"Revive kills zombies" Overdone?

[Ashton]

I think any stratagem tactic that could break the game in your favor is poor design, even if it is an Easter egg. 

Edit:  by "break the game" I don't mean simply winning, I mean winning by trivializing any difficulty.

I agree mostly (one easter egg that's EXTREMELY hard to find and only works on certain enemies might be ok) that's why I'm seriously considering going with "Revive makes the undead stronger" and "Heal replenishes enemy HP"

 

[Eschaton]

That's the problem with the internet.  Easter eggs can no longer be hidden.  Ever.

 

[Ashton]

That's the problem with the internet.  Easter eggs can no longer be hidden.  Ever.

True. At best if it's an obscure game it will take time, be sooner-or-later if there's any sort of popularity then the easter-eggs will be posted online somewhere (likely in a walkthrough) I'm wondering if it's possible to make easter-eggs appear in a random location instead of being 'set' in one spot... of course that would just frustrate players who want to find them I suppose... it's not like that would hide their purpose (which is kinda the point of an easter-egg --- that you find something unexpected)

 

[Tai_MT]

I've never understood why healing items hurt undead.  Aren't you restoring them to life?  Aren't you giving their dead and decaying forms more power and range of movement?

Here's how I would execute the mechanic so as to see it in a way that hasn't been done:

Healing items instantly transform the "undead" into an actual monster that is suddenly much harder to kill and still retains all the strengths of being undead (like near immunity to piercing weapons and elemental effects).  This new monster would have its own drop rates of items and gold and xp and such...  That way, after the initial "holy crap, I shouldn't have done that!" effect, a more experienced player might want to hit them with the spells or effects in order to obtain different drops.  Either that, or I would let the player hurt the enemy with those healing items...  But when the enemy "dies" by those items, it's revived as another monster and the fight isn't over.

Basically, as a dev, I would be thinking "I want the player to suffer for trying to think they could get an easy win.  Players should be punished in game for trying to win without skill".  I'd go as far as if you healed a zombie with a Phoenix Down, immediately having the enemy counter-attack with a 100% "Zombie" state to the character who tried it.

 

[Probotector 200X]

@Tai_MT: So if you put an instant death spell available for your characters, would they die when casting it?

I think one main reason healing hurts undead is because, undead is a stage after death, you can't go back to living normally after being undead, there's just the unending torment of undeath, or being killed again. Healing magic hurting them is like putting them out of their misery.

 

[kerbonklin]

Ah, this trope. Yes it's overdone in various RPGs, but there was one change in a specific RPG that made it very clever and great.

In Bravely Default, you fight an optional Zombie Dragon boss. (typical Final Fantasy boss) When the boss dies by damage-KO, he auto-revives back to full health every time. Now normally most FF players would think "oh it's this boss, let me just use a phoenix down / Raise spell on it." However this instead will also auto-revive the boss back to full HP.

What you're actually supposed to do is to kill the boss once normally using damage (33,000 HP I think on Hard Mode), he auto-revives, AND THEN you have to use phoenix down / Raise to permanently kill him. I thought it was a very genius design to freshen up the played-out trope, it definitely took everyone by surprise.

 

[Tai_MT]

@Probo

I wouldn't be stupid enough to include "instant death" spells.  The closest I currently have to an "instant death" spell is a spell that has a 1% chance upon being casted to cause the Death State, if the creature isn't immune to the element of Fire, or resistant to the element of Fire, and if the player has chosen that path of evolution for their spell.  Honestly, it's there more for flavor text and the rare moments of "that's pretty sweet" when it happens.  It isn't meant to be relied on as a means to win the game.

Here's the problem with spells that "instant kill" in RPGs.  Either they're too powerful and players will spam them on everything because the devs didn't bother making things immune to those spells...  Or they are too weak and work only on standard enemies and not on bosses, which renders the spells kind of pointless as nobody would pay the high MP cost to kill a standard mook they could just hit "Attack" to kill.  Then, you've got the semi-rare cases of "It's a small chance for the spell to kill instantly, but most of the time you just waste your MP casting it".  In those cases (as evidenced by Pokémon as a recent example), players won't rely on it or even consider it a useful skill because it misses so often that you're basically throwing away turns on the off-chance you'll get an instant victory.

As for the Zombie undead thing...  Think about what spells like Cure do.  They repair damage to flesh and organs and etcetera.  If used on a zombie, wouldn't it repair that damage?  Clearly it would repair necrotic tissue as a Cure spell can heal you back from near death.  Same with a Phoenix Down.  As the mechanics work on the living, I would think all that would happen is you bring the undead back to actual life (and probably repairing all the problems they had with their decaying and necrotic tissues to begin with).

You know why it exists in Final Fantasy that cure spells damage undead?  Because some dev got it in their head that "Life kills Death" and ran with it.

 

[The Forgotten]

I planned on working mine like this - Using revive on the undead restores them to life. Battler changes and everything to reflect a "living" version of the enemy. It made the encounter easier in the sense the "living" version did not have access to powerful necromantic magic such as Death, Doom, Curse, ect. However, it make their standard Magic slightly more powerful and gave enemies like White Mages access to their healing spells again.

That said, defeating their undead counterparts yielded more EXP and uncommon crafting items like "Last Breath", "Dark Matter", ect, that you can only get from the Black Market or defeating undead enemies.

It doesn't always make the encounter easier, and if you're prepared, you can make mincemeat of the undead through my character Seluna's "Prayer" abilities which mimic some standard D&D Anti-Undead spells or through stocking up on "Holy Water" which removes "Curse" as well cutting an undead or demon's stats in half for 5 rounds.

It just added other avenues for play.

 

[Ashton]

Just an FYI: I came up with a far more interesting narrative way of doing this - instead of a zombie, the boss is a ghost and the hero uses a spell to bind them to an object (for those who've seen my other threads, this is how Ruxpin, my animated psychotic teddybear, is created.) Though this is a one-time thing since the spell is consumed (or actually doesn't even exist since this was all done using eventing)

However, I'm considering another area later that follows this idea directly. So, I'm still open to suggestions and idea. I really like the idea of revive/life/etc returning the enemies to living enemies and changing their skill set to match, just unsure how I want to implement it (more xp or less, harder battle or easier, etc) so thank you all for your suggestions.

On that note, how would this be done simplest? I suppose one could event all the battles to change the enemies, or would it be possible to write a common event without a hundred different conditional branches for each and every battle? (Or even somehow add it to the enemies DB entries?)

 

[estriole]

instead just killing the undead. make it become 'alive'.

undead state > stronger.

alive state > weaker

more make sense in my opinion.