Adding some "strategy" to my battles.

[Dyne]

I have been racking my brain to try and figure a way through RPGM3's abilities to create an effective way to make Skills and MP an extremly important part of the battle. And now, I have an idea.

The idea I plan on using is this:

All characters in your party have the "Regain MP at set intervals during battle" Special Skill. The whole party always has 0 MP out of their max outside battles. During battles, however, their MP rises.

I was going for a sort of "limit break". The longer you stay in battle, the more MP you gain, and the more skills you have at your disposal. Of course, you have to play it effectively so not to run out of MP when you need it.

After a battle, your MP is reset to 0.

So, what do you all think about this? Good? Not good?

[Kintaro]

Re: Adding some "strategy" to my battles.

You could also improve the power of the skills so that they're more useful than regular attacks.

I like the idea of MP regen although you could just keep defending to gain MP - if that doesn't bother your design, then its a good idea.

Personally I prefer lessening battle events. I want the player to keep going through mini-games and puzzles more, if possible.

I'd like to come up with a game where battles only happen at key points. Learning skills are done through quests. Improving stats, equipment, and earning key items are done through quests too. Then again I'm not much of a designer. I only experiment then get tired after making the stupidest looking simplest of towns.

[TheHonorableRyu]

Re: Adding some "strategy" to my battles.

I think your idea is fairly neat solution!

You just have to make sure that the shorter you want the battle to be, the less total built-up MP are necessary to win. Because if Skillls and MP are important in every battle, people might find it sluggish to have to wait around every battle until their MP is high enough to use the skills they need. There should be low MP-cost Skills required for winning normal battles (if you could win normal battles just as quickly with normal attacks, then Skills and MP would not be very important) and higher MP-cost Skills (like your Limit Break idea) for taking down bosses.


A good general principle for making Skill and MP usage essential is to make them as frequently useful as normal attacks, but never in same circumstances. This may sound too simple, but think of it this way.

In an unreleased RPGM 1 game, I did something that I haven't seen anyone else purposely do.

-I made it so that in each area your party would fight enemies that had such high physical defense that they would suffer only 0 or 1 damage from your party members' physical attacks.
-To compensate for this, in addition to their physical attacks, I made each character learn "Limbo Attacks"--skills which cost 1 MP and consistently do slightly less damage than their normal attack would on an enemy with average defense, regardless of defense.
-Thus if a player indiscriminately made every character use normal attacks, they couldn't be expected to win in short order, because certain enemies would have high physical defense; and if they always used Limbo Attacks they would waste time and MP on those enemies who would take more damage from normal attacks due to their average or low defense.

Thus with this simple convention alone, every battle required thoughtful use of Skills and MP.


Another random idea:

You could also "color code" your enemies and skills.
1.Suppose that your game had "colors" or elements, like Red, Yellow and Blue (or Fire, Earth, Water, or anything).
2.Suppose each color was strong to one color and weak to the other in a paper-rock-scissors fashion.
3. Suppose that many of your enemies had one of the three colors as their elemental affinity and suppose that most of the player's party members had affordable skills of 1-3 different elemental properties:

-A fighter might have a Red (or Fire, etc.) Slash skill and a Yellow Slash skill,
-Another fighter might have a Yellow Axe skill and a Green Axe skill
-Some characters might be able to use all the elements but with weaker base power
-Other characters might have stronger attacks but specialize in only one element

Now if many of the enemies had certain color-coded strengths and weaknesses, and all of your party members had affordable color-coded skills, every battle would require intelligent use of skills, with each specific party member targetting a specific enemy with a specific skill.


These are just random ideas I thought up to get you thinking. You could combine similar ideas with your MP-regain idea.

The main thing to avoid when trying to make Skills and MP useful is to only give every character powerful attack/healing skills and nothing else. If those kinds of skills are all they have, and they cost little to cast, then the player can abuse them, using them every round without discretion. But if those sorts of skills have a high MP cost, it encourages the player to save the skills for boss battles, and no thoughtful consideration is required when it comes time to use them. Your characters should still have powerful attacks, but they should not be useful in every single situation, because then there would be no strategy.

[Jedo]

Re: Adding some "strategy" to my battles.

The idea I plan on using is this:

All characters in your party have the "Regain MP at set intervals during battle" Special Skill. The whole party always has 0 MP out of their max outside battles. During battles, however, their MP rises.

I was going for a sort of "limit break". The longer you stay in battle, the more MP you gain, and the more skills you have at your disposal. Of course, you have to play it effectively so not to run out of MP when you need it.

After a battle, your MP is reset to 0.

So, what do you all think about this? Good? Not good?

Must...not...steal...

[WilliamKirk]

Re: Adding some "strategy" to my battles.

I'm already doing something like that too (RPGM2). I got the idea from Chrono Cross.

[Kintaro]

Re: Adding some "strategy" to my battles.

Yes the problem is there are no elements in RPGM3. You could set monster weaknesses based on monster types though. Which could easily be customized to pretend to be elements. But its obviously annoying to not even have fire deal more damage to water/ice which is the most common piece of RPG element there is.

I just thought of the best solution however, and I think it might be a great idea for limit break-type combat without doing the keep defending to gain MP. Set all character's to have MP steal on regular attacks. This way, you don't have to wait for MP while defending. This also makes sure you gain the MP through attacking.

[DarkMajin]

Re: Adding some "strategy" to my battles.

Cool idea. I'll have to experiment with it in my game too.

[hitogoroshi]

Re: Adding some "strategy" to my battles.

Mine is less complex. The biggest challange is mastering when to use the Shield Breaker (30 HP to lower enemy defense.) With that, you can usually be victorious.

[Omnislash024]

Re: Adding some "strategy" to my battles.

If your character has a Max MP of 0, then your not going to be able to get any MP higher then that. If you wanted to do something like that you wouldn't be able to use random battles or you'd have to reset the MP whenever the character walks into a different area.

[Kintaro]

Re: Adding some "strategy" to my battles.

Yeah I was about to mention that. You need to increase the max MP first. Also this rules out putting in basic Inn's and healing stations and MP healing items. The player should start with 0 MP and it must not heal regularly - which you can script when he starts the game so thats no prob. Doing it this way though I don't think its possible to stop your character from growing to have more max MP to summon limit breaks repeatedly once he saves up enough MP. I was hoping you could cap his max MP so once the spell is able to be cast he has to use it up since he won't gain any more MP/limit breaks. Since you can only change the bonus MP every level - you can't give the player a set amount of MP for the entire game, you can't even change it with an event code either. The only thing you could do is set an MP bonus per lvl and eventually he'll grow to have more max MP than the limit. I guess thats the only niche on the system.

The most extreme way of doing this, is by never leveling the characters up. They stay in a preset level and you increase the stats on your own. This way the max MP never changes - problem is I think the max HP won't change either. Best bet is just the MP drain + incremental max MP. You could do a hybrid where you only level them up through events to upgrade the HP and MP altogether in one go - this should be a key event where the player learns a newer limit break too thats equal to his new max MP.

Man I hate RPGM3's limitations.

[ErikaFuzzbottom]

Re: Adding some "strategy" to my battles.

One thing I like about the RPGM series is that, no matter how sucky a DBS may be, it's possible to include some form of strategy in it.

I never did the MP Limit Break thing myself, though I had thought of doing so before in a couple of RPGM1 games (that were never released, as usual). I'm not sure how this'd work, but you could always make Max MP grow by 1 point, with the player learning new "limits" as they level up. Like at L2, they'll have Slash, which would take up both of their 2MP. At L4, they could learn a new Breaker that takes up all 4MP, and so forth. But I'm not sure how MP recovery goes with this game (I know in RPGM1 it was 10% of the max), so I can't say this would work perfectly. If you wound up getting to a point where you were recovering MP too fast, you could just make it so new Breaks are learned more sparingly and take up a little more MP.

[hitogoroshi]

Re: Adding some "strategy" to my battles.

Well, the healing thing is easy; just put in "heal crystals" that only raise HP. After using that, the whole Limit Break thing is pretty easy. Use draygones idea of 1MMP per level, then make the monsters give out items that recover 1,2 etc. MP. Call them, "Force Crystals" or something. Makes more sense then "You just beat the **** out of me. Now I can use my ultimate power!"
Only DBZ is entitiled to that explaination.

Wow, i amaze myself sometimes. I might use this in my next planned RPG.

[Dyne]

Re: Adding some "strategy" to my battles.

Thanks for the ideas, guys!

If your character has a Max MP of 0, then your not going to be able to get any MP higher then that. If you wanted to do something like that you wouldn't be able to use random battles or you'd have to reset the MP whenever the character walks into a different area.

Well, yeah, I would of course give the characters a certain max MP (which may or may not grow through levels, I have to decide). What I have to do is set an invisible event in every area that depletes everyones MP automatically, so what ever MP you end the battle with, you will always have 0 MP out of battle.

One problem I am having with this is....the MP doesn't seem to be rising in battle. Don't know what I am doing wrong, but I am going to have to fix this...

[WilliamKirk]

Re: Adding some "strategy" to my battles.

It's times like these RPGM2's customizability really shines. 'No having to settle for something half-way of what you want to do.

[Omnislash024]

Re: Adding some "strategy" to my battles.

Ok, try this. Not sure if it will work though.

You need an auto event to modify the MP to go to 0. Give the auto event a condition to go off, and then make the condition a Treasure condition. The auto event should do the following, one it should set everyone's MP to 0 and two should make you lose the treasure. (This is so the auto event won't loop, without modifying it's mode.) Also you might want to put an END EVENT just to be on the safe side (though I never saw a point to "End event"). OK, now for every monster group that you set as random battle, make sure they drop that treasure and make sure it's set to "Always".

The way that I'm thinking, this is what will happen: You fight a random battle, obtain the treasure, auto event goes off, put's your MP to 0, takes the treasure item, and then doesn't go off again because you don't have the item anymore. This is just me being hypothetical though, I'm not sure if it will actually work, but I do know your gonna need auto events and a way to keep them from forming loops.