those people should play another genre of game then, because they clearly don't appreciate what makes an RPG, an RPG
-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
Is 'Missing' the worst game mechanic ever invented?
- Thread starter Deleted member 46489
- Start date
those people should play another genre of game then, because they clearly don't appreciate what makes an RPG, an RPG
Perma death is a different mechanic entirely and not related to, comparable or relevant to missing.
Not seeing how. You really think people reload games every time they miss? That doesnt seem sane.
Role playing makes RPGs what they are. Not miss mechanics.
The stats you picked for playing a role can affect your hit chances. If you're a smooth talker and used all your points in speech instead of guns don't expect to hit every target like an expert marksman
Why do you keep saying you want your skill to matter? That's not what an RPG is about.
It's your characters skills that matter. And yeah, they can miss - kind of makes sense.
If you want a skill based game without stats go play Call of Duty.
It's your characters skills that matter. And yeah, they can miss - kind of makes sense.
If you want a skill based game without stats go play Call of Duty.
Cool, then I'm not an XCOM player worth a damn, and guess what? I don't care. I didn't find the game enjoyable enough to keep playing after I finished it once. It's funny too how you're claiming that the gif is an outlier or that it doesn't constantly happen later on with snipers that missed multiple times in a row with 90% or higher chances to hit when it still does near the end game. Unless there was just some huge balancing overhaul that happened later, but I would have missed that.
Last edited:
I'm sure this would/could be fun, but I think a lot of people don't want this type of action in an RPG. Maybe they don't have the reflexes, or just prefer the purely turn based experience.
That said, I somewhat agree with your basic assertion. I think it is even worse in tabletop actually, where often you wait quite a while for a turn, then come up with an action to do, then roll a 3 or something, then wait another 10 minutes. Some systems introduce 'degrees of success', which I think treat the problem well, where only a truly terrible roll is an outright failure. Everything else has some effect. At the high end you do something spectacular, instead of just a hit.
If you're roleplaying a blind dude, i'm pretty sure missing 90% of attacks is part of roleplay.
Roleplay is a lot more than just Bioware dialog circles.
Any title with "ever" and you can imagine me rolling my eyes.
No missing is not the worst mechanic by far. The adaptive difficulty can make "misses" amp up the tension, because you and I both know devs cheats on their game to give us that close encounter feel.
I loved the "miss" percentage on Persona 5 in the Egypt castle. Barely passed it
Edit: Xcom Cheats as well. Normal difficulty has biased shot percentages so the misses are very rare also if you flank/play right.
No missing is not the worst mechanic by far. The adaptive difficulty can make "misses" amp up the tension, because you and I both know devs cheats on their game to give us that close encounter feel.
I loved the "miss" percentage on Persona 5 in the Egypt castle. Barely passed it
Edit: Xcom Cheats as well. Normal difficulty has biased shot percentages so the misses are very rare also if you flank/play right.
if you always succeed and can never fail then you're missing a quintessential element of role-playing. It's embarrassing to see people missing this concept.
This is simple alright. Simply absurd. An enemy dodging a attack or a hacker failing to circumvent a security system through stat checks is a completely valid abstraction of how dynamic situations where the outcome cannot be determined until the action happens and finds resistance. There are hundreds of games based around OHKOs and they are fun. There are entire genres.
Yes, I'm comparing hitting a bug IRL with hitting a bug on a game because that's precisely what the entire rules system of the game is simulating, in an abstract manner of course, it's what it was designed to do. And not only that, it's something completely natural and intuitive to understand. You attack someone, that someone might dodge, or you might miscalculate and miss. It's not a leap of logic and just makes sense.
Of course failing can be frustrating, but there's a LOT of factors that have to be looked at before reaching the conclusion the whole rules system or mechanic is bad. OP might have just been unlucky, might have built a character with bad stats for melee weapons, or maybe the math in the game just makes it so misses are frequent on its tutorial area and things get more balanced as numbers grow.
Your hyperbolic sense of fun does not matter and isn't a good parameter to judge it. Is it fun to fall to the ground after jumping? Wouldn't flying be more fun? Then why games insist on making me fall? Why Mario and Sonic aren't flying all the time? Is dying fun? Why videogames have death? How do you feel about SimCity or Papers, Please or Football Manager or Gran Turismo or any other game where developers are making entire games out of "unfun real life situations" according to you?
That actually sounds like a really decent idea, but bear in a mind a lot of people who play these games dislike reaction based gameplay. So while you could mitigate it a lot by raising the accuracy, plenty of people would dislike having to apply real world reflexes to the game. So that wouldn't be a win/win.
it would work if your game was based around those kinds of player inputs and stats though.
True, but then you never play true RPGs on PC. True RPGs lack a system, they are interactive experiences where the game master tells a story that the players respond to, and any "dice rolls" made are only for the game master's benefit, never seen by the players.
CRPGs, JRPGs, any RPGs that you play that have stats and progression, are just as much about the "missing", and the reducing of its likelihood, as they are about "playing the role" that you've chosen or were thrust into.
There is a difference between missing because you don't know where to aim and aim being perfect but missing anyway.
...Because he did in the first place? Are you even reading the conversation?
Not to mention removing any comparison to real life would make the mechanic even LESS in need to be defended.
There's a difference between your skill as a player and the skill of your player character
Just because you're ace at CoD or a real life navy seal doesnt mean every character you make should absolutely hit the target no matter how precise you are
Spoken by someone who clearly hasn't actually played an RPG. RNG in video game RPGs is only an attempt to simulate what some pen and paper rules do, but there's a whole lot more to them than just rolling twenty sided dice with your stats adjusting the results.
They aren't "Roll" Playing Games.
In most RPGs you cannot save mid-battle so reloading over a single miss over the course a battle would be losing a lot of progress and no different than just dying.
Also a lot of the better RPGs just have predefined quasi-random RNG, and a shot that misses, will miss anyway regardless of how often you reload, unless you somehow fudge the variables.
literally play D&D 3 days a week, my dude
and a WoD game biweekly (along with trying many other systems/games)
Role-playing is about playing a character with strengths and weaknesses. The stats are there to represent that, while the rolls introduce variance. If you go full combatant then you're going to fail at social checks more often. If you go full social you're bound to fail physical checks.
edit: I know you can play without any sort of rolling, but it's very rare to find a group of people who are all fine introducing failures without some sort of tangible result like a dice roll, card draw, jenga tower (in the case of Dread), etc.
Last edited:
You think you know how to aim just because you aren't blind? Most people don't. "Where" is just one factor to be considered.
My example is extreme but any other poster that quoted you had explained it better.
Accuracy checks feel worse the more fidelity the game has. When it's just characters standing on opposite ends of the screen swinging swords at nothing (classic Final Fantasy) or the entire process takes place in your head (D&D), a lack of accuracy doesn't feel terrible because you can imagine that goblin or bandit dodging of the way.
The problem comes when the combat is animated, like in XCOM, and the enemy doesn't dodge out of the way. You can't get rid of accuracy checks because they're integral to the game's balance, so you just have your solider whip 90 degrees to the side like a lunatic so the shot misses. Or you pull a Morrowind and have the sword go through their body with an unsatisfying *Missed* text box appear.
That's stupid, but for something like XCOM I'm not sure you can fix it when accuracy is so important to the game and it also needs to look good. They could animate the aliens dodging, but that's just more costs to pile on to the game's development.
The problem comes when the combat is animated, like in XCOM, and the enemy doesn't dodge out of the way. You can't get rid of accuracy checks because they're integral to the game's balance, so you just have your solider whip 90 degrees to the side like a lunatic so the shot misses. Or you pull a Morrowind and have the sword go through their body with an unsatisfying *Missed* text box appear.
That's stupid, but for something like XCOM I'm not sure you can fix it when accuracy is so important to the game and it also needs to look good. They could animate the aliens dodging, but that's just more costs to pile on to the game's development.
OP
OP
You can't be serious. Player Skill is literally what separates games from visual novels. That can be either mechanical skill or strategic skill. RPGs have a lot of decision-making, which is part of the strategic skill required in playing them. Plenty of RPGs require mechanical skill as well. I guess you don't like the idea of turn based combat involving mechanical skill. That's fine. A stat like accuracy could also be expressed well via strategic skill. All kinds of puzzle-like mechanics could be invented to serve the purpose. Simply 'missing' does none of that. It doesn't engage me as a player.
Saying that skills don't matter in RPGs is like saying controls don't matter in gaming. You're either being facetious or ignorant.
Also this
There really is a Simpsons scene or moment for EVERYTHING.
Player skill in this context is allocating skills, choosing combat moves and making tactical decisions, not mashing the Awesome Button.
An old old game, Silent Storm (and its sequel, SS Sentinels), did it pretty well. The accuracy model was simulated, but simulated from the point of origin of the actual character models in the game. A soldier with a pistol right next to an enemy was unlikely to miss, although it was rarely possible. But if you had someone with a rifle right next to an enemy, or a machinegun, your miss chance suddenly skyrocketed, because - surprise - the character can't actually orient themselves to hit the enemy from where they're standing, because their weapon is too long. The miss chance took into account the possible animations of the characters, whether or not the enemy ended their turn moving, etc, and the result is that the misses look mostly believable.
A stat like accuracy does not need to be 'expressed' via strategic skill. Like a stat like toughness doesn't. A stat like accuracy is supposed to fold into your decision-making, weighing the chance of a hit or miss versus the numerous other variables that could benefit or damage your characters.
Not a bad idea per say.
But what if you as a gamer is unusually skilled at those timing events? How can you balance the difficulty if you have a character that isn't supposed to hit literally anything with melee attacks because he/she is great at something else? Feels like every character could easily become overpowered.
OP
OP
Fair enough. If people don't like having to use mechanical skill in their rpgs, one could have a puzzle-like mechanic to express accuracy that explores the player's strategic skill instead. RPGs require strategic skill all the time, whether it's making decisions, solving puzzles, figuring out ways to solve a quest and so on.
I'm just saying that a mechanic that engages the player is far better than one that simply says that you missed because you got unlucky.
This is one of the few roleplaying games that truly respects fail states and does everything it can to discourage savescumming, though.
I hate hate hate reloading a save, ever, in any game, for anything, but sometimes RPGs are just badly designed at accommodating failure.
I should've be more clear. I don't have anything against certain random mechanics or events, a dynamic nature is needed for games. But I don't like the "miss" mechanic because it's just frustrating and I want to be able to have control over my own actions. It's just a preference thing.
I know why it's there and have played many games with those systems. But I find the miss mechanic frustrating and there are other ways to achieve variety.
Anyway, a huge amount of XCOM is mitigating RNG and reducing the role luck can play by having backup options and plans laid out.
And the game is also (mostly) designed to let you suffer an occasional "That's XCOM!" moment and keep on trucking even on higher Ironman settings.
I think people who have a healthy respect for and understanding of probability don't get frustrated by misses in those games.
And the game is also (mostly) designed to let you suffer an occasional "That's XCOM!" moment and keep on trucking even on higher Ironman settings.
I think people who have a healthy respect for and understanding of probability don't get frustrated by misses in those games.
That's not the case for CRPGs at all.
And also, there cannot be a turn based system with mechanical skill - that's a paradox. By definition it being turn based you do not -need- mechanical skill anymore.
Disco Elysium is an excellent game in which failing really allows you to explore the character you're shaping. It's one of the closest experiences to tabletop I've played personally.
This is a presentation problem at most, nothing in the actual gameplay suffer because of this. I doubt most xcom players care about this stuff.
It's like saying the FF's "allies at one side, enemies at another" is an huge problem. It's just an abstraction, some people can't be immersed on the game because of that but it doesn't affect the actual gameplay.
A pure RPG shouldn't be a game of player skill, other than acting. Of course people will use strategy in a D&D game even with a dumb barbarian character because it's hard to being true to a character disadvantage if you want to "win" the game. That's why attribute checks exist.
Roleplayer of the dumb barbarian figured the entire wizard's secret plot? DM should demand an intelligence check first, which the player would probably fail.
A pure eletronic RPG is meant to simulate this notion, tho most mainstream rpgs don't do that because the mainstream playerbase doesn't care about the realistic simulation. Xcom and old Fallout players does, however.
I think the expectation when playing a CRPG like Fallout is that player skill and character skill are completely decoupled. If I put a lot of points into a character's sword skill, I expect them to be good at swords. I don't expect them to actually be bad at swords because I the player am terrible at the sword mini-game. Player skill comes in at a different level. Making the decision to give the character a lot of points in swords to begin with, based on party composition, class abilities, and any number of other factors, and then making good tactical decisions in battle that take full advantage of the character's good swording. If that doesn't sound fun to you, you just want to be playing a different genre of game.
OP
OP
I get you. In that case, one can build a mechanic that requires strategic skill rather than mechanical skill. Some kind of puzzle-based mechanic could express accuracy in combat. RPGs anyway involve plenty of strategic skill.
All I'm saying that I'd appreciate a mechanic that engages the player over one that just tells me I failed for no reason.
It's not "no reason." Your character has an accuracy attribute and the enemy has an evasion attribute. The two coincide and the probability that you are going to hit the enemy is based on those numbers. You failed because the numbers worked against you in that instance. That's how probability works. That's how stat based games work.
I get what you're trying to say here but just because you dislike the mechanic doesn't mean it doesn't make sense or needs to be changed in a game like Fallout 2 where the battle system is designed around those probabilities depending on where you are attacking the enemy. The skill is in your strategy and your ability to read ahead into future outcomes based on the choices you're making. Not every game has to depend on reaction time or mouse click accuracy. Those aren't the only skills employed by the player in most games.
I highly disagree with OP. Missing makes a lot of tactical choice in most RPGs, specially because it is used in way to force you to not be able to master all the weapons of a game. By focusing in 1 weapon it allows better RPGs possibilities.
Alongside this the chance to hit in XCOM is:
increased:
XCOM works like this. Each soldier has an aim stat (chance to hit enemy target). Each alien (and some of your soldiers) have a dodge stat that decrease the chance of being hit.
Alongside this the chance to hit in XCOM is:
increased:
- Having higher ground
- Having aim mods/boosters
- Hitting the enemy from the flank/behind
- Having better weapons
- Having "aim" based weapons (such as sniper riffles)
- Having direct line of sight
- By the target running in the previous turn
- Cover
- having lower ground
- some types of Armour
- Target not being directly seen by the shooter
- mental penalties (previous turn was in panic)
- Defense abilities (like shields, hunkering down,etc)
- Further away the target is (sniper rifles don't get this penalty)
Saying that "true" RPGs lack a system is perhaps a matter of opinion. I would call what you're describing an improve exercise more than an RPG. Sure, the RP stands for "role playing" but just as importantly the G stands for "game", and without mechanics there's really no game there.
I only get frustrated with misses when they occur in those 95% hit chance situations. Seemed to happen all the time in Battle Brothers, like at least two or three times in each battle. Now you can bring quite a few party members into battle, and each one can usually get off one or two attacks per turn, so it shouldn't be surprising that eventually one of those high-probability attacks will fail. Nonetheless, it's still irritating, particularly in a game where you face rather tough foes and your heroes can easily become permanently crippled or killed.
OP
OP
I think the amount of damage you do would handle those kinds of scenarios. A character who put all their points in 'charm' would do low melee damage, so even if they get perfect hits, the enemy would whittle them down faster than they could kill the enemy.
If you have actual experience, then it kind of makes your original statement seem even more questionable, since you would know that RNG is only a small part of RPGs. If you only meant that it's a mechanic that is extremely common, if not intrinsic to video games (especially those that rely more on chance), then OK, but that's not really what your statement looked like.
Saying that RNG is what makes an RPG an RPG allows for the ridiculous open-ended interpretations of what an RPG actually is, where anything and everything that has any amount of RNG with any amount of customization is one (which seems to have been a trend for the last decade).
Anyway, this is getting way off topic. I don't really have an issue with RNG in general...been dealing with it for the better part of three decades. I just can't stand "freak streaks" that keep happening multiple times within the same game that aren't actually all that uncommon.
People factor it in by adding the damage from a potential crit to the list of damage ranges they're considering while deciding their next move.
When running a bulky setup mon, a player will heal to stay outside of the dead to crit range if they want to be extra safe for example.
Did you read my post you quoted? I never mentioned RNG. I was responding to somebody that was speaking of save scumming. There's no save scumming in a tabletop experience. When you fail, you fail, and you roll with it (unless you have a merciful DM/GM). Sometimes that means your character dies. If a person can't accept failure then an RPG is probably not the genre for them.