce this style early, the empty space wont be an issue because they know they're moving around that environment with the goal of an encounter.

Honestly, if you have even just one enemy per room, you're gravy. That's without any tracking/luring; with those features it could be less, and still fun and interesting.

 

[Wavelength]

I think that a game where a small number of big monsters act as obstacles can be good (my own nearly-complete game contains nine involved battles over the course of three hours - the rest of the gameplay is other non-battle action).

But that doesn't seem to be what you're trying to design. To answer your question, I'd ask you - what other gameplay and challenge does your game include, outside of battle time? What are the player's goals in your game, and how instrumental are the enemies in achieving or obstacling these goals?