Atypical Battle Rules

[Boonty]

Hello all,

I am making a game with no exploration at all so the core will be its battles.

I have in mind several ideas to make some battles uniques. I share it with you :

- Escort : a typical one. A Game Over condition is reached when a specific actor is dead
- Stamina : the goal is to have at least one living member at the n-th turn
- Magical Wind : In my game, MP are not unlimited. Each turn, a wind will add/remove MP on actors and ennemies depending on how lucky you are
- Elemental Amplification/Reduction/Inhibition : could be for all the battle, for some turns. Could be one element or multi-element
- Buff/Debuff randomly added to actors and ennemies
- Lightning or Meteorite (or whatever any falling phenomenom) randomly damaging some members
- Speed battle : Finish before the n-th turn
- Traps/Bonus on the field activated if being hit by a special move (either by the player team or by an enemy)
- 3 sides battle

The idea of the thread is to exchange on how can we agrement our games with some atypical battles.

What are your ideas ?

 

[Crimsin_Chaos_01]

What types of characters are you thinking about?

 

[LordOfPotatos]

Imma be honest, a lot of those sound really bad.
The thing about combat centric games is that players want to master combat.
And THE most infuriating thing for a combat centric player is losing to RNG. Anything that can swing a battle around by pure luck is very very annoying.

A solid base makes gimmick battles unnecessary, consider adding complexity to the base battle system instead of using gimmicks.
It's a well known fact of game design by now that the gimmick fights are usually the worst fights.

 

[Boonty]

Imma be honest, a lot of those sound really bad.

The goal of this thread was not to determine if the ideas are good or bad according to everyone visions.

The objective is clearly to exchange about how makers here do for breaking the flow of standard battles

What types of characters are you thinking about?

I don't fully understand your question

 

[VegaKotes]

I'm also working on a project with no exploration. The way I'm doing battles is a little simpler though. I'm using one of the few Tactical Map battle plug-ins to change the battle mechanics, as well as a few changes to that such as overheat mechanics and durability on equipment, as well as varying number of combatants per encounter.


The non combat part of the game is planned to play more like a VN or Renpy game with a lot of story with a lot of player choices. Some of which directly affect the story with the majority of which are planned to give the player roleplay opportunities with minimal impact on the story.


The idea being that each fight will be an event unto itself like a game full of only boss battles while the "exploration" part is exploring dialogue if the player so chooses or skipping ahead to the core storyline/battles if they do not.

 

[tumsterfest]

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I like a lot of these ideas. I've already been planning on using some of those as "one-off" situations. As you said, it's important to mix things up to avoid battles getting stale -- especially in a battle-centric game like yours.

Limitations like the "MP drain field" cause the player to think strategically rather than just mash the "attack" button. It also helps facilitate the need to use more tools in their arsenal -- how many games have we seen where you don't need 90% of the skills?

Yes, you don't want to create a "Mario Party/Kart" RPG battle system where luck of the draw is overly influential on difficulty. But even the "random debuffs" and "random meteorite" ideas could be decent one-off situations. (Gold Saucer in Final Fantasy VII is a good example.) I mean, how different is that from enemies attacking random members of your party every turn?

 

[ATT_Turan]

Imma be honest, a lot of those sound really bad.
And THE most infuriating thing for a combat centric player is losing to RNG. Anything that can swing a battle around by pure luck is very very annoying.

While I agree that the random effects doesn't sound like it would be fun for me, I would suggest that your opening comes off as impolite.

@Boonty I think you should read about Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and A2 (not actually play them, unless you can tolerate the kiddy storyline, but read about them). Each fight has conditions imposed by judges that alter the regular battle rules in concrete and consistent ways - perhaps you could draw some inspiration from those.

 

[tumsterfest]

I'm old and forgot to include the actual point of my original response, which was to provide additional ideas haha. Most of these are from Final Fantasy XII (and other games, but I remember FFXII handling them well in particular):

• HP drain effect -- could be party-only, or both party and enemies. You could even make it so healing doesn't work (although you'd have to make the drain effect minimal and make sure enemy and party attacks aren't slicing off massive amounts of HP each time)
• Items locked
• Normal attacks locked
• Magic attacks locked
• "Techs" locked -- or whatever you call your non-magic special abilities
• Summons locked -- if you have that sort of thing
• Can't revive -- dead people stay dead for the remainder of the fight
• For your elemental idea -- if you wanted to get crazy, you could take inspiration from the "color field" mechanic in Chrono Cross. Of course, you could also have the enemy itself shift its weakness, rather than an effect that applies to both sides.
• For your buff/debuff idea -- just don't make them random. Have all characters start off with Silence. Or Darkness. Or all enemies with Reflect. Or force the player to pick a single ally to start with several negative statuses haha
• Enemy regeneration -- have the boss's minions or tentacles or whatever come back X turns later after you kill them
• Magnetic field -- metal weapons/armor slow party down

 

[VegaKotes]

Ooh I remember a few bosses with the regenerating minions.
Usually the go to strategy is to remove the chaff and move onto the main boss afterwards but occasionally games would throw a curveball at you and if you focused down the minions the boss would heal them meaning you needed to focus fire the boss first and then mop up their minions.

It made for a slightly frustrating if somewhat interesting change of pace.

 

[Sword_of_Dusk]

@ATT_Turan Oi! FFTA's story isn't all that kiddy at all! The protagonist is young, yes, but the actual story is serious. Just nowhere near FFT's.

 

[VegaKotes]

Well spoilers for FFTA I guess (Even though that game is like 23? years old at this point, haha....)

Spoiler: FFTA

I'm pretty sure FFTA deals with abandonment issues, dealing with being paraplegic, body issues, bottling up frustrations from parental preference, and trying to forget all those issues and live in a fantasy isekai land instead.

FFTA had some pretty heart wrenching plot points from what I remember. And it caps it all off with the main character trying to convince all his friends that they should give up their cozy happier lives and go back to reality because that's the right thing to do. I really loved the story in FFTA.

 

[ATT_Turan]

Oi! FFTA's story isn't all that kiddy at all! The protagonist is young, yes, but the actual story is serious. Just nowhere near FFT's.

We are going to have to disagree, my friend I played...not a lot, but probably 3 or 4 chapters before I couldn't tolerate it.

Of course, I also had a hard time with the dumbed-down game mechanics compared to the intricate beauty of FFT, so it's possible the story wasn't that bad and the combination of the two is what overwhelmed me.

I was able to play much more of A2, but I still found it silly.

 

[lianderson]

Those are some unique game make ideas. That's what I'm $@#%@#$ talking about!

*jump out of your refrigerator with a karate kick*

Hmmmmmmmmmm..... HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM...... I shall add to this conversation for I is doing an idea. An idea called sabotage. Sabotage everything!

Big level, many monstas, many floors, each floor can be sabotaged. If a floor is sabotaged, all enemies begin the battle with a negative status effect, such as poison, confusion, stun, etc.

I have not fully worked out its logical reasonings yet! So this concept, while currently in the game as a 4th wall breaking prototype, will be removed next update!

*backflips back into refrigerator*

Everyone, tell us your atypical battle ideas!