If the game has easy respec or the equivalent, case 2 could actually be interesting. The idea here is to make the bosses a puzzle that needs to be solved, and part of the solution involves what some players refer to as min-maxing. If such a game is well-designed, the player would need to switch up their set-up for each boss fight, or for each dungeon (fire resistance might be good for the volcano, but for a game of this level maybe there should be an enemy thrown in that uses a nasty ice attack, that the fire resistance ability makes you weak against).

Abusing the game mechanics can be fun, and it can be a good puzzle if such abuse is actually required.

(See, for example, kaizo mario hacks (or mario maker levels). There's also troll levels, where the player isn't usually required to abuse the mechanics (and the level, if well designed, will provide a hint if that's necessary, though generally after the player has failed once), but the level creator certainly does.)

I don't like having to do this sort of thing just to maximize the XP that I get.

I could also mention the case of Ys: The Oath in Felghana. In this game, enemies respawn, but enemies give lower XP when you're at a higher level. This would ordinarily prevent you from overleveling, but if you leave the dungeon immediately after getting the double jump, you can temporarily skip it, kill stronger normal enemies to gain many extra levels, and when you go back to fight the bosses you skipped (which you will have to do unless you can glitch into the castle), you are overleveled to the point where boss fights become a joke. (The fact that one level makes too much of a difference is part of the issue here.) It may be possible to do something like this in Ys 6 (as soon as you can kill some enemies in that dark dungeon), but Ys Origin is too linear for this to work.

Also, I could mention Icewind Dale 2, where XP is gained based on the average party level, so adding a level 1 character to the party will make the rest of your party level up faster.

Which works fine until you're looking for a specific monster that isn't found in one of those respawning area, perhaps for a specific enemy drop.

(Interesting example: SaGa Frontier (where enemies do respawn) has a form of level scaling where stronger enemies replace weaker ones, but there are some areas where the enemies are capped in level, allowing you to farm specific enemies (like Unicorns) for their Mystic/Monster abilities. Unfortunately, this only goes back so far, and I believe some monster abilities can be permanently missed or become much harder to get.)

If that's in any way needed, it's bad design from where I'm standing.

Redemption stories are basically the reciprocal story of Jesus. You have a character in a story that is weak, powerless, and worthless. It is through hard word and growth that the character changes their personality and, also, their skills in such a way that they become strong: usually you start weakest force in the universe and end strongest thing in the universe. These stories tend to be very popular the whole world over. The same mechanic also exists in the Elder Scrolls series. FF2 was notorious for being the game that did it so wrong, they never repeated this idea.

I was thinking about balancing it against a real-life scale, based on my own experience. For example, when I first started studying boxing, to properly get a jab down, it can take a month or two (if you only practice once a week for about 2 hours) to get the nuance of putting your weight in vs not putting your weight into it, making sure your shoulders are loose, etc. Takes even longer to learn how to keep it right when you're hitting a moving target. Even longer for when the target pokes back (even if it doesn't hurt). etc. Obviously, the harsher the conditions, the faster you improve the technique (albeit with certain bad habits). This is why, of course, it makes sense to have more XP given for harder enemies, rather than having a flat rate. If 60 turns is one hour (for the sake of argumetn), then level 5 of a jab should take 120 jabs in the air with no opponent. With an opponent, maybe cut that down to 30 jabs. The level decides the percentage of success of a particular attribute of the jab, where max level (100 for a percentage argument) becomes complete proficiency which makes all attributes reliable come out. Maybe have a multiplier for XP based on your HP (to represent how dangerous an enemy is to you, based on how much trouble you're in).

Obviously, some skills, like perhaps the mining ones or the sexual ones, will come alot more naturally as there's less danger involved, a higher natural incentive, etc. And, of course, the skills themselves are merely multipliers and appliers of your harder to control characteristics, like strength, weight, etc. Of course, this sounds way more complicated than it really is. On the practical side, if you simply want to go kill things with your sword, you simply take "sword training lessons" at the local military outpost, from friends of high skill, or whatever. Then you go out and kill weak enemies and your strength and sword skills will naturally rise. The complexity comes in as the muscles atrophy because you're too busy selling goods, spending time with your virtual spouse, etc. Some skills will be forgettable (fire spell, for example) if you never use it, but those will be affected much less than, say, your lifestyle choices. And, of course, what would a game with this complexity be without a complex relationship system where you could also presumably talk your way out of a fight with a silver tongue or even recruit companions that survived other adventures with you.

Games like Pokemon have a lot of "looking for a specific monster" situations (though they don't have limited spawns for common pokemon). With that said, in Pokemon random encounters only occur in grass or dungeons; on non-grass overworld squares there's no chance of a random encounter.

(There's also one-time-only pokemon trainer battles, but you can't catch pokemon during them. I would still have preferred the battles to be repeatable, especially since in Pokemon Red they're the only way to get money which doesn't involve a move that's only available through a TM or trading with Blue.)

I actually didn't think FF2 got this aspect wrong, in fact I think the growth system is pretty well thought out for its time (especially the way HP increases work). What went wrong is other things, like the slow pacing of the game (excessively long dungeons with no save points), and the fact that heavy armor hurts you more than it helps.

Some of the SaGa games adopted ideas that were used in FF2.

(I wish more games would use this sort of approach for character growth; just tweak some things and the system could actually work rather well.)
Final Fantasy 2 actually gives you more weapon and magic experience for fighting stronger enemies. Also, the way HP gains work, you only gain HP if you lose a significant portion of it in a single battle, so low HP characters are likely to get HP increases, while high HP characters are not.

In the meantime, Daggerfall, Morrowind, and Oblivion fail to implement this; reaching high skill levels requires more skill XP, but yet harder tasks don't reward any more skill XP than easier tasks.

Also, keep in mind that HP is not always a good measure of power. FF2 is an extreme example here; a 9999 HP character with Genji Armor will have a harder time against the final boss than a character with ~1000 HP wearing light armor and a good shield.

In particular, people say that the HP system while a good idea on paper, was impractical and often encouraged self-harm in order to grind. And, people said that it was excessively grindy compared to other games. It makes That's why it works in TES. Was a good idea, but the trick is to balance it. It allows for alot more realism and also fluidity, but you have to make sure it doesn't become an issue. HP was clearly handled wrong, and unrealistically. You aren't more likely to recover and get healthier from a mortal wound, as opposed to microtears on muscle fiber. I hear complaints about how grindy the whole system was, but the HP was the one that everyone said was the worst. Which is completely counter to what i'm looking for. Someone who takes excessive abuse should instead become significantly weaker. Compare Iron Palm training to fractures. They should, because people learn better from learning from their failures (something no game implements). Successes at things you have the least experience with should also grant the highest rewards. IMO, certain skills should rely more on attributes, but other skills should rely more on the equipment. For example, a sharp edge of a sword shouldn't need much strength to do damage, since it's the edge that does the work. A mace, on the other hand, just needs to withstanded the pressure it's taking while the real power comes from the user's strength. Obviously, both should be effected by skill level (being able to apply the weapon where it needs to be applied).

FF2 veterans like myself know that self-harm to get high HP is not a good strategy. Thing is, some enemies (as well as the Blood Sword) have the property that, for every hit, 1/16th of the target's max HP will be stolen from the target and given to the caster. (Damage is done to current HP, but is based off max HP.) This means that high HP characters will take more damage from such attacks, which has two consequences:
* It will take more Cure casts (and hence more MP) to heal from the attack. (The only full heal options are Elixirs, which are expensive and inventory space is limited (in GBA and later, where inventory space is a concern, even endgame you won't have the money to buy 99 of these), and Life 16 on a single dead character, which is impractical because your spell levels generally end up around 8 for your most used spells around endgame (except Cure, which is special because of how often you cast it outside of combat).)
* The enemy will be healed by more, which means it will take more work to kill the enemy. In the extreme case, you may find yourself unable to kill the final boss (whose attack has this property) because of this.

The real way to increase your survivability is to boost your evasion. With high evasion, enemies will not hit you nearly as much, reducing the damage even from HP drain physicals. This leaves only enemy spells, and the damage from those spells is too low for you to need to worry (and if it isn't, you can expect to get HP increases off those enemies until damage is too low to manage).

TES HP gains suffer from the fact that the gains are not retro-active. A character who chooses to boost Endurance later will not get as much HP as one who boosts the stat earlier, and that's the sort of thing that really shouldn't matter, especially when no other attribute works this way. This issue is actually due to the part of the TES leveling system that works more conventionally; you have character levels (unlike FF2 and most SaGa), and gaining levels is the only way to increase your attributes and maximum HP (unlike FF2 and most SaGa where they increase by use (though SaGa handles HP differently from how FF2 handles it)).

TES also suffers from the fact that skill XP requirements increase at higher skill level, but skill XP gained does not increase with task difficulty. Also, I don't like the fact that, when you fail, you get *no* skill XP. (Contrast this to Dungeon Master, where failure gives you *some* class XP, or Wizardry 8, where skill increases are actually *more* likely when you fail.)

The problem with FF2 HP isn't so much how much work it is to get high HP, but rather that many players fall into the trap of wanting high HP when that actually isn't what you want.

What you say you're looking for feels counter to good game design. There should be a risk/reward trade-off; when players do riskier things, the reward for doing so should be greater.

(Also, I believe FF2 only increases max HP; if you want to raise current HP, you either need to rest (which costs more when more HP/MP need to be restored), or use a healing spell or item.)

Just be careful, or you might end up with a situation like SaGa 2's biggest balance flaw (IMO).
In SaGa 2:
* Accuracy of most melee weapons is based off Agility, the only exception being one particular weapon that does instant death rather than damage. Also, evasion against such weapons is Agility based.
* The majority of melee weapons deal damage based off Strength. Using them will raise your Strength (for Humans, anyway; Robots simply need to equip a weapon to get a stat boost, stronger weapons give a better boost, and you can equip multiple weapons to stack their boosts). This means that, while using such weapons will improve the damage you deal with them, it won't improve your accuracy, and eventually you're going to have trouble hitting enemies with it.
* There are 4 weapons (+ some more in the DS remake) that use Agility to determine damage, and using them will raise a human's Agility. This means you get one stat that affects both accuracy and damage, as well as evasion and turn order. As you can imagine, this is pretty powerful, only limited by the fact that melee weapons only hit a single enemy (aside from the fans that the DS remake added, which look rather scary from a balance perspective but don't feel quite as bad when actually used).

Case in point:
* A Robot armed with a bunch of Strength weapons will be able to do tremendous damage if it can actually hit. However, said Robot will be unable to actually hit higher-level enemies at all, unless you happen to give it one of the 2 weapons that never misses, both of which don't appear until late in the game (one in that optional dungeon I mentioned, one in the last dungeon that has treasure chests; note, however, that both weapons hit an entire group as well, which is *really* nice, and are significantly stronger than the DS version fans I mentioned). Furthermore, said robot is rather defenseless and will act at the end of the round.
* A Robot armed with a bunch of Lightsabers and/or Catclaws (Catclaws are better but more expensive and appear later) will consistently hit almost as hard as the Strength-based Robot I mentioned above, will consistently evade enemy physical attacks (put it in slot 1 for best results, as the enemies favor attacking that spot), and will act first as long as the initiative overflow bug (fixed in the DS version, but present in the original) does not trigger.

Incidentally, SaGa 2 also has weapons that don't use your stats to deal damage, like the beam rifle (351-400 damage regardless of stats) and missile (200-400 to all enemies). Also, bows and guns use stats for accuracy (AGI and STR respectively), but not for damage. Spells hit groups (sometimes all enemies) and never miss, but they use magic power (which Robots can't get in the original, and can only get through magical circuit boards in the DS verison), and usually have elements that some enemies are immune to.

Wizardry 8 says hi!

That all may be, indeed, true, but it also makes it harder to win by alternative strategies and such. Morever, it's very counter intuitive, thus a huge design flaw. If most of your player base is "doing it wrong," you either designed the game wrong or lack an explanation in the game. This is my main complaint with fighting games: they usually tell you to hit certain buttons, but don't explain whether or not your input needs to be timed (Virtua Fighter, Tekken) or needs to be input into a buffer to become effective (Dial-a-combo: Mortal Kombat, Dead or Alive, Street Fighter). Fighting games are quite fun and easy, but the barrier to entry is set high by the lack of explanation in a way that's easy for new players. They often make the issue worse by adding "blue-shell mechanics" like super-meters which are meant to make it easier for the player to make a comback. The real problem, however, is that games that are most fun are the ones with infinite complexity (which fighting games have) but are simply to get started in (which the tutorials aren't helping with). This is why something like pokemon was a smash hit: it's super simple to just pick your favorite little mouse and just remember not to try shocking Brock's Onyx, but instead switch to your manky which can break rocks with it's karate chops and low kicks (easy to remember once you know the tropes which exist outside of pokemon, too). At the other end of the spectrum, you have things like Normal (and now Fairy) being super tanky, and having a hidden advantage over Psychic (which isn't official), due to innate stats given to the type. You have both simple entry, yet a system in which more complexity can evolve naturally, with some hidden mechanics for people to explore further, hopefully, further than you the dev have come up with, which is when you know you created a masterpiece. You're confusing TES with the mainline Final Fantasy series. In TES, endurance and HP are completely unrelated (you choose one over the other: endurance is how winded you get from attacking or getting hit with certain types of attacks). Meanwhile, in mainline final fantasy games, especially final fantasy 3 (where, because i knew about this, i spent all my time as a monk, which kinda ruined the experience) you have this issue. I like wizardry in that regard, 'cause, as said, more realistic. The downside is, well, Wizardry characters have really, really short life spans. Right, and this is counter-intuitive. FF2 is a good game, however, to teach people not to min-max so much. Remember, it's to be a difficulty slider. The problem is, too often do you feel the need to max out because games have this tendency to shove a final boss on you that eats max-stat characters for breakfast. This creates the bad habit of min-maxing, because people normally wouldn't do this. It's not like people ever try to max their stats before the first boss or anything.

Yes, FF2 could have used some more explanation; the GBA version added a little tutorial if you go back into the room where the opening cutscene took place, but it honestly isn't enough. In particular, they fail to mention that wearing heavy armor will make your magic less effective (and there's no indication anywhere in the interface, or anywhere in the game's manual, that that is the case; furthermore, since the effect on damage spells is minor, most players don't notice and instead come to the erroneous conclusion that instant death spells are worthless, when they're actually borderline overpowered).

If I were in charge of an FF2 remake, I would include an indication of how much a character's equipment is interfering with their magic, and mention it explicitly in the manual and tutorial.

Interestingly, SaGa Frontier 2 has a similar mechanic, but the mechanic doesn't feel significant enough, and certainly not as significant as the game's plot makes it out to be. (Steel can at most reduce the effectiveness of spells by half (aside from the SP penalty for equipping it), but the story makes it out to be a bigger effect, to the point of nullifying spells. On the other hand, in SF2 it's only steel that interferes with magic, so it's much easier for the player to strategize around this mechanic, and avoid steel on casters, not to mention that it's mentioned in the story that steel absorbs Anima.)

Actually, in TES (excluding Skyrim and Battlespire), the HP you gain at level up is affected by your Endurance at the time of level up. (Note that temporary boosts don't count in Morrowind and Oblivion, but do in Arena.)

Final Fantasy 1 and 2 also have Endurance affecting HP gains. This is especially noticeable in FF2 where HP gained = Endurance, but it doesn't create the same issues simply because there's no arbitrary limit on the number of times you can increase HP, unlike in games with levels and level caps.

Final Fantasy 5 has the best handling of the situation: Your HP is a pure function of your level and base Endurance (including Job but not equipment), plus a bonus from any HP+ abilities you happen to have equipped. (Side note: Those HP+ abilities stack multiplicitively, so a character with 3 HP+30% abilities equipped will have over double the HP, but won't be able to do anything except copy the last character's action.) You make a character a Monk, you get the HP of a Monk; change the character into a Bard and you no longer have the HP, but change back into a Monk and you get it back (but note that you lose the Bard's Agility and Magic Power, unless you decide to give that Monk Equip Harp.)

I love RPGs which allow you to amass lots of levels, sadly it's mostly a JRPG thing.

What you're seeing is japanese culture manifesting itself. It comes from the language in particular. You have languages like spanish which are "pro-drop" (meaning that usually either subject or object pronouns are omitted except when emphasis is needed [usually subject pronouns 'cause they can be implied from verb conjugation]), then you have languages like japanese where the very possiblity of a complete sentence (by english standards) is questionable: that which can be implied is not stated. So the Japanese tend to bounce between two extremes in their games: not giving you enough info because they assume everyone knows the mechanics that they copied from another game (either their own or another famous series of the same genre) or having annoying amounts of popup notifications and hand-holding (ironically, the latter creates issues where information overload prior to trying things out prevents proper digestion). Oh wait, maybe you're right. I haven't touched 3 and 4 in a few years. Yeah. I like the idea of "early investment leads to larger payoff," however the fact that it always seems to be strictly HP in these games, it typically results in forcing someone to play 1 class for way, way too long if they want that HP. Having it always a recalculated function, however, tends to result in some drastic stat changes which don't feel right, and also sort of make the accomplishment feel shallow, like all you're doing is simply leveling up. To this degree, I feel like, indeed, these things would be better off having a form of "investment" but not "endurance * level" or "HP + endurance (at level up)" mentalities. Why not just make HP work the same way as any other stat: when you level up you get a choice on what stats you want to adjust, or there being some way to adjust individual stats without direct leveling?

The first seems insignificant, unless the gains are huge. The second, however, is what Pokemon does, and to great effect. A "win battle" button? Like, it just nukes the enemies without any costs? I think that might just be a step too far in the other direction. You're the first person i've ever read say that. IMO, TES did it much, much better from what i've seen. As you point out, they suffer the greatest game design flaw ever: lack of information on mechanics. Sure, you can look that up now, but that's not in the game, which it belongs, as per good game design. The FGC should point out, fairly quick, why expert players tend to be bad instructors.

In longer games, I don't, as such mechanics tend to limit what the player can do later in the game. Specifically, if the player is 50 hours into a 60 hour game, I would prefer the player to realistically try an entirely new build without having to start the entire game over.

Because HP isn't on the same scale as other stats. In most CRPGs, your HP will usually be your highest stat, sometimes by orders of magnitude.

Adjusting individual stats without direct leveling can be done in one of two main ways:
* A respec option that can be done without leveling up, but that allows re-allication of stat points. (There's the danger of the game encouraging overspecialization too much, however.)
* Have stats increase by some means other than leveling. Ultima 3 did this (you have to find a shrine and donate money to increase a stat). Also, Final Fantasy 2 and many SaGa games do this, by simply eliminating leveling.

In SaGa 3 DS, stats (other than HP) only increase by 1 point at a time when they do increase, but the increases add up; if you die near the end of a boss fight, you would have noticeably better stats (unless your stats are already high). (Unfortunately, SaGa 3 DS doesn't actually let you keep stats if you game over, though I believe there is a "restart this battle" option on game over, so you don't have to load your save and re-watch pre-battle cutscenes.)

Pokemon, at least in the earlier games, takes half your money if you die; given the lack of respawning money sources in gen 1 (unless you can get Pay Day, which in Red requires a TM or trade), and the lack of a bank, this is a serious enough punishment that I just reset whenever that happens.

It works as an option if a player is absolutely, positively, stuck and just wants to skip that boss fight.

Or, if the player is playing the game for the story and just doesn't want to deal with fighting.

(With that said, the game should also have options for players who don't care about the story and just want to fight battles and collect loot and stat increases, learning new abilities every now and then.)

I don't really agree about TES doing it better, for a few reasons:
* TES still has levels, and stat growth (including HP) is governed by levels, rather than stats gradually increasing based off the character's actions.
* In FF2, you get more skill XP when fighting stronger enemies; this does not happen in TES (at least not 2-4). In most SaGa games, if you're weak relative to the enemies you're fighting, you will gain stats very quickly. On the other hand, in Morrowind, for example, even if you somehow manage to kill a powerful enemy like a Winged Twilight with a level 1 character, there's very little reward.
* SaGa races (at least the Game Boy games and SaGa Frontier) are fundamentally different; even the very rules for stat growth and ability learning are completely different between the races, leading to completely different gameplay experiences. (Try playing SaGa 2 with a party containing only robots and monsters; it's quite fun, and it's rather interesting playing an RPG where killing enemies is not how you get stronger.) On the other hand, in TES, they just gave races some starting stat modifiers and some special abilities and called it a day; as a result, character race does not fundamentally change the game the way it does in the SaGa games that have them.

What? The primary method of gaining levels is through choices of actions. With Morrowind, you're tied to a level up, but your max-stat increase is chosen by what skills you use. In skyrim, your attributes are strictly your school advancement, outside of HP, MP, and STAM, which isn't that important in the big scheme of things. TES is weak in that you gain flats amount of XP for using skill X successfully against a valid target. Of course, this is because they didn't think to have an XP modifier based on what that target was (which makes sense for things like Restoration). I would disagree. While the SaGa games indeed put more emphasis on race, to say that it doesn't change how you play TES isn't remotely true. TES series is one that pretty much allows you to have it all, but the racial differences between most classes don't seem to stand out much, especially if you're not choosing a class that caters to your race. Khajiit, for example, have that nice early game night eye spell, which they get for free, which makes them adept thieves or stealth characters. Of course, you can choose to mage and things like that, but if you're not using that night eye (or their bonus to hand-to-hand in skyrim), then you're probably picking the wrong race for what you want to be doing. I generally play as a mage with my Khajiit (like the culture, but prefer mage style), but even still there's a clear lean towards stealth mechanics, and hiding in dark corners in particular. The other races, as far as i've heard, have similar attributes: Nords make fairly good tanks, because they naturally get some resistances innately to magic (especially ice spells). Dunmer often begin with a summon spell, which if you're not using fairly often early on, you're not taking advantage of what you've been given. And, since what you do is where you level up the most, you'll likely finding yourself catering to mostly one class over another (Dunmer tend to be offensive spell casters using summons as their tank to ward off enemies). If you're having trouble finding the benefits of your race, obviously you started the game with the difficulty set way, way too low. You should feel the pressure to use your "minor powers" to their fullest, which is where you'll find yourself catering to one style or another.

This is a universal to any ARPG: if you don't feel pressure at all at the begining, you're either playing the game on the wrong difficulty setting (unless there's no difficulty setting, at which point you say the game is cakewalk). The thing people forget is that roleplaying games are about playing roles, even if all options are available to you. Oblivion and Skyrim are pretty good at punishing players for abandoning their roles. There's the meme "The Drauger are training..." to exemplify this: no matter what you're doing, the enemies are getting stronger. So, if you're a mage, and you're leveling up your sword skills, well, keep in mind the enemies are getting stronger with each level, regardless of what it is you're leveling. You're a blacksmith? Cool, but if you're not making equipment with that skill, to offset the costs, well, the drauger are training. Just because you can be all powerful in all skill trees doesn't mean that you should be all powerful in all skill trees. People tend to learn this lesson fairly quickly, and adapt. How much of a bad time you have depends entirely on how quickly you identify the problem and adapt. If your only skill lis in things like alchemy, smithing, etc, and you're max level in those skills, you're going to a dungeon and dying in 1 hit. Similarly, if all you're doing is sneaking around and shooing enemies with a bow, occasionally stabbing them with a knife, you'll probably find the game ridiculously easy at all stages, except keeping up with the economy cost.

I'm still trying to figure out how to deal with this in my game. I'm leaning towards having all NCPs just live normal lives, with some spawning with certain stat offsets. Instead of everythign guaranteed to be managable, maybe spawning bandit camps with each member having a small random stat offset, and a large random offset that is shared between the entire group (to simulate more experienced bandits). If a high level player finds a low level bandit canp, it just sucks to be them. If the player finds a high level bandit camp while just starting out, well, maybe you should avoid bandit encampments (they may also start with various wanted levels to simulate how aggressive they might be for being found if they're found by a player whom otherwise might not be worth it 'cause they look poor).