Mini-games in RPGs : The Suck, am I right? Mini-games should be kept out of RPGs or at least restricted to a few once-off puzzles, right? Well, except for the combat mini-game. THAT one is fine.

Wait, what? Combat isn’t a mini-game, surely?

Yes, it is. Or rather, it shows that the issue isn’t as clear-cut as all that. What is a grown-up version of a mini-game? The answer is : an integrated subsystem of the gameplay.

Combat isn’t roleplaying. It is easy to ‘roleplay’ without having a set of mechanics designed to model combat scenarios in detail. You could abstract out the whole set of actions into a single combat roll, or a set of combat rolls, informing the player of the outcome after it resolves, in a similar way to handling a lockpicking or persuasion skill check. But few if any roleplaying systems are made without some section of the rules designed to model combat, a legacy of how RPGs evolved from wargames perhaps, or it could simply be that humanity is a violent species and our fantasy games tend to revolve around letting us explore experiences we feel drawn to but can’t or fear to experience in real life, adventure and violence and danger and power, things that combat offers in spades.

Whatever the reason, combat mechanics are generally a large and fundamental part of gameplay in most RPGs, and few people think “aw shit, another boring mini-game” every time they have a combat encounter. I think this is proof that mini-games CAN work, and it also allows us to analyze how a mini-game should work, if you want it to be greeted enthusiastically by your players. I’m going to post up the points I think make for a ‘successful’ mini-game, if you have any points to add feel free to put them in the comments.

Now, a mini-game can still be enjoyable without having all of the following points, I simply think that you need all of these for the mini-game to feel ‘seamless’ to the gameplay. Ie for the player not to consider them separate to the fundamental experience, a diversion. Or worse, a complete waste of time.

*It is worth noting that combat, as a mini-game itself, can fall prey to any of these issues, which generally results in the combat feeling unsatisfying, perhaps even turning the player off the game entirely if combat is the main focus*

*Also note, optional mini-games are excluded. If it’s something the player can choose to trivially circumvent, such as Arcomage here or Pazaak in Kotor, that’s fine. I’m talking specifically about mini-games which are fundamentally integrated into certain gameplay paths ( such as lockpicking) and are repeated throughout the game.*

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1) Complexity. Often the simplest mistake with mini-games is to make them too simple. The type of person who buys a complex and deep roleplaying game isn’t going to be happy if the game forces them to play tic-tac-toe every 20 minutes. Sure, that person might enjoy the occasional game of tic-tac-toe, but anything too simple lacks challenge and variety, especially on repeated play-through’s of the mini-game. Your mini-game doesn’t need to have a gazillion moving parts, it simply needs a large enough solution space in comparison to how many times the player will encounter it.

If you only encounter a puzzle once in the game, a single solution is ok. The more times the player encounters it, the larger the solution space needs to be to provide variety, novelty and challenge. Chess is a good example, there aren’t that many types of pieces but the solution space is vast, enough to have kept humanity enjoying the game for centuries.

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2) Increasing Challenge Over Time. It is an accepted principle of game design that the game should ramp up the challenge as the player masters the mechanics, offering an enjoyable rhythm of increasing challenge followed by increasing reward/psychological payoff. Yet so often this is forgotten when it comes to the mini-games, they stay static. Which is actually the same as saying they get easier and easier, as the player masters the mini-game. If these mini-games are mandatory, they become annoying time-sinks.

Ideally, the mini-game should increase both the challenge AND the range of options open to the player over time, in the same way that combat will increase enemy difficulty but also give them new moves to use in combat.

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3) Supports the Theme and Feeling of the Action Being Undertaken. The gameplay of the mini-game, how it plays and ‘feels’, should be consistent with whatever action or task the player is trying to perform that the mini-game is an abstraction of. Even though a mini-game is an abstraction to some degree for the sake of gameplay, you want the gameplay to give a similar ‘sense’ as the thing being modeled. When you’re trying to hack a computer or pick a lock, playing a game of Mastermind or Hangman or whatever is generally immersion breaking.

Turn-based combat in an RPG is obviously an abstraction but it conveys that ‘chess’ feeling of making tactical decisions on a battlefield. Even though it is an abstraction it doesn’t hurt the feeling of being in battle, it supports it. If you’re trying to model computer hacking, try to create gameplay that gives the player a feeling of penetrating security systems via different hacking attacks rather than a simple pattern-matching memory game.

I’d like to take a moment to point out a type of mini-game which suffers more than others from this problem : dialogue mini-games. The problem is that human speech is incredibly complicated. If you abstract away from direct speech then you can get away with making ‘character interaction’ more mechanical, see the way diplomacy is handled in 4X strategy games, where nations make demands and threats against each other. But the minute you’re face-to-face with an NPC and trying to create the sense of actual conversation, the mechanical and ‘gamey’ nature of mini-games tends to destroy any sense of verisimilitude.

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4) Tied to the Roleplaying Layer. All gameplay systems make use of some set of skills the player has, they wouldn’t have any gameplay otherwise. However, to successfully integrate your mini-game into the overall framework of a roleplaying game, it needs to tie into the roleplaying layer. In other words, it has to involve a mix of player ability and character ability. Your character can’t be an expert lock-pick simply because you personally are good at tic-tac-toe.

Exactly what the balance of player-to-character skill should be in any system is a matter of taste, but I’d say the character influence cannot be so trivial that player skill can easily counteract it. If that is the case, it is no longer integrated into the greater roleplaying game, IMO. Which makes it feel disjointed, separate from the whole.

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So those are the 4 points I think you need to meet in order to avoid the loathing heaped on mini-games. Can we achieve that in all areas? I don’t know. Certainly we can do better in many areas than the current RPG standard. The Thief series showed us the possibilities for deeper stealth gameplay. Games like Space Rangers 2 and Storm of Zehir have added trade and exploration layers. The Ultima series have shown us that morality can be handled with more sophistication than the simple Good/Evil meters that are common these days.

But in other cases it may be better to stick to simple skill checks/no checks if you can’t meet the criteria above, whether due to lack of resources, because that isn’t your game’s focus (Diablo 3 shouldn’t have lockpicking system, for example) or simply because the problem itself is difficult to solve. Better to use a system that doesn’t get in the way than one which actively detracts from the experience. Until we can synthesize human speech, for example, avoiding dialogue mini-games entirely may be the only workable solution.