RPG Maker Forums

So in my project, encounters are fixed events which respawn when you leave the area (bosses don't respawn though). 

My first "draft" of my project just had these events without any graphic to them, so that the player doesn't see or necessarily know (though I could find a way to mention it somewhere in the early/tutorial-ish part of the game) that encounters work this way and are not in fact random. 

I'm thinking about giving the monster/battle encounters a graphic, so that the player can see them.  My primary reason would be that I think it's just a more enjoyable gaming experience to be able to see a monster/encounter before it happens, rather than the encounters occurring seemingly randomly (even if it's not random).

However, I have a couple concerns.  For one, I've looked high and low for various monster  character sprites, and I've found a lot, but there are some battlers I am using / planned on using that really have no sprite to match.   Second, a good bunch of my battlers only have a very vague correspondence to the character sprite I was able to find for them.  Finally, this would potentially limit my ability to add future battlers (not too concerned with this particular project, but would be for my next project).

I'm thinking that having a graphic that vaguely resembles a battler is good enough--but the game experience would suffer if the sprite didn't match at all (especially in contrast to the fact that many do indeed match).  I'm thinking I should just use the 20 or 30 battlers that I have matching sprites for and make good use of them, though part of me wonders if I'm limiting my battlers/project unnecessarily.  But again, I think being able to see the encounters would make the game more enjoyable, especially since combat/dungeons are fairly difficult already in my game. 

I'm really torn about the best way to proceed.  So, would love to hear other people's thoughts.  Thanks in advance.