Rpg Mkaer Map Encounter
Jan 29, 2014 Description:Includes 29 total maps. All but 1 of them I have created myself. The other one, I used as a base from the sample that comes with VX as a means of showing that you can still use the sample maps and tailor it to fit your own game. The maps include forest paths, caves, interiors, exterio.
Posted byWelcome to the first in what I hope will be a series of articles written for this subreddit about how to take standard JRPG design and make it better. Today's topic is the dreaded random encounter, why players dislike them, and how to make them more fun and interesting.
What's The Issue?
A large number of players, even fans of the JRPG genre, are lukewarm at best on random encounters. They call them tedious, grindy, or some other variation on boring. The heck of it is, they're not wrong most of the time. Random encounters can be engaging and evocative parts of a game's design, but frequently they are not. The art of how to craft interesting encounters seems to be a bit lost, and not just in RPG Maker projects. Even big-budget JRPGs from AAA developers seem to have abandoned the idea of making encounters fun, instead opting to juice up their boss fights and setpieces. This is fine as far as it goes, but players are going to be spending a much higher percentage of their time contending with random encounters than they are boss battles. Consigning the bulk of your player's mechanical interaction with your game to being mindless filler is a terrible tradeoff no matter what you're getting in return.
But fear not. Random encounters can be fun, and all it takes is some thought, creativity, and the rigorous application of a few simple principles.
Why Random Encounters?
So why have random encounters at all? You certainly don't have to. A lot of very good games have eschewed them. Don't be afraid to cut them if they don't fit your game concept. However, random encounters are a longstanding part of the JRPG tradition, and they can be done well.
Random encounters serve several important purposes. They provide adversity for the player, giving them a constant stream of obstacles to overcome. They force the player to think strategically about how to utilize their resources. They provide an element of randomness, ensuring that no two runs of any dungeon are exactly the same. They evoke a sense of danger and progressive exhaustion, connecting the player to the feelings of the characters and giving them a sense of the world. They help provide an area with a unique texture and flavor; a forest full of giant spiders and feral wolves tells a different story than a forest full of living plant monsters and druidic cultists.
And yet all of these appear to have fallen by the wayside. Random encounters have become attenuated. Easy encounters that can be overcome by mashing the attack button or spamming one catch-all AOE ability provide no challenge. Games that are too generous with resources and player safety eliminate strategic resource management, as well as reducing the mechanical bond between player and characters. Areas with a small number of similar monsters and encounter pools with little variance diminish the benefits of randomness while maintaining its downsides. Thoughtless enemy design and placement mutes the effect on area texture and flavor.
Now that we understand the problem, we can try to reverse some of these design trends and make our encounters more interesting.
How Not To Fix It
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Before we dig into good ways to resolve the issue, let's establish up front what won't solve the problem. Making your player's skills more flashy and interesting won't do it. Devising more complex combat mechanics (limit breaks, team attacks, varied resource mechanics, etc.) won't do it. Adding an extra zero to every monster's HP and cranking up their damage so that encounters are punishingly difficult won't do it. I'm not saying that you shouldn't do these things; on the contrary, all of them are good ideas given the proper context. But they aren't the fix we're looking for.
Step I: Interesting Adversity
One of the most important things random encounters should do is provide obstacles for the players to overcome. The more varied these obstacles are and the more interesting they are to overcome the better. It's also important to be smart about when to push the difficulty of your random encounters and when to ease off.
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The first thing is to make sure that a solid majority of your encounters provide some kind of challenge. The players should be able to overcome them with a reasonable effort, of course; every encounter doesn't need to threaten to kill the team; but your average encounter should exact a toll on the party's resources. If the player has to use a potion or heal spell after most fights, then there is a limit to how many fights they can get into. They have limited fuel, and being out in the wilderness or in the bowels of a dungeon becomes tense and exciting, because their resources keep dwindling lower and lower.
It is unfortunately easy to undercut this sense of tension and danger. I've played too many RPGs where encounters barely tax the party and a fresh, level 1 healer can output so much healing with efficient spells (or healing items are so cheap and so constantly showered on the player) that the player's fuel is effectively bottomless. There's a theoretical limit, but a dungeon would have to be a hundred and fifty floors long for the player to start feeling the least bit nervous. Even worse is the more recent trope of save points completely healing the party for free and being placed every forty yards throughout the entire game. There is no surer way to make the player feel safe, comfortable, and bored out of their skull. This is not the aura of tension and menace that you want your dark, monster-infested caves to evoke.
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Of course, it's one thing to make your encounters into obstacles, but it's another thing entirely to make them interesting to overcome. We'll get into encounter design more in a bit, but for now I'll say that most encounters should tax the player's resources, but clever or skilled play should allow the player to mitigate that tax. Give the enemies weaknesses, and reward the player for exploiting those weaknesses by lowering the tax on their resources.
As an example, let's imagine an encounter of fast-moving wolves that relentlessly attack and have low base damage but a high critical rate. They are constantly nipping away at the player's hit point total, and every attack they make is a potential huge hit. If the player mindlessly spams the Fight command over and over they'll take a lot of damage and might even be subject to a string of unlucky critical hits that forces them to revive someone. However, if the player uses an area of effect spell right away they can clear the wolves out immediately, saving themselves all of that damage at the cost of some MP. The player has been rewarded for making good tactical use of their tools, and over many encounters this will add up to a successful dungeon run instead of having to turn back halfway and limp home.
Enemies with devastating attacks that need to be neutralized with a status effect or burst damage, enemies that need to be prioritized because they cause annoying status effects of their own or heal other foes.. there are a lot of possibilities to keep it varied and fun beyond just 'that enemy is weak to fire, so use fire.'
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Step II: The Importance of Variety
So we have a player that has limited resources and encounters that force them to spend those resources. Even better. these encounters reward good play by lowering their resource cost if the player does well, making them engaging. This is a substantial improvement, but it isn't enough on its own. We need to add variety.
You should start thinking of your monsters in terms of what feeling you want them to evoke in the player, how they will challenge the player, and what tactics the player will need to use to defeat them at peak efficiency. It helps to think of them in terms of roles. Keep in mind that these are meant to be broad categories; a tool to make your design better, not a straitjacket that should limit your ideas.
Mooks are weak cannon fodder. They don't do a lot of damage, but their little scratches will add up over time. They generally die in one or two hits with a standard physical attack, and wasting a spell on them is overkill. They're not threatening on their own, but they always show up in numbers or running interference for something bigger and meaner.
Brutes are tough and dangerous but slow and inconsistent. They have high hit points and can't be killed quickly without a significant investment of resources such as a huge spell. They hit hard, but they're slow and usually not very accurate, and their combat tactics are strictly one-note; they just punch punch punch. Brutes usually have a weakness to a particular status effect so that a clever player can quickly defuse them and then focus on other threats before chewing through their hit point bar. If you make all of your Brutes immune to instant death effects there's a special place for you in RPG designer hell.
Skirmishers are fragile, but they're fast and moderately threatening. They frequently get in a round of attacks before the player can even react. Common variants have a high critical hit rate, high evasion rate, or both.
Artillery are slow and fragile, but if they aren't killed right away they go off with a bang, either with hugely damaging attacks, threatening AOE or crippling status effects. A sane player encountering one for the second time prioritizes them immediately.
Harassers don't do a lot of damage, but are threatening because they weaken your party with debuffs or status effects. They eat through specialized resources that cure status ailments and can be threatening when paired with other enemies. They can be annoying, but their presence adds strategic depth to the game.
Supporters have very low damage output and are usually fragile, but they buff and sometimes even heal other enemies, amplifying their threat. Later game supporters can even be specialized to shore up a particular enemy weakness, such as casting a protective barrier on an artillery enemy or amping up a brute's accuracy and critical hit chance.
Elites are multi-spectrum threats that aren't trivial to kill. They deal threatening damage, have strong defenses or high hit points, and have multiple tricks up their sleeve, often combining the abilities of multiple other roles. Particularly lethal elites will perform the roles of a supporter, skirmisher or artillery while being too tough to be a priority kill, making them incredibly dangerous.
Demonic Spiders are just plain unfair. They're hard to kill, they have powerful attacks, cruel status effects and sometimes even instant death attacks. They are almost mini-bosses, but if you can overcome them the rewards are generous. These generally don't show up until the latter half of the game to escalate the challenge.
Rewards are a rare encounter that's easy to kill, not terribly threatening, and are worth a much bigger share of experience and gold than you'd expect. Sometimes they even drop rare items. These monsters are more important than you'd think; it makes the whole process more fun if the player has a chance to 'win' the random encounter roll.
The variance and texture of your random encounters comes from mixing and matching the enemy types on the above list. You want a good mix of easier and harder encounters that give your player a varied experience. Some encounters should be pushovers, like a handful of mooks with no backup or a couple of reward enemies, to give the player a break from time to time. Some encounters should be very difficult, like artillery guarded by a pack of elites or a pair of brutes backed up by some harassers that make it tough for the player to decide what to focus on. Of course, both of these should be rare encounter types, and a more standard mix of encounters should form the baseline: a whole bunch of skirmishers that beg for your AOE, a couple of harassers that aren't going to kill you but might force you to use some antidotes, artillery plus some mooks to reward smart prioritization, and so on.
You can and should vary which types of encounters are common in which areas in order to give them a sense of place. The Goblin Fortress full of mooks and the occasional big, bad brute; the evil wizard's tower full of harassers and artillery that pelt your party with spells; the final boss's lair packed wall-to-wall with swarms of elites and demonic spiders with whole screens full of brutes in place of mooks. It's also important to vary the overall difficulty level of encounters from location to location. A difficulty curve is important, and it's also a good idea to have the occasional difficulty spike that temporarily ramps up the challenge (ideally coinciding with a climactic moment in the story) and the occasional breather level that lets the player coast for a little while and give their mind a rest.
If I can rant for a second, what the hell happened to the population of monster encounters!? Here is a standard random encounter from the first dungeon of Final Fantasy III. Those guys aren't particularly strong, but each type is a little different, and there's seven of them. I think the most enemies I ever ran into at one time in the entirety of Bravely Default was four, and that was pretty uncommon. Most encounters were with one or two enemies. Even the DS remake of Final Fantasy III had a hard cap of three enemies on screen at once, with their health cranked up to compensate (which just made them feel like annoying punching bags.)
Don't be afraid to flood the screen. Don't do it in every fight, but don't avoid it altogether either. Have one encounter that's two artillery, and then another encounter that's those two artillery plus four mooks for an added challenge. Have one encounter that's a lone brute, and then another encounter where he's flanked by skirmishers. This makes the player's varied toolkit more fun to use. What good is an AOE spell if the party never encounters more than three enemies at once? And having multiple threatening enemies in a normal encounter allows you to make the player's status effects and spells more useful. An instant death spell that actually works isn't overpowered if the party still has to fight through the remaining skirmishers after they use it to kill the brute.
It is also extremely important to have a variety of enemies for every location. I have played way too many RPGs where each location only has two or three different kinds of enemies. Ideally you want many more than that, so that the player doesn't get bored of seeing the same enemies over and over again. It's fun and exciting for the player to enter a new area and try to figure out the encounters. The more unique enemies and formations that you have in a region, the longer it will take for the player to have seen everything. One of the key reasons players get bored of random encounters is that they face the same two enemies in the same handful of formations over and over again. Mix it up; even slight variations on existing formations is more interesting than more of the same old thing. Give each major area six to eight types of enemies and as many as two dozen different formations to keep things fresh. Ideally the player will still be running into new challenges right up until they leave the area.
Conclusion
Random encounters don't have to be a weak point in your gameplay. Thoughtful design that keeps its goals in mind can produce fun, varied encounters that test the player and keep them engaged.