dtgreene: So, given an RPG in which combat is a separate game mode (for example, if there's a separate battle screen, but I count things like Chrono Trigger in this category; I wouldn't count something like Baldur's Gate, however), how should the game decide when combat starts? Do you like such encounters being determined by a random number rolled each step, or do you prefer some variety of enemies that are visible ahead of time?
borisburke: Yes and no.
The game should scale the important encounters to be slightly harder than you. As you get harder and better equipped, the starter enemies will become easy and boring, which it where the phrase 'grinding for XP' comes from. The game should make the weak enemy disappear or get harder. If you were a game Dev, how would you do that?
I think it should be scaled according to distance-from-spawn (in an open world game) or distance into the story in a linear game. Some games, to their credit, have both.
The problem with having weaker enemies disappear entirely is that it can then become hard to get items and skills that can only be found, or are most easily found, from weaker enemies. (SaGa Frontier 1 has this issue, as weaker enemies are replaced with stronger ones, and the abilities that a monster can learn from an enemy depend on which monster it is.)
The problem with having them get harder is that it can make leveling up and getting stronger feel pointless. Why spend the time getting stronger when the enemies will get stronger as a result?
So, I would probably just have enemy stregnth be area-based.
(Now, one interesting question is whether to have out-of-depth enemies appearing. Stranger of Sword City, for example, occasionally has an enemy 10 levels higher than the average enemy level, or an enemy type that's significantly stronger than the other enemies in the area, appear. (Note that Saviors of Sapphire Wings does not do this.))
