Hello all. Nabbed a used copy of RPGMaker 3 a couple months back on a whim (getting an excellent "Are you sure you want to spend your money on this?" look from the cashier in the process, heh) and am just starting to fiddle around with it now. Quite a lot to get used to, as I am not a very technical person and have no experience programming anything, but I think I'm getting the hang of it. Have a few things to say about the system's limitations, but...well, I'll ramble on a bit about what I'm planning to do with it first. That might provide someone with something to bounce ideas and answers off of. I've spent some time digging through the old posts here and found them extremely informative, by and large. Anyway...
Messing with the game a bit leads me to believe it's not really suited for some of my more epic storylines (I'm a wordy bastard). But that's fine. Write a story suited to the medium available rather than try and force the program to be something it's not, I'd say. So, going with something episodic and character-driven. Story's barely there, but that's fine by me with fiction as long as the characters are interesting. More to the point though, I'm not sure how long it'll take me to fill up the memory space for one file, so having the RPG basically be a set of serial stories makes it easier to manage it so that if you start to run out of room you can more easily take pieces out without an intricate plot crumbling to pieces. Can do something more complicated in the future if I'm inclined to come back to RPGM3 after finishing one game.
That's academic for now, though. I have to plan it all out on paper first of all and need a USB keyboard or connector before I can do anything much involving words (damned if I'm inputting dialogue with the PS2 controller). Will likely take care of the typing issue in the next couple days (Wild Arms 4 comes out tomorrow, so I already know I'm headed to Best Buy in the near future). For now, there's quite a lot of things I've been wondering about in regards to the battle system and I've filled up the rest of this overly lengthy post with that. Much of this could probably be determined by experimentation with my own copy, of course. But hey, I work forty hours a week, and it's all the more convenient if someone can throw answers at me while I'm unproductively earning money.
The matter of keeping the PCs and enemies properly balanced is obviously something that will take me a while to sort out. It would be easier, however, if I had a better understanding of how RPGM3's combat system determined things such as damage and evasion rates. I spotted a couple questions along these lines while digging through old posts, but none of the threads quite got into the level of detail I'd like. Damage calculation looks to be basically subtractive (PC's attack score - enemy's defense score = damage dealt, in other words). There's obviously some random variance in the system though, which makes it a little hard to be sure. I'm still trying to determine how much of an effect other things have on the numbers, also:
Skills: So skills require you to set a certain effect power? Okay, simple enough. I'm not sure how literally that number translates in actual combat, though. Would a skill deal damage simply according to Skill's Effect Power - Enemy's Defense, for example? Or does the character's strength come into play, too? In other words, that would be (Skill's Effect Power + PC's Attack Power) - Enemy's Defense = Damage.
Stat-uppers/downers: These look straightforward enough, actually. Cast a strength-boosting spell on someone that improves their strength stat by 50 points and they henceforth do something resembling 50 extra damage per attack. A couple questions about these occur to me, though. Do they stack? Say you cast that strength-booster twice on the same target. Well, I've tried that one out and the second spell had no visible effect on the target's damage output. Okay then. A point that I'm not clear on yet, though, is: what's the difference between the game's Haste status and a raw improvement to a character's Agility? It seems redundant to have two ways to boost speed, so I'm presuming they don't function the same way.
Weak Against/Strong Against: I haven't messed with this much yet, but I need to. I basically am wondering the same thing as with the above paragraph: do they stack? Say, for example, Cecilia is attacking an undead creature. Suppose she's using a weapon that's strong against undead. Suppose she's also attacking with a skill that's strong against undead. Does she then effectively get a double boost to her damage output, or can it only count once? And hey, say the undead creature is innately weak to humans; does this mean he's taking even more damage? Or can only one of these factors come into play at a time? I'm also wondering: if a magic-using character equips a weapon that's strong against a certain type of enemy, and they cast a spell on a monster of that type, will the spell get a damage boost? Or is only physical damage affected?
This is the sort of thing I wish the booklet spelled out more thoroughly, but I suppose they didn't have room to accomodate people who are as obsessive about detail as I am.
Speed at least looks very simple based on the battles I've run so far. If Bob has twice as much Agility as Jane, Bob gets twice as many turns as Jane. Right. The booklet indicates Agility also determines a character's dodge rate though, which is something I don't think I'm too fond of. I would've preferred to have a separate stat to manipulate. As it stands right now I haven't fiddled with things enough to determine how much an advantage in Agility translates to increased evasion. If someone has any idea how exactly that works, I'd appreciate it.
As for a more general point of dealing with the stats themselves, well, just about the first thing I caught on to while experimenting was that lower numbers = better. Easier for comparison, so easier to figure out the system. The suggestion to start characters in the game with several levels up already is also a good one which I'll employ once I really get building.
Equipment...well, I can't really get that set up until I know what kind of scale I'm looking at for the stats. But I knew right off I wasn't going to handle it the way RPGs often do. In other words, no nonsensically linear equipment progression where some hick town sells better armor than an urbanized capitol just because you reach it later in the game. There may be no medium that follows its traditions more doggedly than console RPGs, but that doesn't mean I have to follow all the silly ones. So, I'm thinking weapons and armor are more likely to be important for the support abilities attached to them than for raw stat gains (which also has the effect that when something does give good improvements to stats, it'll really stand out). That way you can shuffle around what you need for a particular situation or area rather than just buying all the latest equipment and ditching the rest. It does occur to me that this will lead to clogged inventories, though; storage space didn't seem all that ample, unless I'm missing something.
Hmm. That's all the spam I've got for now. I'm sure I'll have plenty of questions about variables once I get keyboard compatibility and start putting story stuff together. Browsing this board did far more to make the uses of variables clear than the instruction booklet did, but no doubt it'll still take me a good deal of trial and error to get used to them. Conserving storage space is a mark in their favor, certainly; because maps take up more space than anything else I've played with so far, and I like maps.
Messing with the game a bit leads me to believe it's not really suited for some of my more epic storylines (I'm a wordy bastard). But that's fine. Write a story suited to the medium available rather than try and force the program to be something it's not, I'd say. So, going with something episodic and character-driven. Story's barely there, but that's fine by me with fiction as long as the characters are interesting. More to the point though, I'm not sure how long it'll take me to fill up the memory space for one file, so having the RPG basically be a set of serial stories makes it easier to manage it so that if you start to run out of room you can more easily take pieces out without an intricate plot crumbling to pieces. Can do something more complicated in the future if I'm inclined to come back to RPGM3 after finishing one game.
That's academic for now, though. I have to plan it all out on paper first of all and need a USB keyboard or connector before I can do anything much involving words (damned if I'm inputting dialogue with the PS2 controller). Will likely take care of the typing issue in the next couple days (Wild Arms 4 comes out tomorrow, so I already know I'm headed to Best Buy in the near future). For now, there's quite a lot of things I've been wondering about in regards to the battle system and I've filled up the rest of this overly lengthy post with that. Much of this could probably be determined by experimentation with my own copy, of course. But hey, I work forty hours a week, and it's all the more convenient if someone can throw answers at me while I'm unproductively earning money.
The matter of keeping the PCs and enemies properly balanced is obviously something that will take me a while to sort out. It would be easier, however, if I had a better understanding of how RPGM3's combat system determined things such as damage and evasion rates. I spotted a couple questions along these lines while digging through old posts, but none of the threads quite got into the level of detail I'd like. Damage calculation looks to be basically subtractive (PC's attack score - enemy's defense score = damage dealt, in other words). There's obviously some random variance in the system though, which makes it a little hard to be sure. I'm still trying to determine how much of an effect other things have on the numbers, also:
Skills: So skills require you to set a certain effect power? Okay, simple enough. I'm not sure how literally that number translates in actual combat, though. Would a skill deal damage simply according to Skill's Effect Power - Enemy's Defense, for example? Or does the character's strength come into play, too? In other words, that would be (Skill's Effect Power + PC's Attack Power) - Enemy's Defense = Damage.
Stat-uppers/downers: These look straightforward enough, actually. Cast a strength-boosting spell on someone that improves their strength stat by 50 points and they henceforth do something resembling 50 extra damage per attack. A couple questions about these occur to me, though. Do they stack? Say you cast that strength-booster twice on the same target. Well, I've tried that one out and the second spell had no visible effect on the target's damage output. Okay then. A point that I'm not clear on yet, though, is: what's the difference between the game's Haste status and a raw improvement to a character's Agility? It seems redundant to have two ways to boost speed, so I'm presuming they don't function the same way.
Weak Against/Strong Against: I haven't messed with this much yet, but I need to. I basically am wondering the same thing as with the above paragraph: do they stack? Say, for example, Cecilia is attacking an undead creature. Suppose she's using a weapon that's strong against undead. Suppose she's also attacking with a skill that's strong against undead. Does she then effectively get a double boost to her damage output, or can it only count once? And hey, say the undead creature is innately weak to humans; does this mean he's taking even more damage? Or can only one of these factors come into play at a time? I'm also wondering: if a magic-using character equips a weapon that's strong against a certain type of enemy, and they cast a spell on a monster of that type, will the spell get a damage boost? Or is only physical damage affected?
This is the sort of thing I wish the booklet spelled out more thoroughly, but I suppose they didn't have room to accomodate people who are as obsessive about detail as I am.
Speed at least looks very simple based on the battles I've run so far. If Bob has twice as much Agility as Jane, Bob gets twice as many turns as Jane. Right. The booklet indicates Agility also determines a character's dodge rate though, which is something I don't think I'm too fond of. I would've preferred to have a separate stat to manipulate. As it stands right now I haven't fiddled with things enough to determine how much an advantage in Agility translates to increased evasion. If someone has any idea how exactly that works, I'd appreciate it.
As for a more general point of dealing with the stats themselves, well, just about the first thing I caught on to while experimenting was that lower numbers = better. Easier for comparison, so easier to figure out the system. The suggestion to start characters in the game with several levels up already is also a good one which I'll employ once I really get building.
Equipment...well, I can't really get that set up until I know what kind of scale I'm looking at for the stats. But I knew right off I wasn't going to handle it the way RPGs often do. In other words, no nonsensically linear equipment progression where some hick town sells better armor than an urbanized capitol just because you reach it later in the game. There may be no medium that follows its traditions more doggedly than console RPGs, but that doesn't mean I have to follow all the silly ones. So, I'm thinking weapons and armor are more likely to be important for the support abilities attached to them than for raw stat gains (which also has the effect that when something does give good improvements to stats, it'll really stand out). That way you can shuffle around what you need for a particular situation or area rather than just buying all the latest equipment and ditching the rest. It does occur to me that this will lead to clogged inventories, though; storage space didn't seem all that ample, unless I'm missing something.
Hmm. That's all the spam I've got for now. I'm sure I'll have plenty of questions about variables once I get keyboard compatibility and start putting story stuff together. Browsing this board did far more to make the uses of variables clear than the instruction booklet did, but no doubt it'll still take me a good deal of trial and error to get used to them. Conserving storage space is a mark in their favor, certainly; because maps take up more space than anything else I've played with so far, and I like maps.
I came in this topic hoping to answer a question or learn something new... but it's just making me question what I thought I already knew.
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