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Sometimes games and game mechanics just drift apart. JRPGs and random encounters used to go hand-in-hand in game design, but they’re becoming harder to find together now. Whatever happened to them? Let’s talk about how RPGs and random battles got to know each other, got on each other’s nerves, and fell out of love, and see if there’s anything they can do to get the magic back.
Featuring:
Final Fantasy I
Pokemon
Skies of Arcadia
Final Fantasy X
Final Fantasy VIII
Golden Sun
Xenoblade Chronicles
Wild ARMS 3
Bravely Default
The World Ends With You
Lost Odyssey
Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga
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Pokemon knew since the first game that being able to use repels to allow players to avoid random encounters was a smart move.
They also did a great job of creating very specific areas where the player knows random encounters will happen. This ensures if a player needs to get from point A to point B they can often easily avoid these areas to ensure they don’t get slowed down by random encounters if they want.
Other games use a system like that, but not usually to the same effect. Holy water in DQ is a thing but it's generally not that useful, and there's Estoma in the SMT series that repels enemies but it's a relatively rare skill. Repels in pokemon are generally more effective since they exist to mitigate the downsides of backtracking
@@torch-bearer9138 combine that with the fact that there is incentive to look for and fight specific enemies rather than just overcome whatever lands in front of you.
I have never used a repel. I have bear every version (just about).
The problem is stubborn people like me who try to trudge though for 20+ years before finally actually using the useful tool
I have a humble request. Would it be possible to display game titles when gameplay is being shown? I know most of the games you've shown but not all. I'd like to check them out but not knowing the titles makes it difficult.
Seconded, also could we please get the titles of the background music?
Seconded. Game Maker's Toolkit does this, and it seems like it should be basic practice.
The games shown are listed in the description but I agree this would be a nice touch
@@XdeadsoulXful Not all of them. He uses clips from one of the megaman battle network games, but it's not listed at all in the description.
This'd be useful, agreed ^^ I'd love to know which game is shown at 6:55, so if anyone knows, I'd be really thankful!
You could always tell when a random encounter was coming in the Dreamcast version of Skies of Arcadia because the DC's disc read noises would get SO LOUD right before it loaded the fight in
lol that's great
Only works when you have the actual hardware.
based dreamcast
I think my favorite random encounter horror story is from Xenogears. There's a dungeon that required you to jump across a gap. But if a random encounter started while you were in the middle of the jump, then after the battle you lost all forward momentum and plunged several screens down.
what the hell??? that's actually criminal LOL
that's good design baby
That sounds horrifying.
I honestly never had much of a problem at the Babel jump, but i know what you mean.
Ah the infamous Babel Tower
Can we get the version where every time a random encounter pops up in the video the sound of the relative game's encounter starts and your explanation's stops?
KZhead ads are like that sometimes...
You nailed it
@@cpicard6561 Viewer skipped the ad!
@@jeffd.683 Got away successfully
@@EMPerror403 Wasn't that the joke at 0:45?
I remember Dragon Quest 9 had it so when you reached a certain level, enemies would start running from you instead of at you, meaning that you realllly had to try to get an encounter in the early zones late game.
game was soooo goood
Earthbound did exactly the same thing 15 years earlier.
Earthbound also had a great system, where if you where high enough level enemies would be randomly defeated.
i still play this games lol
Not all monsters actually. There's some neat characterisation here. Like those damn monkeys around Alltrades Abbey will still aggro you even if you're way past their levels.
I think the reason random encounters stayed around so long in pokemon is that for a good part of the game, they're not actually stopping you from moving, you actually were looking for a pokemon to capture. And most of the puzzle sections happen in the champions arenas where the combats are actually shown on the map before with the trainers (and you can avoid a few of them)
The frequency of random encounters can also drastically change their function. If random encounters are common, they tend to be the main source of combat/exp/gold etc. If they are rare, it can become more of a looming threat. This small chance something truly scary is right around the next corner.
the rate at random battles appearing changing from area to area is a real nice touch too, like you say it can change the feel of whats happening in the game at the time, like more or less urgency
If you wanna put random encounters in a game. Put clearly defined dangerous and safe areas. There is a reason why nobody likes caves in Pokémon but most other routes are fine.
Yeah, another way Pokemon controls the annoyingness of its random encounters is that there's often a way to avoid most if not all of the tall grass in a given route.
Exactly! I never liked caves in Pokémon because there is no sense of safety without repels. The player needs to experience both tension AND release, but being in a cave without repels is JUST tension until you leave
@@brianb.6356 1 thing i think is clever is when a route has two paths, one with a trainer and one with grass. It gives the player a choice, do you take on the trainer now, risk losing, but if you win you get a safe path in the future, or do you risk the grass and hope to pass encounter free and come back later after healing?
@@regojozsa but doesn't that mean caves are just extended sections of tension for the even bigger release of making it safely to the other side?
This is something Pokemon used and then didn't go hard enough on after Gen V. The darker grass in Black and White was a super smart mechanic. Hell had they actually gone all the way with that they could have designed whole routes with tiered difficulty and allowed the players more freedom of world traversal. (I think X and Y sorta used this with different encounter rates in say flowers, tall tall grass, and regular grass, but not the difficulty aspect)
Earthbound has a nice solution to battles in old areas. If basic attacks are able to defeat the enemies before they attack the game just skips to the victory screen.
Yeah, Earthbound had a great system!
not to mention enemies start running from you, so you only get low lvl enemies if you actively pursue them
Found a wild Henke, nice
Such an elegant solution I don't know how devs decided dropping resource management from the formula was the only solution
Hell yeah earthbound, some enemies actually share the same overworld sprite and its a sort of lottery on what you’ll get basically
5:13 I like how Zubat is shown as the truly powerful pokemon.
Well, after fighting 100,000 of them in Mt. Moon trying to get to the other side, you are left permanently traumatized by them
@@anameyoucantremember p
Earthbound doesn’t have random encounters but the system of instantly winning a battle if you can kill the enemy with one turn of your basic attacks really helps with not making weak enemies take too long.
Yeah. It also has the thing he praised about Persona. Approaching them from behind gives you a first strike advantage, and getting caught from behind yourself makes any battle you were trying to flee from even more daunting. Building on that, Strong monsters hunt you down, while weaker monsters run away, making them easier to avoid or getting the drop on them. It basically had all the good encounter mechanics way ahead of their time.
And they run when you get too strong
I think that what made Pokemon's encounters more bearable is the fact that they only happen on tall grass (except in the caves). That makes you feel you at least have a choice of whether you want to fight or not, and the game constantly gives you reasons to willingly go through them. In other games, it just feels like a struggle: "I just want to get from point A to point B!"... You mentioned that there should be ways to make them not feel like a trap, but that's deep down what they actually are, so it's better to hint the player that something's fishy
that's why caves and sea routes in Pokemon suck, but tall grass doesn't
@@photogenicBlur I also think water routes and caves are specially bad because of the low variety of pokemon. It really sucks to only encounter tentacool and tentacruel
@@juliorosag oh that too, good point
Also, pokemon also gives you the option to outright cut the tall grasses
@@ventusse perhaps, long ago, but that option was removed in gen 5 or 6 and hasn't resurfaced. Probably never will again since the HM system has been mostly gutted at this point, but most routes in the last few gens have had very clear "safe" pathways to follow, so...
10:19 What's even cooler about TWEWY is that in the post-game, you can chain up to 16 encounters in a row for a higher challenge and bigger rewards, with enemies becoming stronger as you go through each round. Add that to the fact that you can also level down and change the difficulty at anytime in order to increase your drop-rate and Level 1 Ultimate battles became a blast for me to play through. Really glad that the sequel is looking to keep this mechanic.
EEEEEEEE IS DESIGN DOC TALKING ABOUT THE BEST GAME EVER TWEWY??? THE COMMENT FITS AND UR PFP SUGGESTS YOU KNOW ABOUT IT OMG OMG IM SO HAPPY
OKAY HE DID TALK ABOUT TWEWY LETS GOOOOOO
Twewy probably has my favorite mechanical ideas when it comes to Rpgs, raising the diffuclty and lowering your level actually serving a purpose with food that allows you to even further raise drop rates which then allows you to be at a higher level, honesty im excitied to see how NEO plays with the meanchis the original laid down
TWEWY making random encounters completely voluntary, and giving you so much control over how you engage with them, really helped maintain the pacing and fun of battles, and I hope future RPGs try something similar. It also helps with the problem I mentioned in my post about each battle needing to feel unique -- given how many variables you can alter even before you start the battle, you can always make them feel fresh.
@thebigchungus451 But it just stacks the encounters one after the other, right? I watched the Fantasian trailer and thought they came up with a pretty good idea of how to fix random encounters. It stacks up to 30 encounters, but puts all the enemies in the same battle, and your attacks can damage multiple enemies.
I enjoy the "battle of attrition" aspect of long dungeon crawls. This, of course, only works if (1) random encounters are legitimate threats that require you to expend resources, and (2) you have meaningful limits on your resources. Many games don't meet the first requirement. Many more fail the second requirement, although you can fake it to some extent with rules like never stocking up on healing items from item shops. Conversely, what really sucks is when the random encounters are effectively meaningless, so the only resource they drain is your patience.
Yep this is a huge aspect of JRPG dungeon design, good to see someone else has noticed it.
Unfortunately I don't think this works either, since resource management becomes impossible with an indefinite number of challenges. If the game controlled the pace of encounters (like SMT's encounter cooldown system), it might work better.
@@elliotgott2993 "since resource management becomes impossible with an indefinite number of challenges" No, that simply isn't true. The players still control how LONG they spend in the dungeon or wilderness. You aren't supposed to live in the dungeon, you're supposed to dip in, achieve your goal, & get out in 1 piece. Part of that is having to make hard choices about which nooks & crannies you choose to explore, or which fights you run away from. verisimilitude
I did not finish Persona 4, but I intensely recall my dash towards the boss of the first region. I realised that I was under prepared. The enemies in the final levels of that region wiped the floor with me. I just wanted to check out the boss and so I avoided all combat. Somehow I got there on my last leg and weirdly the entire fight was actually doable. But I was constantly close to being wiped out and used everything I had. Later regions in the game did not give me this big of a trouble. But this first experience with the game and being constantly threatened by enemies that could take me out easily seriously had an impact on me.
@@kgoblin5084 That's not really how modern RPGs work nowadays, though. You're generally expected to be able to finish the dungeon in one run. I generally find the "duck in, duck out" method to be kind of boring, to be honest. If you can just retreat and grind indefinitely, the only resource being tested is your patience. A setup like Darkest Dungeon's, where you can't leave once you start (at least not without penalties) and have to work only with what you prepared in advance would be more interesting, in my opinion, and more in line with the spirit of original D&D.
I'm a huge etrian odyssey stan, and I honestly can't imagine the series without random encounters. Since the game is designed around mapping a very visually homogeneous environment with limited inventory space and punishing enemy encounters, the random encounters keep things tense and cause you to evaluate your priorities. You know how many steps are between you and a treasure chest or the next staircase, and an enemy radar gives you a sense of how likely a random encounter is. Do you risk it or retreat back to town? This is balanced nicely with stronger fixed enemies that you have to puzzle around and which continue to move on the map while you take turns in random encounters. You can use that to your advantage to help manipulate the FOE, or the enemy can invade your battle and drive your heart rate through the roof. For a fantasy RPG, the etrian odyssey series is paced like one of the scariest survival horror games I've played.
Yeah it showed to me that random encounters can be essential for dungeon-crawlers or games that heavily put an emphasis on ressource management. I dare to say people who generally hate random encounters, never played a game where it was utilized well enough.
Definitely I think the EO series has the best use of Random Encounters I've ever seen
It helps that there's an indicator to show how much danger you're in. Blue/green being fine, and red meaning prepare uranus
With random encounters, it feels like whenever you just want to get through with no fuss, you'll hit something with every step. When you're grinding for an enemy, it takes ages to encounter it.
@@TomCruz54321 I’m pretty sure final fantasy 7 has a turn off encounters button it’s right between the 3x speed and god mode
@@TomCruz54321 Yeah, tell me about it, I remember playing FF6 a while ago, and when the world changes (I'm trying to keep it slightly vague in case you haven't played it), and I need to reestablish a proper party by travelling to a bunch of different locations, I'm constantly interrupted by enemies. It got so bad that I just looked up if there was a way to avoid it, and as it turns out, there's an item that let's you simply avoid all encounters, but it's basically hidden with zero indication of it's location, and it unironically made me say out loud: "Oh come on, really?" It might seem petty, but I actually dropped the game shortly after. I was already tired of it, and that was sorta the last straw.
rng do be like that sometimes and this rule applies to EVERY game with a percentage to drop mechanic. you've been grinding for that one item for hours? nah, You don't want that drop anymore? here have it now lol
And that is why I just breed for perfect IV stat pokemon instead of shiny breed. At least with IV breeding they made tools in the form of the destiny knot and Power Items and everstone to where you only deal with RNG that is unavoidable.
Also to add, part of me thinks stepping away from random encounters in some Rpgs, especially pokemon is good so if you see a mon it makes it easier to EV train since you arent praying to the RNG gods that you run into the pokemon that will help you with ev training you stats. Where in other rpgs like dragon quest (unless they have a similar system to EVs) wouldnt IMO need RNG since it they are more doubled down on story.
I like how Cthulhu Saves the World does random encounters. You only get a set amount per area so once you've burnt throught them you can freely explore, but you have an option to start an encounter whenever you like. It allows for interesting randomness at the beginning of each new area, but then hands you the controls once the fun wears off.
Was hoping to see this mentioned! Thank
I was actually surprised that Cthulhu Saves the World wasn't mentioned in the video itself. Was fully expecting an honorable mention of some sort...though maybe that's because when I played it I had a huge "why hasn't anyone done this before now? It's brilliant!" moment.
Panzer Dragoon Saga does something similar. As you're travelling, the radar changes colour that represents the likelihood of an encounter. However, as you defeat enemies in an area, that likelihood decreases. There's multiple areas within each zone. (I wonder if it also decreases given your level v area level, as it doesn't have scaled enemies...) It'll reset if you leave a zone and come back later, so you can choose to grind a bit extra if you want. If I recall rightly, there's also an item towards the late game that you can choose to equip which will lower the encounter rate.
Some of the Steamworld games did this as well, but what I found was that it inhibits grinding, which for some people (like me), is part of the appeal of random encounters.
@@Vesperitis To clarify, which Steamworld game did you actually have in mind? The closest thing i can recall would be SteamWorld Quest and they have the enemies on the map. They actually did a very smart move, where defeated enemies would only respawn, if you would use a save point to heal your party. But i want to add an example of my own and that is Etrian Odyssey. While it has random encounters, they are basically triggered by a set amount of steps you do while exploring the dungeons, letting you think twice about every step you make.
Something kind of important I feel you overlooked when talking about the advantages and purposes of random encounters: the way they put pressure on the player. In your standard turn-based RPG setup, dodging is entirely out of the player's hands, and attempting to flee usually means forfeiting a turn, giving the enemy a round of free hits on you if you fail. With that damage carrying over between battles, when you have no control over when encounters happen, the well-being of your party becomes an organic time limit for how long you can hang around in this hostile area before needing to turn back and make the trek back to town. In the modern paradigm of visible encounters the player can finesse around if they choose, this element of pressure is either mostly or completely lost, depending on the game.
In my experience, it just turns into a game of tag with the symbol encounts that chase you - I've had a few harrowing moments in Atelier, Fairy Fencer, Shining Resonance and Alliance Alive where I *had* to dodge all the enemies, or die trying. It's not quite the same as calculating the shortest path through a level to minimize random encounters, but it's close, and it's more action packed as well.
@@leohuangchunwang Yeah, but the problem is, is that being able to dodge crap, means you probably _will_ dodge crap as often as you can, which means you use less consumables and less MP (or whatever it's called) which reduces the difficulty of getting through a dungeon, especially the games that let you avoid nearly everything. Some games, the challenge *IS* the Endurance Run. Final Fantasy 1 for example, the Marsh Dungeon was fatal for most people for their first time because they underestimated the amount of preparedness you needed for that hellhole. But in Lufia 2, are there any dungeons other than the Ancient Cave (where your enemy stun toys are taken away), that actually have a modicum of difficulty? (especially since they put healing plates absolutely everywhere in most dungeons, making sure you will never run out of MP) Or how about Breath of Fire 1, where you can Mrbl3 through everything and just use the Hero's overpowered dragon morphs to deal with all the bosses and barely flinch even if you did avoid most of the fights the entire game? Also, if the game's combat system is so boring, that you WANT to avoid doing it as much as possible, then there is something wrong. Either the encounter rate is too darn high (Witch's Tower from BoF1 having an encounter every 3 steps hardcoded), or the battle system is too darn slow (Legend of Dragoon). As much as I love LoD's story and art design, sound design, etc... one thing I think they REALLY needed was faster battle transitions.
@@Dhalin Honestly, the difficulty in Lufia 2's dungeons didn't come from the enemies you fight there, so much as it comes from the puzzles you have to solve(though some places DID have some right nasty encounters, and you learn what needs to die immediately REAL quick).
@@Nehfarius Other than the Ancient Cave Floor 80+, I don't think I've ever seen any situation in which there were "nasty encounters" with things that "need to die immediately". And I suppose there's some challenge in the puzzles, I was talking more about the battles themselves. Ancient Cave aside, there's very little of any challenge in the game even if you skip the Cave. If you do anything in the cave at all, then the rest of the game turns into "Hold the L Button to win".
This was typically how early Dungeons & Dragons handled its random encounters. The DM was encouraged to roll for them every 20 in-game minutes. Combined with the general deadliness of early DnD, and players were encouraged to be efficient and mindful of their resources. Nor did the party get much XP from wandering monsters in those days (early DnD rewarded the lion's share of XP from seizing treasure and removing it from the dungeon).
An argument for random encounters is that it forces you to consider resource management, in most Shin Megami Tensei games (as well as Persona) your progress in dungeons is limited to how well you can manage to stretch your limited supply of HP and MP, and, once those are exhausted, make the choice to either turn back to a rest station, or to forge on and start using your limited supply of HP and MP restorative items. It creates interesting wrinkles in your thought process "should I use this more expensive spell and end this random encounter in one turn or should I take the risk and take some HP damage instead, if I do will I have enough MP for when I'm fighting the boss" and so on and so forth. I think the main problem with random encounters is that most random enemies in RPGs aren't meaningful enough to take the time away from the rest of the expirience, if a random encounter is just going to be attack attack attack, battle over, gain XP, then of course that's not interesting, but if the stakes are higher, and random battles can actually take a chunk out of you, then they become more meaningful as a gameplay element, and the ability to "skip" them hinders the design of the rest of the area. It's the reason why in Dark Souls, bonfires are rarely right next to boss doors, so you can't just corpse run to the boss over and over from a save point, you have to deal with the enemies in the level first before being able to fight the boss.
Definitely. A bad party composition or poor planning wastes a lot of extra resources and then you have to quit the dungeon sooner than otherwise. It's hard to imagine how the danger could be maintained without random encounters. If you can see the enemies, you know how many are between you and your objective. It's the not knowing that makes it tense.
@@crisis8v88 I'm reminded of my experience with the library, from Halo. Eventually it becomes a resource management problem - use the most efficient gun for each enemy, and try not to use ammo at a faster rate than it drops from enemies. That said, I'm not good at first-person shooters, so maybe more skilled players don't see it that way.
It's a design idea that dates all the way back to D&D... where very notably treasure was used to buy XP. It wasn't just a question of 'do I use this health potion before the boss?', it was also 'do I *abandon* this health potion so I can haul more gold out after beating the boss to level up, but risk dying due to a random brigand attack on the way back to town?' :D :D
@@kgoblin5084 As far as I remember, you didn't so much "buy XP" as you received some XP for acquiring gold, which insensitivised taking only easy fights or finding less dangerous solutions to encounters, because killing monsters wasn't the only method to gain XP, and dying in those days meant starting at level 1 again. Also anyone who doesn't bring a donkey into the dungeon to haul your spoils is playing early D&D wrong, objective fact.
I really liked how P3 did it, with all the points you said and also having the ability to go back to the lobby and heal up or change around your party. It also makes it so you usually can't just two tap enemies with your regular attack and usually have to spend MP to use abilities that the enemy is weak against, or having different affinities to different weapon types so certain characters are stronger against certain enemies and weak against others. Plus then you add the mini-game involved with initiating battles, by rewarding you for sneaking up on enemies and punishing you for recklessly approaching them, and having enemies that you can easily beat run away from you. And then ON TOP OF THAT, to make the system even less tedious they added the rush function so you can speed through fights that you've grown too powerful for. Tartarus would be perfect if it wasn't so damn long tbh, sometimes you're in there for like 3 hours straight just to reach the next checkpoint. And yeah. I get that the game doesn't want you to do it all in one go but then it shouldn't punish you by making you waste an afternoon when you could instead do something that progresses your social links. Just feels like contradictory game design.
So one thing I've seen in a few games like Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, is a sort of "Random Encounter Temperature Gauge". It starts off green after entering an area or finishing a battle, but steadily changes to red as you move around, indicating an impending random encounter. Adds a bit of predictability and makes "random" encounters feel more manageable, while also upping the tension in tight situations since now the game is tipping you off when the bad thing will happen, that it will happen soon...but not how bad it is. Edit: Fixed typo
that sounds similar to persona 2 where you can see a RE coming on the radar as it goes green-yellow-red
@@caellanmurphy4751 A lot of Atlus games seem to use that mechanic. SMT Nocturne, Etrian Odyssey (and thus the Persona Q games), and so on
@@jaidens.g.1920 I think SJ did it best though EDIT: only talking about MegaTen since I didn't touch Etrian Odyssey
Fantasia by Sakaguchi does the same thing, but he skipped those examples because it conflicted with his "random encounters are bad and outdated" narrative.
@@usuariofuturista Maybe he has an Android so he couldn't play it. jk that sounds like a cool system
Another thing FFX did was give Tidus the "Flee" ability extremely early on. It was a guaranteed escape from battle instead of the dice roll for most normal run away commands.
Which is a nice feature to have.
FF IX did it first. Zidane has it since minute 1.
@@XanderVJ except you had to wait for zidane and you lost gil for using it
@@XanderVJ FFV Thief class disagrees.
@@XanderVJ yeah but with how clunky IX's combat is compared to X's, even the act of running away is annoying. FFX's combat is so good that I didn't care about random encounters that much but of course I used Tidus's ability
SMT Nocturne, and several other Atlus games actually, has a color-coded encounter warning onscreen, in this case built into the compass. The pace of its color changing lets the player know how quickly the next fight is coming, and also lets them judge if they think it will hold red long enough to make it to the next room.
I've beaten Nocturne and I don't have a clue what you're talking about so the game hasn't made a good job at telling me that
@@makiiavely You've never looked in the bottom right corner in the overworld outside of battle? And wondered why the radar has kept changing in order for 3 colors. And stays a solid blue for some parts
@@stareater4629 not really brother
disclaimer Nocturne is one of the best games I've played period, but I've never noticed that
@@makiiavely they make it more obvious in SJ
I actually prefer random encounters to visible encounters, as long as they are implemented well. While I disagree with the notion that they are an obsolete or inherently flawed mechanic, they are definitely not right for every game and much much easier to mess up than visible encounters. I do kind of wish that we could move past the 'Are random encounters bad?' discussion because I feel like a lot of modern JRPGs are screwing up visible encounters in ways that never get discussed. From enemies that chase you around like heat seeking missiles, corridor heavy dungeon layouts that make actually avoiding the encounters impossible, encounters that respawn too quickly or even just having unresponsive controls that make the process of avoiding encounters feel so much more frustrating than a high encounter rate ever could have.
Corridor type areas just so you are kinda forced to face visible encounters are argurably the worst IMO - it hampers a big part of the RPG experience which is exploration.
I remember playing Alliance Alive and there was an area where I was backtracking a lot but it went through a corridor where it was impossible to dodge the visible enemy. I felt like I fought way more in that dungeon than I ever have in any random encounter game.
And there's also the inverse of corridor areas. Areas that are way too huge just to fit in all the enemies, but you do fuck all in them unless you intentionally get into battles.
I don't see how though. Those forced encounters means you will have the same number of encounters either way but you have a moment of anticipation. I actually do think Pokémon had the right idea with the grass where encounters are random but not universal.
Etrian Odyssey (the series) has an interesting take or random encounters. You do have a way to guess how close you are to one (there is an UI element just for that... and knowing how close you are to an FOE). That way, if your party is at their limit, you can decide if you push forward a little more while mapping the floor you are in or it's better to warp back to town.
I for the life of me can't remember which game it was (I want to say a Final Fantasy), but there's a JRPG which lowers the encounter rate if you travel in a straight line, and increases it if you turn frequently. I always thought that was nice.
suikoden, i believe that's the game
Pokémon sorta does that, or rather every time you turn it counts as an extra step. You can actually turn in place without ever leaving the tile you're on and still get a random encounter.
Bravely Default
Didn't Legend of Dragoon do this?
IRL driving works that way too, especially if you are on a road with dividing walls.
It's so weird to me that you specifically use Golden Sun as an example of random encounters getting in the way without also mentioning it actually did something really smart and turned them off for puzzle rooms. They'll interfere with your working memory while traversing a dungeon, but there are plenty of rooms that a have a self-contained puzzle to solve and no random encounters at all. If you want another comment to balance that out, I love FFX, but by the time you get No Encounters in that game, the story's all but done. Players normally first see it when going back to Baaj, which you can do almost right before the final dungeon. Some will get a lucky drop if they explore the optional dungeon at the end of Calm Lands (still quite late). As far as I know/remember, that's about the earliest possibility. (And yes, skipping a bunch of encounters would leave you underlevelled for a blind run without the PC cheats, but I think the cheats let you turn off random encounters anyway, so that is a pretty nice combo for story-only folks.)
Not all puzzle rooms got the treatment, but I do agree with you that generally random encounters there aren't as bad as other rpgs.
Came down to say this. At least most, if not all, puzzle rooms in golden sun are no-fight zones.
It is also interesting to mention Golden Sun games are tremendously easy and they have no depth at all in combats. It's virtually impossible to get killed in a dungeon. The problem is, however, in serious JRPG that are not made for kids. What do you do in a Dragon Quest or a Shin Megami Tensei, for instance? It's a tough decision.
@@quickrat3348 Golden Sun has plenty of depth. Using djinn abilities lowers your stats but sets up a powerful summon attack. Swapping djinn between characters changes their class. Just because it uses the simple turn based approach from FF1 doesn’t mean it was made for kids. In fact it has some pretty heavy story elements with the onscreen death of multiple characters in the opening scene.
@@XemnasKH It certainly has depth, I really enjoyed messing with the class system. It's almost like a more puzzle-ey version of Bravely Default's since I couldn't confer OP classes to everyone and had to think about who got what. That being said, the reason why many people say there is no depth is because it's pretty much a fact that Djinn Rushing (just spamming summons from the get-go) is the vastly superior strategy to careful class planning. You don't need to level very high to just spam and win nearly ever boss fight with just Djinn Rushing. It's also why GS ROM hacks usually insert countermeasures to this strategy.
The statement "they're whole job is to keep the player from what they were doing before" reminds me of invaders in Dark Souls.
*their
@@Liggliluff you right
I've been playing through pokemon black for the first time recently and with experience from other pokemon games I personally don't mind the encounter system there, due to the availability of repels, taking paths through less amounts of grass, and the potential for easy levels. However a feature that I think would work well even in modern pokemon is the ability wether to choose to fight or run before you throw out your pokemon so even if you came across an unsavory battle you coukd run from it near instantly and not waste time
Are you still playing Black?
The Ar Tonelico series had an encounter gauge that would change colour to warn you when a fight was about to happen, and it got emptier with each encounter: once the gauge was completely empty, there were no more random fights in the area for as long as you were there.
I specifically thought about this and how nice it was.
Kinda reminds me of how all the rooms in undertale have a set population, so the more random battles you get into, the less likely it is that you'll get into another. This also plays into the genocide route, where you really have to try to kill every last monster.
That was a smart move from developer. If I want to grind i will get out of that area and grind again, love when dev give player freedom to grind or not
Lord of the Rings The Third Age had something very similar to that
"But nobody came."
Overworld enemies that on occasion can't be outrun is a good way for designers to make sure they have a bare minimum encounter rate for levelling and resource drain. I think Symphonia does that, makes it an amusing moment your first time when a gelatinous blob looking shadow just ZOOMS at you.
It was SCARY, I remember when I was little, those things were no joke
Pokemon does that. You can fight only trainers and you'll never be underleveled (unless you change team members way too often). Random encounters are basically optional from an Exp perspective.
Octopath Traveler actually had one of my favorite "random" encounter systems. There was always a set distance you could travel before a fight appeared. Think of it like a bar that filled up with every step you took. However, hitting a loading zone or cutscene would reset that bar. This turned dungeons and the overworld into fun little optimization challenges in order to minimize the number of fights I got into. It also added a risk vs reward dynamic to exploring. Sure there could be a chest with an amazing weapon off to the side there, but I will almost surely hit another encounter if I want to go check out.
Also, running increased the chance of encountering an enemy.
@@pn2294 I think that's kinda dumb unless there is something you would want to run from. Idk, haven't played the game
@@dappershinx9234 it can allow you to get into towns/areas earlier than intended if you optimize your movement and opens up a lot of opportunities for good gear that speeds up the tougher fights one struggles with, for one
@@nerothewateruser8030 Nahh. It's just annoying. You can do that in more creative, less time wastey ways.
@@dappershinx9234 mmm, I disagree. Evasive Maneuvers isn't just a skill for sequence breaking, it also helps if you're doing sidequests and don't want to be bothered to run from every encounter you get while finishing it. That chest too far away to reach without getting jumped by at least 1 encounter? You can reach it now and either fast travel back to town or try to reach the next area to reset the encounter and do it again. Or one could always just not equip it, as all skills can be freely shuffled in and out and technically none of them are exclusive to anyone. It's pretty versatile, all things considered
Random Encounters work really well in games like Pokemon and Shin Megami Tensei because the whole point of the game systems is to get new Pokemon or demons into your party so the element of surprise works to your advantage. However, as you stated the processing powers have come a long way so those games have other ways to surprise players.
Undertale as this interesting thing where, as you kill enemies in random encounters, they become less frequent as the area literally becomes depopulated. It also has a fairly low encounter rate (except in the tutorial area) but a lot of scripted ones that happen at certain points, giving the feeling of surprise and novelty without the repetitiveness of standard random encounters. So, yeah... Undertale is pretty good, that's my hot take.
And it also helps that random battles actually do something. Sparing all the enemies within an area helps you get the Pacifist Ending, Killing all the enemies you meet(which is sometimes harder than sparing them) can give you the Neutral Ending, or just running away. And again, I don't think any of the puzzle rooms had random encounters except in some parts of the Ruins.
@@thesnatcher3616 As well as sparing still giving you much more gold than you would've had killing, so even pacifist and neutral runs have useful random encounter grinds inbetween puzzles or towns/shops/saves
its a balanced system that never feels too dull.
Undertale being good is a luke warm take at most. I think the majority of people have realized that it’s a good game. It got hate before because of cringey fans not the game itself
@@aubreyh1930 Sorry... I hate to say it but... woosh
what about having random encounters only on the world map and have those random encounters be more than just battles.. like "oh look at random shop keeper showed up" or something...
this actually sounds really interesting! it would kind of give a roguelike feel without compromising world structure and level design. even if it could still drive to frustration... but the more possible events the game could roll, the less likely it would be to encounter repetitive situations, so maybe not so much
I made this in a Tabletop game my team designed (it was just a school project, not a real thing) In the beta test we got to know this is just frustrating. Most of the times the players didn't wanted them or didn't had the money when the right merchant showed up. And when they wanted to buy, they had to be hunting the shopkeeper instead of progressing in the game.
Miitopia kinda does something like this. The first time you go through a new path in each level there are random scenarios that can happen between party members, both good and bad.
I may not remember it very well, but I remember it happening with Torneko in at least one version of Dragon Quest 4. Or was it another DQ game? That sounds familiar at least
Sounds like the first Dragon age.
Another reason I personally still like the random encounter mechanic in some cases is because it gives you a reason to keep a good eye on your supplies and the statuses of your team at all times as you never know when you're going to run into yet another enemy that can be your potential end. And it's a constant presence compared to being able to control which enemies you run into at which time, so if you're getting low on supplies, you can just run away and get some more if anything.
What often helps make the random encounters more manageable in older RPGs are fast travel spells. Making you rough it the first time you headed to a new town, but allowing you to then warp there if you ever needed to backtrack to it always seemed fair to me.
I actually prefer controlling random encounters to overworld enemies. Bravely Default 2 showed me that
At least in some games random encounters can be turned off. Not every overworld encounter can be avoided, and I actively prefer staying as low level as possible to have as hard a challenge as I can get.
Yeah I've only played the demo for 2 and that's what I missed the most
I agree 100%. The random encounter modifier was one of my favorite parts of the first one, and the lack of it is a major drag on the sequel. What's really annoying to me is that there's no reason it couldn't be used in overworld encounters as well, and patching it back in should be pretty easy
@@jerichtandoc7789 I tried something similar with Final Fantasy 7 a couple of years ago. Turned of the random encounters entirely and only fought the battles required to progress. Couldn't finish it though as the boss I reached would 1-shot my party due to how low level I was!
Honestly, I would prefer onscreen enemies to toggle methods. It feels really cheap imo
One aspect that rarely gets mentioned about random battles is how they can work as a way to test the player's resource management skills. For example, one thing I like about older Dragon Quests is that you are unable to restore your resources in the middle of a dungeon. That means that you have to carefully think in every random encounter what is the most efficient way to dispatch every enemy, since the amount of MP in particular you have available in that dungeon is limited. The older Dragon Quests reward you for knowing your enemy, knowing your own skills and being able to deduce whether it's better to blast a group with a fireball rather than use more MP to heal the damage you've taken in a longer battle.
I've found that people just hate resource management in general. That's why FF13 just heals you at the end of each battle and why status effects no longer affect you outside of battle in Pokemon.
@@pn2294 Which is odd for Pokemon fans as TCG is also a resources management game, and I think GO and Masters make you think of how do you allocate resources during the day.
@@pn2294 The status effect thing bugs me so much. Back in the early gens, getting poisoned while mid-route or in a dungeon was a legit thing you had to worry about since it punished you for poor preparation and put your Pokémon on a timer. Gen IV did it the best imo, still having overworld ramifications but not being as harsh by fainting your mons.
@@aghadlarhen9397 Antidotes aren’t that expensive honestly
Someone already mentioned Antidotes, so I'll ask: Could you buy consumables in those older Dragon Quest games? Because then you can actually recharge during the dungeon. I played Final Fantasy, not Dragon Quest, but in those you could buy a portable camp that renders any attempt at resource management meaningless. You keep money and exp from run to run, so the dungeons become about grinding.
I grew up with random encounters in games, and have never really found them annoying.
It's surprising how common the "get a random encounter while walking" is when "get a random encounter at each discrete step" works so well. I'm thinking about things like FTL, or Slay the Spire.
Also, those games don't let you go back to a rest spot and if you lose, you lose. You don't keep exp and gold then get to try again. That's why they feel so different.
I think the difference is that one is an informed choice, and the other is not. You can strategize around an encounter in the future, but not one that just comes at random.
Etrian Odyssey does random encounters brilliantly, I feel. You get an indicator that goes from green to red, and when it's red, it means an encounter is coming, you just don't know when exactly. It creates an interesting decision when low on HP/TP: Do you march on a few more steps, risking your life to better prepare yourself for your next journey? Or do you go back to safety using an Ariadne thread, having made a little less progress?
That's the same way with "Legend of Dragoon"
It is actually based on the tiles, each has a designated number (from 0 to 5) and you have a random encounter number (from 30 to 50 I believe), each tile you step on reduces your encounter number, as it gets closer to 0 the colour moves from Blue, to Green, to Yellow and finally Red As mentioned, some tiles have 0 meaning you can't get encounters on those tiles (these are typically found at floor entrance/exists) while high numbers are more common at intersections
I affectionately refer to that indicator as the “FOEdomter”
So I agree with this video on the whole, but I do think one thing it misses is how random encounters interact with challenge. In a lot of the classic NES and early SNES JRPGs, the challenge of the random encounters was less about the difficulty of any given fight and more about resource management over the entire dungeon. For instance, in Dragon Quest III, it was almost impossible for any encounter outside of a boss or mimic to kill you from full health/mana. But there was a risk/reward aspect to spending mana or allowing yourself to stay on low health. You had to accurately gauge how many resources you could invest in a given fight or to restore any give party member, and that decision making process turns a basic combat system into something a lot more strategic. Of course, as JRPGs started focusing more on narrative and became easier, the random battle became as vestigial as an appendix. If you are a FF7 and you don't really care about challenging me, then there is no point in forcing me to fight. In fact, by allowing me to *not* fight, you allow me to self-select difficulty by fighting bosses underleveled. In addition, the old, fatigue-based random encounter system still had problems, as you pointed out. The puzzle solving and annoying backtracking issues are particularly egregious, though most old games had some kind of repel item that would ward off lower level enemies, even if most players never used them. That being said, I do think there's something lost when we focus exclusively on usability. I think a lot of modern JRPG fans have the expectation that the genre is fundamentally about narrative and that anything keeping them from that narrative needs to go. But I feel like that ignores that JRPG combat and encounters can actually be interesting in and of themselves.
Good points, old JRPGs were almost like a different genre when you take inventory management into account. Just like how there's many subgenres of rogues.
That seems to mirror the TTRPG shift exactly. Back in the olden days dungeon crawling was the premier style of play, and tracking arrows, potions and health from room to room, treating rests as a risk/reward system, and even having your characters themselves as an expendable resource was the common method of play. That's the rpg world that random encounters come from. Modern games are much more about narrative as experienced by your characters, and paying attention to how many torches you have, grinding room by room in a ruin for months of real-time play, or keeping backup character sheets in case deathtrap 14 on table 8 slices you in two are considered antagonistic to the story and character driven nature of the modern game. I wonder if the shift was motivated by changing TTRPG trends or increases in VGRPG possibilities?
@@MinamotoKensuke I think this is a really apt comparison. A lot of gameplay systems look stupid when put into a context that doesn't suit them. A lot of the crunch of AD&D looks arbitrary, confusing, and unnecessarily slow when viewed in the context of modern, storytelling-first TTRPGs. But in a world where the content is the dungeon crawl, those systems are not just good, they're necessary: without them the dungeon crawl would be simplistic and uninteresting. It's really interesting to me as a designer how player expectation can really change the reception of various systems. I wonder how many games I've written off because I didn't come at them with the mindset necessary to enjoy them.
Just noting, I’m playing through the relatively recent Persona 4 on Very Hard and it’s literally this. The random encounters are somewhat visible, yes, but they block the path and the first two dungeons have been an absolute learning curve of how to resource manage with limited currency, health, mana, and permanently underleveled characters (xp might as well not exist lol).
Final Fantasy, the first one, was very heavy on resource management. Other than certain notable encounters (WarMech, any monster with instakills, etc), the fights weren't that hard. It was to the point that the simple healing rod, forgot the actual name, that could heal the party for such a small amount that didn't matter in any individual battle, was one of the best items as far as managing your health went, since it effectively acted as free regen if you used it every turn. And the white mage wasn't that strong anyway, so you didn't lose much offensive power.
Etrian Odyssey has probably my favorite encounter system in an RPG. It's simple on the face of it: They're "random" in that just like a normal RPG you don't really know how many steps you'll be taking til the next battle, but EO has a little indicator on the screen that cycles through different colors to vaguely tell you how close you are to the next fight. When it's red, you're only a few steps away. On its own a decent forewarning, but its genius comes in when you recognize that even as you're fighting, everything that moves around in the dungeon *keeps moving for every turn you take in battle*. That means some traps, the day/night cycle, and the biggest one, the F.O.E.s which are dangerous boss enemies that you tend to want to avoid on your first visit to a floor. Some F.O.E.s only even notice you and start to hunt you down if they hear you fighting! And in some cases, you might deliberately bait one away from where it's stationed so you can move past it to whatever it's blocking, by intentionally getting into fights!. So basically, EO takes a system that normally breaks up the pacing of the exploration in an RPG and makes it synergize with it instead. You gotta look at the indicator and know where you are/where you're going, and it becomes a puzzle in and of itself sometimes.
I like SMT more and more as an adult, now I'm smart and I realized you can use the "Estoma" spell to reduce random encounters and "Riberama" to increase random encounters. "Tales of" was really good too, where you can use dark/light bottles to control encounters, except for when the enemy physically blocks the way through the dungeon (Vesperia I'm looking at you). EDIT: I also really like exponential leveling systems, so let's say you avoid all encounters in Trails of Cold Steel's, when you fight a boss you'll level up a lot, as if you had fought all encounters anyways.
Bravely Second has another system the original didn't have: consecutive battles. If you are strong or clever enough to win a random battle in the first round, you can choose to immediately enter another battle with better rewards and chain multiple battles with increasing rewards. It helps cut down on grinding. However, the draw back is your BP, which determines how many actions your characters can take, carry over, which can make the next battle tougher, and/or run out of actions to complete the next battle in the first round, ending the chain.
That's very interesting...
I loved Bravely Second. It was the most meta game I've ever played.
Something else that's cool is being able to influence encounters too, since you mentioned the Pokémon example. Abilities like Static and Magnet Pull have out of battle effects as well that make finding some sorts of Pokémon much easier. There's also Repel Tricking, which is bringing a Pokémon at the level of something that can still pull encounters due to not being a high enough level, but at a high enough level so that some other unwanted encounters can't happen. Another game that does it well is the MegaMan Battle Network games. There exists Navi Customizer parts that can give you things like a permanent repel or things that can influence one element of enemy to be more common.
Just replying to your comment so the algorithm knows I want more Battle Network.
In Shin Megami Tensei V, the sprites of demons are shown in the world similar to Xenoblade where they have their own aggro distance based on the player. Some will chase you from far away, some will shoot at you, and some will stay there until you get really close to them and after that, there is a random chance to encounter other demons other than the sprite you attacked. They also feature a demon trap when going around scavenging using a quest navigator and will either result in a regular random encounter or an encounter with one of the mitamas that give you different items based on the color when they spawn. Overall, it's a good balance between randomness and predictability and I would highly recommend checking it out.
Man, I feel like the only one who legitimately likes random encounters. I like the suspense of not knowing exactly what I'm going to fight next, not to mention periodically getting into fights going from Point A to Point B makes traveling a natural way to gain levels and cuts down on grinding
I really miss them in Pokémon actually. While it looks cool to see Pokémon wandering around in their natural habitat it takes away the suspense and excitement of whether you’re going to be surprised by a new Pokémon you haven’t seen yet. Some games will tell you if you’ve found all the Pokémon on a given route or not, but if you haven’t checked then random encounters make it harder to know if you’ve found everything or not. Even if you’ve already encountered three different Pokémon on a route several times, you could have the exciting surprise of something else leaping out later. If everything is clearly displayed on the map then you know exactly what is or is not waiting for you which is less fun for me.
A lot of people like random encounters, this video is just nitpicking for its own purposes
I hate them
@@anameyoucantremember They love xp from them after a easy fight.
@@ZiliMidori y’know it’s said that taking the random encounters out of Pokémon makes rare things less exciting but the system they have now essentially does do the exact same thing, the only difference being you’re not forced into the fight when they spawn Like you can walk down the same patch of grass with a bunch of zigzagoon for the 50th time but then suddenly spot a shiny out of the corner of your eye or something like that and that’s just as surprising. Stuff still randomly spawns, you still randomly encounter things, it’s just not in the form of a battle after a 10 second cutscene, and multiple things are displayed at once
The Legend of Dragoon was a great "early" example of giving the player visibility, if not control, over random encounters. There was always an arrow pointed over the player's head, and the color would change depending on how close you were to encountering an enemy. It would start blue, then yellow, then red when you would hit a random encounter in the next few steps. I remember playing that game in my childhood and wishing more games with random encounters had similar mechanics, because even if the player had limited control over IF the encounter happened, they would at least have a good idea for WHEN it would happen.
Should try Lord of the Rings The Third Age
I think Etrian Odyssey deserves a mention. Here encounters aren't entirely random but instead as you walk through the dungeon an indicator starts to go from green to red indicating how close you are of running into a fight. And managing it is pretty important since you can find in a room with powerful enemies that show on the map called FOE that you need to avoid, so you'll find yourself either risking going through the room and getting into a fight in the middle of the room or walking forward and back to activate the encounter and restart the meter so you can safely cross the FOEs.
It's important to note that FOEs can join a battle in progress if you take too many turns, as combat rounds are equivalent to movement rounds in the overworld.
I remember my first JRPG without random encounters, which was Lunar the Silver Star Story. I could just run past the enemy if I wanted, or try to lean into certain types of enemies by how their sprites looked. Once I experienced this, this is how I wanted future JRPGs to be done. The good thing about how they did it though, was that one sprite represented a number of different potential battle scenarios. So that chance that they might be very powerful was still there. Once the enemy touch you, it went to another screen for battles, and a number of different enemies are present for the battle.
You mentioned Golden Sun, and missed one of the benefits of the random encounters: being able to surprise the player/reward them for exploration of areas that don't seem to have a purpose. There are several Djinni (cute little elementals that are the game's class system, special abilities, equipment, and summons all wrapped into one) that you can only find by encountering on the world map, off the critical path a little. There are only 1 or 2 of them like this for each element (4 elements) in each game, but the encounter rate for these creatures is extremely high, if not guaranteed, if you're in the right area, so you don't have to run around and fight a bunch of overworld monsters before finding the special encounter. Get to the right area, and boom, there it is. This works especially well, since otherwise, Djinni will either join your party after solving the puzzle to get to them, or after solving the puzzle and beating them in battle. Finding one of the overworld is a great "Wait, what?!" moment, makes you feel like you should explore everything, rather than just following the critical path. That doesn't invalidate some of the problems with random encounters, but I personally found they never really bothered me too much in Golden Sun. They turn them off in dedicated puzzle rooms, and the sprite work, animations, and music are so good that I don't mind fighting a few more enemies.
"They turn them off in dedicated puzzle rooms" Most of them. They forgot in some of them. I replayed it earlier this year... Those few rooms where they forgot can kiss my ass. Also I disagree with the overworld Djinni, because the problem of having to slog through random encounters to get to those special areas. Not wanting to keep running from weak random encounters anymore makes me say screw it and go to the next town instead of exploring more. The overworld is pretty big and the number of Djinni to find is low, so there's also a lot of pointless dead ends to find, and that also discourages exploration. I stop wanting to look for things when I keep finding nothing. No matter how many times I play Golden Sun, I still keep a Djinni walkthrough handy, just so I can get the overworld ones quickly, with minimal extra encounters, and without wasting my time in pointless dead ends.
Joey Jojo Jr. Shabadoo?? That's the worst RPG party I ever heard
[runs away sobbing]
But you *have* heard of them.
Worthless worthless worthless worthless worthless!!!!!
@@That_Lady_Charlie Hey! Joey Jojo!
One game that really runs random encounters well is the Etrian Odyssey series for DS and 3DS. It has a gauge on the screen that fills up and changes color to tell you how close to a random encounter you are. The gauge doesn't give precise numbers, but watching it go for green to orange to red gives you a rough feeling of how long until the next fight happens, which removes what is for me the most annoying part of random encounters- the aggressive interruption of whatever I was doing. It also keeps a map of the area on the bottom screen at all times even while in a fight, which helps to keep you focused on dungeon puzzles or whatever you were exploring before the battle started. It also has a very aggressive difficulty, making the battles less of a minor inconvenience and more of a delicate tightrope act of not getting your team nuked
8:50 “it’s difficult if not impossible to tune the rate of random encounters properly to make it fun for everyone” Bravely default: you underestimate me, mere mortal
I actually really like the traditional SMT random encounter system like in nocturne or strange journey where a little sprite or the map changes color as you move showing whether a random encounter is about to happen or not. Blue=safe. Red= danger. It’s still random and there’s the suspense but since you see it it’s less annoying.
Etrian odyssey, there is a circle that goes from green, to yellow to orange to red, and only when it's red will you find a random encounter. How long it's takes to shift between each color varies. But it does let you know when to expect one. It means if you barely survive an encounter and need to heal, but can't and your only option is to use an item to teleport back to town. You could take advantage of that to explore a little more and draw out your map or even open a shortcut if you know or can see you are a few steps away. Items that lower encounter rate make the shift between the colors slower too.
I'm just few steps away getting away from this overleveled miniboss infested room and the circle is red, I can do it! Got into fight, took one turn too long to finish it, FOE caught up to you, escape failed, party wiped, restart the entire floor. ...man, I miss EO.
@@mbekmbek7214 ah the memories.
Legend of Dragoon does this too and I love it. You can turn ui icons on and off with one of the shoulder buttons, and one of those icons is a pointer jewel for Dart that turns from green, to yellow, to red as you take more steps, letting you know how close the next encounter is.
@@Chatrbuug I wouldn't be surprised if that's where the etrian team got the idea from, the first game of the series is a ds game.
@@Vulcanfaux it also marked exits between scenes, so they could have painting-like backgrounds without as much confusion about where you can go, which I also appreciated.
Going back to d&d roots, a lot of dungeon masters just don't use random encounters at all or only use them sparingly. Instead, they use scripted battles in each new part of a dungeon and maybe some random encounters if the party backtracks or stops exploring to rest
yeah, it's interesting to see how tabletop rpg design has also progressed, as well as players' philosophy towards what is good game design.
TLDR: AD&D utilised random encounters better (or at least was better at explaining to people why they are needed in the game and how to use them). That is partly why they are not used as much in modern TTRPGs. Full comment: Random encounters used to be essential for D&D. D&D as a game is at its core an attrition/resource management game. Basically, whenever you enter a dungeon, you have to complete your objective as efficiently as possible, be it slaying the dragon dwelling there, reach the next floor, or simply delve as deep as possible. However, another important thing (beside completing the objective of your expedition) was to actually return back to safety. Typically, the longer the party lingers in a dungeon, the more random encounters they trigger. When a party exhausts the HP pools of its members, spell slots, potions, torches and ammunition, they will eventually want to rest to recover those resources. In this context, random encounters add a "resource tax" of sorts. The party knows that it will have to pay this tax, but they don't know how large it will be, since there is a lot of randomness involved. When all things work well together in a properly designed old-school dungeon, the party is constantly faced with meaningful choices during exploration. Do they want to search the room, hoping to find some treasure? Do they enter the secret corridor they just discovered? Do they take the path that clearly does not lead to the main objective, but likely leads to some extra content? Does the party heal the wounds from the previous fight using conventional medicine, instead of using healing spells and potions that are in short supply? Normally, the answer would be "yes" to all of those, but in an old-school D&D dungeon, all those activities take considerable time. And that time will cause more encounters, which will likely deplete their resources further, thus decreasing the chance of the expedition's success. Suddenly, they have a risk-reward consideration. And the players used to learn tricks and strategies to explore dungeons more efficiently (e.g. mapping the dungeon and infer the likely locations of secret rooms based on the floor's layout and apparent "empty spaces" between the rooms and corridors, rather than spending hours checking every wall in every room). Part of the reason TTRPG players don't use random encounters anymore is the fact that since the 3rd edition of D&D, the rulebooks and the GM's guides don't teach people how to properly run such a dungeon. They don't even tell how to track in-game time (something that AD&D books have dedicated a few pages to explain not only how, but why). And random encounters are not explained in that context as well (including the fact that random encounters weren't "combat" encounters by default).
@@braunbekmaxim5821 That's really interesting. The 5e DMG does include a section on telling time, but it isn't multiple pages long
@@braunbekmaxim5821 that doesn’t work because a lot of modern players hate attrition and bookkeeping That’s why they got rid of R.E. in the first place. They want to constantly be at full strength for a fight
@@pn2294 I wouldn't say that it doesn't work in modern editions. If the players and the GM keep track of the passage of time, similar gameplay experience can be recreated. Yes, recovery is easier in modern editions, but it requires considerable time investment (e.g. 1 hour short rest in D&D 5e). Some spells are cast with significant casting time, making them a risky activity. The only thing one needs to recreate Old School playstyle is having players that are open to it, as well as what is required for that playstyle. Not the norm, but one certainly can gather a group of like-minded players.
I think one of the innovations we've yet in the mainstream to see is continuing to show part of the current dungeon screen while in battle. This would let you keep the some context of where you are while doing your thing. This would have especially made sense with RPGs on the DS an 3DS where you could show the overworld on the bottom screen while in battle.
Etrian Odyssey does this. Strong enemies (FOEs) are shown on the map, and while you're in battle the map is still shown. The FOEs will still move while you're in a random encounter, and can join into the battle.
I personally love how Final Fantasy XV handles encounters. Generally overworld fights that you can avoid, but ships airdropping troops on you forces combat in a random sort of way. To me, it feels like a good balance between random fights and control.
Tbh I like random encounter, and I think they still have a place in modern games. I like how the Etrian Oddysey game used them, giving you a meter that become more red while you're exploring, which tell you how probably is to encounter one
If you can tell the encounter is coming, then it's not random anymore. Yes, you don't know which enemy it is, but there is a better transition between exploration and combat.
@@danielmoreira7085 It doesn't tell you that you gonna find one, just that you're in a moment where this is more probable. If you're in green you have 0%, so you cannot have the annoying thing where you encounter one after 2 steps, but you still have a probability to find one in yellow, even if is low. You even can move a lot in red without find nothing if you're lucky enough.
Yes, I wanted to mention it. Since EO encounters are often quite challenging (not even counting FOE shenanigans), that's a pretty useful tools. There are also skills that can modify the encounter rate, either augmenting or diminishing it
I was about to type a comment about Etrian Odyssey. Like, literally with every video I watch on this channel, I always immediately have to think about EO as a positive example for whatever he is talking about. Btw, if you haven't noticed, Etrian Odyssey heavily throttles the encounter rate in puzzle-focused rooms of the dungeon. The newer games in the series at least.
Tbf though, Etrian odyssey Oddysey is specifically designed to work in the style of old school RPGs and that's part of its selling points so I think it's just not a very good point to use EO imo. They modernized some systems of old a bit or took inspiration of other games that came later (stuff like repellents, spells that reduced encounter rate, etc) but at the end of the day when playing EO I still feel like it's the same system People kinda dislike, just smoothed out to be less ball breaking - this is specially obvious in EO1 which fell very rough around the edges
Ambushes in Dark Souls and Sekiro are really just recontextualized random encounters. I could even say the same for Yakuza series where you're just walking down the street and suddenly you're interrupted by a cut scene of a side quest.
With side quests in Yakuza it feels like random reward, not encounter.
@@Gnidel An encounter is an encounter regardless.
For the first time, sure. The second time going in, you know what to expect. True random encounters are... Well, basically random. Those ambushes are scripted encounters. Both are encounters but of a different type.
I would not say so. You can run from any random encounter in DS or Sekiro. In many RPGs you cant run. Also the game designers can specifically place these encounters instead of them being decided by a computer. Which was a point in the video.
I get giddy whenever Golden Sun is mentioned in a video, I played so much of that game, it's always exciting to see that part of my childhood being remembered by someone
Sees this video title while I just beat or am currently playing Temtem, Shin Megami Tensei 3, and World of Final Fantasy
I'm not mad at random encounters, but then, the turn-based jrpgs that tend to have them are my comfort genre. I actually don't necessarily like field enemies -- in a lot of games, they tend to crowd the screen, usually looking incongruously large or saturated compared to the background elements. And I don't like the feeling of having to decide to grind at every step of the game; when given the _explicit_ option, I will try to go around the enemy, but with random encounters I can naturally level up as I go places, with a bit of randomness to make it feel less intentional when I do need some xp ("I don't want to _grind_ right now, but I could just circle around the room _one_ more time, and if anything pops up, hey, it's not my fault...")
I like the system in paper mario TTYD where you can clearly see one of the enemies in world and chose to fight it, but then some "friends" show up that are predictable for the area but still random. And then you can get badges later on to let you skip enemies that don't give exp anymore. Random encounters in the Pokemon cave sense are only reasonable in that art style/system limitations. Otherwise you should be able to mostly opt out of randome encounters, and never have them in a world movement critical section, like running from a boulder Indiana Jones style.
Meh i disagree Paper mario did that really well, but ttyd puts respawning enemies in places where you're forced to fight them to continue, and that's just obnoxious
I wonder if it depends a bit on the story of the game. In pokemon they never really bothered me cause the story is about exploring, discovering new creatures and getting stronger through battles. Whereas in games like final Fantasy, there's a huge plot going on and the battles feel like interruptions.
Similar to when you're watching a KZhead video, and a random -encounter- ad plays. It's annoying and can make you lose track of the video, especially when ads are placed in the middle of sentences.
seeing golden sun footage makes me sooo happy!
I can't say I entirely agree with the tone. Random Encounters are ancient fossils that haven't changed with the times, but Field Encounters didn't really start improving until Persona 5 and TWEWY. Stuff like attacking the field enemies yourself are hit or miss when you basically guarantee pre-emptive attacks instead of making sure a player has to account for ambushes. There's many mechanics that improve Field Encounters that have analogous applications on Random Encounters(Like stealth items vs. Repel), and a few others that can only work with Random Encounters or only Field Encounters or literally just TWEWY. As for what I like to see... Random Encounters -Battle chaining to temporarily remove encounters for a while. You can even make a separate list of restrictions to take to increase the time or give extra rewards. -Complete scenarios or beneficial events like the ones done in FF9 had the most mystery and impact because they were in random encounters. Random NPCs and chest mimics can't quite cover everything. Field Encounters -Traps or environmental effects from nearby map features. Hard to do, and I can definitely say that Xenosaga and Dragon Quarter could make improvements, but there's potential there. -Using the moving entities to affect something else, like puzzles or NPCs. Also you know. You could design encounters so that they're FUN, and are quick to get over with if the enemies are weak. Maybe it just needs cleaner loading transitions and less clunky actions. Or a battle system that doesn't assume 3 minutes of juggling numbers to get anything done.
I agree with what you said about pre-emptive attacks. In some cases the game even goes so far that it seems like a punishment when you _don't_ get the advantage, rather than feeling like a bonus when you get the advantage. Although, I disagree about chaining encounters to get a bonus lowering the encounter rate, unless you can turn it off. That sounds like a _nightmare_ if you're actually trying to grind XD
@@Orynae Fantasian is already doing something similar, with banking the encounters you get as you walk around. The mechanic has plenty of variations, I'm just suggesting (temporary) lowered encounter rates to be one of the possible rewards.
Nocturne's random encounters in hard mode are hilarious. They're harder than the actual bosses of the game sometimes because they can just straight up end you in one turn if you're unlucky.
I always enjoyed random encounters because it made more sense to fight random enemies in different areas instead of fighting the same enemies in the same area and position everything time you visited that area.
One of my favorite executions of random encounters is Wild ARMs 5. There's a static super enemy in each dungeon, usually somewhere between 70%~90% of the way through, that's way more powerful than the encounters in said dungeon, and when you defeat it, it lets you toggle encounters off or back on with a simple press of the R2 button. The game also tends to remove encounters when you're in a puzzle room. Also, when you're at a point of the game where you've pretty much seen the whole map, it gives you the Monowheel, a vehicle that lets you avoid random encounters on the world map and travel faster
Above anything, I think showing the enemies on screen instead of using random encounters boils down to a psychological thing. The main benefit here is that players *know* when they're going to get into a fight. For example, recently I was playing Tales of Graces f, and I found myself often times running straight at the enemies while traversing fields and dungeons because I was in the mood for fighting. Here, I was getting into battles *more* often than I was in Tales of Phantasia a few weeks back, but I was OK with it because it was completely my choice to get into those battles. Once I felt like I had leveled up enough, or just wasn't in the mood to keep fighting anymore, then I started maneuvering around the enemies so that I wouldn't have to deal with them, or use a Holy Bottle if needed. In Phantasia, when that same feeling of not wanting to fight anymore kicked in, still having to deal with battles when I didn't want to *severely* hindered my enjoyment of the game. I know escaping is an option, and Holy Bottles can still reduce the encounter rate, but it's not enough to outset the benefit of choosing *when* you get into a fight as opposed to *how often.* Basically, player agency is the key here. Tweaking settings in an option menu is just not as intuitive as moving your character around an enemy.
This, very much so. It much more natural and immersive to run to or avoid battles in the overworld than it is to go into a menu and artificially disable battles.
The benefit's from showing the enemies on screen, the ability to evade them, is also its downside, from a game design perspective. Two things can happen if the player runs from everything. The first is the player being underleveled. That's self explanatory, low level means you kill slower and you get killed faster. The second is the player being too healthy or have way more supply than they should at that point. If you had played or watch people play From Software's Souls game you'll likely be familiar with the tactic of just ignoring everything and throwing yourself at the boss as to preserve your healing. Instead of finding efficient or creative ways to deal with enemies, you just don't engage them, at all, and just brute force your way through instead. Random Encounters, meanwhile, forces players to fight and make choices. Do you fight them and lose some HP and/or MP, or do you risk run away to try to persevere strength at the cost of losing out on turns and give away HP for nothing? It put's players into a War of Attrition as the game slowly grinds down the players team until either the player dies, retreats, or make it to the next safe point. Of course, the Random Encounters and Field Enemies needs to be well implemented into the game. If you're able to stomp through random encounters by just spamming basic attack, then either your too strong or they're too weak, and are only and annoyance instead of the grindstone that they were intended to be. And Field Enemies can be placed into certain spots, have some special properties, or map element's that makes fighting at or around them very annoying or infuriating. These encounters, Random or Field, are only as good as the mechanic's crafted around them. Edit: Anyway's, sorry for the paragraph's, and sorry if my point's seem all over the place. Writing's not my strong suit, but that doesn't stop me from trying to express my points.
@@daddysempaichan You do realize there's nothing stopping people from using the otherwise neglected foes to farm for supplies for the battle, right? Nothing's changed in that case. As for your scenarios... 1) If a person gets bodied, there's nothing stopping them from going back to fight other opponents until they're strong enough. There's also the possibility of rewarding the player for exploration so they can have a fighting chance. Nothing that a random encounter system is absolutely needed for. 2) You make it sound like becoming too strong in random encounter games is somehow impossible. You can do it in FFX for example. Just fight until you're satisfied and then make your way over to a save sphere (this is especially simple in the ruins of Zanarkand). Hell, I'd say it's even easier in them because (from the experience I have in the genre) they just continually respawn forever whereas that isn't the case with games that give you the choice. 3) That's the thing though, the point you're not getting. You're FORCING people to make these choices (something most gamers loathe). No matter how you twist it, the choice dilemma in a random encounter system is almost the same as the one in a game without it. The only difference is that now the game actually takes your thoughts into account. Besides, you DO realize there was never such thing as a war of attrition that did not wind up becoming a battle of brute force?
@@laststrike4411 You are right. I'm not going to deny any of the claims because I too, have experience in the genre, and completely understand that random encounters is almost a universally hated system, even if I, personally, grown up and is used to random encounters. However, I will point out that my post isn't about promoting random encounters, it's to point out the reasoning as to why developers might prefer a random encounter system instead of a field enemy system, and the reasoning why, when given the choice. How the devs implement them is another thing entirely. Sorry if my post make it seem like I was promoting random encounters. That was not my intentions.
I loved how Earthbound had a system where on-screen monsters would run away from you if you were too powerful for them, and that if your party was able to defeat an enemy with standard attacks without taking any damage, that you'd automatically win the fight. It took away a lot of the frustration of 'fighting hordes of Zubats' problem - if you got into a fight, it was a challenge, a question of whether you had enough resources to proceed, and probably worth the experience points.
i think the ability to "flee" from a battle helps random encounters immensely. random encounters annoy me when they happen frequently and i'm forced to fight. however if i'm able to leave the battle and not spend too much time on it, quickly getting back to the exploration, i don't mind as much.
I feel that random encounters work better with games that have faster battle systems and load screens, when I played Skies of Arcadia I started mid-playthrough to flee almost every battle, which is perfectly fine in that game since is a easier game, but that game had a dumb hidden point mechanic that pretty much lock you from some of the later side-quest, because flee reduce thats points. Personaly today I prefer to see the enemies on the field, I guess you can thank that to thw Trails games
Oh yeah, the whole Vyse the Legend side quest is bullshit, I think you get 25 free runs before you're screwed, and you have to defeat 25 HUNDRED enemies to get it in the end, which you almost never do in a casual playthrough. I love the game, its one of my favorites, but it's also dumb.
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Slow combats are really annoying in Pokemon's 4th gen, seeing any trainers is always super annoying because it always take so long to do anything
When I played FF7 on the Switch, I used the "turn random encounters off" rarely, but when I did, they felt really relieving. I never thought random encounters were a problem until I started thinking about it. I think they're fine as long as they don't disrupt your pace, and when you know when to expect them.
Earthbound’s auto win with lower level enemies was brilliant
Random encounters have been perfectly implemented in the Darkest Dungeon. I have never seen it executed more seamlessly and naturally.
Being able to adjust random encounters is such a nice feature. You can decide if you just want to cruise through an area or begin a long grinding session for some levels and possibly some rare drops. If not possible, at the very least a speed up button for battles so they don't feel like they drag on for much longer than they need to (we already have bosses for that). Also skills and mechanics that allow you to completely skip low-level encounters while still obtaining the benefits are nice. But yeah, the prospect of encountering something special in Pokémon were some of the more exciting things. Shinies , rare, or even the first time you encounter a roaming Pokémon make for some memorable journeys. One tidbit on Pokémon though: the plural form of the word Pokémon and the names of all Pokémon species are the same as singular. So you would instead say "one billion Zubat" instead.
If i being honest, i love random encounters on nocturne, specially on hard dificulty Its makes you FEEL the end of the world, like there is no safe place, and that death is on a left turn everysingle time
I agree, encounters in SMT & Persona feel meaningful & challenging (especially on harder difficulties), sometimes even more difficult than the bosses. They aren't mindless "press attack to win", which helps a lot imo
I like how this video mentioned the encounter systems of Bravely Default and Xenoblade Chronicles. 2 of my favourite encounter systems in Video Games, despite being radically different from one another.
Personally, I feel that random encounters aid in game pacing, though I may be an odd case. When I have the option to avoid any and all encounters, I'll typically do several at the start of a new area to see the new set of enemies, then often avoid the rest if I'm feeling the party can continue at the current level. This generally makes gameplay feel very unbalanced in the sense that I'll have a glut of battles without any sort of progression, then a bunch of traveling, exploration, and dialogue without any combat to break things up. Guess it's just a part of how my brain wants to work. I know this irritates me, but, when given the option, I tend to find myself breaking the steady rhythm that random battles naturally provide.
Random Encounters are great when used smart. I think having random encounters on world maps or outside dungeon areas in games that don't have world maps are good to grind with risks. You said it yourself, you might roll a 1/100 enemy that will just smack you if you get too low while grinding. If you have puzzle focused dungeons. turn of the encounter rate. You kept showing the first dungeon from Mega Man Battle Network, without showing the actual problem dungeons with encounter rates. (ElecMan's dungeon, where you have to solve a battery puzzle with random encounters and with no way to recover health between fights). In Battle Network 4 there's a dungeon where you get 10 seconds to grab bats but have to deal with random encounters while doing so. It's not good. Games that shuffle up how encounters happen can do a lot for helping the player be immersed without being annoyed.
a timer is cool too, you can have a high encounter rate that guarantes one battle per screen, but a second battle will only trigger if you spend too much time in the same screen, that is basically how tabletop encounters work, there is a fixed encounter, and random encouters if the players are stalling
@@devforfun5618 That's part of mixing it up. MMORPGs does that occasionally. Add encounters if you're taking too long.
I think I speak for many gamers when I say that I have no interest in grinding anymore. My time spent is too valuable to engage in combats that aren't interesting, challenging and story progressing. It's good to show that the world is dangerous and eventful but games like Super Mario or Undertale do that without relying on randomness. I prefer thought-out content over randomly generated filler/chores.
nay, re are always pure annoyance and break the flow. it was and never will be a mechanic that is good
@@nilsjonsson4446 undertale has random encounters, what
One of the times I really loved random encounters was when I played Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey. It really built up a feeling of stress and being stranded as you searched through a maze for the next save point. It's a similar feeling to Dark Souls where you weigh whether you should push to the next bonfire or retreat. The biggest thing I loved about it was the encounter rate being _just_ right. You run into encounters every few dozen steps or so, meaning you get a chance to breathe between battles (most of the time). And if it's still too much, you can unlock a sub-app that reduces the encounter rate even further. Or if you need to grind you can use a different sub-app to increase it. Random encounters can honestly suck sometimes, but I love the way it was handled in Strange Journey.
Cool thing in Redux was if you beat Demonee-Ho's Boot Camp Training in The Ingress of The Womb Of Grief you got a forma to turn into a subapp that was basically Estoma.
I really like random encounters. They're what I'm most familiar with. In games where you only trigger battles by running into enemies in the overworld, I never know how to behave.
TWEWY also did some neat things with how difficulty and drop rates for items worked. That game is a treasure trove of great and interesting ideas to play around with mechanics in games that are often botched into making them a fun and unique way to balance difficulty for both early game and late game. Games which handle the random encounter rate in a neat way was (in some way) the mystery dungeon series as you knew what was in the area sure, but if you got unlucky the difficulty could spike and it was always fun to see what i had to deal with every room and corridor, especially in the monster rooms mechanic where even going up to the next floor could be my death sentence. It encouraged smart planning and preparation as well as smart gameplay throughout.
I know a lot of Table Top Role Game Masters that don't even use Random encounters anymore. The main complaint is that it ruins the pacing and doesn't give a very dramatic scenario because in most games the players can fully heal after each fight. Here's my thinking on the subject, if players in both types of games were guaranteed a challenge. As in, no under leveled creatures approached (or like in the mother games the battles are over instantly) leaving only the roughest toughest creatures behind then it would make each fight a real challenge while also letting your character progress in a very interesting way! Imagine being so strong that in the fields next to your home town you can sleep without the chance of anything even daring to approach you. This would also stop overleveling, but I'm sure you could add a reverse repellent or some sort of pheromone if you wanted to let people grind like that and rise to the challenge. You could also tie EXP to quests or engaging with the world and make few more dynamic levels so that as you grow through playing the game the world starts to feel different because weak monsters run away from you.
""" I know a lot of Table Top Role Game Masters that don't even use Random encounters anymore. The main complaint is that it ruins the pacing and doesn't give a very dramatic scenario because in most games the players can fully heal after each fight. """ Of note: I can tell immediately that all the GM's with that complaint only play 5e, & in full story-gamer mode. There is an issue of putting oneself in a bubble going on there. Other systems, including older or OSR variants of D&D don't have the same issues... and mechanics from those other games can be pretty simply mixed-&-matched into 5e, to create a much more prevalent sense of danger (since among other things the characters will be in more danger :p) Overleveling: the real issue with overleveling is the strong incentive to level given an exponential growth system. Capping battle opportunities, either Mother style where weaklings give no benefit, or by disconnecting XP from simply winning battles (good examples: classic D&D gold=XP, Numenera exploration=XP, Pillars of Eternity XP for completing a monster log entry) helps a lot, but still leaves the underlying carrot to go grind enemies. Another take on the matter is to reduce the rewards (eg. by capping max health), or gate advancement via something like GM set milestones.
I like the way the Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth games handle random encounters, even if they're an amalgamation of a few already existing mechanics. Basically, the playable character has hacker skills which can be used on the field, and what they are depends on the Digimon you have in your party. There's a few skills which allow you to reduce random encounters to an extent or completely turn them off, but you need to have specific Digimon in your party to access those skills. It's been a while since I last played those games so the only thing I remember about these hacker skills is that you need to have at least 3 mega level Digimon in your party to completely disable encounters. You can also get hacker skills which increase the encounter rate or trigger a battle on the spot. In a way, the game is kinda built around grinding as you have to do it a lot to take your Digimon through the Digivolution tree to get certain skills etc so frankly, it's not the best thought out game, but I do think it does a lot of interesting things.
CS tried to do some of the fundamental QoL features, but the implementation was hit or miss. The animation and menu bloat made it almost as inconvenient as actually fighting, and the durations could've been longer.
@@benedict6962 agreed. makes me wonder if any of these features will be carried over to the new Story game currently in development and be perhaps better implemented
Actually, in the Golden Sun games, for rooms that are meant for puzzles, they crank the encounter rate way down. :3
I think persona 5 is a good example of right random encounters. You know exactly where enemies are in the world, you even can see if they're really powerful, but you'll only see what monsters are inside once you start the battle. Edit: Typed this at the start, you also said this at the end
Fantasian has an awesome solution where you save random encounters for later. That way you don't have to fight when it's not convenient.
And as an added bonus, you can also rack up a bunch over and over for more efficient level grinding! I love Fantasian's approach to random encounters.
Wish you'd talk about Pokémon Sword and Shield a bit more... their solution was interesting to say the least, there's both visible Pokémon in the grass and faceless shadows that may spawn when you're in the tall grass and you'll only find out what they are when you two bump into each other
But when the faceless ones are the same as ones you can see in screen...it takes the mystery out.
@@happiestaku6646 not always/entirely. There were a good number of pokemon who were only found in the random hidden grasses. I was grinding for drampa for a long while. Unless you meant the surprise of not knowing when you'll run into them which yeah that's gone
@@christopherschlegel6412 the lack of surprise element is why i ended up avoiding the shaking spots in sword more often than not. Only utilized them while trying to cobble together a nuzlocke-like ruleset, and for completing the dex when certain pokemon were exclusive to those spots.
I'm glad you mentioned Wild Arms, the control you feel over how much you're going fight things is so nice. I don't remember if the first one had this, but WA2 definitely did. The tools that you can use in dungeons are a fun touch too, but that's a different topic
Honestly I always wondered what happened to random encounters as games went on. The one I think made them the most "right" was a Touhou RPG fangame series called Labyrinth of Touhou: as you walk around a counter in the lower side of the screen will rise and you'll get into a battle when it's around 50% or more. In the 2nd game you also have some passives that reduce the speed at which the counter goes up, allowing you to walk more and fight less. Inversely in both games you have a dedicated button that raises the counter to 200% to guarantee a fight on the next step which is excellent for grinding.
I think Etrian Odyssey is probably one of the best examples of how to make random encounters interesting. The game gives you an indicator in the corner that transitions from blue to red as a random encounter gets closer and closer, so you're never really caught off guard with an encounter, and the game's high difficulty means that every random encounter could very well wipe your party and lose your progress, which is rarely a _huge_ penalty with the games (usually) offering a lot of shortcuts to open up. On top of that, the games also have enemies on the overworld that move along the map as you do, which are usually way stronger than everything else in the area. The games turn down the encounter rate in areas with those overworld enemies so you can focus on solving the puzzle to get around them, but if you get into a fight, the overworld enemies can join in if you let them catch up, which adds an extra layer of tension. It's a really great system, and I honestly think more people should take a look at the series before writing off random encounters as inherently bad.
A couple of SMT games do that. Nocturne and Strange Journey.
Oh, do they? Not terribly familiar with SMT (I'll get to them... someday), but that makes sense, since it's the same developer.
@@Rean.Schwarzer in SMT theres even a skill called Estoma that lowers or outright banishes encounters. As long as you are higher level in most cases. Which should happen in most cases.
A thing of random encounters I like, especially in the older grindier games, is I can pay minimal attention to those sections and have a movie or youtube on at the same time whilst I go through them. But in more recent games, that have enemies on the map, tend to have a "If the enemy touches you they have advantage, you need to hit them on the map to gain advantage." style mechanic. I have to pay a lot more attention to those, which makes taking the time to level up more tedious and mentally draining.
I agree that recent games is much more mentally draining, but I think the mechanics more engaging than older RPG
When I was building random encounters for my D&D campaign, I knew random encounters could become a serious issue, since D&D rules in general slow down the game massively once you're in combat. So I tweaked the random encounter system in a few ways that seem to be working pretty well so far, and I figured I'd share them, since they can translate really easily to video games as well: 1) Have a maximum number of random encounters the party can get per day of travel. I use a system of 6 dice, three for the day and three for the night, and you get a random encounter for each dice that lands in a certain range. If the encounter rate is 3, any dice that rolls a 3 or lower means a random encounter. That means there are no more than 6 encounters in any given day (and practically speaking, a lot less), and the party can even reduce that number if they sacrifice some travel time to sleep in an inn or isolated homestead, reducing the number of night rolls down to 1 roll or even nothing. So the players can make decisions about mitigating the risks posed by random encounters. 2) Have opportunities for the player to learn about what they're likely to bump into. I use a system where players can ask any locals or travelers they meet about the nearby threats, which lets them gain information about the safest and riskiest routes to go down, and that could easily be built into an RPG. So maybe the direct route to where you want to go has Goblins and Kobolds fighting over territory, and there's a lot of both who will be more than happy to fight you, but taking that route saves you a week of travel time. In my experience, the more informed decisions a player gets to make, the less they get frustrated by things like random encounters or ambushes. 3) Not every random encounter should be a fight. In my random encounter tables, I deliberately include things like bad weather, or traveling merchants the players can barter with. It helps keep things interesting. But even more importantly, if they do get into a fight, they can choose to try and sneak by to avoid the fight altogether (and maybe have risk/reward in that too, where you can cut down travel time by taking a fast pace, but you can't sneak by any encounters while doing so). And while it would be harder to do in a video game, have other ways to end a fight besides killing; if it's an angry bear, you could distract it by dropping a days' rations and running away. If it's bandits, maybe just surrender and give up a hundred gold, so they let you live. 4) If you're way higher level than the monster that you randomly encounter, it tries to run from you. And this one both reduces the frustration of backtracking, and makes a random inconvenience into an intermittent power-trip. For example, if your random encounters start with a prompt that says, "You see a goblin ambush up ahead. Would you like to try and sneak by?", fifty levels later, the prompt might say, "You see a bunch of goblin ambushers suddenly scatter deeper into the forest. Would you like to give chase?" Those fights have half the number of enemies, but they're worth double the XP and Gold, and they only try to set traps or run on their turn. The memes basically write themselves. tl;dr: Random encounters should be a risk, and I think the real problem is the lack of informed decision making on the players' part. If players know the risk ahead of time, and can use certain tools to try and mitigate the risks, I think the problems with random encounters become less...well, problematic. These are the changes I try to use to make it better, and hopefully that can inspire someone to improve their system (or even mine).
I've never liked random encounters in D&D, but this system seems so sophisticated I'm tempted to give it a try. Thanks for sharing!
imo bravely default's customization is the BEST not only with the random encounters but how its so grind friendly