Characters with Limited MP while other characters have full

[Alexandra]

I'm working on a RPG Maker VX Ace game in which the main character is a rather unique mage (will not fully in-depth, the general idea is that they aren't capable of using magic themselves but can trick magic items, which require a mage to activate, into thinking they are). One of the main ideas I have planned for the main character is a MP Drain ability, where if the enemy is of a 'mage' type then they are drained for a fairly significant amount of mana. This ability uses TP, and generates MP for the player, which can then be used in battle to activate various magic items. My question is, is there any easy way to set this up so that the main character starts with 0 MP, and is never affected by full party restore effects, and also doesn't gain any actual MP when leveling up (their max will increase, but I don't want for them to actually get any). Ideally, I would like to achieve this without scripts, even if an answer is somewhat convoluted, but scripts would be welcomed. If you have any ideas, just let me know.

 

[mauvebutterfly]

It's a bit cumbersome, but you could have a variable for storing the MP value. Every time you use a party-heal effect our event, reset the MP to the variable after the heal.


You could try doing something similar in battles and then reset the MP after the battle to negate any MP gain from leveling up, but you might need to use a script to create a timing window between attacking and ending a battle.

 

[Alexander Amnell]

For the mp healing you could do all this with a simple conditional. Let's say you have a potion that's meant to restore 30 mp as an example and the actor that shouldn't be able to recover mp except through his/her mp drain skill is actor 1 for the purpose of this example your formula box for said item should look like this.


b.id == 1 ? 0 : 30


   So that if the item is used on the actor at index of one then the potion will have no effect, if used on anyone else however it'll restore 30 mp as intended, just keep that consistent throughout all items and skills that restore mp and can target said character and no matter what the player tries they shouldn't be able to heal actor 1 for mp without using the drain skill.


   As for mp resetting to 0 after battle, that's also quite simple. All you need is to have a common event running as a parallel process that checks if actor one has any mp left and if so drains it to 0, and turn on the conditional switch whenever actor one is in the party. Since common events don't run during battles (by default, if you have a script that alters that then this solution obviously isn't for you) the effect is that as soon as a party with actor 1 in it comes back to the world map from a battle his/her mp will drain back to 0. This should also solve the mp gain on level up issue as well (though I didn't think ace restored anything on level up without the use of scripts anyway.)


   As for full party restore effects, just don't use them. I know it's slightly more cumbersome but if you don't want to use any scripts instead of using recover all for inns/checkpoints/whenever you offer full healing to the party just use the change hp and change mp commands instead, having change hp fully heal the party and using multiple change mp commands to restore everyone except your fake mage. The good news is you only really have to do this once, then you can just copy/paste the healing effect itself into it's proper place in other events that perform the same function, so it's not really that much more cumbersome than using the restore all command and it keeps you from using scripts.

 

[Alexandra]

Thanks a bunch. I had originally been thinking of keeping MP between battles, just not allowing it to be restored, but thinking about it the ways that are suggested seem to make much more sense, and can very easily be justified in-universe.