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!

Sword World: What If D&D Didn't Matter?

This post is me suddenly realizing that I could Simply Write About something I've repeatedly alluded to in replies on social media: 

"If you've ever been curious what a fantasy adventure TTRPG might look like if it hadn't developed under the massive shadow of D&D, then you should check out Sword World."

I probably don't need to explain the shadow of D&D and how it warps the TTRPG landscape. It's the game everyone has played, it's many people's only game, and it's the game everything else is compared to. But the interesting thing is, that's not true across the whole world. In Japan, for example, D&D never got that initial foothold (something about dice availability, if memory serves) so the TTRPG scene developed in its own ways. Even now, D&D is simply Another Game That Exists. It's not the most popular one (that's Call of Cthulhu, interestingly enough), and it's not even the most popular one in the fantasy adventure genre: that honor goes to the subject of this post, Sword World 2.5.

I want to be clear, because the internet has (rightly) learned to be wary when an American wants to talk about something Japanese. This is not a post about how perfectly awesome Sword World is, or how it's better than "western" RPGs, or anything like that. This is about the fact that we have a genuine example of a fantasy adventure TTRPG that was under no pressure to compare itself to D&D, which feels a little like peeking into an alternate timeline. I, for one, find it fascinating to compare and contrast. Maybe you will too.

So let's talk about One Real Example Of What Fantasy Adventure Looks Like When D&D Ain't Shit.

Sword World 2.5

Just as a quick introduction, Sword World is the top fantasy adventure TTRPG in Japan. It's currently in edition 2.5, which is what I'll be talking about here. There's no official English version, so I'll be using a fan translation, which you can get for free HERE. There are three core books; I've looked at Core Rulebook I, which covers the general gameplay rules and the basic races and classes, along with a few monsters. My understanding is that Core Rulebook II and Core Rulebook III include some special additional rules and advanced classes, but I haven't looked at them yet. Trust me, there's plenty of interesting comparisons to observe just in the first book.

Classes & "Skills"

I'm starting here because it's one of the first and biggest differences someone like me would notice about SW2.5. It has classes and skills, but they don't work the way we're used to. Your classes are your skills. You don't put points into skills, or have your class grant you skill proficiencies that scale up automatically. No, when you make a skill check (or spellcasting check, or attack roll), you roll 2d6 and add your level in the relevant class. Most (but not all) checks have more than one class you could use, so you use whichever one you have the higher level in. If you don't have a relevant class at all, then you just roll a blank 2d6 (you don't even get your ability modifier).

As you may have inferred from the preceding paragraph, multiclassing is normal. I don't mean it's "allowed" or it's "not a variant rule" or it's "common." I mean it's the expected default. Every character is a mix of a handful of different classes, likely each at a different level. If that sounds overwhelming, that's because you're imagining "classes" that are much bulkier than the ones in SW. You don't have a five-page spread of abilities for each class. Your class is like... a paragraph or two. For example, the Fencer class explains that as long as you're using light weapons/armor you get an improved crit chance, and... that's it. Add your Fencer level to your combat rolls, just like anything else, and you're ready to rock and roll.

XP, Advancement, and Adventurer Level

While SW2.5 does have "experience points" and "levels," it doesn't work like how you're used to. Instead of reaching the next XP threshold and gaining a level, you spend XP to purchase levels of individual classes. The XP cost of purchasing a level depends on whether it's from a "major" or "minor" class, and how high your level already is in that class specifically. Have a look at this chart:

Brand new characters start with 3,000 XP worth of levels, so you might start the game as, for example, Sorcerer 2, Fencer 1, Scout 1, giving you magic as your primary focus but with a bit of melee ability for flexibility and a wide array of utility skills. Someone used to D&D would call this a 4th-level character, but in SW it's actually a 2nd-level character. This is because your "adventurer level" is equal to your highest class level, not your total number of class levels. Which makes sense, because we're on tight 2d6 math for everything, so we want to be measuring power by what's getting added to the roll, not by how many different things you can do.

How you gain XP in the first place is also a bit different than the D&D model. You automatically gain XP at the end of each session: 1,000 XP if you achieved your objective, or 500 XP otherwise. That's basically it. There's some bonus XP if you defeated monsters, but it's pretty small: 10 XP per level of the monsters defeated. The example in the book is if you win a fight against a 3rd-level monster and their four 1st-level minions, that's 7 levels total, or 70 XP. You also get 50 XP if you manage to roll snake eyes on 2d6 (a 1-in-36 chance). Both of these are a drop in the bucket compared to the base session XP.

But in addition to XP and classes, your advancement also includes "Growth" of ability scores. At the end of each session, you— wait a second, I haven't told you about ability scores yet, I'd better do that!

Ability Scores

Characters in Sword World have six stats. Which is funny, because if an American designer said that, many people would assume they had never seen a game other than D&D. But that's objectively not the case for SW2.5, and in fact there's a very specific reason to have exactly six ability scores: Growth. Your six stats are numbered 1-6 on your sheet, and at the end of each session, you roll a d6 twice, pick one result, and increase the corresponding ability score by 1. But wait, it gets even more interesting.

You don't add your ability score to rolls, you add your Ability Modifier, which is exactly what you think it is. This is even funnier than having six stats—people would call you a liar right to your face if you claimed that you had a score/mod duality for any other reason than D&D-brain. And yet, here we are. Anyway, you get +1 mod per 6 points of score. Most starting mods will be +2, some will be +1, and very very few will be +3. But this connects back to growth: if you have a score that's close to the next multiple of six, you can try to steer your growth toward it and get that next +1 (eventually, dice willing).

But growth isn't the only way that SW2.5 makes ability scores more relevant than in D&D. Weapons and armor, for example, have minimum Strength requirements. (Proficiency by class isn't really a thing, for the most part.) You use your Vitality score for calculating HP, and your Spirit score for calculating MP. I haven't found anything similar for Dexterity, Agility, or Intelligence, but still, the scores are getting more use than in D&D at least.

Side note because I know you're wondering: yes, you roll your ability scores. In order. That said, there's some amount of control: your choice of background gives you a set of flat numbers that your rolls are added to, and you also roll three full sets of scores and choose from among them. This model, alongside the growth mechanic, point to an interesting middle ground of guided chance in between the extremes of raw luck from old-school D&D and full control of modern point-buy.

I Am In Love With "Fellows"

In video games, sometimes an NPC will temporarily join your party, following you around and helping in combat but staying in the background the rest of the time. In some tabletop D&D-alikes, you can get hirelings that work similarly. In Sword World, you can do this with other people's player characters.

Want to share your character with the world? Make a Fellow Sheet, which summarizes their stats and includes a random roll chart for a few combat actions, and—get this—you even have to write down lines of dialogue your character would say when doing these combat actions. You can then post your Fellow Sheet online, such as in a fan forum, where people you've never met might pick them up to take along on their adventures.

Fellows stay in the background, contribute according to your custom random table during combat, and cannot take damage or die (in the event of a TPK, they're assumed to miraculously escape). Here's the adorable part: after using a Fellow, the book explicitly encourages the player(s) to contact the Fellow's creator (probably just a post online) both to thank them for their help and to give a recap of their character's little side adventure.

Power Tables

Remember I mentioned the issue of dice availability as part of the reason D&D didn't catch on right away in Japan? Well, SW2.5 is fully d6-based, and that includes rolling for damage (or healing). But apparently they didn't want everything to deal Xd6 damage, so instead they created Power Tables. Your weapon or spell will specify a "Power" rating. Find the row for that Power on the table, and roll 2d6. There will be a box corresponding to your result which tells you how much damage you deal. (You also add bonuses from things like your STR mod, but that's after you're done with the Power Table roll.)

At first I was surprised. Requiring a reference to a table on every single instance of damage is a bold move, though maybe you get used to it if you're referencing the same Power rating every time. Also, it does present an interesting solution to the need for variable damage output using only d6s and without too much range from the bottom to the top. I don't know if I would have the guts to do this in a design of my own, but I see what it's offering.

Relatedly, this method of damage calculation means everybody's always rolling 2d6 for damage, and SW2.5 takes advantage of this. Your chance of a critical hit is based on the dice result of your damage roll rather than your attack roll, scoring a crit when you roll your weapon's crit threshold or higher. Lots of weapons put this threshold around 10-11, but the Fencer can reduce this by 1 (at the cost of halving your STR score for the purpose of weapon and armor requirements, which means less power in the first place and also less defense). Also: crits can explode. When you crit, you record your rolled damage, and roll again. If that's a crit too, just keep going.

Three Combat Systems

So, you know how in D&D (and similar games), there's differing opinions on tactical combat versus abstracted combat? There's grid-based model, battlefield zone models, here-there-elsewhere models, all kinds of stuff. They all have advantages and disadvantages, and often it's a major decision point for which game(s) someone is willing to play.

Well, Sword World just sidesteps the issue by having three different combat systems with different levels of complexity and depth. The idea is that you bounce around between them, depending on which one serves the needs of a given fight. You can use the "advanced" mode (full tactical grid) when you have a big, complicated fight with interesting terrain and want to have a really robust experience. But if you want a quicker fight, you can use the "simplified" mode, where you just abstract the battlefield into three zones (the melee "frontline" and two ranged "rearguards") and leave it at that. The stats on weapons and spells (range, area, etc) are designed to accommodate both modes.

There's also a third mode that splits the difference between simple/advanced, but I honestly don't see the point of it. Maybe I'm missing something and I would get it if I actually played it? Who knows. But hey, it exists!

Okay Okay I'll Wrap It Up

There's plenty more interesting points of comparison to talk about (like how dwarves are fireproof and elves are perfect swimmers, or how there seems to be an assumption that adventures are short and serialized instead of campaign-length megaplots), but this is getting pretty long already. Anyway, the point is, Sword World is solidly in the adventure fantasy genre without being a "D&D clone," and this makes examination of its design choices absolutely fascinating for fantasy fans who live and breathe the inescapable dominance of D&D. If design comparisons are at all interesting to you (and if you got this far into my blog post, I assume they are) then I highly recommend that you go have a look at SW2.5 for yourself. And by all means, hit me up with your observations! I'd love to hear about them!

Pokémon's Game Design Problem

Over on BlueSky, I did one of those silly engagement posts that asks what topics you could discuss at length with no preparation, and one of mine was Pokemon's Game Design Problem. To my surprise, multiple people wanted to hear more, so here's that topic in stream-of-consciousness form.

So the short version of the problem is this: Pokémon doesn't know what kind of game it wants to be anymore. It used to be a very specific type of game, and has changed gradually over time, without any concrete intent to become any other type of game instead. It just... drifted. Now it's less of a game and more of a pile of game components—some new, some legacy, and all divorced from any coherent design intent.

Okay, so what type of game was it originally? Don't say "monster-collecting game," that's a term invented later for games that couldn't legally say "Pokémon clone." Hell, collecting wasn't even a big thing originally. More like a subsystem that you'll be rewarded for dabbling in a little but mostly has no impact unless you're trying to 100% the game. Like Korok seeds.

No, originally Pokémon was a cookie-cutter JRPG. It came out at the height of the SNES RPG era, at about the same time as iconic titles like Chrono Trigger, EarthBound, and Final Fantasy VI (the one marketed as III in the US). It was almost a decade since the original Final Fantasy, and the genre had hit its stride, established its conventions, and was at the height of its popularity. It was right at the cusp of being "formulaic," and Pokémon used its formula.

To be clear: I don't just mean having levels and turn-based combat makes it an RPG. The copy-paste goes deep. Core loop of refreshing at the inn and then attrition-ing through a dungeon or between towns? Stock. Elemental rock-paper-scissors? Stock. Changing your party due to new arrivals or to match a specific challenge? Stock. A dungeon full of rocky or ghostly enemies who resist your Normal attacks? Stock. Hell, even having your party members evolve into stronger versions later in the game had already been a thing for years. It's just the RPG tropes of the era all the way down. The only real innovation was the symmetry of having your party drawn from the same roster as the monsters.

That's where Pokémon started. Any amount of examination shows that it's somewhere else now. For example, battles (aside from a handful of story checkpoints) are now entirely optional and the ground is littered with more supplies than you could ever need, which removes the entire core play paradigm of old-school RPGs: get from A to B before you run out of gas. That's just literally not a thing anymore (as of Scarlet/Violet).

Which is fine! Pokémon doesn't have to forever remain a genre of RPG that was popular in the 90s. Completely fine for it to change. But what is it trying to be instead? That's where the problem is. The makers don't seem to know. It still includes the combat and level systems that it needed when it was an old-school JRPG, but they've been removed from the structures they were built for (dungeons and routes) so they're just weird and in the way. And in place of what's been removed we have... what? A few half-baked minigames, presented by NPCs who, even in-universe, would rather be doing something else? A "world of adventure" that you can't interact with except by walking around? Lovable creatures who mostly just stand around, and your only way to interact with them is through a combat system designed in a different era for a different game?

If you don't want to be an RPG anymore, then fucking do something else. But they won't, because it's not a game series anymore, it's a multimedia franchise with a focus on merchandise. The point of a Pokémon game isn't to be a game, it's to introduce the next region and expand the roster of collectibles. As far as actual gameplay goes, the only proactive intent that can be inferred from the evolving design of the games is that apparently they think we all hate battling, so they keep creating workarounds to reduce how much of it you have to do.

An interesting point of contrast is Legends Arceus. Whatever its overall strengths and weaknesses, it does have intent. Since combat was going to be de-emphasized, they streamlined it down into a dynamic subsystem that's kinda fun each time instead of being an attrition mechanism that's designed to function across a long string of battles. Since prowling in the wild was the focus, they made it matter: you can catch directly in the wild, there are resources to harvest in the wild, the majority of your research tasks are in the wild, and the pokémon can interact with you in the wild. Though it has plenty of flaws, PLA at least is a game that has chosen something to be about, and at least tries to focus on actually being about that.

But the main series? It's just roster expansions with some legacy mechanics stapled on, seemingly designed by people who are certain you don't still want the old Pokémon experience but have no idea what you'd rather be doing instead.