How much research/metagaming do you do when starting a new RPG with all sorts of stats and attributes and shit?

Game was just hard enough to be entertaining at normal on my first run. If you chose a higher difficulty despite being told by the game itself its for people already familiar with the game then you're dumb

>>Do a modicum of research to ensure you at least don't make any catastrophically bad decisions?

This one. Specifically, I do research to figure out how to optimally make the build I want. I don’t min-max, but I do want to make the build I usually play in all RPGs.

I just play the game

i go through several characters for trial and error

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I just play the game

i don't start new rpg's because i know they're a waste of time

I had to force myself not to look up anything, nor not to abuse saves for a best outcome when i was playing pathfinder Kingmaker and goddammit that was one of the most fun playthroughs i ever had
Metagaming is a trap, blind runs is the way

Was there any sense of self awareness when you typed this?

>check out new rpg
>looks cool I might play it
>check out youtube reviews and metacritic to see if its any good
>check out "howlongtobeat" to see if the price/length ratio is worth it
>google "most efficient builds in the game"
>open up a tab for dungeons, overworld, towns, items and npcs
>spend 5 hours in character creator
>open a 2 hour podcast for background noise
>play for 5 minutes
>google "when does the game get good"
>play for another 2 minutes
>close the game
>cry in bed
yep
another successful gamer day

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pathfinder is dangerous. nevermind metagaming, you always want to restart with a new class and WoTR even moreso with the mythic

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I'd say that it's mostly the first option, but if things are unclear I can look up their meaning. Normally I'd search for such information after starting and noticing that something is off, like when I created a character with low dexterity in Atom RPG and had to restart during the first town.

I'd say that the second option can be sensible because you simply can't know what's good and what's a complete waste, making the game less fun and interesting for you. Just look at all the people who struggle with the sewers in VTMB, I recently finished the game twice with completely different builds and had no problems at all. What I mean is that when it comes to these more complex RPGs it might be better to get a little familiar with the systems and the demands of the encounters.

It goes without saying, but none of this applies to "RPGs" such Fallout 4 and Dark Souls where your build doesn't matter all that much and you can easily adjust while playing.

RPGs are usually fine to play on normal mode even if you made a "bad" character so I don't usually research on a first playthrough

But if I like the game and want to play on harder diff, I look up what stats do and that's enough from there

I have never ever read fucking retarded books or watched 3 hour videos on how to make a character

Oh you have no idea howmuch willpower did u have to conjure for the start of that playthrough
But it got easier as time went on
I recommend it to everyone

It's your fault user. The game gives you the option to wear heavy armor and use assault rifles, you're retarded if you play anything else.

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Another rather extreme example of trying to play completely blind is Age of Decadence in which you can easily get completely stuck if your build isn't optimized for your chosen route. While I appreciate that you have to be dedicated to a route and playstyle, it shouldn't be that extreme while pretending to give you a nuanced choice.

Any RPG that gives you tons of build options while having some of these builds be straight up not viable is a badly designed game.

There, I said it.

i just look up what not to do since i've been blindsided by enough games by now i don't want to find out the hard way anymore

Fallout 2 is also a good example as agility is the god tier stat and creation engine players whine about the tutorial temple that the ants are fucking them up

nta, but I found pathfinder kingmaker really frustrating in a strange way, the 'main plot' or whatever just kept jerking your around with a dozen hidden doomtimers, and long ass fucking travel times it's incredibly annoying to play without prior knowledge (and so incredibly long that moreso than other games I am extremely disinclined to restart), my last save was somewhere around after beating the 'barbarian king' or whatever and then I just never actually returned to the game, I remember the 'forced party member' sequences that came out of the blue, and out in the field to be incredibly frustrating; particularly that one where you need to use the cleric dude during the lich cyclops tomb thing where he was like 3-4 levels behind the rest of the party and in starter gear (because my PC was cleric, so never used him) and that whole place was just a chain of level drain effects and bullshit that I had to savescum before practically every single battle, but the main issue being that they popped him up with 'oh yeah you gotta use this dude for htis dungeon' when I'm like a month's fucking walk from home base or anywhere I can buy him some gear or some shit and if I decide to walk back then like half a dozen doomtimer events are going to go off

even knowing what I know now, I'm not particularly motivated to restart because there's so many goddamn things happening it's like you'd need a flowchart or playbook to not waste time exploring, or knowing who you can assign to what events because of what other 'much more important' events are popping up around the corner that you need to de-assign and re-assign with like 3 days left to completion on the first thing

I know some people absolutely "love" all these 'consequence heavy' everything going horribly wrong all the time chaotic experiences, but I feel pfkm went a little too far. combat and stuff's fun tho

Underrail is one of my favourite games of the 2010s.

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There are basically no games made since the year 2000 in which you can fuck yourself over in a way that makes beating the game impossible, looking up anything is ruining the experience for yourself

>played New Vegas on Very Hard
>most of the game was a breeze
>highest level, maxed out all combat skills except Unarmed and Explosives
>get to the dam
>can't kill anything before being overwhelmed
>think I fucked up my build
>discover Unarmed is hilariously overpowered through experimentation
>scour the wasteland for every copy of Pugilism Illustrated and Boxing Times and a Ballistic Fist
>mow through the endgame like a hot knife through butter while taking smoke breaks to read magazines when they wear off

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yeah that's retarded, you have to increase specific skills to specific levels or you're stuck and you have no way of knowing it until you get stuck. It feels less like an RPG and more like an adventure game with multiple scenarios

I agree. Fuck underrail. I remember I made a melee character and the game is bullshit on purpose, but melee character get their shit pushed in hard unless you know exactly what you are doing. The game is around 100 hours long with sidecontent and at around 50 hours I literally could not go further because the enemies completely annihalited me and I couldn't a damn shit about it
Had to reroll to an assault rifle dude and wow amazing, I can play the fucking game

the only thing difficulty affects in 3d fallout games is how much damage you deal and gets dealt to you, it's basically meaningless to play on anything other than normal where it's 100% damage both ways

>people who played before the game added a lot of very difficult enemies will tell you it's ez and you can solo it without outside help
In underrail, it's all psy faggots who played before the nerf (psy was fucking busted there was no way to fuck up a psy build unless you were an actual retard)

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I hate segments where you're forced to play as a particular party member, especially without warning. KOTOR 2 managed to do this right and wrong at the same time, you can get so fucked up in the Atton and Handmaiden segments if your aren't ready for them but it also has the cool segments Dxun and Goto's ship where you assemble a party without your main character which is cool, especially in the case where you have to divide your party and use a secondary group. It should always be done in the latter way as it's interesting rather mostly frustrating like the way of doing it.

Running out of bullets and having to improvise with whatever trash I had on hand to fight, and having to eat whatever I could get my hands to heal on in certain situations was fun, but that wore off 1/3 into the game. I played F3 on Normal and was never forced to drink toilet water or use RadAway, so having to do that in NV was nice.

This is a stupid post. Or are you going to blame that on the game too?

The problem with comparing "action" RPGs where player skill is a rather large factor is that you can easily compensate a poor build with skill or just by cheesing the game. In New Vegas you can always keep shooting someone in the head until he dies, but in a cRPG it might be essentially impossible to get through an encounter if your botched your build too much.

The final boss is a damage check so if you didn't focus a lot on your damage output you just can't beat it, you also need to bring TNT if melee and the scanners can kill you very fast, the tentacles are effectively RNG if you decide to melt them, otherwise you have to bear the full brunt of a powerful tentacle for every damage type in the game. The whole area is also impossible to leave from until you beat the final boss. First time I've played it on Normal I was stuck with a shitty makeshift build and had to start a new run because the alternative was loading to the last Arena save dozens of hours prior and with the new knowledge in hand I could at least make a more solid build. Since then I've beat the game several times including on the DOMINATING difficulty.
Most of the game is challenging but a lot of the challenge is optional and you can do it at your own pace, taking as much time as you need to prepare, it's the forced segments like everything up until Depot A and the entirety of DC that are shit and poorly-paced. At least DC makes up for it in kino, but it's unnecessarily brutal for a new player. It doesn't help that it was a few years prior that many of the most bullshit enemies in the game were added and sprinkled throughout the game. Death Stalkers, Azuridae Goliathus, Greater Coil Spiders, Hunchback Mutants, they didn't exist before the update that added DOMINATING, and they all have awful little gimmicks that give a lot of trouble. They don't even have their own unique oddities, it's like they're asking players to play on Classic (I mostly played on Oddity).
Assault rifles are outdated, SMGs still rock.
It's fun, I had a blast with it but I wouldn't recommend it to someone.

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>There are basically no games made since the year 2000 in which you can fuck yourself over in a way that makes beating the game impossible
One of the things I really liked about the xcom reboot (never got around to playing 2) is that you could put yourself in a no win situation through lack of skill, foresight, or just really bad luck.

You should know what the stats do and how the mechanics work. RPG's use to have 50+ page manuals that told you everything and you were expected to read it before starting the game. That's my reference. Looking up optimal how to builds is too much.

I do a modicum of research just to not get shrecked in the early game, but if I start seeing in-depth guides right off the bat, then I'll read them.
One game I wish I read an in-depth guide for was Underrail, that game is brutal in difficulty, it mostly boils down to your build, which is why people kept saying "just do psi, brah" because most of the other skills are damn near useless except for crafting, which is how I learned that Underrail is a crappy game.