Designing Encounters, Take 2: Players are not your enemy, Part 2: Solutions

"Frustrating" to "Interesting"
 
There are common methods to making a frustrating fight more interesting. The key in many of these is interaction. One of the most important principles is interaction between the game and the player. We aren't watching a movie here. The player has to be actively engaged in the experience. Many signs of frustration are simply the fact that they are artifical barriers that the player can't do anything about. The enemies have a little more health and so the fight simply takes longer.  These barriers are non-interactive and only serve as pure impediments.

In a racing game, you could make the automatic car non-responsive as all hell. That would be "difficult" because now the player will have a harder time getting first place. Compare that kind of difficulty versus a racing game where the only cars you can drive are manual. That would be more difficult but the player actually has an avenue to interact with.

1. Clear cause and effect - "Oh, the dragon roars before he does his flame breath. 

A clear cause and effect relationship lets the player learn the patterns in the encounter. If the causes are unclear and the effects devestating, then the player might be confused as to what he is actually going to see. If a player doesn't know what hit him, there's very little he can do to actually learn.


Subtle hints can be a good idea but remember not to go overboard. The more likely a player is to miss a hint, the less he should be punished for missing it.

2. Directness - "The dragon isn't just a walking sack of hit points."

Directness is critical to ensuring player interaction. Players don't want a longer fight. They want a more intense fight. A boss encounter that lasts an hour and a half with the player being in no real danger for 89 minutes is not fun. Once the player has perfected his strategy and his actions, the encounter should end relatively quickly.


A corollary to this is that there should be some path to victory that is within the player's grasp. If you set out to design your encounters with no real solution, your players will bend almost every rule and probably break your game/fight in order to overcome your encoutner.


3. High Player Interaction - "If I block, the flame breath does much less, and if I hit his leg he limps a little!"

Make all actions, even the ones that aren't optimal, do something for the player. If the player can't dodge the thousands of shards sent his way, at least make his block action mitigate damage. If the player can't hit the monster at exactly the right time, at least reward him with a little bit of damage. Nothing is worse than demanding flawlessness in your player.

"You have to hit this boss at this exact instant or nothing happens."

However small, the player should feel the effects of his actions. Have the boss bleed, or bellow taunts or scream in agony. Have a health bar or numbers pop up with damage. You want to avoid the scenario where the player has hit the boss 1000 times, only to die before the 1001th hit which would've killed the boss but the player gave up because he had no idea how many hits left he had to go.

4. Guidance IF the player needs it - "That flame blast looked like it hurt. Pay attention to his roar and prepare to defend yourself!"

On one hand, you don't want to give all the boss strategies away. On the other hand, it is highly important that if the player keeps failing, that the game realizes this and tosses him a hint or a clue to help him progress. If all else fails, remember to give the player guidance and suggestions if he's clearly doing it wrong or struggling to succeed.


"A clever example in the game Eternal Darkness was the Guardian boss. The player can only defeat this boss with magic. If the player insists on using guns to fight him, the Guardian boss simply laughs after 1-2 minutes with the phrase 'No human weaponry can defeat me, mortal', giving the player a subtle hint as to what he's supposed to be doing."


5. Options - "Man. I just can't defeat this dragon. Maybe I should look for some gear that increases my fire resistance?"

Options make more sense in RPGs where wearing the correct gear makes certain scenarios a lot easier. Being able to find/collect fire absorbing gear against bosses that primarily use fire makes the fight trivial. Essentially, if the players can't find a strategic way out, they should feel like they have enough tools/items at their disposal to "try."  Whether that be armors that mitigate specific types of damage or just a wide range of spells/tools designed for niche purposes, options exist to give players hope that perhaps they can find some tool that will make their encounter a lot easier.

Without options available, the player can only continually bang his head on the same roadblock that's been bugging him continuously. 

Afterword, my rule of thumb on attacks:


Here's my rule of thumb for toning down difficult encounters to interesting ones. For every single move/encounter/attack pattern the  player might face, you get to choose 2 out of the 3...

1. Highly Damaging/Effective
2. Hard to Dodge
3. Hard to Predict

If something is hard to dodge and hard to predict, then it shouldn't punish the player too badly because there's very little he could do about it. If something is hard to dodge and highly damaging or effective, then the player must be able to predict that it's coming. If something is hard to predict and highly damaging, then the player must be able to dodge the effect once it occurs. If something is highly damaging, hard to predict and hard to dodge then you might as well just kill the player outright because you're not giving him very many opportunities to interact.