Battles as a point of friction in RPGs

05 May, 2024

The first post of two where I think hard about what bothers me so much in a lot of RPGs, and why I think I might be in a niche

Reading the second part might help contextualize a few things, but it's not required.

For the longest time, I couldn't figure out why some RPGs wore me down more than others that, superficially, seemed the same. People have their own preferences about what they would rather play, so I'm not here to say what's right or what's wrong, but last year I finally found out what bothered and exhausted me, and it was... the battles.

Apparently, it's well-accepted that battles are just an intrinsic part of roleplaying, and sometimes are the only way a player can meaningfully interact with the world. And that's fine! It's not as much a design philosophy as it is the result of adapting tabletop systems to computers, and without a human to play the DM's role, we are left with fewer ways to interact with the setting and deal with its consequences than battling away the adversaries.

At the same time, a lot of games build these intricate narrative systems with choices and consequences, toting around the player's freedom and how they can meaningfully change the world or, at least, the story. However, a lot of times, these choices are still arranged around battles in which the player doesn't have a choice but to participate.

And that's what's been wearing me down, because it doesn't appear to be a well-thought process but just another feature of RPGs: you're here to be the great protagonist, and you do that through choices and combat. But even if the combat itself can be good, spreading battles around as a requirement for the story can be tiring.

The first example that always comes into my mind is Wasteland 2 – which, let me be clear here, is a very fine game. And while the game does have some interesting story paths that can change according to what you do, sometimes completely altering the outcome of a substory, all the story beats are behind tiresome battles that you have no choice but to fight (and win).

This, of course, is my subjective opinion, but I don't find the combat on Wasteland 2 to be that engaging to warrant constant battling. Although the character sheet has some interesting options, when the combat is rolling you depend more on luck on skill rolls than preparation, and even the best strategy can't work if you don't have ways to prepare and mitigate your own combat downfalls. Considering that, sometimes, the combat is pushed into the player with no way of avoiding it, even if to return later, the lack of supporting systems that give players more agency in the engagement plays against one of the game's strong points, which is choice and consequence in the story.

Let me give an example: at the beginning of the game, when the story starts rolling, the player has to choose between two places to go first, and deciding on one place means they lose content and story parts on the other. That's fine, it's a fair trade when the game is trying to depict a complex world. The issue arises when you aren't prepared for what you'll find, battle-wise. What I mean in practice is, if you decide to explore the AG Center with a group of mostly ranged units – and very basic melee capabilities – you'll have a hard time, since there's almost no ammo on the map, and you can't leave to restock your supplies and return. Even if you could, ammo is expensive at the beginning and you might not have enough cash to buy enough. Then, your characters have to be ultra-specialized in ranged combat – to waste as little ammo as possible – or be heavy hitters with melee weaponry – because ammo wouldn't matter then. It's entirely possible to softlock yourself at this early part of the game, and I know that for a fact because I did softlock myself this way.

In the end, the best way to play Wasteland 2 is to know, ahead of time, how your engagement is going to be and build your party for it. The player has to use meta-knowledge to overcome in-game challenges because the game doesn't hint at them or give ways to mitigate choices with bad outcomes – like, for example, being able to leave the AG Center to scavenge for ammo. And although it's possible to play blind and finish the game, it becomes more of a test of patience and mental resilience against the lack of mitigations than of preparedness and strategy.

And don't get me wrong, I like Wasteland 2, but a lot of these things got in the way of me properly enjoying the game. And although I'm talking about Wasteland 2 here, this is true for almost every other RPG, from Divinity: Original Sin to Underrail to The Age of Decadence. These are all games that, if you didn't build your character just the right way, or didn't have just the right skill to avoid combat, can softlock you in unavoidable battles that, although weren't made to be hard, don't give mitigation options for people less inclined to combat or that didn't prepare the character correctly for an engagement they didn't know was coming.

JRPGs are, in general, a different beast. While the shortcomings of Western-made RPGs are, usually, due to design decisions related to how battles are staged – and the lack of mitigation for bad decisions – Japanese-made ones have a greater focus on each battle at the expense of having a simpler combat system, at least superficially.

What I mean by this is that while Western RPGs have a lot of complex systems and subsystems interacting with one another behind the scenes, measuring skill levels and dice rolls, Japanese RPGs have much more straightforward systems that interact directly with one another with, usually very predictable outcomes. A Fallout 1, for example, definitely has a much more complex skill system than, say, Final Fantasy VII, a game from the same year. That doesn't mean that Final Fantasy is easier, but that there are fewer ways a player can softlock themself and not be able to figure a way out.¹

Another great example is the Shin Megami Tensei series, famous for its challenging battles. Notice that "challenging" isn't "difficult", because the overall combat system in the games is very simple to grasp but, to win battles, it's necessary to play them almost like a puzzle, looking for ways to extend your turn while shortening the opponent's attack window. It's a system that expects a bit of experimentation – and even encourages it.

However, with JRPGs, bad friction manifests itself in other ways, usually as random encounters. Although the main selling point in a lot of JRPGs is the story, random encounters are, in my mind, counter-intuitive to that proposition, as they hinder story exploration. In Shin Megami Tensei, for example, if the player is exploring the map as part of an important story beat that's pushing them forward, constant random battles break the pacing and, in some situations, can discourage further map investigation to find hidden secrets. The ability to stop, leave, and gather supplies – something that's usually not possible in Western RPGs – does little to mitigate this feeling. Even if the battles are easy to win, the constant rhythm-breaking can wear some people down.

And, as before, although I'm talking about a specific game here, it's a common issue in the genre overall. They are, I believe, a vestige of the old RPGs made in Japan, where random encounters were used as a source of XP to farm levels, a different function from acting as obstacles in exploration.

It's impossible to talk about these aspects without mentioning resource management, another bane of digital adventures. While resource management does have its place in RPGs, the way it's commonly implemented feels like a remnant from tabletop in a bad way. Much like unwarranted battles, it's expected of the player to carry supplies for various purposes without actually informing beforehand, through gameplay, what is actually needed. We see this commonly happening when players either save as many potions as possible, refusing to use them in fear they might be needed later, or using them when required, but not carrying enough to last through the whole section. With rarer items, it's even worse and might lead to the trope Too Awesome to Use.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to be unfair, resource management is something very difficult to balance, and it's even harder to properly relay when it's adequate to use some items to a player. However, its effects go beyond just support item management: in most games, some characters require MP usage – or another finite resource of the same sort – to battle, but using it renders them useless in later fights – unless we have an item to recover this resource. It's a double-edged trap: not only do the attacks rely on a finite resource, but they require carrying another finite resource around to deal with the limitations of the former. This usually ends up being just a point of friction that doesn't provide any benefit to the gameplay, just like making ranged characters carry ammunition – be they bullets, arrows, bombs, etc – while melee fighters can freely attack without minding any system-imposed limitations.

Another Eden, a mobile gacha RPG I frequently play, has every character consuming mana when making any attack other than the basic one. Being able to carry only one healing item that can be used only once, it's always hard to consider the right time to use it: I need the mana-consuming attacks to defeat enemies, but I don't want to face a boss having little-to-no mana. At the same time, if I use the healing item too early, I'll get to the boss with little mana anyway, but if I save the item for later, the random encounters become unnecessarily hard.²

It's important to note, though, that resource management does have its place in RPGs. I'm not saying that this limitation is useless, but actually that it's just applied indiscriminately, probably because "that's how we've always done it". It's formulaic. Removing this aspect could very well improve some games, but could completely break others where its repercussions were better thought out. Exploration should have friction, but not every kind of attrition³ works for every kind of game, even if they all bear the tag of RPG.

In the end, I always tended to gravitate towards RPGs with little to no combat – like Disco Elysium and Planescape Torment – or games where it was possible to avoid combat by mixing player smarts with mediocre character skills – like Fallout 1 and 2. Then I found out about the SaGa series, and it all became clear.

The SaGa franchise is atypical and experimental, with every entry being their own thing, even if they are part of the same collection. However, the games usually have some points in common, like fully recovering the HP after each battle, being able to see the enemies on the map and avoid them, being able to flee from every fight (including bosses), little to no resource management, and so on. Depending on the game played, combat could be very challenging (I'm looking at you, Scarlet Grace), but it would still, one way or the other, give the means to overcome that challenge if it wasn't forewarned.

I'm not a SaGa expert, but I got pretty obsessed with the games because they are just... fun to play around, to engage with the systems, even if their story aren't the best around. Just the bit of "automatically healing up after every battle" already throws away some major preconceptions and changes the rules of engagement.

I very much doubt that only these games are breaking the mold, so speak. Given how long it took me to find out that SaGa existed, I can only imagine what other RPGs are out there experimenting with different formulas and mechanics. I, at least, would love more games that rely less on number-crunching or meta-knowledge and more on mastering a superficially simpler combat system just to move things along.

The same way I would like to see Western RPGs freeing themselves from their D&D heritage and influence a bit more, I would like to see more JRPGs trying not to be Final Fantasies⁴ or Dragon Quests.

#rpg #video-game