strangest/coolest rpg mechanics

King of Posters Galaxy Oddity
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woah, I am totally baffled by those Baten Kaitos things. Like, seriously baffled. Never noticed momotaro and Pac-Man, that’s for sure …

[quote=“u_u, post:39, topic:3393, full:true”]
Are there games that have an economic system that isn’t entirely player-centric? Like, prices that are determined by factors other than how high your level is or how far along in the game you are? Specifically, are there rpgs where the location you found or purchased an item alters its resale value? Like, if you found a sword in a cave, it would not be considered very rare if you tried to hawk it in the town right near the cave where you found it, but if you traveled to a large city far away it would be regarded as an exotic artifact and fetch a higher price[/quote]
paging @ToruMasuda, since he’s the king of rigging the stockmarket in Bumpytrot (a relaxing, nonlinear adventure, where you can be the bad guy if you want. Fennel’s going to be the best btw kthxbye)




unfortunately, Youpi’s Star Ocean 2 game-breaking topic on SB1.0 has been lost in time, using a guide, he bent this game to the max and it was such a blast to experience this broken game ~~~


and just a tiny bit from my side, because I don't know such awesome things that have been posted here, but still want to contribute to this wonderful topic:

FF9 has this (iirc) late-game dungeon where you weapon stats are inverted, so if you kept them from the start of the game, you equip these weapons and deal massive damage™. Or you are a fool and wonder why the difficulty has been ramped up like hell suddenly, and why the B-cast characters suddenly deal damage like pros when compared to the A-cast. Like I did the first time 'round.

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This thread is great, btw.

The World Ends with You has a nutrition system where you can buy and eat food items you buy around Shibuya like ramen, crèpes or burgers. Each character has particular likes and dislikes about the food they consume. Each food item has its own digestion value and it takes a different amount of time (battles) to digest the food. Once fully digested, the meal confers an unique bonus to your stats, modified by the character’s like/dislike. There is a set amount you can eat in a given day until you get too full and can only eat small snacks until the next morning.

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I was also going to mention the stock market in Steambot Chronicles, that is influenced by completing certain quests.

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TWEWY also has several brands of clothing with different styles. One would be punk fashon, other will be gothic, sporty, and so on. Each brand has a popularity level on diferent districts, and you can influence the brand’s popularity by winning fights in the various districts while wearing pins and clothes of that brand.
All the brands have opposing styles and are named after the animals in the chinese zodiac.

Also, mobile and f2p games made passive game bonuses quite common, but it’s worth mentioning that, back in the day, TWEWY already gave you a bit of exp while you weren’t playing. You’d cash in after loading your save. You’d get a small boost to your abilities, perhaps contributing to a level up before you resumed play. The hard limit was 1 week, after which you didn’t accumulate any more “off time” exp

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contractually obligated to note without having (yet) played it that TWEWY has a bravery stat requirement for said clothes equipment, where low bravery is linked to masculine clothing and high bravery is put onto female clothing, and after boosting it up with said food one can find character-exclusive bonuses for putting the male protagonist in a cheongsam or abuse the mixed benefits of said gothic lolita fashion

in the non-player-economy category, don’t a whole bunch of old rpgs allow slim, slow profit from buying consumables in one place and selling them off where they’re more desired? Paper Mario having different buy / sell values for hot / cold damage / healing items in the desert / tropical islands / arctics is the first that comes to mind

also for thread title worthy strange rpg mechanics, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door had a long list of hidden animation flair timings during action-command attacks to fit flair into for more audience meter gain

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This is 3 of the 4 Xs in the 4X genre.

The main appeal of games like X is exploiting galactic trading routes to the point where you have enough money to build your own mining operations, then your own space stations, then your own trade routes, until eventually you have created your own economy.

Fable has fluctuating item prices based on the item’s relative scarcity in the world. However, much like everything else in Fable, this system was not well thought out, as the value of an item is only determined at the point of sale, not relative to all other items. So all you need to do to generate unlimited money is run around collecting diamonds until you have about 100, sell them all to a merchant with no diamonds in a single transaction, and then immediately buy them back in a single transaction. When selling them their value will be appraised at maximum scarcity level, and when rebuying them they will be appraised at their minimum scarcity value.

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TWEWY also had a proto-streetpass sort of system which gave you EXP for passing other players!

-DS’s that are also running Mingle Mode will exchange “ESP’er” contacts, and grant you access to the ESP’er’s shop from which you may purchase some of their items. Each ESP’er is worth 50 MPP. Also, if you mingle with an ESP’er, you gain some bravery.

-DS systems running any other games with wireless communications will add a “Civvies” contact (20 MPP), but they will have no special value.

-Some other wireless noise may generate “Alien” contacts, although it is widely believed that Aliens are a random occurrence that is not affected by other wireless devices. Each Alien is worth 100 MPP.

aaannnnndddd pins had upgrade paths that diverged based on the proportion of EXP gained from battle, from sleep mode, and from mingle mode, so you had to balance this shit out to get rare pins

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Anybody ever play the iOS port to see how this proto-streetpass stuff is implemented there?

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…… we kinda grew up, I suppose, and that’s it?

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anyway, to add something more noteworthy:

Valkyrie Profile has a few characters that, if they have a history together, get a special cut-/story-scene when you are sending them to Freya/Odin. I discovered this by chance when I found all of the new ones being pretty forgettable and sent them to Freya, and didn’t really get it until I played it a second time (and experimented with a savefile/different combinations of characters).

Item creation was also somewhat special, but I only remember it being weird, not why. Has been too long already …

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This isn’t very obscure at all by this thread’s standard but when you’re a kid pre internet all you can do is speculate. I didn’t know for the longest time how or why desperation attacks occurred in FF6, I’d just feel a huge thrill when Shadow’s dog would show up and attack an enemy for huge damage. Gamefaqs removed all the wonder in the world.

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How does a game avoid being ruined by GameFAQs? Asking for a friend.

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I guess by having enough self control to not look things up from Fear Of Missing Content, I definitely don’t have it.

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How would a game designer avoid that though? Like, make it so impenetrable that GameFAQs can’t ruin it? Randomization of mechanics? Just not having enough people care about your game to write an FAQ?

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Randomize the name of the game so people can’t google that shit.

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i mean, much like learning Santa doesn’t exist, at some point you have to come to grips w/ the fact that all games are is a bunch of intricate, programmed circuitry.

Then instead of wondering how these magic boxes/discs do what they do, you get to participate in threads like this where we marvel at the weird, hidden formulae stashed away like numerical treasures and subsequently dug up by nerds w/ way too much time on their hands!!

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My favorite way of putting this is referring to computers as “carefully organized sand”

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what the fuck…? spoiler text pls

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mods please flag this thread NSFL

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Divinity: Original Sin has one of my favorite gimmicks in a video game. It has two player characters. When you start the game you get to make two characters with a decent-ish character creator and everything! This also means that you get to pick dialog for two different people and you can make them argue, which has a RPS resolution mechanic.

Apparently, the ending of the game is determined by how your PCs argued throughout the game

Divinity II: Ego Draconis was not a good game but it is one of my favorite games. The original version of the game (and the X360 base version was never patched) had a rather strange system. You leveled up like in a normal RPG, but enemies leveled against you. So, not only did your stats go up, your enemies’ stats went down. This included how much EXP they reward.

Another funny mechanic for a RPG is that enemies didn’t respawn at all. So, every time you level up, you lower the amount of EXP that exists in the world. Since you are supposed to level yourself up, and level enemies down, enemies about 5 levels above you can’t be harmed. When you are 5 levels about enemies, they can’t harm you. You can put yourself in a situation where the final boss of the game can’t hurt you at all, or you can get stuck with no way of progressing.

Other Divinity II fax:
-You can turn into a dragon or back whenever when you are outside and there is no fall damage lol
-There are a bunch of ‘morality’ segments that are maybe just jokes? One of them is just straight up a room that asks, ‘Do you want to help this dude you’ve never seen before or kill him?’ and then nothing changes no matter what you do.
-You can select your gender but characters just avoid gendering you at all. There is one part where they call you a dude regardless of your choice tho.

This game is so fucking weird the more I remember it?
-Your character can read minds. Reading minds costs XP (and the amount depends on who you are reading), which, as previously pointed out is a limited resource. Reading minds doesn’t take away XP, but it gives you an XP debt that is added to the amount needed to gain the level after the next level. You can rack up a huge XP debt iirc.
-Sometimes reading minds flips triggers in the world, so reading someone’s mind will make a chest appear or something. Sometimes it doesn’t, so you can read someone’s mind, find out about the chest, reload your game, and go get it while saving the XP. There’s a wizard who shows up a lot and you always get some huge bonus for reading his mind, like a stat boost or a level or something. Gaining a level is kind of a punishment, though?

I love the Divinity series so much ;_;

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