Personal Self-Imposed Challenge Rules

[Zeus Killer]

If anybody wants to, they can post their ways of making a game harder than it was meant to be, or comment on them.

As the thread starter, I’ll go first.

-XCOM (Enemy Within): Classic Ironman, turn on any second wave settings related to gameplay (no save scumming), tutorial is recommended for the first play through, but not neseccary on subsequent ones, ALL DLC missions must be successful.

-Pokémon (Main Series): Normal Nuzlocke rules and shiny clause, turn on Exp. Share ONLY in city limits (unless it’s Po Town, for obvious reasons), whilst you can use Pokémon Centers for most occasions, you CANNOT exit a gym/trial once it starts so make sure to save beforehand, if the scenario has a low likelihood of fatal injuries, then fainted Pokémon will be still alive, but not useable in the challenge, gender is based on the title, starter is selected via dice roll.

-RPG Template: Any choice (both in character setup and actual gameplay choices) that has a numerical value between 3-12/19-20/100 has to be decided by dice. Anything not in the specified options has to be seconded to the dice rolls.

[Sajiri]

I guess when I played saints row 4 and it was too easy, I did melee only, with the exception of when I had to use a specific superpower/firearm to kill something because of mechanics.

I've never done a nuzlocke challenge in pokemon, but I like to do theme challenges (like the sun theme in the ruby remake, anything that had a connection in some way to sunny weather. My drought vulpix, sun pattern vivillon, cherubim) I think I tried a type challenge in one of the BW games but I never finished it because I found that game boring beyond all belief.

Im sure I've given myself actual challenges in games before but I cant quite recall them. I typically dont bother optimising in a game anyway and just go with whatever seems fun so I guess that in a way is a challenge to make things harder.

[Zevox]

You know, I don't think that I've ever actually done anything like that myself - unless avoiding taking advantage of some New Game+ features that would make the game way too easy in Persona 3 counts. Otherwise, I just tend to increase the difficulty by actively turning up the difficulty setting.

A classic example that I've heard of that comes to mind though is doing a 3-Heart run in any Legend of Zelda game, skipping all of the heart pieces/containers so that your health is permanently at the starting amount, meaning there will be little room for error late in the game.

[Rodin]

My favorite one I've done is for Final Fantasy VI. I always found the game too easy if everyone is allowed to use Magic in the same way (and they become too strong if you optimize Esper placement in the same way). I also found the characters to be pretty imbalanced, with some people far more useful than others.

So, I made a ruleset.

1) Nobody can use Black magic except for natural mages - those who can use magic before learning it from Magicite. So, this is Terra, Celes, Relm, and Strago. These characters can only equip Espers that teach Black spells, and aren't allowed to use any Grey or White magic except that which they learn via leveling up.

2) The only people who can use White Magic are those with weak special abilities. I forget the exact layout I had here, but it was folks like Locke and Setzer. I only allowed 3 so I wound up with one dedicated healer per party in Kefka's Tower. Similar to above, if the Esper doesn't teach White spells, they don't get it.

3) Everybody who can be good with no Magic at all is stuck with Grey spells and Grey spell teaching Espers.

------

This changes gameplay in a few ways. First, there's no option to just AoE everything down all the time. Second, if your healer bites it, you better have Phoenix Downs and other Item healing to stabilize with. Similarly, status effects become much dirtier because you have to use Items to fight them. Third, you make much better use of weaker characters - Locke becomes essential despite Steal not having combat utility. And finally, the game is just overall a lot harder. Need Reflect on the entire party to fight the Stooges? Hope you brough a lot of Grey Magic using characters or the right Esper. Float on everybody? Same. Get hit by Kefka's HP to 1 attack? Best have Elixirs on standby. Oh, and no teaching the entire party Ultimate and just nuking everything you see.

Oh, and I also follow the usual rule of no Vanish/Doom or glitching the game in similar ways.

[Greg_S]

Live off the land challenges can be fun in some RPGs. The rules are simple: no shops, unless it's necessary to complete the game. You can buy oxyale in FF1, or an invisibility herb in DQ3 (not strictly mandatory, but better than farming for drops), but that's it. No weapons, armor, or item shops. I finished one of these in DQ3, and it was really interesting to go through the game with huge gaps in gearing, especially armor.

[JellyPooga]

Doom: Chainsaw only, pistol only, shotgun only (to be fair, the latter isn't much of a challenge; the shotgun rocks!)

Dark Souls: Starting weapon+Magic only (played as Sorcerer (briefly) and Pyromancer)

[Ebon_Drake]

One I can distinctly remember making up was for Vampire: the Masquerade - Redemption (a game I was quite fond of despite it not actually being all that good): starting discipline groups only, no discipline tomes allowed. For most play-throughs you just end up cheesing your way through using the same 3-4 broken Thaumaturgy powers. Restricting yourself to the discipline groups your PCs start with significantly alters how you play, as you have hardly any access to ranged damage spells and will primarily rely on physical buffs as well as experimenting with jankier discipline groups like Animalism. Unfortunately a lot of the PCs have overlaps in their disciplines so it can get a bit repetitive, if I was to do it again I'd probably relax it a little to allow one discipline tome per character and/or just ban the Thaumaturgy groups.

Baldur's Gate, BG2 and other Infinity Engine games: minimal resting. There's essentially nothing stopping you from resting to replenish health and spells after each fight and I did exactly that on my first few plays, but I found it both tiresome and immersion-breaking. I don't set a hard rule on it, but try to avoid resting as much as possible until I either run out of spells (sometimes even beyond that) or I reach a natural point to rest such as arriving at an inn or because my PCs are affected by exhaustion.

Back in the day, my friends and I had "gentlemen's rules" for playing multiplayer GoldenEye 64 and later Perfect Dark. No shooting in the back, and no shooting unarmed opponents unless they try to attack you first. If you broke the rules and/or got the "dishonourable" ranking at the end, you had kills deducted. Also, no Oddjob allowed - I think that one was pretty much standard everywhere, he was too small and hard to hit.

[Zevox]

Dark Souls: Starting weapon+Magic only (played as Sorcerer (briefly) and Pyromancer)

Sounds easy, seeing as magic in Dark Souls is generally more effective than the weapons anyway.

It does remind me though that my second run through Dark Souls was as a character based on Dante from Devil May Cry - I limited him to a longsword held in two hands to be Rebellion, some kind of basic ranged weapon (a crossbow, I think?) to represent Ebony & Ivory, and a select couple of Pyromancy buffs to represent Devil Trigger. Even picked out his clothes to try and make him look like Dante - though that mainly meant he never wore headgear and I eventually had him wearing the one red outfit in the entire game.

[Zeus Killer]

Fire Emblem Awakening: I tried writing a gameplay-based fanfic, but that one was tricky to pull off. First order of business-play as female Robin, get everyone paired up. The problem: Robin CANNONT be paired up with Chrom, because both the initial and fanfic-based profiles need to line up, and that's not possible with female Robin marrying Chrom.

[Maryring]

I did a pacifist run in No One Lives Forever 2. No killing anyone except for those you had to kill to continue on through the game. So that meant relying entirely on stealth, tranq darts and the stunner.

[Triaxx]

Counter to no Oddjob, Oddjob only. Amusing to see a bunch of people running around looking at the floor to stop the auto-aim shooting over everyone's heads.

Favorite challenge ever has to be Pokemon Fire Red, Pidgey only. Not the evolutions, just a Pidgey. Harder in the originals due to the lack of flying type moves, but definitely an interesting challenge.

Final Fantasy Tactics with four Dancers and a Bard was surprisingly easy up until that one fight.

[Jormengand]

I remember unarmed-only Skyrim being quite funny, especially since it was possible to make your unarmed strike stronger than most weapons. A pain when you needed to fight at range, though.

Doing World's End with no consumable items, trying to get every kill and the perfect bonus on each mission, is a struggle. Worse still, starting equipment only. That said, the challenge makes itself easier in a way by forcing you to get every ability point.

Also, try completing Populous: The Beginning without training any followers except on level 15 and UW8, no freeing the shaman on 15 or UW8, and no worshipping the totems on UW3 which give you trained followers. Or, no casting spells except for the ones you need to complete certain levels, usually landbridge before you have access to boats. Both of those challenges combined, OTOH, is just impossible. You can, maybe, get through a few levels by throwing braves at people until they go away, but no more than that.

For those who hate themselves, try completing Diablo II without using any abilities other than attack, throw, scroll of identify, tome of identify, scroll of town portal and tome of town portal. Barbarian, amazon and to an extent assassin have enough passives to do this, but it's a painful process. No cheating and using paladin auras.

The worst one I've ever tried, though, is this: Give Up, but you have to hit the button and start over from the beginning if you die. This on a game where you usually die 100+ times per run. Absolutely, positively the worst.

[Triaxx]

I did a sort of challenge run in Skyrim. Playing through as a Paladin, so heavy armor but no ranged weapons allowed. But since I was a Holy Warrior, I let myself use Shouts since it was granted by the gods. Of course trying to wear down a dragon using only Firebreath is it's own challenge.

[GloatingSwine]

I did a sort of challenge run in Skyrim. Playing through as a Paladin, so heavy armor but no ranged weapons allowed. But since I was a Holy Warrior, I let myself use Shouts since it was granted by the gods. Of course trying to wear down a dragon using only Firebreath is it's own challenge.

Let it land, shield bash it in the face, beat it until it recovers, repeat.

Best done with Spellbreaker.

[Triaxx]

Fair enough but it only lands in one place in Winterhold. Which I didn't learn until it crashed at half health.

[druid91]

Jedi Knight Jedi Academy.

Use the Console to do the following.

- Spawn Kyle Katarn.
- Spawn Player Clone.

- Keybind the following to whichever keys you find entertaining.
~ Spawn Storm Trooper.
~ Spawn Heavy Trooper.
~ Spawn Reborn.

- Change your model to an Imperial Officer.
- Set your faction to Empire.

Then try to complete the level with two avatars of lightsaber induced death chasing you. While you throw bodies at them hoping to slow them down.

[Anteros]

I did a pacifist run in No One Lives Forever 2. No killing anyone except for those you had to kill to continue on through the game. So that meant relying entirely on stealth, tranq darts and the stunner.

Oh I did this in Metal Gear Solid 2. Super frustrating. Especially that Vampire boss that dodged bullets because you have limited tranq bullets. It was very annoying to get to the end of the game and get accused of being a murderer when I hadn't killed anyone all game.

[Cozzer]

I'm not into super-hard games, so I only use self-imposed challenges with super-easy games (or games I know well enough that they're super easy to me) when I occasionally replay them for the story, so that the gameplay is at least mildly interesting. But they have to be challenges that do not require grinding of any kind, otherwise the gamplay becomes even duller instead of more interesting.

For now, I tried doing Final Fantasy 7 while only using one of each kind of Materia. It's still perfectly doable while doing a normal level run (for me, that's when I don't run away from encounters but never stop to farm enemies either). It was still way too easy towards the end.

For Saints Row 4, I randomly switched weapons / powers instead of using the best ones, to keep things fresh.

[LibraryOgre]

On an old phone, I had the demo version of Bejeweled... this is like 15 years ago. I couldn't get very far in the game, because it was the demo, and I didn't want to pay for a time-waster, so I set a new challenge for myself:

Lowest possible score.

I would actively TRY to get a low score before getting locked out. I worked on strategies to more quickly lock the board. I can't remember the details of how low I could get, but it was pretty ugly.

[JellyPooga]

Sounds easy, seeing as magic in Dark Souls is generally more effective than the weapons anyway.

Pyromancer was pretty easy, start to finish; starting with the hand axe made the early game quite manageable and it's a decent weapon to take into the mid game before you get hold of some of the better pyromancies. The late game of Pyromancy was surprisingly hard compared to Sorcery; limited spells known and relative weakness and the cost of upgrading your flame, not to mention certain foes' resistance to fire, made tackling bosses and some late-game mooks harder than I thought they'd be. Sorcerer was much harder in the early game, though the mid to late game was a doddle. The only really tricky aspect of both playthroughs was deciding when to actually use magic; especially in the early-mid game when attunement slots and spells known are more limited. It took a fair bit of grinding just to be able to purchase the spells/slots needed to get past certain early bosses (especially the double-team ones). Blighttown, particularly, seemed to pose a problem if only because of the number and toughness of foes between bonfires at such an early stage of the game before additional pyromancies were available (note that I'm no pro-player; I'm a "casual" with a stubborn streak; I spent many hours figuratively beating my head against brick walls whilst playing Dark Souls!).

Do bear in mind that "starting weapons only" includes shields; parry is great if you have the knack, but those starting shields are...well, let's just say that the game is a lot harder when you discount some of the buffs some shields grant.

[Olinser]

If anybody wants to, they can post their ways of making a game harder than it was meant to be, or comment on them.

As the thread starter, I’ll go first.

-XCOM (Enemy Within): Classic Ironman, turn on any second wave settings related to gameplay (no save scumming), tutorial is recommended for the first play through, but not neseccary on subsequent ones, ALL DLC missions must be successful.

-Pokémon (Main Series): Normal Nuzlocke rules and shiny clause, turn on Exp. Share ONLY in city limits (unless it’s Po Town, for obvious reasons), whilst you can use Pokémon Centers for most occasions, you CANNOT exit a gym/trial once it starts so make sure to save beforehand, if the scenario has a low likelihood of fatal injuries, then fainted Pokémon will be still alive, but not useable in the challenge, gender is based on the title, starter is selected via dice roll.

-RPG Template: Any choice (both in character setup and actual gameplay choices) that has a numerical value between 3-12/19-20/100 has to be decided by dice. Anything not in the specified options has to be seconded to the dice rolls.

Pshaw that's some weaksauce Pokemon challenges. Nuzlocke isn't particularly difficult because the rules allow you to grind out extremely high levels so even with crappy Pokemon RNG you can grind to outlevel any fights.

Anti-Type +5 or +0 is much harder - that's where you can only fight Gym and Story battles with Pokemon weak to their main type and are not allowed to be more than 5 levels higher than the enemy Pokemon (0 means you must be the same level or lower). The hardcore version of this is you aren't allowed to use any MOVES that aren't weak against the enemy type.

[tiornys]

Mandatory Fights Only was a fun challenge in Grandia II Anniversary Edition (Hard mode), Final Fantasy XIII, and (with an additional rule about not extending battles to grind) Final Fantasy Tactics.

I also enjoyed a similar challenge run in SMT: Devil Survivor Overclocked where I obtained both the Focused and Survivor titles on New Game (Normal mode).

Both FF Tactics and SMT: DeSuO also make fun solo runs (main character only, except where other characters are forced into battle).

[Velaryon]

I did a "no relics" playthrough of Shovel Knight. Only after I beat the game did I realize that was actually a trophy. I've been meaning to do a "no health upgrades" run, but haven't got around to it.

[Zeus Killer]

Pshaw that's some weaksauce Pokemon challenges. Nuzlocke isn't particularly difficult because the rules allow you to grind out extremely high levels so even with crappy Pokemon RNG you can grind to outlevel any fights.

Anti-Type +5 or +0 is much harder - that's where you can only fight Gym and Story battles with Pokemon weak to their main type and are not allowed to be more than 5 levels higher than the enemy Pokemon (0 means you must be the same level or lower). The hardcore version of this is you aren't allowed to use any MOVES that aren't weak against the enemy type.

True, but that also requires one to be patient enough to actually reach that point in grinding.

That...uh, did the Dark Souls veterans come up with that one?

Incidentally, for most of my Saints Row IV playthrough, I duel wielded pistols (and my character was dressed similarly to Alucard from Hellsing), because why not. Though I do see the melee only challenge as being fun.

[Triaxx]

I set myself a challenge of using only Railcraft Trains in Minecraft for my logistics, and it really does change how you play. No teleporting everything through a single block, keeping trains all running, and not hitting each other and exploding. Definitely not a challenge for the impatient.

[Winthur]

Have I told you about the best series for doing dumb crap, Hitman?
Here we go:
- speedrunning the whole game by only using the titular assassin's iconic weapon, which is, however, quite restricted in its usage
- classic ghosting, with no use of disguises and no knockouts
- beating every level with the max stealth rank while using a loud and unwieldy shotgun
- the All Zeroes challenge, where your final score has no shots fired, no alerts, no unnecessary victims, etc. ...
- ...and its logical conclusion, where a mission is by design restricted only to a sniping approach, but you can subvert it by slicing a limousine in half with a fire axe...

- ...or when you do something entirely off-the-wall and have your target get driven over by a car...
-...especially if said car is driven by his own security...
-...or if you just want to make a fairly casual run in some disguise that isn't used too often or with a weapon that isn't used too often.

Each game can be beaten in an hour, I spent probably over a thousand hours on them altogether.

--

Aside from that, I completed both Terran campaigns in SC and BW using only Marines (and SCVs for mining). SC is actually pretty easy for this purpose, BW requires a lot of slowpushing with bunkers and making units from like 18 barracks.

[Kafkesque]

I tend to do "in-character" runs more so than challenge runs, but it tends to turn into a challenge anyway

- Skyrim: I'll do no-shout playthroughs for races I don't feel like the Aedra would logically bless with the Dragon Blood (mainly Daedra-worshippers like Dark Elves or Orcs). I've also toyed with a "Captain America" build (shield + unarmed... it's honestly kind of a pain to get it to work properly)

- Planescape Torment: I play my Nameless One as, well, a decent human being--no threatening or using violence unless somebody's doing the same to me, don't lie or manipulate people (unless there's a good reason to lie, like imminent danger)

[Zeus Killer]

I tend to do "in-character" runs more so than challenge runs, but it tends to turn into a challenge anyway

- Skyrim: I'll do no-shout playthroughs for races I don't feel like the Aedra would logically bless with the Dragon Blood (mainly Daedra-worshippers like Dark Elves or Orcs). I've also toyed with a "Captain America" build (shield + unarmed... it's honestly kind of a pain to get it to work properly)

- Planescape Torment: I play my Nameless One as, well, a decent human being--no threatening or using violence unless somebody's doing the same to me, don't lie or manipulate people (unless there's a good reason to lie, like imminent danger)

This, combined with determining characteristics via dice rolls for RPG's, sounds like my dream challenge.

[Cozzer]

Well, for that kind of game I always do in-character runs and play good-ish characters (how far "good" can be pushed depends on the setting and tone). It's usually not a challenge, though, since games tend to reward you for doing the right thing, in the end.

[Psyren]

Some I've done:

Mass Effect 2 - Insanity, no Heavy Weapons, leave squadmates untrained.
Mass Effect 3 - Insanity, no Medigel, leave squadmates untrained.
Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer - Solo Platinum
Jade Empire - I did lots here: no weapons, only weapons, no magic, only magic (+ Spirit Thief), no party members (if forced to take them, must leave them active and only evade until they die.)
Secret of Mana 2 - No class change or only 1 class change

Some I've wanted to do:

Skyrim - using survival (i.e. food/drink/rest) and spell components mods
Diablo 3 - All conquests and GR100+ on Hardcore
Starcraft 2 - Finish a Co-op Brutal Mutator solo (including bonus)