RPG Design: Boss Battles and the Positive Feedback Problem

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 14, 2012

In my article last week about Frayed Knights‘ problem with boss battles, I neglected to mention one other factor that worked against my poor bosses which is peculiar to the RPG genre: One of my guiding principles of the overall game design is that the game should be fully playable and of reasonable difficulty for a player who chose “sub-optimal” progression for the party. In other words, a player should not be penalized for experimenting with character advancement and making some “poor” choices.

I stand by this choice, and unless something convinces me otherwise, I expect to make this approach with any and all RPGs I make in the future. The whole point of creating a rich character design / progression system is to allow players to experiment and customize characters as they would like to imagine their character, not as the game dictates.  More importantly, I would never want to create a situation where the player finds the end-game unwinnable (one way or another) because of choices made in ignorance they made earlier in the game. Should there be consequences for choices? Sure. But that’s not the same as penalization.

The problem with even a middle-of-the-road approach like this – where the game is balanced for middle-of-the-road ‘optimization’ – is a positive feedback loop. Yes, “positive” sounds like a good thing, but in games, it’s often a bad thing.  I’ve talked about this before, in fact exactly three years ago today. Must be the season or something. But I thought I’d revisit the topic with a bit more concrete examples, and relate it to boss design.

With a positive feedback loop, good players get an easier game, and poor players get a harder game. The “rich get richer, poor get poorer.” In coin-op arcade games, the positive feedback loop was  advantageous to getting players to pump in the quarters, as it led to a speedier conclusion to the game – and gave less-skilled observers some insight into the amazing things the expert players could do as long as they could “ride the wave” of their own success.

And then there are the boss battles. In general, boss battles are intended to test a player’s mastery of in-game skills. They should represent something of a break from the gameplay routine – an interesting challenge. Although, really, in an RPG as much as any other game, I don’t think you should have any uninteresting challenges. But anyway… a boss shouldn’t be just a “bigger, badder” opponent.  They should be a special, dramatic challenge for the player.

The problem – if you’d call it that – is that there is an additional layer between the player and the game, and that is his character (or characters). In a traditional game, the game can challenge the player directly – testing his precision and timing with jumping, or with jumping and shooting combined in an epic boss fight.  The potential capabilities of the player’s avatar are known entities at design time, and challenges can be designed to exactly test the player’s mastery of control necessary to get within a threshold of that potential.

But how do you do that in an RPG, when the player has invested their points into their characters ‘leet’ bread-baking skills?  Do the bosses now challenge the player to a bread-baking contest instead?

This runs into another contradiction of the purpose of a boss battle – to break up the routine. If the player has gotten to the point where he can win the game by simple, skillful application of bread-baking mastery, the player should not be able to simply bake his way out of  a boss fight! No, at the very least, he should be tested in the application of his skills in a cookie-baking contest, just to shake things up and get the player out of his comfort zone, right?

But what designer is going to create customized boss encounters for every area of character expertise – and non-expertise?

My poster-child for this problem is Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, a game that’s failures were made so painful only because it tried so hard to push boundaries. So many encounters in the game could be resolved through means other than straight-up combat. They worked very hard to make the game very playable for a character that relied upon stealth or subtlety. But then – especially near the end-game – they dropped you into an arena with a straight-up combat against a powerful boss opponent, and if your stealthy or subtle character had neglected their combat skills – something remarkably easy to do to this point – then you, the player, were in for a very rough time.  There was no place to hide, and nobody to talk to. Just guns and fangs.  A conflict designed to challenge combat god builds was multiplied by three.

That’s analogous to having an entirely conversation-driven boss encounter, a la Vizzini’s “battle of wits” from The Princess Bride, and if your characters Wits and Conversation skills aren’t high enough, you’ll automatically die at the end and lose the game. What’s that really testing? Whether or not the player knew the designer’s intentions and demands in advance? Players would cry foul at this – and justifiably so – yet we let the combat bias slide all the time. We’re used to it, I guess.

There’s no easy answer to this. “Middle of the Road” bosses are certainly an easy approach – challenging an “average” player with an “average” build – but not a particularly satisfying encounter, and subject to the positive feedback problem. What are some other approaches?

1. Constrain player customization.  Class-based systems work well here, as the designer has limited the variations they must design for to a few well-defined options.

2. Force the player-characters to maintain a minimum level of combat skill. Level-based systems help here, too – regardless of how you’ve customized your character, your attack, defense, and hit points have still gone up a minimal amount. In this case, an overwhelming challenge may be made easier simply by delaying the encounter for a couple of levels.

3. Make the “optimal” tests optional. Here’s where you put the Vizzini and Master Baker and Combat God boss fights – somewhere off the main quest line of the game.

4. Provide alternative methods of winning encounters. You can fight the demon-lord head-on, sneak around him, or talk his minions into betraying him.

5. Provide alternative boss encounters: This is an expensive approach, but not unheard of.  Different “boss encounters” (or major challenges) may be chosen by the player, which test different character abilities.

6. Allow players to use custom skills to weaken the boss encounter: The “raw” encounter may be a great challenge for an optimal combat-build character, but the player can use other skills (in advance?) balance the encounter. This is really, IMO, the best approach, as it allows the player to “test” his skills at using the character’s other abilities.

7. Auto-Scaling the encounter: Yes, Oblivion handled auto-scaling poorly, giving it a bad rap. But IMO, this is potentially no different from a live “Game Master” building an encounter around his player’s abilities. It just needs to be handled much, much better, so it feels like less of a cheat.

8. Bosses should be able to counter the most-optimal strategies: This is generally good boss design anyway. I don’t think bosses should negate a player character’s abilities – this is simply the reverse of the original problem.  But a little bit of ‘negative feedback,’ not to penalize optimal character builds but to reduce their advantage – could make for more interesting encounters.

9. Fully Organic Bosses: There is no set “strategy” for defeating the bosses, but simply an interesting encounter and environment where the player is free to use any skill or strategy at their disposal to resolve it. I love this idea in theory, and lean this way in my own design, but in practice it can result in boss encounters feeling no different from any other.

 

While I didn’t always apply things perfectly in Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon, it tended towards the more old-school RPG approach of having the “bosses” be somewhat understated and less of an “event” anyway. My real desire is for all combat encounters to be interesting and present their own challenges, and I’m not completely abandoning that approach in the sequel, either.  But there will be a few “boss encounters” that will be “punched up” a bit more.

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