@Wavelength: There is one problem you don't address here. If you make sure people can avoid your encounters, then what is to stop them from getting to the boss and being underleveled because they ran from every fight? But, if you put the fights in choke points, you might as well have gone random (in a way) as the fight is now unavoidable (for practical purposes).
I still say though it comes down to what kind of game you want to make (and play). If you want encounters to whittle down resources before the boss, you need to force fights somehow. Usually, people do random encounters as on screen ones you can't dodge (or avoid) seems to frustrate the player even more than the random fights do (as they now see the on screen encounters as pointless, as you cannot dodge them).
On the other hand, if you want every fight to be life and death strategic, maybe then you don't need random fights? Make all fights fixed? Just a thought for the OP to think about.
I'm sure there are
many problems that I didn't address here! XD The question of "what role do Random Encounters have in your game" is something I've talked about a lot in a lot of different places and the scope and situationality of that question is huge enough that it could never be fully addressed in a single thread.
Assuming a standard kind of adventure made in the vein of mid-generation
Final Fantasy games, I do think it's important to hit that balance where a player
can theoretically avoid every Roaming Encounter they see, but doing so is diificult enough that most players will occasionally play the lay of the land wrong and hit a few encounters in most dungeons whether they want to or not. A player who's
really tired of fighting still won't like this, but then why are they playing a combat RPG? The bigger reason this is better than Random Encounters is that a player is still opting into or out of
most combats, and when they do have to fight they can blame themselves for getting caught (if it's well-designed).
So why am I generally against the "just let the player turn REs Off" system, when it allows the player to opt into or out of all battles? It's because of the things I mentioned in the last post - instead of making the player feel good about dodging an onscreen enemy and feeling like they earned a pass from a mandatory battle, by turning REs Off it just feels automatic, and makes the player wonder "why would I ever want to fight?" The main reason, of course, would be "to grind EXP and other things I need". That realization isn't fun. It's all about how it's framed.
I really like what you said: "
I still say though it comes down to what kind of game you want to make (and play)." And I agree. There are games where the
Bravely Default mechanic could shine. I just don't think that traditional RPGs usually fit that mold. I'm trying my best to picture myself playing a version of
Final Fantasy 7 where you can just choose to turn off REs. There are definitely points where I would use this feature. But I think I would enjoy the entire game less for having it. It would no longer seem like a dangerous world where I was adventuring and defending myself from enemies that are coming for me.
I'm occasionally a fan of the "fixed fights" approach (I use it in
timeblazer because one of my prime design goals was to make every battle feel memorable), but, like you said, it's heavily situational on the type of experience you want to deliver. For most RPGs I would never even consider this approach.
Hope I don't sound too argumentative, I'm really enjoying this conversation!
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Also, as to the "Escape" discussion - the way I handled this in one of the games I was building was to add a favorable bias to the calculation every time you failed, so that with equal agility you might have a 35% chance to escape the first time you try (and failure only forfeits one party member's action), whereas after five failures that number would be around 60%. It doesn't take away the feeling of "if things go bad, we could get wiped", but it does generally avoid punishing the player for a long series of bad RNG rolls that they can't control.
I think more "organic" solutions like the
Tales series (where a meter fills up and you escape once it's full) or
Quest 64 (if you can run outside the battle's boundaries, you escape, no questions asked) are even better, but they can be hard to implement well in a turn-based system. I'm not so sure a one-turn delay before escaping would be so smart for a turn-based system, and maybe your "always escape" solution is better.
