How to make Grinding for Experience in a IF style RPG work without being too repetitive and boring the player?

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Hey guys, so I’m interested in creating a kind of open world style IF where the player is basically playing an RPG game. Like Wow for example, you have levels, quests, need to get xp and gold by farming and grinding.

Do you think it is viable to create an rpg like that in this kind of medium? My main concern is that rpgs like the one I’m envision would require the player to level up to get strong enough to get to the main boss of that specific section (like poe arcs) and would need to hunt creatures with his party to get to this level.

I imagine that grinding for levels wouldn’t really translate well into a 100% text IF right? Probably it would be to repetitive and boring. But this is such a integral part of the experience that the player would be playing that I don’t know how to overcome this problem.

There would be quests where the player could do to get xp but I don’t like the idea of only relying on quests for this.

I’m coding in choicescript btw.

TLDR: How to make the experience of grinding for xp in a text based IF without boring the player to death?

Thanks in advance for all the help!

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Well if you have to include grinding I would think it’s better to make the process more complex and not overly repetitive. I think choicescript as a medium would be better for a quest-centered rpg. Correct me if I’m wrong though because I haven’t played enough choicescript games.

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I’d look into this article, which studies grinding in choice IF by one of the most popular IF authors: Behind “The Bloody Wallpaper” – The Rosebush

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I wrote a couple of text-based RPGs, except using Twine. Both allow players to choose a character archetype at the start, and each encounter can be approached in different ways depending on what you have, like spells and potions. As they get used up, you have to change tactics whenever the same encounter comes up again. So it all turns into a balancing game.

Edit: also, make sure to have a bunch of them, 10-15 at a minimum. Some way to make sure encounters don’t repeat too much is also a good idea.

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I might be wrong, but to me the questions seem to be identical for graphical and textual RPGs. Why should it be more or less boring to grind in gfx or text RPG?

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What makes grinding not boring? I’m not really sure because I’m only occasionally in the mood for it. But I would say it’s a combination of pacing and aesthetic experience. Text games usually respond instantly (now that we live in the future), and often don’t have illustrations or music. I would consider slowing down the experience somehow, maybe even some kind of timed autofight. You don’t want the player to be thinking about getting through it faster by clicking faster. Just let them appreciate the experience Oregon Trail style, intervening when appropriate.

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I originally wasn’t going to reply to this thread because I honestly can’t stand grinding in videogames, much less in IF.

Comments on grinding, which I don't know how to write in a tone which doesn't sound antagonistic.

Very rarely does grinding feel like it respects the player’s time, and I’m often left wondering if maybe the solution should have been better pacing, instead of providing areas to the player with a note, which reads “If the game’s difficulty curve was designed incorrectly, then please spin your wheels here for an unknown amount of time until the game becomes too easy. Thanks.”

Rant aside, it’s worth noting that I’m apparently not in the target audience for a game with grinding. I didn’t even know there was an audience who enjoyed it until now. Nearly all of my friends love RPGs and JRPGs, and there’s always a point where they say something like “Ugh, the games making me do grinding for a while now… I’ll let you know when that changes in a few days.”

NOTE: I’m note going to tell you that adding grinding is objectively wrong. It literally just has not occured to me that anyone seeks it out for gameplay, but—like most people—my friend group is not an average sample of the human population.

So…grain of salt when reviewing this feedback, etc. We seem to be coming from two very different worlds here.

This sounds excellent. I would love a system where I could customize my party, enter a grind area, and select some simulated time interval to pass as a single bulk calculation. The game processes for a bit and then tells me how my party is doing after the interval, with the option of reading a report of what happened during it.

If it’s clear my party’s build isn’t getting them killed, then I can safely select longer intervals.

I feel like this respects the player’s time enough to make grinding become a non-issue. The player’s achievement is in how the party is customized, which takes planning and effort. The time interval tests it in a wide variety of scenarios, to see if the player has accounted for them.

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Well. Maybe there is, but grinding needs to be motivated, the process interesting, and the rewards worthwhile. Some RPGs do this very well (Monster Hunter World), some fail miserably at it (Archeage), and some are almost exclusively built around this dynamic (the whole of the Disgaea franchise).

In a parser game, I can’t see how grinding can be done in an engaging way, but I’d love to be proven wrong. In other flavours of IF, there are maybe better possibilities.

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I will need to ask my partners and friends about this, in detail.

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The same as graphical or choice games.
By making it variable (for example several types of enemies, introducing critical hits, vary the attacks of both PC and NPC). And provide some benefits/achievements often.

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I would add that the benefits/achievements should scale according to how much real-time the player will likely spend in an average encounter, if you’re not going the “Oregon Trail” auto-fight route.

Using the game interface takes time, and so does reading. This should be factored into the reward. Highly-complex, turn-based battles that can take 10-15 minutes to complete should be rewarded accordingly, for example, and a dev should—ideally—measure completion times from testers to balance this.

I feel like someone should not have to spend real-time days stuck in grinding (with an optimized method) between major quest points, even if the mechanics are fun, just because the loot per encounter is so scarce.

Essentially, I’m just being a long-winded repeater of Paul’s feedback.

I’ve been watching people play and replay (and replay) the Persona and Monster Hunter games for a few years now, and have been taking notes. These are players who have the numbers all written down in spreadsheets and do the math as part of planning how they’re approaching the game.

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I feel it’s a good time to point out that simple repetitive activities can be relaxing, and iterating on a scenario by taking different options each time can be interesting. See also: retrying the kind of roguelike where the average playthrough takes fifteen minutes.

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My favorite games follow this model. :grin: Most of them are entirely built around it, though, instead of treating it as a means to get between quest points, which greatly shifts the focus of the game.

They also have enough variety in mechanics (as @Pebblerubble points out) to sustain this as the primary loop.

This is probably why I’ve heard players call some forms of this “gameplay”, and other forms of this “grinding”. They’re the same structure, but it’s a lot more noticeable when implemented certain ways. Usually when I heard people call it “grinding”, it’s become too tedious or monotonous.

This might be why I was so confused to see it planned as an intentional feature. :thinking:

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A boring grind typically means repetitive and unrewarding.

First, you have to nail the combat mechanics to be enjoyable. Whatever strategies are available to the player have to be interesting, or at the very least easy to use.

Second, you have to employ some level of randomization. NPCs could be autonomous. Fights can have secondary opponents enter mid-fight. (Maybe secondary NPCs too.) The loot found, should be interesting and rewarding in and of itself (Diablo is built on this). No two fights should ever play out exactly the same, if possible.

Thirdly, the spoils from battle should feel worthwhile on more than one level. The results/rewards of a fight can go towards more than one thing at a time, like… gear, levels, story arcs, quests, relationships, etc.

Fourthly, the party members should feel alive. On a simple level, NPCs can comment about what’s happening during or after a fight. Even better if they have their own stat system for how they react/behave towards you and each other.

Lastly (and this is getting crazy), make it so certain things, that happen in a battle, launch mini-story arcs. Like, if the party’s mage casts fireball for the first time in a fight, afterwards some characters might comment about it and even show concern about how much it weakened them (used mana) and such… maybe there is more to do about it. Make the dynamics of an average fight become side-plot points.

Start simple and build it up. Battle text should be concise and useful. Battles should not drag on too long (except for boss fights). There’s not much more I can offer without knowing about the specific game mechanics you have in store, but I hope that inspires you in some way.

And welcome to Intfiction, Sherlock! :slight_smile:

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[quote=“Joey “Jess” Tanden, post:7, topic:70092, username:inventor200”]
This sounds excellent. I would love a system where I could customize my party, enter a grind area, and select some simulated time interval to pass as a single bulk calculation. The game processes for a bit and then tells me how my party is doing after the interval, with the option of reading a report of what happened during it.
[/quote]

That’s an interesting idea but I was picturing the opposite of a fast-forward ability. In a JRPG you usually walk around in real-time, meaning the activity is paced by your walking speed and the encounter probability [insert your own text limiting the time period under discussion here if this is no longer true]. That’s fine because sitting on the couch, fidgeting with a d-pad is a soothing way to relax. A text game should incorporate some pacing, perhaps with animated transitions, but it’s not as pleasant to click a link then wait until you can click another one. So maybe make the game automatically make reasonable decisions, so the player can just monitor as it goes. But maybe the physical aspect of messing with the controller is more important than I realize.

Respecting the player’s time is probably not a great angle to approach this from. The point is to give players a thing they can fidget with for a while when they want to spend some time doing that. It’s like doing a coloring book.

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Also worth mentioning: Loot! Vary what the PC gets after victory. Give sometimes some rare but precious items. Make the loot usable (and maybe necessary).

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I feel like these two things are not mutually exclusive, and we are talking about two very different concepts here.

What I’m reading from what you (and others) describing is a primary game loop, which everything else is built around. It’s something the player does because they want to, and that’s why they’re playing the game. If there’s a quest at all, it’s probably not the focus of the game. Even if it’s to relax or keep busy, it still respects the player’s time because it’s engaging enough to draw the player toward it. The player wants to spend time on this.

What I’m warning against is a situation where the quest is the primary focus, and grinding is made to pad out the time in between. Whether or not the player wants to engage with these mechanics, they have to, and meet some quota before the rest of the primary game can continue. The player’s time is not respected here, because the grind’s design is tedious. It might have been relaxing for the first hour, but now the player wants to continue to the next part of the main quest and re-enter the primary part of the game again, which is outside of the grind space.

I’ve seen both of these kinds of games in several forms, and my favorite games are of the former category.

Relaxing fidget games are not an alien concept to me; they’re my favorite kind of game, and I’ve played quite a lot of them, and have taken a lot of notes as I play, which is why I’m sharing here.

EDIT: Essentially, my experience in studying game design and game reviews has led me to a conclusion: If it’s relaxing and fidgety and involved, and the player wants to do it, then it’s “playing a game”. If it’s tedious, flat, and the player really wants to be done with it as of hours ago, then it’s “grinding”. My abject confusion upon entering this thread was because the vocabulary being used is something I’ve always heard applied as a critique against lackluster game design, and it’s only at this point of the thread that I’ve understood that “grind” is being used generally, including cases where the player wants to keep engaging with it.

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Honestly, I’ve never really enjoyed when a game forces me to mow down armies of mooks just to get strong enough to have a fighting chance against the next plot important opponent, and I think maybe one reason I was never that much into playing RPGs on home consoles is that you can be mindlessly mowing down enemies in game while most of your attention is on whatever’s playing on the television when you play on a handheld, and it would have been awesome if I could tell a Pokemon Game to just Loop the Elite 4 with a party consisting of an E4 Killer and 5 mons in need of leveling to evolve for Pokedex completion, moving the exp. share between party members as they evolve or could tell a disgaea game to do a loop of Cave of Ordeals 3, Wing Slayer/Big Bang/AoE9 Magic until everyone in my party is either out of SP, Dead, or lacks an attack that can hit a 3*3 formation(in case it isn’t obvious, I’m talking the Afternoon of Darkness Cave of Ordeals)… So yeah, totally down for an option to automate the process.

Still, I think the goal, at least for the main quest of an RPG, should be that a typical number of random encounters on the way from one plot fight to the next should dish out enough experience to make the fight challenging, but doable and that being underpowered for a plot fight should be a symptom of the player going out of their way to avoid random encounters, missing equipment upgrades that should be found on the game’s critical path, or really bad builds/strategy, though expecting the player to complete a few technically optional side quests along the way isn’t unreasonable… and naturally, someone who thoroughly explores every area before moving on finding all the optional upgrades in the process, completes every sidequest as it becomes available, and only runs from random encounters if they desperately need to get to a healing spot ASAP should generally have an easy time with most plot fights, excluding those the plot says the player is supposed to lose(though for those, I prefer when winning is possible even if it’s treated as a bonus boss that requires a new game plus or ludicrous amounts of grinding to stand a chance instead of the enemy being literally invincible as it can be quite satisfying to wipe the floor with such opponents, especially if winning the “unbeatable” fight unlocks an alternate ending or some really good loot).

If the player has to spend hours on end killing the same mooks over and over even when they’ve been playing well all along because the next boss has a huge spike in power/difficulty, that’s a good indicator something’s gone wrong in the balancing process… Though, if you’ve made the combat fun enough they’ll do it for hours on end even when they don’t need to, you’ve done something right.

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I think there’s some nuance here though, because not every primary game loop is “grindy”.

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Some games, I forget which, attempt to reduce the need to grind by assigning quests when the game notices grinding-like behavior. For example, you’re grinding away and some NPC approaches asking for help, gives you a bloody letter, and then falls down dead. Well, that’s interesting, so you go investigate the clues you now have in hand.

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