General RPGs' Preferable Non-Realism List 2

A few years back, I made a list of instances in which it was better for a game to be unrealistic than to strictly adhere to the limitations of real life. It was kinda fun to write! And also, I soon after realized that there were more examples of these moments of desirable suspension of disbelief to be found. So I figured, why not do another rant once I’d gotten a decent number of them? And as we all know, 8 is the best number, so I went with that. Thus, now that I’ve thought of that many more of these things...let’s waste our time once again with this nonsense! Here are 8 more examples of RPG conventions that are much, much better sans realism.



Expiration Dates: Let’s face it: RPG characters do not have any great gift of common sense when it comes to what they put in their mouths.

No, I’m not just talking about Shion’s love life in the Xenosaga series. I’m referring to RPG characters’ universal belief that anything and everything that they find in a box is good eatin’. An herb discovered within a treasure chest situated at the very bottom of an abandoned mine? A blackberry found in the back corner of a rotten armoire located in an underwater city last populated over a hundred years ago? A vial of healing potion just left out in the sun on the floor of a floating ancient temple created by a race that went extinct a millennium prior? Throw it all in the Inventory sack and live like there’s no tomorrow, guys! Age won’t have desiccated that herb’s ability to restore 40 HP, no amount of rot and fungus will interrupt that fruit’s dedication to restoring 30% of your MP, and c’mon, what harm could there possibly be in ingesting a beaker of liquid chemicals allowed to react to one another and heat for ten centuries in a row?

By Asmodeus, do you realize that there is a moment in Millennium 4 in which the heroes explore a series of abandoned, forgotten sewer passages, find a treasure chest with meat inside, and actually take this long-lost sewer meat with them to potentially consume later? It isn’t even like this is some edible item found in a normal, disgusting RPG sewer system--it’s a section of underground fecal water-park that has gone unvisited for so long that the city above has outright forgotten about it! This is meat that has been stewing in a highly populated and active city’s poo-gas for an indeterminable set of decades, and rather than forever swear off the act of consuming food then and there at the mere sight of this wretched stuff, they intend to EAT IT. Oh my God.

And frankly, even the stuff you can buy fresh from a vendor at the beginning of the game probably shouldn’t be exactly as useful at the end of an adventure that spans weeks, months, or possibly even years.

With a mere touch more realism, 90% of the healing herbs you find in RPGs should cause more harm than they repair, as the flora should cause paralyzing digestive distress that puts an adventure on hold for a good 24 hours at a time, as the potions should probably fatally poison their consumer’s innards. And just opening that sewer meat’s chest should have straight-up melted Marine’s face right off with the fumes alone. But as amusing as it is to theorize that diarrhea should be so intrinsic to most RPG adventures that it counts as a party member, I sure as hell don’t want to deal with some knucklehead developer creating a timing system for using up items before they go bad, or denying me vital vitality victuals as I explore various dungeons just because it’s not realistic that they’d still be edible after being placed into a treasure chest a thousand years prior.

EDIT: Thanks to reader Adam E, I have now remembered that I have dealt with the realism of food spoilage in action in an RPG before. Baten Kaitos, though generally a pretty laudable couple of RPGs, does indeed have a system in play wherein certain items, those being health-restoring food, will indeed, after a set period of time, transform into a spoiled food item that no longer restores health but instead has a virtually uselessly low chance of inflicting poison on someone. I don't know how I could have forgotten this little example of some developer thinking a bit too highly of how clever he/she was, but I'm guessing I mentally blocked this part of the Baten Kaitos experience out, because this mechanic serves no purpose whatsoever beyond inconvenience and frustration.

But thanks for reminding me, Adam! I mean, sort of. Admittedly it's not a blast to remember the experience. But still, thanks!


Village and City Size: Anyone ever get concerned about the viability of most RPG towns’ genetic diversity? I mean, I like the coziness of small-town communities as much as the next guy, but 4 houses and 1 shop stall does not a village make! Hell, it doesn’t even fill out a cul-de-sac properly. Even the largest RPG city that you’re allowed to fully explore from 1 end to the other doesn’t usually amount to much more than the population and geographical area of my local shopping mall.

But that’s not really a bad thing. I really don’t need to explore every nook and cranny of New Tech Fantasyburg to get the overall idea of the city’s size and scope, nor do I especially want to spend the next 5 hours of the game doing so--repeated architecture tiles and NPC dialogue doesn’t have that powerful a pull on me. I’ve played RPGs that stuck around 1 single city well past the novelty’s expiration date, and it wasn’t a great time--Ordon Village in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess was infuriatingly dull and overplayed, Kingdom Hearts 2’s beginning in Twilight Town was worse, and poor Dragon Age 2 never even escaped from the city of Kirkwall.

Also, on a personal note, I am absolute shit with directions, and this flaw absolutely does translate to my gaming. I already frequently get lost in the more decently-sized city microcosms in some RPGs--even navigating a moderate city section, like those in Deus Ex 3, is a spatial nightmare for me. Seriously, game developers, never give us any more than these tiny slices of RPG towns. Please. For my sake.


Running Endurance, Part 2: As I noted last time, RPG characters generally seem indefatigable when it comes to jogging from 1 screen to the next nonstop for 50+ hours of game time, a fact that I’m very glad for, because as little value as I clearly place upon my time, even I have better shit to do than to fritter away an extra cumulative 60 minutes’ worth of time per game because some slow-ass protagonist wanted to meander instead of trot his way to every goal.

But as a sharp-witted and anonymous reader pointed out on the last rant, not only does unflagging limb motion as they literally cross the world never tire most RPG characters, but their running endurance and speed are also rarely, if ever, affected by their actual physical condition. Spikehair McSwordbutt will jog at exactly the same speed, for exactly as long, whether he’s at full health or a measly 1 HP. Be he of robust constitution or suffering from no less than 6 different status effects, some of which may be states of unconsciousness, his pace is equally unfaltering.

Now, I can’t say this for absolute certainty, as I just avoid running and all other forms of physical activity altogether either way, but I think that if I were deeply poisoned and every step I took literally drained the life from my person, it might have a negative impact on my capacity to hustle.

But of course, this is a good thing, and should not change. Because 1 game did, in fact, link a character’s ability to run to their HP. And that game was Lunar: Dragon Song.

And you never, ever follow Lunar: Dragon Song’s example.

On anything.

EVER.


Decaying Weapons: Okay guys I know I did this one last time, and don’t worry I’m not counting this as 1 of the new 8 things on this list, but hear me out on this: I just really fucking hate equipment degradation. Seriously who the fuck is the obnoxious little shit that first came up with this ass-ery? To the first video game developer that decided to apply the natural entropy of all things to video games’ weapons, armor, and whatnot, let me just say: I want every badger on Earth to become uncontrollably, very aggressively attracted to you and seek you out. I desire the last moments of your life to be someone forcing you to binge-watch Star Trek: Discovery. I hope you accidentally bite your tongue every single day.

Oh, and hey, just to keep things fresh, there’s a whole new reason these days why weapons that disintegrate as you use them is a bad thing, as if the obvious wasn’t enough: game developers can use this shitty game mechanic to scam you into paying them more. Never afraid to be unequivocally proven to be liars and cheats, Bethesda used the annoyance of weapon degradation in Fallout 76 as an opportunity to, after having said on record that all microtransactions would have no effect on gameplay, sell players special equipment repair kits to make the weapon degradation less inconvenient. Yes, Bethesda took this spectacularly anti-fun gameplay mechanic, put it in their game, sold that game to you for 59 dollars and 98-and-a-half cents more than the game was worth, and then charged you more money for a solution to the problem that they created. So yeah, besides just the obvious reason that it’s fucking asinine beyond the human capacity to fathom, weapon degradation is a bad idea in RPGs because it is also, it seems, an invitation for Todd Howard and his unethical corporate shitstain peers to rape your wallet.


Return Policies of Limitless Possibilities: Life for a merchant in an RPG world must occasionally become something of a nightmare, when the heroes roll into town. Sure, these assholes will probably lay down some coin to purchase a few necessities...but they may very well drop 99 battle axes on your counter, instead, and demand that you buy every single one off of them at half resale value. Does it matter that you’re strictly a potion vendor? Nope, you’re still obligated to purchase nearly a hundred of an item that you don’t even peddle--and even if you did, it’d still be a tough sell, since the adventurers wouldn’t be unloading an overstuffed sack of helmets on you if every last 1 of those damn things wasn’t obsolete compared to the equipment offered in this very town. Does it matter that you’re located in a tiny, rural farming hamlet, on an island with no port? Absolutely not--you’d better goddamn well have the full 46,000 that the pile of outdated knives is worth on hand and ready to fork over, down to the last gil!

However, as silly as it may seem that any given stall in a farmer’s market has got more shekels in its cash box than Randy Pitchford has stains on his immortal soul, I’d much rather have the convenience of being able to sell any amount of anything to anyone in an RPG than to have the alternative that you see in some Western RPGs like Fallout, games which actually limit how much currency any given merchant has on hand at any given time. As convenient as Fast Travel makes the process, it’s still something of a pain to find yourself carrying a load of valuable crap to sell, and have to hoof it to 1 vendor after another to get rid of it while still getting your money’s worth. And while I can appreciate the amusing subversion of RPG tropes inherent to it, it was nonetheless kind of annoying in Undertale when merchants refused to buy your junk off you, even if for admittedly logical reasons. Although the concept of the “Looter Shooter” is relatively recent to the industry, the quick and gratuitous acquisition of stuff, and the immediate pawning of said stuff for cold, hard zenny, is a longtime staple of the RPG genre, and adding the frustrating minutia of real-world restrictions to these transactions doesn’t have a beneficial tradeoff. Just let the dirty trash-picking waster living in a torn tent under a collapsed overpass possess the 1600 caps he owes me for unwisely handing him a dozen laser shotguns, and let me get on with my Fallout life, Bethesda!


Global Monolingualism: Basically, every single culture on any given fantasy planet (or undefined magical land, or magic-locked sister dimensions, or collapsed titanic divine mecha that they crawl on like disgusting parasites, or whatever) has a 95% chance of speaking the exact same language, and, to compound this miracle several times over, often all with the same accent! If anyone speaks a different language, you can be damn sure it’s only because it’s useful to the game’s narrative--padding the game’s time with quests to translate plot-relevant prophecies and instructions, padding the game’s time with sidequests to translate not plot-relevant dialogue for no particular reason because what was the point of Al Bhed really?, emphasizing how alien Tales of Eternia’s Meredy is even though the game gets lazier and lazier on implementing this different languages thing once it stops being useful and just kind of says “fuck it, everyone perfectly understands everyone because magic, we can’t be bothered to keep track of this shit any more” eventually, and so on.

This is, of course, not an RPG-specific trope by any stretch of the imagination, but they certainly make use of this convenient bit of non-realism at least as often as any other form of storytelling - perhaps more than most, even. And just as obvious are the benefits of taking this approach that every single being in the world, even a bunch of schmucks who’ve been living for a thousand years on a floating sky city apart from the world, or a bunch of inner-earth-dwelling dwarves who have never before this moment even encountered an inhabitant of the surface, speaks a single, unified language. If we were to introduce the concept of a realistic divide of languages between a planet’s cultures such as what we deal with in our own world, the complications of having to set up appropriate narrative devices for translation would soon become overly burdensome--and that irritation would easily outweigh what little benefits the story would gain from the situation. If there were any benefits to be had at all--I can’t really think of what, say, Lufia 2, or Lunar 1 would gain from such linguistic distinctions. Even the benefits for games in which a cultural divide is a plot point wouldn’t necessarily have much to gain--Grandia 1 and Chrono Trigger, for example, don’t have the kind of storytelling objectives that would get any real mileage from language barriers, even though encountering and exploring new lands is a major part of Grandia 1, and doing the same for different times is a major part of Chrono Trigger. For the pleasure of not having to hire a new translator every time I get shot from a canon into another county in a Mana game just for the sake of realism, I’ll gladly embrace the “all the universe speaks English” approach.

Also, the current system of only involving other languages when they’re useful to the plot actually works to our benefit in another way, too. While it’s frequently just a convenience to have everyone speak Galactic Basic Standard, the fact that we’re groomed to expect everyone we encounter in a game to speak a single language actually makes it more noteworthy when a character or plot device doesn’t. An indecipherable sacred text or a magical girl falling from the sky who speaks a foreign language wouldn’t seem all that eye-catching in a game whose course of events already had to juggle English, Japanese, Spanish, French, Gaelic, Polish, Cantonese, Al Bhed, Klingon, Animal Crossing, and Wookie. But in a game with only a single widely-spoken language? The difference stands out far more.


Money-Changing: Is it especially likely that a typical human empire, the human kingdom said empire is at war with, a secluded elven village, an underwater town of merpeople, a single vendor inexplicably and unapologetically living in ruins that have been abandoned for over 500 years, a community of extra-dimensional cat-people, the denizens of a post-apocalyptic wasteland existing over a thousand years in the future, and real, actual fucking penguins would all happen to accept the same gold coins or colorful gems as payment for their goods and services? No.

Do I want to revisit Secret of Evermore’s system of requiring you to visit a money exchange merchant every time I reach a new area of the game whose currency is completely different from the last? A far, far more emphatic no.

Seriously, nothing important is accomplished by this. No one cares, no one possibly could care, about that level of realistic detail in their RPG adventure. It’s a mild annoyance which adds nothing to the experience. Or it’s not even that much--the currency differences between the NCR, Legion, and general wasteland in Fallout: New Vegas were all but meaningless in a game whose economic system is primarily about barter.


Dietary Realism: Honestly, even when they’re consuming food items that haven’t been sitting in a moldy pouch for multiple lifetimes, RPG characters have got some shit diets. The Secret of Mana kids go their entire adventure subsisting on nothing but candy, chocolate, jam, and an occasional walnut. You trying to tell me that after weeks, maybe months of being in the wilderness, subsisting on nothing but ice cream toppings, they’d be in any condition to take on dark sorcerers and gigantic dragon-furries? Randi’s Strength stat should have been going DOWN every time he leveled up; the only healthily robust part of these characters’ bodies should have been their acne!

And what about all the game meat some RPG characters acquire as they go along their travels? Yeah, not everything caught in the wild is as dangerous as the infamous bushmeat (although it’s certainly present in some RPGs; the Millennium series outright has you collecting edible, health-restoring monkey and gorilla meat, for example), but a steady diet of game meat is a dicey gamble--realistically, in games where you get consumable meat items from wild boars and birds and so on, at least 1 party member would be struck with a nasty parasite or possibly even fatal disease per long adventure from all the untreated dire woof-woofs they’ve been cramming down their gullet. And that’s assuming they’re even cooking the damn stuff--some RPGs distinguish between raw and cooked food items, after all. Really, Fallout 4, you’re trying to tell me that Nora can spend her days devouring the raw innards of giant mutated cockroaches that roll around in and actively dig through the filth of post-apocalyptic Boston--not an especially clean and sanitary city even before Armageddon, I’d like to point out--all the time, and nothing, absolutely nothing will threaten her health beyond a slight increase in rads?

Man, just a little more realism to this situation, and Adventure Bar Story wouldn’t even exist.

But of course, even though the act of sinking my teeth into the twisted, bloated bulk of a hideously mutated mole-rat makes me queasy merely to think about and would probably lead to a legendary battle with my bathroom if I tried it, it’s better not to transfer the real-life reactions to living off the fat of fantasy and post-apocalyptic lands. Because I don’t think there’s a single person alive who won’t agree that malnutrition and food poisoning are major fucking bummers.


Fuck You, Second Law of Physics: Two objects cannot occupy the same place at the same time. But 5 - 8 objects that happen to be several humans, a robot, and a talkative self-aware guinea pig fully decked out in medieval armor? Oh, yeah, that’s no problem. Pile on in, guys, plenty of room in the single block of texture space which the protagonist inhabits! Just cram yourselves so far up into the main character’s personal space that you outright vanish from sight, as a Japanese subway attendant looks on with tears of envious admiration in his eyes. Or, alternately, all the supporting party members can just sort of trail behind the hero as he wanders around, single-file, keeping a respectful and exact distance behind him like dutiful, emotionally-repressed wives of olden times, while maintaining no more than a phantasmal presence, since the protagonist can unexpectedly double back whenever he feels like it and just walk right the hell through them with nary an effort.

Still, as peculiar as it may be for characters like Star Ocean 2’s Noel, the majority of Chrono Cross’s cast, and 95% of all Kemco characters to possess a physical presence equal to their overall substance as characters, it’s way better to have one’s party members disappear into the protagonist’s pocket or haunt his every step as no more than specters, than to have them running around as solid objects. Because then you get situations wherein your companions block your path if you want to go back, or loiter in doorways, trapping you indefinitely within small rooms because you can’t push past. The problem of becoming trapped by inconvenient and random NPC movement paths is already enough of an irritation; we don’t need to add the people who’re supposed to be your allies to the mix.

Just imagine if the 98 party members following Josephine around in I Have Low Stats But My Class is Leader, So I Recruited Everyone I Know to Fight the Dark Lord were all solid. The RPG would basically be a highly frustrating game of Snake.

I will say that, while my preference is the non-realistic approach to this issue, I’ll also accept a scenario that is much more realistic, too. As in, party members are solid beings who can obstruct your path, BUT you also have enough realism as a person to, y’know, open your stupid mouth and ask them to move. Fallout 2 was, I believe, the first RPG to come up with this idea, probably due to how infuriatingly often companions got in one’s way during the first Fallout, and a few titles since have gone this route, and bully for them. Whatever it takes to keep a narrow passage at the corner of the area map from becoming my protagonist’s final resting place because he’s just too damn shy to ask his closest friends in the world to take 2 steps to the left.




Well, that was fun, again. I really don’t have anything new to close this one out with, so, I dunno, I guess I’ll just reiterate what I concluded with last time: realism is a fine and lovely thing in our games, but it’s not an end in itself. It’s a tool to serve the purpose of a better gaming experience. So if implementing a new gameplay mechanic or eliminating a trope of the genre for the sake of realism does more harm than good to the audience’s experience, well, don’t fucking do it! You’d think this sort of thing would be obvious, honestly.