In Drakkhen [PC, never tried SNES], if you have a party member die too early in the game, you may as well start over (or reload). Rezes are too expensive for quite some time.

I was thinking not of death (though I agree that it should be easy to reverse), but rather of hit point healing. Wizardry 1-3 and 5-7, and Pool of Radiance, make it time consuming to simply restore your HP after a hard adventure. You have to rest, cast the few pathetically weak healing spell you get (and it's a while before you get something better (except Wizardry 6-7, which front load it but don't have anything good for late game); in PoR you never get something better), get frustrated because it decided to restore only 1 HP (it heals 1-8 HP), rest to get the spell back, and repeat.

There's a reason later Gold Box games added the "FIX" menu option, and that later D&D based games include an option to auto-cast healing spells on rest.

FF2's issues are largely due to things like pacing, balance, and keeping one mechanic hidden that shouldn't have been. If the game were to get a full remake that reworked much of the game, but kept the idea behind the leveling system, it would be truly great.

Also, even if you think the game is bad, there's still no way it's as bad as Hoshi wo Miru Hito, which gets even basic games wrong.

(Worth noting that I *do* like FF2, but I still admit that it has issues.)

I do hope that SE brings the remasters to some DRM-free platform; I would buy them. In the meantime, I'll have to settle for playing Romancing SaGa 2 in Japanese, which could get tricky.

(If you're going to try a SaGa game, don't start with Unlimited SaGa; literally *any* SaGa is a better choice. Even the original SaGa (Final Fantasy Legend) is a good choice; the game is actually very fast paced, especially if you start with a female main character and sell her Saber right away.)

Let me save anywhere outside combat. On different slots. If you autosave, keep backups, or preferably all of them, I know how to delete files)

Let me rest where it makes sense within the game world (including ambush risks etc.)

That, and I'm pretty sure Trials doesn't have a [url=https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Pok%25C3%25A9mon_data_structure_(Generation_IV)]a fucking insane save checksum that manually checks the data of everything during each save.[/url]

Half joking here but do it Dark Souls style. You're role-playing? Play the role. Immerse yourself. Are you at a campfire/inn/whatever? No? Well then answering that food delivery at the door means some rowdy demon elves are going to come take a dump in your helmet after they cut your head off. You must feel the danger to understand your role.

As I said half joking. I love Dark Souls but I also love Dragon Quest, Fallout, etc. It might not be the best solution but menus, pausing, and safe zones certainly do take you out of immersion.

Another idea, (and I have no idea if this has been done) punish the player for saving outside of a safe town. Not with money as it can become almost too abundant late game in some RPGs. Make your party sacrifice some amount of XP. Maybe half of whatever hasn't been solidified into leveling up. If you were a real sadist you could take XP and have them possibly de-level which would be somewhat realistic. Your highly experienced party somehow got lost in the wilderness with no plan and are blindly wandering? It sounds like your party isn't THAT experienced, so you can save but everyone loses a level. Another option would be to just cut everyone's max HP by 50% until the next time you are able to rest at an inn. Again if you're a sadist you could make it stack or something to discourage spam saves once you took the initial hit.

I swear I'm not trying to think of ways to make everything terrible. Just brainstorming and I've clearly been playing too many difficult games as of late.

I *really* don't like this idea.

If you do insist of having a mechanic on these lines, reward the player for not saving for a while rather than punishing the player for saving. Perhaps the player could get stat or XP boosts the longer the player goes without saving for a while. With this said, I still don't like this because it discourages saving, and not saving I see as being a bad habit of many players.

Also, the cut max HP option increases the risk of the player saving themself into a corner in which the player is not strong enough to go from the save to a safe spot (perhaps there's a boss in the way).

Interestingly enough, I have had a similar idea, only it wors with resting rather than saving; as you fight enemies, you'll quickly gain some stat boosts (there is a very reachable cap), but the stat boosts go away when you rest. Resting will be the most convenieng (perhaps only?) way to recover your resource, but if you rest too often, you won't be able to hold on to the stat boost; in particular, resting right before a boss fight might not be a good idea. In game where it's easy to avoid or run away from encounters, this mechanig would encourage the player to fight at least some encounters on their way to the boss (or fight easier encounters if the dungeon is something like Dragon Quest 2's Cave to Rhone, which is a dungeon that has incredibly dangerous encounters later on, but (fortunately) no boss).

Interestingly enough, SaGa Frontier 2 has a mechanic where, the lower your current WP is, the more powerful your martial arts are, and the lower your current SP, the more powerful your spell arts. So, your Firestorm spell might not be strong enough to kill some of the enemies at the start of an event, but will gradually grow in power as the event progresses until it is. (Note that, due to the way SP boosting equipment works, your SP will never start a battle below a certain amount, so you don't need to worry abou running out, and there's still the option of spending LP if you do run out.) With that said, SF2 only lets you rest in town, and in many events (including, rather infamously, the final dungeon), there's no way to do that without ending the event (at which point you can't go back).

It's also an issue with games that use skill point systems or similar systems that require the player to make irreversible choices wen it comes to character progression. In many of these situations, I like to make one choice, play with it for a bit (without saving), then reload and try a different choice.

It's why I never got into Quest for Camelot (early Game Boy Color game).

It's also one of the three reasons I didn't get Breath of Fire 5: Dragon Quarter; the others were the D-Counter, serving as a (turn-based) time limit (which went against what I was looking for in RPGs at the time), and the copy protected save file (which I consider to be a form of DRM).

In RPGs, saving everywhere besides maybe in combat. It would still be preferable to be able to save in combat, but it might be very problematic to restore everything as it should be in the middle of it (AI, positions of everything etc. and ensuring the same things happen as if you didn't load) so no saving in combat is acceptable.

Checkpoints and auto-saves are a great addition to manual saving in case you forget, but checkpoint only systems usually irritate me too much.

As for resting, there probably should be some limitation to it to prevent spamming it constantly and making healing items useless as is the case in Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale.

This is an interesting idea, although if you were going to do this, the game would need to provide a way to make back the lost XP, which would most likely be via random encounters or respawning enemies. Otherwise the game would get progressively more difficult, as the PCs would be under-leveled. The issue I see is that might then lead to more XP grinding and repetitive gameplay. Although perhaps random-encounter grinding would be preferable for some than having to play the same static content over again, if saves were restricted.

The problem with the resting model in those games is they're based off a tabletop RPG where, the GM would, with such resting, start having the bad guy win. Collect more reinforcements, spy on the player characters to learn their weaknesses, expand their power base, etc. That's pretty hard to do in a CRPG outside of "rests since this quest became active give buffs to the story characters in it". (Or scripted failure of quests sidequests; it can't happen much in main quests.)

Codified in the rules for 13th Age (one of the better d20 variants):

Thing is, when I play a CRPG, often I just want to build up my party of adventurers, and sometimes I want to do that but don't want to progress the plot, so I don't like having this sort of limit on rests.

So, I would rather have limitations on where one can rest (perhaps only at towns and "save points" (even if saving is possible anywhere) than a limitation on how many times you can rest, or a side effect to resting.

(In Romancing SaGa, time can pass without you being there, causing quests to open and close, but it's done by the number of encounters you fight, which encourages the player to avoid encounters in order to not fail quests, and that just feels like poor game design to me. A bette approach would have been to have time pass based off the number of quests completed instead, but then you have to make sure that the player can't get into a situation where there are no open quests.)

As I said, I think the mechanic:
* Would work better in reverse.
* Would work better if attached to the rest mechanic rather than the save mechanic.

Also, in some games, lower level characters get more XP from the same enemies, so that could be a way to let them catch up and make the loss only temporary. Then again, some games don't use XP in the first place.

By the way, Wizardry 4 uses the approach of a different sort of penalty for saving; when you save, you are returned to the title screen, and when you reload, the level is reloaded, meaning that defeated enemies will come back to life. (Note that, unlike most RPGs, you don't grow stronger by killing enemies in Wizardry 4.)

I think one way to discourage resting too frequently is through timed quests/events, so that if the player wastes too much in-game time, then there will be negative consequences. I.e. assign some level of urgency to quests, so that in-game time is a resource the player has to manage. I have the impression that Pathfinder:Kingmaker has tried to do this (although I haven't played it, so can't comment on the implementation).

Another option is through making the PCs require supplies (i.e. food, water), which would deplete over time. Imo, coupling that with making it non-trivial to travel back to the safe zones, plus a strict weight allowance, can add a nice, realistic layer of having to manage that. Again, I struggle to think of many CRPGs that have done it well.

Do it like Dark Souls. The game constantly saves and you can exit at any time but you can only rest at bonfires. You have to live with the consequences of your choices and that's good because it ups the stakes and intensity.

There are enough players who dislike time limits in RPGs, as well as many who dislike time limits in general, for this mechanic to not be that good of a solution.

Having to live with the consequences is not good, because it discourages experimentation, and it also makes the game more stressful, which is often not what the player wants. (In general, I am typically OK with losing progress from the current game session (with the exception of lucky RNG drops, and only up to a point), but I am not OK with losing progress made from previous game sessions.) I prefer the stakes to be limited, so that dying isn't too punishing.

In fact, I wouldn't mind having the penalty for death be negative, where it's necessary to die to grow in power.


You don't have to make it non-trivial to return to safe zones; just make it non-trivial to return to the place you just were.

Also, weight allowances and inventory space limitations are annoying. I can see limits on carried consumables making sense from a gameplay standpoint, but limiting non-consumables can often be annoying, since it forces inventory management needlessly.

Yes, I know a lot of players dislike in-game time limits. Although I think in principle they make sense and, as mqstout mentioned, in a tabletop RPG the GM would probably bring in some negative consequences if the players were wasting a lot of time. I'd say a lot depends on the implementation. Bear in mind the 'negative consequences' don't have to be as black and white as quests being failed. There are more nuanced consequences that could be introduced, for example allowing enemies to regroup and prepare more.

I quite like weight/space limitations in RPGs, as I feel they add to realism and immersion. Inventory management can add a layer of strategic preparation to a game, if players need to pick and choose what equipment/consumables to take on a given quest. Also, bear in mind there can be negative consequences of not having inventory limitations, if you have to search through piles of junk to find what you need (coughDivinity:OriginalSincough ...)