Understanding SNES-Era RPG Mechanics

Let's talk about old-school RPG video games—specifically, what made them tick, what made their gameplay so compelling back in the day. I'm writing this partly because game-related trivia can be fun for its own sake, but also because I think a lot of people looking back at SNES-era RPGs wildly misunderstand how they worked. This is because some of the SNES-era mechanics have since been pulled out of their SNES-era contexts and repurposed for other roles in modern games, leading people to (mis)interpret old games through the lens of modern design. For example, the random encounters and XP-based leveling that is often maligned as just artificially padding the play time actually used to have an important role in the overall design. Curious? Let's dive in.

The Gaming Landscape

As long as we're talking about understanding things in context, let's look at the bigger context of video gaming as a whole. This was before everything was 3D open worlds and first-person shooters. Heading into this era, the non-RPG games were mostly stuff like Mario and Street Fighter, in various forms and IPs. There were a few outliers (notably Zelda, which is probably part of how it took off), but for the most part everything was jumping and punching. Even the crappy movie tie-in games that came out every year were mostly platformers.

I couldn't tell you whether it was intentional or not, but RPGs served as a foil to all the real-time dexterity-based gameplay dominating the field at the time. It was long-form gaming. Instead of giving you two minutes of testing your input skills and reaction time where one or two screwups would spell doom, they gave you a long series of interconnected decisions across multiple axes, whose consequences were cumulative rather than immediately catastrophic. Other games were threatening Game Over if you screwed up a couple times in 90 seconds. RPGs threatened Game Over if you had accumulated too many inefficient decisions over the past couple of hours. That's the paradigm you need to keep in mind to understand these games.

The Core Gameplay Structure

The RPGs of yesteryear had a pretty consistent play structure. You would be In Town, where you can refresh all your various resources, and then you would Venture Out (whether across the map to a different town, or to an important dead end and then back to the original town). In other words, gameplay is about getting from one "refresh point" to the next before the resources that you had refreshed became fully depleted. Where this gets interesting, and indeed the "meat" of gameplay, is the variety of resources and how they all intersect with each other.

The Resources

• HP — You can think of HP as the most foundational resource, because it's the one that determines if when you've lost. When a character is out of HP, they're unusable. When the whole party is out of HP, it's game over. Every time you engage in combat, even if it's easy, you're going to lose at least a little bit of HP, putting you at least a little bit closer to losing.
• Actions/Turns — As I'm sure you already know, these RPGs were using turn-based combat. Do you use this character's turn to attack? Heal? Set up a buff? Use an item? If it's a long fight, a buff could yield great dividends, but in a shorter fight it's a wasted turn. Healing might be what one character is best at, but if you're paying enough attention to know that the fighter almost killed that monster, maybe it's better to have the healer smack 'em and remove that source of HP drain from the fight.
• Mana/PP — The ability to do things. This presents the possibility of "running out of gas." In most RPGs you had a "normal attack" with no cost, but it's a single-target attack that's often your least powerful option for most characters. Usually somebody has an attack that hits every enemy, or is more powerful, or gets a bonus against this enemy because it's the right element; but it costs Mana and you only have so much. If you use it now, this fight ends faster, making you lose less HP, but that's also true for the future fight that it becomes unavailable for if you use it now. Which fight do you use it in to minimize your overall attrition?
• Status — You might not think of status conditions (or the absence thereof) as a resource, but they sort of are. If someone is debuffed to only deal half damage, then you can't defeat the monsters as fast, so they get more rounds to attack you, so you lose more resources. If someone is poisoned, then your HP loss per round has increased, so each round counts for more attrition. If someone is muted, they can't use their special abilities, which (depending on the character) might lengthen the battle and thus cost you more HP. How much loss does each of these cause you? Is it more or less than the loss incurred by spending someone's turn (and an item or MP) to clear the condition? Is it likely the condition just comes back right after you clear it, meaning you wasted a turn? Do you play those odds?
• Items/Money — "Refresh Points" are usually towns that include an item shop, where you can buy consumable items. The most basic is the health potion, which directly restores HP, making you last longer. Likewise, Mana-restoring items are potent because they extend the usage of your entire suite of abilities (as a result, they're often expensive or hard to acquire). You can also get items that clear status conditions, which presents an important set of decisions for the player: if you buy a status-clearing item whose associated condition doesn't come up, you wasted money that could have been used on a more relevant item. But if you encounter a status that you can't clear, you're going to accelerate your attrition for the rest of the dungeon. What do you buy, and how many of each?
• XP/Money — You gain XP from battling enemies, and that XP makes you more powerful. Effectively, you suffer attrition in exchange for eventually reducing your rate of attrition. Similarly, you gain money from battles, which you can then convert into the aforementioned items (or upgraded equipment), creating a second way that you trade attrition for future resilience against it. An interesting difference, though, is that a level up will immediately improve your performance, while money will be completely worthless until you reach the next Refresh Point, making it more like an investment for the future.

Example: Viridian Forest

Let's put all that together in a familiar example so you can see how all these threads tug on each other. We'll use Pokémon, partly because everybody's familiar with it, and partly because it lets us set aside things like party dynamics and area attacks so we can focus more on the foundational resource exchanges. So let's examine a classic trek through Viridian Forest. (We're going to assume original Red/Blue games for this, since they were released closest to when this type of RPG's popularity and formula was at its peak.)

You're starting in Viridian City, which is a Refresh Point: there's an "inn" (the PokeCenter) to heal your party and an "item shop" (the PokeMart) to buy supplies. Your objective is to travel through Viridian Forest and reach Pewter City on the other end. Just like Viridian City, Pewter City is a Refresh Point, so if you reach it then you're safe; you have "cleared the dungeon." You fail if your whole party is out of HP before you get there.

What are you up against along the way? Along the path from end to end, you have to fight several trainers. Some are avoidable, but they're also your only source of money and your best source of XP. Additionally, most of the path is through long grass, meaning random encounters (wild pokemon) will occur many times, but the number of encounters and what exactly you'll face is unknown.

The roster of enemies is significant. The Caterpies are pretty basic, presenting minor HP attrition. The Weedles have the chance to poison you, which vastly accelerates the attrition (and in early games, keep depleting HP outside of battle). The Metapods and Kakunas don't present any direct threat to your HP, but they have high physical defense that rises every turn, costing a lot of PP to defeat. That said, they also offer lots of XP compared to other enemies.

So let's imagine you're halfway into the forest by now. You have a random encounter with a Weedle. What do you do? You could use your Normal attack that you have (or, "had") 30-35 of, but it will take two hits to finish it. That will add up over the course of the dungeon. Not to mention, Weedle gets to strike back in between the two hits, and it might poison you. Do you play the low odds? Do you decide it's fine because you brought an antidote (or because you picked Bulbasaur, who can't be poisoned)? Or do you decide not to risk it and use your limited supply of Embers/Bubbles to one-shot it? (Do you know yet whether Bubble will one-shot it?)

Of course, maybe a wild Weedle's little bit of XP (and zero cash) isn't worth spending an Ember or two Tackles or an Antidote, so you want to run away. But your attempt to run away might fail, and if it does, the Weedle gets a free attack, which will deplete some HP and possibly poison you—exactly what you were trying to avoid. Do you try anyway? If it takes you 2-3 tries to run, then you've suffered the same attrition as fighting, but without gaining XP. If you fail to run once or twice and then switch to fighting, you've achieved the same result as fighting in the first place but with additional losses. Are you sure you want to try to run?

Oh! Now you've encountered a wild Pikachu! Do you want to catch it? It's a very rare encounter, so it seems a waste to pass up this opportunity. But what does the catching process cost you? You would have to hold back and carefully lower its HP without knocking it out, letting it hit you in the meantime. Then you start throwing PokeBalls (each of which represents a Potion or Antidote you didn't buy), and each time it breaks free it gets to hit you again. And throughout this process, every time it hits you, there's a chance it paralyzes you. That means your enemies always get to hit first (faster attrition!) and sometimes you lose your turn (longer battles, more attrition!). Can you afford that, based on how close to the end you are and the current state of your party?

Hm, you're pretty deep into the forest, but your party is looking rough and you're low on items. Do you double back, return to the original Refresh Point, and try again? On the one hand, any trainers you fought don't refresh and you might be a higher level now, so maybe a second go is easier. But getting out means walking through more random encounters; can you make it, or are you close enough to the end that it's actually better to keep going? Also, what's the state of your item inventory? You haven't made enough money to resupply, so your second attempt will have fewer resources. What happens if you get poisoned as soon as you return to the forest but you've already used all your Antidotes? Do you just keep restarting over and over until you get lucky enough to not get poisoned for an entire run? 

Long-Form Give-and-Take

As you can see, there are lots of decisions to make. What's important to note is that none of the decisions are about whether you can win the current battle. A game like Street Fighter asks "Can you defeat this opponent?" That's not what a SNES-era RPG asks. It's not asking "Can you beat a Weedle?" over and over again. It's asking "Can you defeat this dungeon?" and the Weedle is just one component. The challenges exist on the dungeon scale, not the individual fight scale. If you wanted to continue the analogy with Street Fighter: an RPG fight doesn't correlate to a Street Fighter match, it correlates to a single move in a Street Fighter match. An entire RPG fight, start to finish, is the equivalent of a Street Fighter player reading the current situation and then selecting and executing the correct move. Failure worsens your position, and it's not until you accumulate enough failures that you finally lose.

Unfortunately, sometimes games inherit as "legacy mechanics" the things that were refined for use in SNES-era RPGs, but without the full, systemic context they were developed for. In some cases this is new games repurposing old mechanics, sometimes it's an existing franchise making "quality of life changes" that remove a mechanic without accounting for the ripple effects of that change.

It doesn't take much of a change to deflate the whole thing; that's the nature of a multi-faceted system. For example, scroll back up to our Viridian Forest example and reread it with a change in mind. What if your party fully healed after every fight? What if you didn't have PP and could always use whatever move you wanted? What if things like running away or catching had a 100% success rate? Take any one of those changes and plug it into the example, and you start to see the consequences cascading down through the whole play experience. Games are about making decisions, and changing even one thing in this system starts to make a whole lot of decisions cease to be decisions.

That's why you're so tired of this or that RPG mechanic. Not because the mechanic is bad, but because it's been disconnected from its purpose. It matters how a mechanic is used. It matters how it fits into the larger play structures of a game.

So That's That

I don't really have a fancy conclusion, I just wanted there to be someplace on the internet where someone could read about how some of these weirdly ubiquitous RPG mechanics got their start and how much sense they made in their original context. Hope you enjoyed!