Have you ever seen things happen in CRPGs that do not make logical sense?

Here are a couple examples:

* In Might and Magic 3, items can have random affixes, for example an item might be wooden or obsidian. In particular, note that items can also be leather (including things like rings and swords). However, there is a base item called "leather armor", which can have affixes attached. This means you can have things like "wooden leather armor" and "leather leather armor". Does that make any sense?

* In the Dragon Quest series, there is a rather infamous enemy known as the Metal Slime (and it has some stronger relatives that behave similarly, but are stronger and give more XP). For anyone not familiar with this enemy, it has low HP (3 in DQ1 for example), high defense so your attacks do 0 or 1 damage (unless you get a critical, which igonres defense), is immune to magic, likes to run away, and gives a huge amount of XP. It turns out that this particular enemy is often hard to run away from. So, if you don't feel like fighting one (say, you're playing DQ6 and DQ7 and want to avoid XP, or if you're speedrunning with a route so precise that an unwanted level up can screw things up), you might try to run away, fail, and have the enemy run away. Does that make any sense? (Also, up through DQ7, it's possible for Metal Slimes to ambush you and run away before you get to enter a command.)

(Note: For purposes of this topic, I am mainly interested in things that derive from the game's rules, not those that are explicitly scripted or placed by the game designers.)

I remember that. I also remember some game (though I can't recall which) also had quality descriptors in the same vein, so you could find stuff like "rusty leather armor".

One thing that comes to mind is (vanilla) TES4 - Oblivion, where the level scaling brings about bandits and highwaymen clad in Glass or Ebony Armour which are supposedly tremendously rare and expensive artifacts (and indeed it's hard to find a merchant with enough money to sell those pieces to). With equipment like that they could buy a whole village and live happily ever after sitting in the sun drinking Shadowbanish Wine for the rest of their lives...

Nothing CRPG specific comes to mind right now, but the wooden leather armor made me think of Rise of the Tomb Raider in which you can excavate hidden caches, and one of them was located in a space with a wooden floor, so Lara just dug in the wooden boards like she would usually dig in the earth, and judging by the resulting mound, it appears that the wood was filled with dirt as well. ;P

In Avernum, you can be presented with an Androcles choice. (Help a trapped animal in hopes of a reward) only for it to turn out to be a hungry animal.

But more pointedly, there are several strange sidequests such as delivering meat to someone under mysterious circumstances or the entire Xian series of items.

In South Park: Stick of Truth you can summon Mr. Slave to shove an enemy up his butt while you're doing a quest inside his butt. Assception that defies all common sense.

I actually prefer the approach that Dragon Quest took, and that has been followed by JRPGs since; you can only rest in town at the inn (and towns are small enough that finding that inn isn't a problem), pay a nominal fee, and your entire party is fully restored. This solves the logical issues and cements the role of the town as a "home base" where you go between adventures to rest up; it also makes mid-term resource management a meaningful mechanic. (It's certainly more sensible than the "can rest anywhere except in town" mechanic that seems to be common in WRPGs.)

With that said, I don't like time limits for quests, so I don't like the approach of Patfinder: Kingmaker. Instead of having such a restriction on resting, make it so that you have to kleave the dungeon and go to a designated safe spot to rest when you run out of MP; if you aren't near the end of the dungeon but are low on MP, a tactical retreat might be a good idea. On your next trip, you'll have the experience and treasure from the previous trip, and you'll also know how to get through the earlier part of the dungeon and reach the unexplored areas faster and in better shape.

Final Fantasy 1 allows resting on the world map via consumable items, as well as resting in the inn at towns. (The only item that lets you regain MP when you rest is a bit expensive, however; FF2 has the same issue with its only rest item, and FF3 omitted such items entirely.)

Then, Final Fantasy 4 came and made a couple further tweaks:
* There are save points in dungeon; by using an easily obtainable (that is, buyable and not expensive) item, you can rest at those save points. Longer dungeons sometimes even have multiple save points.
* Resting does even more; you can now cure status ailments and even the condition that occurs at 0 HP by resting. (In FF4, note that Tents don't work for this IIRC, but Cottages do; FF5 I believe allows Tents to work for that purpose.)

I hear later games in the series (maybe starting with FF10?) went even further; instead of needing an item to rest, when you hit a save point your party is fully restored for free.

[Final Fantasy 4 spoilers here]

Just a few things in Final Fantasy 4 that could be considered glitches, and which can wreak havoc with the plot's scripting:

Final Fantasy 4:
* Early in the game, it is possible to avoid entering the village of Myst, allowing you to skip it. If you do this, you can then proceed as normal for a bit, albeit with Kain in your party when he shouldn't be. Tellah will not be in his usual spot, so he won't join you but will still appear in cutscenes. Unfortunately, when you get to the scripted Tellah versus Edward fight, the game will crash.
* If, instead, you go back to Myst after protecting Rydia, you can then trigger the cutscene there as normal. At this point, your party of Cecil, Kain, and Rydia will be fighting against the girl who is later revealed to be Rydia. Does that make any sense at all?
* At one point in the game you actually fight Golbez; after the battle, he turns into a hand that grabs the crystal and then disappears. When you regain control after the cutscene, you can have Rydia (who just joined your party) cast Warp (revive her if necessary; Phoenix Downs are really cheap in this game), and teleport back into the crystal room. If you go to where the crystal was, you'll find that it's still there and can pick it up.
* After you get that crystal, you can continue the game normally until you reach the sealed cave. At this point, the cutscene where Golbez shows up and Kain betrays you will happen, the crystal will be taken from you, and you can then proceed as though you had cleared the cave, thus allowing you to skip one of the most annoying dungeons in the game (it's the one with all the trapdoors, and which blocks Teleport (but not Warp) in order to prevent you from skipping the aformentioned cutscene).

This has changed in DQ11. You can also find campfires in the wild where you can rest, among other things that you can do. DQ has always been a conservative series in term of gameplay, but Yuji Horii has (finally) opened his mind to new features.

Baldur's Gate 2 when you try to rest in Hell (I think only early versions):

"You may not rest here. Either find an inn or rest outside."

[Final Fantasy 5 spoilers]

Final Fantasy 5 also has some odd things that can happen as a result of glitches. Here are some that are related to event scripting and cutscenes:
* When you reach the first town in the second world, the first time you go to the inn there will be a scene where Galuf gets up in the middle of the night and goes to the pub to get a drink. Later in the game, there is a (mandatory) scene in which Galuf gets plot killed, and is therefore never in your party after that point (although at least other characters try to revive him and fail, unlike a death in a certain other game). If you hold off on going to that inn earlier until after Galuf's death, and then decide to rest there, the cutscene with Galuf will *still* play, even though he should be dead at this point.
* In the third world, you'll be sent to the Great Library during a cutscene. If, after the cutscene resolves, you cast Teleport, you will end up right outside the place where the cutscene started, but there will be some changes to the world map that allows you to ride your chocobo around the world, allowing a sequence break. (Unfortunately, this doesn't let you beat the game faster, because you still can't enter the final dungeon.) At this point, Lenna is not in your party, but if you do things out of order, she will show up in cutscenes, and once you reach the Fork Tower, she will become a party member even though she shouldn't be in your party. You can then go through the pyramid as normal, then later fight the demon who possessed Lenna with Lenna in your party, which is not supposed to happen. After the fight, she will still be in your party, but dead and need to be revived.
* If you win that fight with just Lenna, you will have a party of all dead characters. At this point, you can walk around as much as you want; as long as you don't get into a fight, you won't get a game over. You can even use a Phoenix Down or a Tent from the item menu, and can revive characters that way (as I said, Tents revive in this game, as do Cottages).
* One thing that does make sense, but is not what you'd expect to be implemented: If you do this, and then go to the mountain where Bahamut would be before triggering the cutscene that would awaken him, he actually won't be there. (This situation isn't normally possible in world 3, but it happens here.)

There are also some wierd game mechanics things with Final Fantasy 5 ("Not enough MP" but the spell still worked, for one), but that's for another post.

Yeah, I remember that from the few JRPGs I played like FF7. I think they also sold tents for the world map? That makes sense logically and doesn't take a stupid amount of time in-game.

The issue with Kingmaker especially is that resting is this long drawn-out process that brings up multiple menus and character animations. It's just super tedious, especially since they added it to the world map. At least in games like Baldur's Gate it goes by in a flash, from what I recall.

I hear that Pool of Radiance is also bad with this, but in a different way. In that game, the issues with resting are that, even in a safe place:
* 8 hours of rest or so will allow you to memorize (bad term, but that's what the game uses) all your spells, but will only give your party members 1 hit point each.
* There is a healing spell, and you get it right away, but it only heals 1-8 hit points to one character (and you could easily roll a 1 here, which is quite annoying having to go through the menus only to get 1 measly hit point, as I know from my Wizardry experience). There is no upgraded healing spell in the game, so even at the level cap, you are still only getting 1-8 hit points per spell cast.
* If you want to get the spell back after casting it, simply resting isn't enough; you have to go back through the menu to select the spell to memorize each time before you rest (and if you forget, you don't get the spell back). No, the game doesn't remember your previous choices; you have to choose the spells you want every single time.
* No, there is no "auto-cast healing spells on rest" option; you have to manually cast them each time.
* As a result of all this, the fastest way (in real time, not game time) to fully heal a severely injured high level character is to rest for literally weeks of in-game time, which still takes a decent amount of real-time.

(Fortunately, later Gold Box games improved this issue.)

I coulld also mention the original Wasteland, where there is no rest option; the only practical way to heal is to keep skipping turns doing nothing. (It's a good thing the DOS version has macros, so you can set one to be a bunch of ESC presses to make resting be decently fast.)

Dragon Wars, incidentally, did this better; there are pools near the starting point that fully restore your magic power, there are spells that heal the entire party at once, and your health doesn't get high enough for 1-8 points of healing to not feel like enough outside of combat, plus there's the Bandage skill which provides out-of-combat healing up to a certain value (10 + Bandage skill, to be precise).

As for Wizardry, the only main series Wizardry games that handled resting in a sensible way are 4 and 8.

Arcanum

You can be kicked out of fancy restaurant for not wearing elegant enough suit.

That sounds reasonable enough; what would be bizarre is if you could be kicked out for wearing a suit that was *too* elegant.

Here are some mechanics ones:

SaGa 1/Morrowind: Being blind increases your accuracy. (In SaGa 1, this only applies to basic strength-based attacks.)

SaGa 1:
* More AGI makes you take more damage from multi-hit attacks.
* More MANA makes you more vulnerable to a slime's Melt attack.
* All-enemy hitting magic attacks are unaffected by the enemy's magic defense (equal to enemy's MANA) unless the enemy is weak against it.
* Group targeted spells ignore magic defense when used by you, but not when used against you.
* At one point you will be randomly attacked by an invincible bird that you are supposed to run away from (which works about half the time, though note that the RNG is rather poor in this game). If that bird runs away (becaue it ran out of attacks), it will undergo a boss death animation, splitting into pieces.
* The Saw only works if the attacker's STR is less than the defender's DEF. Yes, this means that it's easier to saw apart a god than it is to saw apart a goblin. At 100 STR, there are only two enemies you can saw apart, one of which is the aforementioned invincible bird, the other is the final bas.

Morrowind also has some more of these:
* Repairing is more likely to succeed when you're tired.
* At extremely high Mercantile skill, merchants start offering less for goods you sell them.
* At extremely high Mercantile skill, you can sell cheap items for all of a merchant's gold, and then buy valuable items for 1 gold each. (Note that buying at 1 gold might take too long, so it's faster to pay full price and then sell a worthless item to get all that money back.)

And in Daggerfall:
* Resting on your patio (or even thinking about doing so) is grounds for arrest.
* On your ship, which you've payed for, trying to bash down the door will cause guards to come after you, even though you're in the middle of the ocean. (Note that this region has no courts, so yielding to them will simply lower you to 1 HP.)

There's more that can be said about the Elder Scrolls games that is appropriate for this topic, but this post is too small to contain them.