DESIGN NOTES: random encounters, experience points, and expressiveness...
i've been working on a more traditional dungeon-focused rpg project and i've been noticing that i often react negatively when a random encounter pops up, especially deeper in the dungeon. i want to be really careful about diagnosing why. i'm a big proponent of random encounters and have had a lot of rich, varied and memorable experiences of them, so it wouldn't be fair to blame my dread on the format itself. i've had some lousy experiences of them too, and the factors that separate the good from the bad are numerous and slippery. at this point i've preempted the usual offenders: i've already got the depth and pacing of battle, the frequency of fights, the rate of attrition, and the sense of risk, dungeon length, and so on where i want them. not perfect, but in the ballpark. by my own intuition (which i have little choice but to trust), the negative feeling that comes up when i enter a fight - resistance, an "i don't want to deal with this" feeling - is disproportionate. i've had more tolerant reactions to games whose fights i liked less. so what accounts for my present reaction?
many explanations are possible, but after some consideration i'm indulging a hunch that this is a problem experience points can solve. like my past games, i went into this project without the intention of having exp or leveling up, because stat gains and experience curves look like more trouble to balance than they're worth. if i want to offer a sense of growth over time, i can lean on equipment, fixed upgrades, any number of other options not based on something as unpredictable as how many battles a player ends up fighting. but now i suspect exp rewards may play a more transformative role in the phenomenology of dungeons and battle than i previously thought. i don't believe it's a simple matter of enticement - in my favorite games i've never felt like i was sitting through battle just to get the dangling carrot of experience points. instead, i think the ability to control your power level through experience gain is a huge and underestimated avenue of expressiveness in rpg play.
the fact of diving into the dungeon at a given time is always shadowed by the possibility that i could have gone and grinded instead. at some point i have to wager that i have enough power and commit to a dungeon run. when i've made that bet, every battle becomes a double drama. it's not just about surviving, it's about proving my wager correct. if i can stretch my resources all the way to the end of the dungeon, it proves i was right not to grind. i hate grinding and love being right, so this is an attractive prospect to me. conversely, if i can't grind, then i'm in the dungeon because i have no choice but to proceed at my current power level. without anything personal to prove, my commitment to survival is more of an obligation than an act of expression. it can still be fun or rewarding to try anyway, but without that power over the terms of my entry my role in the storytelling is diminished. i’m an actor in the game’s story attempting to play my part to the game’s standards, instead of a co-author putting forth my own vision for the story in dialogue with the game’s systems and furnishings.
that’s not to say that being a co-author is “better”, but when i’m used to having more power, a game needs to provide a pretty strong vision of its own to persuade me to drop my resistance to having less…
a similar dynamic plays out on a per-battle scale. just as the grinding-detour shadows the dungeon-delve, the choice to flee battle shadows the choice to fight it. in an environment where the only goal is survival, the choice between the two is pretty much mathematical. one will probably preserve your resources better than the other, and while the judgment of which option it is is a little subjective, it's not particularly expressive. but when there's exp on the line, i have a reason to choose to fight even if it's the costlier option. what's more important, short-term survival or long-term growth? in light of the contradiction between the two, battles become a wager: when i choose to fight instead of running away, i'm betting i can effect an outcome where the gains in exp are worth the cost of fighting. i know a battle will cost me time and resources, but if i think i can cut down on those with smart playing, then by choosing to fight i'm making a shrewd tradeoff in order to rack up some gains. the inverse is also true: if i think i can get by underleveled, then running away is a gamble i'm taking that i don't NEED the experience and can get by in the future on pluck. either way, i get to tell myself i'm being shrewd and clever and getting one over on the game. the better i know the battle system and its facets, the better i can exploit it, the better a deal i can clinch for myself, whether by fighting or fleeing... in either case, the act of judgment transforms whatever choice i make into a personal challenge. now i’m responsible to it not just because it was put in front of me, but because it’s a chance to affirm the story that i wanted to tell.
this is the missing ingredient in my present work, i suspect, whose absence causes me to react so poorly to these encounters. there's a lack of personal investment because i have no authorship, no control over the circumstances of the challenges i take on, no say in what they mean. there's no alternative to going into the dungeon right away, no choices i can make that govern my starting position, and so my mindset is one of being tested by the system rather than one of us testing each other. this attitude affects how i react to individual encounters ("why are you making me deal with this? i didn't ask for this") and is reinforced by the fact that the choice to fight or run is an exercise of mathematical estimation more so than of subjective values, so i'm fighting battles mainly out of obligation with no personal angle. exp rewards for combat seem to offer a solution to both layers of this problem. are there other ways to solve this? can side quests and other optional avenues of power serve to give a personal stake to dungeons? can other rewards entice us to view battles as wagers instead of obligations? is the random encounter format doomed to produce problems of motivation unless we reward players for killing the denizens of whatever cave they happen to find themselves in? maybe it's better for these battles to kind of suck a little...
of course, i'm playing my own game, so i expect i'm overestimating the problem. it's hard to stay personally invested in the outcome of a dungeon crawl when i’m replaying it for the 10th or 100th time and i already know everything in it. players will bring more curiosity and patience to this than i do, probably. maybe i'm letting anxiety win out here and i needn't fret so much about scaring off players by asking them to accept too many costs and setbacks for not enough reward. but regardless of what this means for my own work, i think the phenomena i've described factor heavily into my experience of rpgs in general, and help make sense of my diverse reactions to formally similar games.