Having an idea is not valuable. Understanding the value of an idea on the other hand is very valuable. This is why clones (and even sequels) often fail to achieve the brilliance of the original they derive from.

When playing games like Fire Emblem I usually have a have a hard time keeping track of all the units. Bahamut lagoon had 6 directly controlled units (with up to 4 party members in each unit) and 6 AI controlled dragons. I think this is a good number for a more casual RPG.

What I do like in Fire Emblem is how almost every mission has optional secondary goals (get that item, recruit that character etc.) that actually affect the rest of the game to some degree and tie in with the story nicely.

So I'm wanting to make a sort of visual novel game with world exploration between conversations/characters. Problem is I find a lot of visual novels boring/tedious. They're also hard for me to deconstruct/figure out how to make them because you're rarely told when choices matter and you have to replay them so many times to discover everything.

Your sort of answering your own question here. Make the short term effects very clear for every possible option. Then make sure the the combined long term effect of multiple choices make logical sense – or are at least predictable based on previous in game experience.

I hear what you're saying - I'm guessing my question is a little too general. I guess what I was wondering is whether or not this is a common pitfall into which people fall. I think for now I'll build it according to my original plan; if I get the game to a working prototype I can at least evaluate it properly. Thanks for the feedback though.

There is no such thing as a to general question.

Your hypothesis is that doing some change will benefit your game. Doing the whole change will be lots of work. Ask yourself this: How can you prove/refute the same hypothesis with the least amount of work?

That said, a version control system with good fupport for branching is recommended, but not required.

What type of game is this? And how are you planning to tell every characters story? As a big up front dump or as small snippets on top of game play (Bastion, Thomas was Alone)?

Personally I prefer tutorials served in thin slices through the whole game. The first Potral-game comes to mind with structure of 70% invisible tutorial and 30% post-tuorial storyline. Games by Intelligent Systems (Advanced wars, Fire Emblem) are also very good at incremental tutorials. I don't really mind that every "slice" it's mostly text and forced actions (No player decision making) as long as every slice is thin.

i don't like most action games that are under 15 hours. i think i'd go crazy if i played a rpg that short.

But isn't this at least partially because you paid full price (50€)? Imagine that the game was sold in 10-15h "chunks"  and every "chunk" was a lot cheaper than a full game (€ 10-15).  Every "chunk" represented a full story arch, but with the story ending with loose ends enough for a "sequel chunk". Then you could continue as long as you like, and end when you like. Wouldn't this be an option?

True. But I also think this is something that keeps a lot of people out of the genre. Theoretically the "market" for shorter (5-10 hours) JRPGs with less Grind and more Puzzle should be there.

If it should be there, it would be there.

Perhappes I should rephrase myself. Markets have two sides: supply and demand. I am the demand (please point me to good RPGs with a game length under 10h ) and I have a hard time believing that this makes me a unique little snowflake in this regard ( I enjoy RPGs and have a traditional 9-17 jobb +  1.5h commute).

So lack of demand should not be the problem. It should be abundant. Supply on the other hand is just not there. Unlike what some economist would have you believe, supply does not magically appear out of nothing just because there is a demand for it. The fact that we don't have a lot of shorter RPG:s is most likely because no one figured out how to do them well yet.

The problem with the shorter RPGs is that RPGs in general tend to be a very gradual climb to some epic resolution (which is part of the charm), with shorter RPGs (for example, Vagrant Story) by the time you've really carved out your place in the story the abrupt conclusion feels very deflating. It's not that there is something wrong with the long RPG, it is just that the shorter RPG is a different breed of game and needs to be approached as its own entity because it tends to cater to a different crowd.

I agree that both rulesets and themes would have to change a lot. Focus would have to shift (both in story and mechanics) from character empowerment to character relations. Away from the epic "larger than life" quest to something more personal or though provoking. Less Peter Jackson, more Christopher Nolan.

Ironically this would probably line up well with the intended demographics. The traditional long RPG is aimed at the age 15-25, a time where our daily lives revolve around growing up and explore the world. So games with epic quest s and large worlds are a perfect fit. It's also an age in where time is in relative abundance compared to post graduate life of work and family. So game length is a non issue. The short RPG would be played by older gamers with less time. It would have to provide an experience relevant to a mature audience, since they would be the once who actually played it.

Here's another one: Game length.

Why do most (J)RPG:s feel the need to go beyond the 50 hour mark? I guess a part of the explanation is to have time to travel around the whole world map. Then on the other hand, why do we so often need to tell that particular story? The whole of story Koudelka (PS1) take stage in one mansion and during one single night. And that worked fine. How come we don't see more of these compact stories in RPG:s?

i think the problem is that the "core fanbase" for jrpgs DOES want long games.

True. But I also think this is something that keeps a lot of people out of the genre. Theoretically the "market" for shorter (5-10 hours) JRPGs with less Grind and more Puzzle should be there.

Right now the only thing I could come up with is damage = random(player.attack + weapon.attack) - random(enemy.defence + emeny.armour) but I think that would be kinda lame and maybe a bit too random.

Suggestions please? 

I have not tested this yet, so it's just a theory, but I think you'll simplify balancing if you drop addition and sustraction in favour of multiplication and division.

In my current project I'm going to try something like this: damage = baseAttack * weapon.attack/enemy.armour

Assume a standard attack has an  baseAttack of 25, a hitRate of 80% and takes a full turn. Then we have an attack effectiveness over time  of 20 (25*80%/1). If we want to expand this with could add a weak and fast attack (20 = 12.5*80%/0.5), or a slow high damage attack with a low hit rate (20 = 100*40%/2). Since all the attacks have the same attack effectiveness over time, they would be balanced in the "normal" case. Armour will not effect their effectiveness relative to each other.

That said, using dividing armor practically means that an armor improvement of 10% is actually just an HP improvement of 10%, and you might not want this linear translation.

Having subtracting armour on the other makes this Math a lot harder for you as a designer. Let's assume an armour value 10 and see how that would effect the three attacks mentioned above:

Light attack: (12.5 - 10) * 80% / 0.5 = 4
Standard attack: (25 - 10) * 80% / 1 = 12
Heavy attack: (100 - 10) * 40% / 2 = 36

In this example the heavy attack will be 9 times more efficient over time than the light attack. This might be what you want, but you will have to make a lot of adjustments and tweaks to prevent slow heavy attacks from becoming the dominant strategy.

Here's another one: Game length.

Why do most (J)RPG:s feel the need to go beyond the 50 hour mark? I guess a part of the explanation is to have time to travel around the whole world map. Then on the other hand, why do we so often need to tell that particular story? The whole of story Koudelka (PS1) take stage in one mansion and during one single night. And that worked fine. How come we don't see more of these compact stories in RPG:s?

unadjustable encounter rate.

An adjustable encounter rate is something that needs the right kind of attention to work properly. I playing Bravely Default and loving it, but I never touch the encounter rate adjustment. It feels wrong, like I'm cheating, because it's outside the game play mechanics introduced by the world. If it was an early item or a cheap potion, then it would have been a completely different things.

[First rule of item crafting and abundance:]

First rule of item crafting and abundance:
Assuming that a the same ingredient can be acquired again and again by completing same set of actions again and again and that there is no practical limit to how many times this set of actions can be repeated, then it does not make sense (from a mechanics perspective) to require more that one instance of that ingredient for the same recipe. This is extra true if the crafting system has a non-realistic context such as the making of magic potions.

Only exception I can thing of for this is setting and flavour text. If the recipes are in rhyme or verse adding "two" of something might be required.

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.

I don't really have an issue with reusing Elves/Orcs/etc. If the central story or mechanic of a game does not revolve around a specific trait of a specific culture, then reusing established tropes saves info dumping. The same argument also holds for the Meat/Thief/Tesla/Nurse-team. It something not a part of what makes a game unique, then don't make it needlessly complicated.

What does bug me however is the simplified world view where all Elves are all good and all beautiful, whilst Orcs are the unquestioned targets of a player lead genocide. Those stories just remind me why I stopped taking LoTR seriously after reading Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. I would love to play a game where the Orc equivalent of Nelson Mandela fights to abolish the oppressive Apartheid regime of South Lothlórien.

[Grandia]

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.