Ugh, do I have to?

[Dr. Delibird]

Quite often, in games with a progression system, games end up with some amount of imbalance when it comes to rate of progression. More often than not this takes form as a slow rate of progression, where the player has to do more than is mandatory to proceed (in terms of the progression system).

What I want to discuss is how much grinding is too much? Of course if you design your game correctly grinding should be completely optional. However I am of the mind that such level of balance in an RPG specifically is just not achievable without compromising on depth imho.

So how much grinding is the utmost level that retains an acceptability about it?

I personally like it when the game gives you just enough experience so that if you don't grind then the bosses (or other major challenges) are beatable IF you use a lot of skill but without the skill the boss is extremely hard to beat outside of luck factors such as crits and misses.

 

[Webby]

I usually grind to surpass 2 levels ahead of the monsters so I get the tension that my health is slowly getting low and my attacks are doing quite good.


Too much grinding to me is when the you can just 1-shot the boss, just by doing an attack, no using skill, or just straight-up rich...


It depends on the type of player and how they spend their time playing, working, studying, etc. Players who have too much free time can reach


about 10 times than the average player who plays casually...


I'm just a casual player, I balance playing, studying and such, so I don't grind too much on one game...

 

[Milennin]

As with most questions: depends a lot on the game. The more grind you have in the game, the more rewards you're going to need to keep players interested in wanting to grind. If the only reward for grinding is to progress the story, your story better be damn good. If there is grinding for optional content, then it's fine, as long it's reasonable.


Ways to make grinding bearable:


-Lightning fast combat (cannot even begin to emphasize how important this is) The slower the pacing of your combat, the more tedious it's going to feel to sit through the grind.


-Smaller steps with decent rewards along the way over huge steps with a good reward at the end. Grind is easier to tolerate when it's split up into smaller chunks that feel like you're making progress towards the main goal.


-Meaningful and varied rewards. Because getting the same useless things over again makes grinding feel pointless.


-Game design facilitated to grinding. Meaning that when player enters town to rest at Inn, the Inn isn't at the opposite end of the town entrance. Minimise downtime and amount of clicks required to keep the player grinding.


The more points you get right on making grinding feel like a worthwhile activity, the more you can get away with making the player grind more.

 

[Engr. Adiktuzmiko]

The Legend Of Heroes Trails of Cold Steel games seem to do nicely with the super optional grinding thing... If you proceed thru the game normally without skipping much enemies you should end up with just the right level to fight the bosses (with proper tactics), and grinding is actually hard as the exp drop from the level difference of the party and the enemies is quite huge.. and the game in both story and gameplay and battles have good depth too imho.


In my own games though, I am definitely struggling with the balance thing

 

[Leysos]

@Engr. Adiktuzmiko This is a level of Zen I'd like to achieve in my game. If I'm not leveled up enough to reasonably defeat a boss by just exploring the previous areas, I will grow to dislike a game/become less motivated to complete it. This is the philosophy I'm taking when designing story areas/bosses, but if you have to make your players grind, make it as simple as possible so they don't outright drop your game because you're asking too much (i.e. have very few weapon shops and can only get reasonable gear through crafting, whose ingredients are dropped by monsters you can't easily get to, if it even tells you which monsters drop what. I've a lot of pent-up frustration over Star Ocean 3.)

 

[Kes]

@Leysos Please do not quote whole posts simply to indicate who you are replying to.  It makes loading the page and scrolling down much slower and is especially difficult for those who are accessing this on their phone.  If you want to make it clear who you are answering, just use the @username convention as I have done in this post.


Thanks.

 

[Leysos]

@ksjp17 Sorry. Habit from another forum that allowed it. I fixed my post.

 

[YoraeRasante]

I really like Chrono Trigger's style. As long as you don't avoid battles, they are reasonably challenging.


The problem, as mentioned, is repeating the feat.


I usually play my own game until the point of the boss, and balance it to be a passable challenge to the level my party is at.


BUT... I can't say I"m among the best...

 

[Lord Semaj]

The Bioware route with games like Baldur's Gate that are open to exploration and with great potential for grinding is to just have the monsters give lousy meaningless xp and then have each quest completed give a crazy amount of it.  Quests that rewards 12 xp per kill end up with 500 xp rewards.  If you're getting 1000xp for a monster, you might get 1000000 xp for the quest.  In this way, the developers can somewhat control the level of players by the quantity of available quests.  JRPGs do this now too with Side Quest Job Boards that give all the XP you need to stay overpowered and well geared without much grinding at all.


Given how there are simple options to avoid it easily, I don't find any sort of grinding to be acceptable anymore.  If I'm killing mobs just for the sake of killing mobs for their rewards then it's meaningless and boring and the game suffers for it.  But if it's part of a side quest or main quest line, it's fine... so long as the quest isn't Kill 10 Rats.


About the Trails in the Sky series, the way they solve the problem is a combination.  They give massive XP bonuses after chapter fights to level the party like crazy and they have a scaling XP system with soft caps that eventually make grinding virtually impossible until a certain part of the story unlocks a new XP curve and allows characters that have fallen behind to level up like crazy with a huge XP reward percent boost for defeating the new monsters stronger than them while characters at level cap can now continue to level normally.  All characters are able to keep up in levels easily this way and you can take someone you never used before and give them like 20 levels in a single fight.

 

[Aoi Ninami]

What I want to discuss is how much grinding is too much? Of course if you design your game correctly grinding should be completely optional. However I am of the mind that such level of balance in an RPG specifically is just not achievable without compromising on depth imho.

I don't see why that is. You should be balancing your game by playtesting it as you're going along, and getting others to test so that you end up with feedback on how it comes across to players with a variety of playing styles. If any of your testers tell you "I couldn't beat X boss with the stats I naturally had, I needed to grind", then you can ask further questions to find out why that was -- perhaps they had the wrong strategy for the boss fight; perhaps they just got a run of bad luck; perhaps they had the wrong idea about how to work your game's progression system; perhaps they really did their best and you just made the boss too hard. If it's that last one, then you can respond to the feedback by toning the boss down, or boosting the player's progression. At no point do you have to "compromise on depth".

 

[Doktor_Q]

Another option, related to the aforementioned lightning fast combat, is making the combat fun on its own- I've survived grinding in several MMOs purely on account of finding something entertaining in mostly-random battles.


Some thoughts on achieving that:


-Fast combat: see above. Less waiting on the game. Also, a lower turn count for random battles- managing the turn order to stun or eliminate as many opponents as possible before they can attack can be worth thinking.


-Variety of encounters. Different enemies who behave differently and show up in different groups, where your tactics need to adjust based on the composition and possibly arrangement of enemies. As a bonus, have encounters behave differently on the map as well.


-'Bonus' conditions in battles. Definitely not to the level of FFTA's law system, but additional objectives beyond just "murder everything on the screen" can be helpful. Metal Slime equivalents could be seen as a basic form of this.


-Interactivity. Depending on your game, timed hits and defenses can keep otherwise simple fights a bit more engaging. Or ten times as tedious because you flooded then with QTEs, so, take it with some more consideration.

 

[AcetheSuperVillain]

Grinding can be fun on its own.  It's crazy fun to grind in Disgaea, even to the point where the it's more fun to go on weird grinding escapades than it is to follow the plot.  Disgaea works is because there are a lot of things to grind at once.  EXP, Mana, Weapon Levels, Skill Levels, New Items, Money, Item levels, and you use 10 characters at a time and have 3 times that many in reserve, so there's always something that you're getting done and always something to do next.  Another important aspect is that Disgaea always provides you with challenges that are out of reach or just barely do-able for your current level, and they reward you heavily for going above and beyond.  Disgaea achieves this with a lot of randomized and systematic content, so that approach might be worth looking into.  


I'm also a big fan of Rogue-likes, 4X games and simulations, where "grinding" is pretty much the whole game, so I would never try to put a cap on grinding potential.  

 

[Dullstar]

I'd generally say you probably want to make it so that no grinding is necessary assuming the player does not go out of their way to avoid fights.


I have played several games that become laughably easy if you just fight all of the random encounters because the developer assumed players would run away from them - which begs the question of "Why are there random encounters in the first place if you're balancing the game around the assumption that people are going to run away from literally all of them?"

 

[RogdagoR]

In my game I'm planning on-map encounters, mixed with a seamless action combat for start the fight...something like a frontal slash, if you hit the enemy before he do(for aggro monsters) you get preemptive attack.


When the slash occurr i run a check on average party level and average troop level, and if the party is above of X value i just run a collapse animation and give only a few items to the party, no exp.


This is for avoid grinding and "useless" fights versus weak enemies, but you still get items(mostly for crafting).


Also for the aggro ones i set them to be aggro till the average level for the zone is quite the same(more or less).

 

[YoraeRasante]

@RogdagoR this reminds me of Earthbound.

 

[RogdagoR]

@Waterguy it has a system like the one i'm doing? Never played that game but yeah i guess there are a plenity of games working that way.


Mostly I took the inspiration from MMORPGs

 

[SeagullKing]

My tolerance for grinding varies depending on the end reward.  Undertale, for example, had an alternate ending if you essentially go around killing everything you can find.  I did that grind without issue, as the reward (the creepy story) motivated me to keep going.


I guess if there's a good enough reason, the grind is worth it.  At least for awhile.

 

[AcetheSuperVillain]

Valkyrie Profile is another game where you can slash map enemies to get a drop on them in combat.  I think in Atelier Iris 3, weak enemies will actually run away from you on the map if you're strong enough, and if you can slash them on the map to end the combat automatically.  Grandia Xtreme did a similar thing where you can hold down the X button to be "ready" for encounters, but it slows you down, so it's not practical to just walk around everywhere while you're "ready".  

 

[Robin Hoot]

It really depends on how the grinding is done imo. For games like Dragon Quest, grinding feels strangely relaxing and I end up not minding spending hours and hours doing it, while in games like Nocturne grinding is completely useless (unless you need level to learn a new skill), but the potential deadly random encounters both add tension to the game and is annoying because I just want to progress in the story.


Nowadays however for most games I avoid grinding like the plague, because it feels more or less like I'm cheating and not really enjoying the challenge.


I have 0 experience with game designing, but from playing tons and tons of all sorts of RPGs, I'd say a good way to balance it would be either make it so level is not as important as other variables (like in Shin Megami or Pokemon) or making it so heading straight to the boss, only fighting random encounters along the way are enough, making grinding unnecessary unless the player just wants to ram through bosses without caring about strategy whatsoever. And if the player just runs away from every single battle, make it more challenging but not to the point of being unbeatable.

 

[Marillmau5]

I would do a lot of scaling methods.


Lets say youre level 50. In an early easy dungeon that has level 45-50 enemies, the enemies would have a random check to scale from +0 - 10 levels. Making the highest enemy level 60 but most would be in the lower levels. So the progression is within youre level range.


But lets say youre level 40, that same early easy dungeon the scaling would be off because its too high for you already. so it doesnt get too hard to pass and you can test the waters in that area since its already hard.


So now lets say you are level 85, same early easy dungeon, the enemies would still be from level 45-50 but the scaling might have higher numbers, where an enemy could scale +25-30. Making the enemies range from the lowest 70 to the highest 80 vs your hero at 85. Keeping the level easier since youre higher level but still a challenge and not like if youre on god-mode on that dungeon.


I would imagine this would keep leveling up the hero too fast. So maybe there could be a plugin to give exp when the enemy is higher than you only and finding items and completing goals. So now each place can become a temporary grind zone until you outdo it and it will keep pushing you into harder areas. And it will stop people falling into that point in game where theyre grinding level 1 slimes at level 99.


the most i would probably let the enemy level be under the hero would probably be 10-15 levels under.


I wish wild pokemon scaled like that but with trainer battlers only because if it scaled with wild pokemon you would only catch and never train.