I would like to see a few games that have random adventurers running around town. This is such a rare thing that I feel sad
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Adventurer is just another word for vagabond, and there are plenty of fellow adventurers in most games. They're just usually camped out at the local shrine and town gates asking for coin or else the 'hunters' in the wilderness because very few adventurers stumble upon a fortune of money from looting all the houses in a village, slaughtering hundreds upon hundreds of people that stand in their way or happen to only kill animals which have inexplicably swallowed large coin purses...which is actually something I'd like to see less of to be honest.
I love games that at least attempt to give some indication of the logistics and planning necessary for travel, rather than having everything provided for you in odd and nonsensical ways or else be a nonexistent issue within the game (though some things should stay nonexistent, It's bad enough that normal bodily functions call me away from games, and the last thing I'd want is an extreme where nature calls for my protagonist in the middle of fighting a massive dragon or something and renders him ineffective until he finds a bush or an outhouse) It doesn't have to be to complicated either, maybe the character has a wealthy benefactor that stipends out the funds for travel expenses and rewards bonuses for exemplary service (would make for an interesting spin on a game with choices, where rather than all choices == similar rewards and you just pick
by your own morals choosing for yourself rather than what enriches your biased benefactor could easily leave you penniless and result in having to resort to corpse-robbing and village ransacking to support yourself, though ideally in such a game such actions should have consequences if caught, like they would pretty much anywhere and anytime irl outside of wartime.)
I'd also like to see more morally grey characters, and I don't mean like the morally grey where you as the player can simply choose between morally black and white selections such as "will you keep the expensive locket you found and sell it later or go over to the woman crying over her lost locket five feet away from where you found it and surrender it to her." I'm talking about the kind of morally gray characters who have serious flaws yet can still be sympathized with. Characters like
Phillip Strenger/The bloody baron who is by all accounts a despised and horrid person detested by all until you get the whole story, realize that given his circumstances he truly tried his best to do the right thing more often than not and the cataclysm that was his family life at games start was no less the fault of his wife's actions than his own.
Keira Metz who is a spoiled aristocrat in exile so unaccustomed to 'country living' that she's willing to manipulate you by any means necessary into granting her access to plague research so that she can develop a sort of bioweapon just to buy her way back into a ruler's court and out of "the lice infested hellhole that is the countryside" The cool thing about this one, however, is that she's far from the monster that sentence portrays, and offering her asylum at a fortress of war is more than enough to convince her to surrender said research documents and abandon her insanity. Or even the protagonist of my example game;
Geralt of Rivia, is plagued with character flaws such as infidelity/being unwittingly pimped out while suffering from amnesia (distinctions that don't actually matter to a scorned lover and drive him into true infidelity) kidnapping (technically speaking) and summary execution in the judge,jury and executioner sense that hasn't been 100% facts based every time. These traits alone have scared a few people I know away from the game, but once you get the context and something of the whole story the perception often changes. These people don't become, good or upright citizens by these revelations, but it gets so deep that at times as a player you have to take a step back and acknowledge that "if I were in their shoes at the time, I can't say with any semblance of certainty that I wouldn't have acted worse than they did there" and that's the magic of it all, morality is a fascinating concept to explore but to many people these days have such a limited world view that they believe everything they've experienced is everything there is and that everything is absolute, and out media today largely mirrors that view for the sake of populism and I for one long for the day that's no longer the case. Would love to see rpgmaker games become a part of that.
Not saying either character is a great person or anything, just that they are multifaceted. Most of the time in games that offer moral 'choices' those choices boil down to "it's common sense/the current politically correct response" versus choices that either just get you a reward for being an rear end in a top hat or one where your party members have to summarily chastise you for your 'wrong thinking' after you've made it and then you end up with the same results playing out that would have if you'd just picked the correct answer to begin with. True morally ambiguous choices that make you think about the situation before deciding, where the 'correct choice' is not so obvious that all you need understand to know it is read the choices themselves are so rare in games both rpgmaker or otherwise that I can't actually think of another game to draw examples from. I hope they are out there, but I've not played them if they are and would love to see more where morality is thought about in a more realistic sense, and as a result the characters appear far more realistic than they'd ever be able to be as 'morality archtypes'.
