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[s0]

High "miss" chances in combat drive me nuts when it's a mechanic completely outside the player's control. If attacks can miss every once in a while (say, 5% or less), it can add a little bit of unexpected tension when an important player attack misses, or unexpected relief when a big enemy attack misses, but having it happen too frequently ruins any ability to plan your combat strategy. I played through Ultima V not too long ago, and the miss chance was ridiculously high. Combined with the chance of "grazing" an enemy (doing no damage) if your attack does connect, I was probably dealing actual damage less than half of the time I tried to attack anything.

This could probably extend to all forms of randomness that strongly affect gameplay. Repeatedly rolling the dice hoping to get lucky is not engaging. Show me the numbers I need to see to plan out my actions, and if I fail, let it always be my fault rather than the RNG's fault.

tho to be fair this is MOSTLY a problem with very old rpgs. even most games from the mid 90s don't have unavoidable high miss chances.

[oahda]

Fighting mechanics.

That goes for games in general of all genres, tho.

[Pfotegeist]

There's no detrimental mechanics, I thought. Well, here's one.

A bunny finds a secret location, and to enter he must defeat a monster that's more difficult than any others in the area. 100x as much health, so he's not dangerous, just difficult. Call this a "gatekeeper" he protects something cool... right?  Am I right?



Oh, poop.

It's like, failing to meet expectations, and then countering "you lose."

[valrus]

Fighting mechanics.

That goes for games in general of all genres, tho.

I can't really picture myself playing yet another RPG, but if I did, it'd be because the game let me do something that wasn't fundamentally just "monster extermination".

Compared with the wealth of basic mechanics that (say) boardgames use, RPGs (and a huge number of videogames beyond that) largely use one: reduce a counter to zero, when zero, remove piece from play.

I mean, make whatever ya love; I'm not saying you shouldn't love what you love.  But in answer to your question, yeah, what I'm tired of is "hit goblins with sword until they disappear".  Make an RPG without that, and I'm all ears.

[Sik]

That reminds me of the Phantasy Star II text adventures (which are kind of misleading because they're actually mini-RPGs that just happen to not have graphics). Yes, there are battles, but they're rare, like just a couple in each of them (99% of the time is spent exploring and figuring out what's going on), and even then your weapon is usually whatever you happened to have lying around (e.g. a surfboard or a lightning rod, or even a mirror to reflect a laser in one case), and in some cases they're really just used to block the path until you do something else. Battles are never part of the main gameplay, they're just the dramatic points of the plot.

Also bonus points because their plots are completely different from most RPGs since they focus on explaining where each character comes from, in one case the plot is about stealing a painting. As short as they may be they completely make their parent game pale in comparison.

[valrus]

Battles are never part of the main gameplay, they're just the dramatic points of the plot.

Come to think of it, there aren't actually that many games like that, that use combat and violence no more frequently than a book or movie would.  Most of the ones I can think of are on the Adventure/RPG fringe (like Zork or Quest for Glory, iirc) or solidly in the Adventure mode (Fate of Atlantis).  Maybe stealth games -- when you kill someone, it's potentially a big deal and there are consequences.

Also, for all its popularity, there aren't many games I know of that handle "combat" like Pac-Man: getting to fight back is so satisfying precisely because you DON'T get to do it all the time.  For just a brief moment, the tables have turned.

[oahda]

Little combat is still some combat.

Get rid of it all and be creative instead of reusing Standard Game Filler Content #1™.

[Sik]

May as well complain then that the game is basically an electronic version of tabletop games (down to the literal use of dice), that's about as uncreative as it can get. But then again the whole RPG genre started like that, and you aren't going to get rid of that influence short of going with a whole different genre (maybe even new) altogether.

[oahda]

I'd like to see the birth of that, then~

[PappaWayne]

Random battles frustrate me to no end, as well as battle repetition for the sake of dragging out sections of the game.

I know it's a bit of a staple in many jrpgs but I find random battles frustrating and see them as almost a lazy method of implementing combat. It's good to see that these appear to be being phased out more likely, however they are still about (pokemon I'm looking at you).

As for battle repetition, the only time I feel it can add value is when it's made as a conscious design choice to make levels/dungeons a battle of attrition to reach the end with the supplies you have, eg Dark Souls. You don't want to end up with the kind of repitition dragon age 2 had shudder

[s0]

Random battles frustrate me to no end

yes

thankfully jrpgs seem to be moving away from that as of late

[medieval]

grind money
spend on bullshit
grind money
spend on bullshit
grind money
spend on bullshit

then you have enough money for the best weapon in game and it's like meh, your super weapon just broke the game and doesn't even feel nice to play with, congrats there is now nothing to work towards, and you've just been playing a simulation of your real shitty working man's life.


ALSO:

npc's talk about crazy weapon, there's no getting around it, you have to get this super crazy weapon, the story and everything builds up towards this one moment where you get the weapon, then you get it AND YOU CAN'T EQUIP IT OR YOU ONLY GET IT AT THE VERY END SO WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU GONNA USE IT FOR THEN

[Jordgubben]

This has been touched upon a bit, but I don't think anyone has mentioned it specifically yet: The standard "Attack" and "Defend" commands. If not a mage (or equivalent depending on setting) then the standard "Attack" command is what is used all the time. The "Defend" command on the other hand is never used by any one, ever. And this really bugs me because both of them have proven really easy to fix.

Some examples:
 
Good old Grandia had the excellent idea of splitting "Attack" into two separate commands: "Critical" (Prevents enemy action) and "Combo" (Higher total damage). This duplicated the number of choices for most non-boss battles and picking the right one could be critical at times (Pun not intended, honestly).

Fire emblem has you selecting your weapon on every attack. Getting this right is important because you'll be defending with that weapon until your next turn.

Bravely Defaults "Defend" equivalent (the "Default" command) stores an action for your next turn. So if you defend one turn you can attack twice the next one. This adds a lot of low level strategy to an otherwise simple combat mechanic.

[denzgd]

I'm sick of playing RPGs which have classes that emphasize status effects, and then mini-bosses and bosses are not impacted at all by these effects. I find it really hinders strategy, forcing the player to have to focus on offensive magic and physical attack strength. Of course, there are support moves that increase defense/attack/etc but I feel like disabling the same certain moves across the board is totally sucks.

I think an unfortunate side effect of this is that it makes progression in the game amount to "Can't beat this boss? Better kill a whole bunch of smaller monsters and keep coming back until you can!" This does not go hand-in-hand with bosses being immune to a player's moves, and I see it in many RPGs. But immunity to specific effects, with classes that emphasize them, are often a big red flag. I think what it comes down to is inhibiting strategy.

I believe in Shin Megami Tensei IV, you couldn't poison/paralyze/etc bosses, but there were no classes to speak of - only abilities that your team would learn or inherit. And bosses wouldn't just be immune to status effects; they could be immune to any number of things, such as fire damage, physical attacks, and so on, depending on the boss. Strategy was working around this, and finding out what they did, so you could defend yourself and defeat them. I really like thinking about my strategy on a deeper level than "Better level up and come back." Though, that is a simplification of what I consider a prevalent issue in RPGs. It can ruin an RPG for me, very quickly.

[JWK5]

I've always enjoyed the early Final Fantasy games and pretty much all the (core) Dragon Quest games, and having played some of them again recently I find that still holds true no matter how much time passes. Despite the grinding, the sometimes bare bones storytelling, and the sometimes brutally rigid game play mechanics I find myself enjoying them more than modern RPGs.

The older RPGs also held your hand a lot less, though they basically relied on gating and funneling in order to keep you on track (which for the most part worked like a charm). You could go in the wrong direction and make navigational errors. You could go under-prepared and accidentally stumble into dangerous territory that you are not ready to handle. It's probably the exact same setup that keeps me hooked with the Demon's/Dark Souls games, and while I enjoy open world games like Reckoning, Skyrim, Fallout 3, etc. I inevitably get frustrated with the long-winded dialogue full of unnecessary information and just start speeding-skipping through it and give up on the story almost altogether.

I don't want my RPG to explore for me, I don't want all the secrets and back story of the world dumped on me in a single hour long conversation, I don't want the game to hold my hand and remove all trial and error from battle, I don't want a party full of characters without weaknesses, I don't want the developers to treat me like an imbecile and assume I can't handle taking a wrong turn, and I especially don't want every story to play out like an melodramatic soap opera. Give me an adventure and let me run with it.

[Elwind]

I think RPGs are too convinced that they need to provide 100 hours of gameplay, and this ends up making them too tedious, inefficient, and bogged down with repetition. This manifests in many ways: random (read: frequent) battles, selecting "attack" 90% of the time, high shop prices (who buys ethers?), low battle payouts, having to heal in-menu after battles, lack of MP regeneration, cutscenes where every character has to speak a line in turn after every development, meaningless quests, and so on.

I think a good modern comparison is Xenoblade vs The Last Story. On one hand you have something ambitious and grand-scale that has some "wow" moments but also way too many fetch quests whose experience payouts hardly even make your level equal to the final boss's. On the other hand you have a game whose premise and story probably could have been taken further but had minimal grinding and downtime between plot developments.

Another issue for me is data transparency, and I'm sure anyone who's played a Fire Emblem game can at least partially agree with me here. Without the reference site serenesforest.net or something equivalent, you'll probably be lost as to how some of the mechanics even work, what some of the numbers even mean, and how some stats (attack speed) are even calculated.

[baconman]

The "OMFG EVERYONE IS DOWN TO 1 HP" attack.

In fact... pretty much overall boss design altogether.

700 useless potions/ethers when you're at the point of using mid-potions and mid-ethers.

The fuck is with potions/ethers anyways? You might as well call them "milk" and "beer" now.

FUCKING PRINCESSES. (not verbally, that would actually be a WELCOME change of pace) THOSE DON'T EVEN REALLY EXIST ANYMORE.

"Meat Shield, Item Stealer, Laser Light Show, and The PrettyPretty Nurse team up, once again, to save the fucking world from total annihilation!" - FFS, get real with personalities and plots already. People want to make some cash, have some neat shit, make friends, get laid, and fucking LIVE. If you're taking down some threating, menacing power - make that enemy personally aiming shit AT YOU, to FUCK UP YOUR LIFE. Not for venegance because they've already succeeded, either. Also, real enemies have relationships and attachments, too. They aren't just randomly obnoxious and toxic to everyone around them "just because they are." And maybe some of those relationships are toxic, but people tolerate toxic relationships for various reasons, as well.

Why am I going into a cave in the mountains to retrieve some amulet that was stolen from you, in order to get a legendary artifact in exchange from it, when I can go to that same cave in the mountains TO GET THE FUCKIN' ARTIFACT ITSELF?

[oldmanmike]

Is anyone else getting tired of the recycled lore that a lot of Western RPGs default to? "Elves", "Dwarves", "Orcs", "Skeletons", "Dragons", etc. I do. Not saying all Western RPGs do this, and some make great use such lore, but there's so much more to pull from within the context of just Western mythology, literature, and culture alone. Thinking back to games like Cosmology of Kyoto makes me realize how homogeneous the genre is, basically just rehashing Dungeons & Dragons along with Lord of the Rings ad nauseam.

[Ammypendent]

Mechanics I'm tired of are ones that serve as time fillers or gatekeepers to the actual role playing.

I'm tired of meaningless "bonus $$$" sidequests. I want sidequests that have impact on either the characters or how it changes the current scenario. Let there be opportunity costs in how you complete them instead of do everything before X mission for optimal reward.

I'm tired of NPC-waits-for-you. One observation a friend of mine made is that so many devs focus on the interesting backstory of an NPC when they should be focusing on interesting things the NPC does in the game.

Is anyone else getting tired of the recycled lore that a lot of Western RPGs default to? "Elves", "Dwarves", "Orcs", "Skeletons", "Dragons", etc. [...] basically just rehashing Dungeons & Dragons along with Lord of the Rings ad nauseam.

Actually one of the reasons those species/races/monsters became the staple was that one of the first modern tabletop RPGs, Chainmail, was heavily inspired by Lord of the Rings. One of the makers of Chainmail is also in the dev team of original D&D. Rest is history.

But I agree, there's a plenty of other mythology we can draw upon or create.

[oahda]

@oldmanmike:

Yes. Skyrim is absolutely terrible and feels ridiculously unoriginal, especially as it tries to match a crappy "language" (it's an awfully done cypher of English, not a proper constructed language) mixed up with random Old Norse words like draugr and all sorts of crap alongside a Tolkienesque fauna. It's immensely uninteresting and really crappy. Ugh.