Tell me about your armor design.

[_Leviathan]

We always talk about skills or weapons as obviously they are fantastic for being flashy and look cool, but as a tank lover, I'm more thrilled to find a new armor than a weapon. Not only does armor tell about the wearer, it also protects and keeps you warm at night.

I've had my armor sketched out somewhat, but the most notable design choice I've made is to use Yanfly's Armor Scaling. For the moment, that is. However, I feel like this is a very poor design choice for an RPG, and I'm thinking of ways to change that -- perhaps dumping Armor Scaling completely.

Now, here's my problem:
Since I use very small numbers for stats, Yanfly's Armor Scaling plugin makes tanks feel very underpowered in the early game. They could only tank an extra hit or two as they stand now, and they'll only reach their full "defensive potential" once mid-late game. That would make the player not want to invest on the tank, and instead favor a damage dealer or a support instead.

However, with the normal a.atk * 2 - b.def formula, tanks are extremely overpowered with the way I've set up the stats. Not only would they have ridiculous damage resistance, but a tank can not deal damage to another tank, which could cause an infinite loop in battles, with the right conditions. That is why I've dropped the b.def from most of my skill formulas.

So how would you deal with this problem? Removing the Armor Scaling plugin would render both Defenese and Magic Defense almost completely useless, so there's not much point or thrill getting new armor.
I was thinking of experimenting with barrier points, another one of Yanfly The Great's plugins. Instead of having a Defense negate a portion of damage received, why not start the battle with a number of barrier points equivalent to your Defense? Armor would be valued not only because of the HP increases and other buffs, but heavier armor would grant you more barrier points. Think of Ablative Armor in XCOM 2. Even if your character gets hit, there's no need to use valuable potions or waste magic to cure them.
It sounded pretty good, until I realized that it would render Defense buffs and Defense penetration skills useless. Besides, what would I do about Magic Defense? This system could work on a very simple game, but I'm aiming for something else right now.

I am at a tight spot, and I was hoping to hear some of your thoughts. How do you design your armor? What makes them interesting and how does it work with the rest of your game? Perhaps I should make my starting numbers bigger instead of numbers like 2 - 6... Still, that doesn't solve the underpowered feeling of the tanks early on.

On another subject, what do you think about armor that scales with the wearer? Does the idea of never having low-level armor, and instead have a variety of armors which buff and debuff different things sound appealing? Most armor would be equal, and you could equip different armor for different builds and resistance against certain types of enemies. Personally, I find it very appealing.

 

[bgillisp]

Personally, I find low numbers really hard to balance, especially if you have a lot of different armor types floating around, as 1 - 2 points of DEF can be the difference between utterly useless and impossible to hurt. But that's my $0.02 on that part. As to some of the ideas or solutions that might help:

1: Maybe consider what you want one point of DEF and/or MDF to mean in your game? I actually experimented with an idea where one point of DEF reduced all damage by 1%, with a maximum of 99 DEF (99% of damage blocked). Interestingly enough, there is a game that did this a long time ago in the 90's, Betrayal at Krondor, where the only defense you had against damage was your armor value, and it blocked that much of the damage you took from weapons.

What I found in my experiment with this is when DEF is really low (1 - 10) you don't care at all about getting 1 more point of DEF, as it feels too minor (wow...I can now block 3% of all damage vs 2%. Big woop). To handle this you'd probably have to have starter armor at something like 15 DEF or so, so it actually feels like it matters even having armor.

Also, if you do go this route, you may wish to go to gamefaqs or some other site and look up the armor values Betrayal at Krondor used so you can get an idea of the tiers they went with. I think they did 15 - 25 - 30 - 40 - 55 - 70, but I could be off a few numbers here and there.

2: Maybe play with the damage formula some more? I once used a formula of 9 * a.atk - 5 * b.def, which meant each point of DEF blocked 5 HP of damage. Maybe play with the numbers in front of the a.atk and b.def and decide how much you want one point of ATK to raise damage, and how much you want one point of DEF to block in damage.

3: Maybe make the tank character higher level than the others for early game? For instance, if the rest of the party is starting at level 1, have them start at level 7. The level difference alone will probably make them stand out as "Hey, this person can take more damage than the others.". Or, you could have them start with a better armor than the others do when the game starts. That's actually what I did with my tank character, they started with the 2nd armor in the list instead of the 1st, as well as started 3 levels ahead of most of the other characters.

Anyways, those are just a few ideas that came to mind.

 

[RachelTheSeeker]

Dang, it's pretty cool to hear from someone who digs armor more than weapons in games! I've always been a fan of cool new gear in general, but I feel that armor is often undervalued in these types of simulations compared to weaponry.

I'm afraid I don't really have a good answer, as I'm just a step above a novice at game-making. Much of the time, I have my armor and weapons follow a certain level of scaling with the game, and only have as many tiers of the stuff as there are "chapters" of a project. However, I try to make equipment count and, for my current project, I try to sub-divide gear in a more classic sense, a la Dragon Quest -- character classes don't stick to a specific category of armor only (tanks only heavy armor, etc), but instead the characters who can use better armor progress in armor types based on their combat capabilities. There's nothing to bar, say, a mercenary from using any armor they like... even a mage's.

Ultimately, I'd say that the route of creating unique armor with varying effects, while still having roughly the same stats, could be cool! If not trying to emulate a retro style of RPG with my current project, I'd be handling armor and weapons in a very Final Fantasy X fashion, where different equipment only really matters for its special effects compared to others. Say, a shield that adds Pharmacology versus one that reduces fire damage taken? As far as stats go, I'm not certain how to handle them. One guide I recall from the past suggests making equipment a fraction of its main user's stats at the point of the game where you could obtain it; maybe try that if you want?

 

[kovak]

Maybe your issue ia not with equipment but with skills as well.

Well, what makea a tank to tank is the combination of armory and skills, defensive stuff goes beyond armor scaling and high HP since they can dodge, reduce damage by elemental rate, reduce targets hit rate, reduce atk or mat of target, etc.

All those things can be applied to both skills and armory. Effects also plays a major role in combat.

 

[Aesica]

For starters, I think an actual "tank" character should be more than just some dude/chick wearing armor with bigger numbers. My tank characters also have self-mitigation abilities, taunt-style abilities, higher overall health pools, self-healing abilities, and things like that. So, even if their armor totals are only 2-3 points higher than the rest of the party, they're still effective tanks.

 

[TheoAllen]

I kinda hate thinking about armor if it's linear RPG, it's in my opinion redundant that you have to buy/grind a new armor in shop like you do in classic RPGs, because why not just ditch it completely (like I do on MP system and switch completely to TP system) and just focus on combat/story without much thinking about it? but if it's open and/or you have strategic layer, armor would complement the system you're making.

Although, yeah let's talk about armor.

This is a theory and I never really have a chance to try to balance this. Personally if I go use low stat design, I'd still design formula based on Atk - Def formula. You said that tank would be ridiculously OP cz take no damage. This is true, personally experienced it in XCOM/XCOM2 when armor indeed reduce damage taken even to zero. However, in that game, armor is not permanent and can't break at the duration of battle if hits by a certain weapon or gets hit by a few times. You can also try to put a skill like "Armor Break" that basically reduce armor by flat value (but remember to not let it pass below negative). You can also play with element resistance that you get bonus flat def up based on element. If it resist impact damage, it gets bonus armor by a few flat values, say, 5 or so. Although I'd say this is better to be implemented in turn based strategy games rather than turn based front/side view.

On another subject, what do you think about armor that scales with the wearer?

And as I said in my opening post you might as well as completely remove armor all together and just use default scaling def stat.

Does the idea of never having low-level armor, and instead have a variety of armors which buff and debuff different things sound appealing?

It's appealing since it adds strategic layer, but it's also "scaled" with the micromanagement. If it's become troublesome like you have to unequip and equip different armor for every battle, then it's not appealing.

 

[Milennin]

It's all within the skills. The 2 defensive classes in my last game don't have spectacularly high defences, nor is there any form of equipment. What makes them armoured are their skillsets that lets them control where enemy attacks land, and options to block or reduce incoming damage, as well as self heals to keep on going.

As for numbers. I would suggest to avoid going super small, because it prevents you from balancing numbers very precisely.

 

[NinjaKittyProductions]

I have found with my projects that I absolutely hate armor that gives just flat Defense stat. I choose to go with Elemental Resistance and Physical Resistance on armor instead. So instead of an armor giving you 20 to Defense, it might give you 20% Physical Resistance. In this instance, my skills just worry about my characters stats and not the targets stats what so ever. It gives a clear number from a balancing standpoint as well. If an attack does 100 damage, and my hero is wearing Scale Mail that gives 20%PDR, then the hero only takes 80 damage.

This could work with magic defense by having armor reduce magic damage with the sp-parameter magic damage resistance.

It sounded pretty good, until I realized that it would render Defense buffs and Defense penetration skills useless. Besides, what would I do about Magic Defense? This system could work on a very simple game, but I'm aiming for something else right now./QUOTE]

In this instance with the suggested above, you could have skills add states that give + or - to PDR or MDR.

 

[kranasAngel]

Here's a potential idea, rather than having defense alter damage taken directly have it alter what armors you can equip. Thus the tank with the highest defense stat can access higher level armors at earlier levels.

Then you can have a lot of fun with what armors you're wielding. I know in one of my earlier games I gave every armor and weapon a different buff and drawback. So maybe one Armor not only reduces damage taken slightly, but has thorns on it so that it deals some of the reduced damage back to the attacker. This gives the player something of an interesting tradeoff as to what they want their tank to excell at.

Also you can still weave in armor penetration into effects like these, by having the penetration reduce the amount of retaliation damage you take.

 

[LostFonDrive]

As suggested above, % based damage reductions are an interesting alternate approach that can be used. You could give armors a multiplier value that is put into your damage formula.

 

[jonthefox]

This is a very hard aspect to balance in my opinion. As you and others have said, there are trade-offs. I haven't found any perfect elegant solution; it's about what works best for your RPG.

I personally enjoy smaller numbers in RPGs - I find them more meaningful and clear. But, they're a LOT harder to balance. So I tend to shy away from them.

I also find yanfly's armor scaling mechanic to be much better about balancing combat. Or any multiplicative damage formula in general. However, this also provides much less clarity to the player about how much value 1 point of DEF actually gives a character....which bothers me. It also creates weird situations where having a little bit of armor can either be really meaningful or really negligible.

Ultimately, I would try to take a step back and remember that in an rpg, everything is about the number of "hits" that a character can take. You look at the damage that players and enemies are dealing, you look at HP, and you think ok, my squishy mage should probably be able to take 10 hits from a regular enemy...my tank knight should probably be able to take double that, at least starting out in the early levels. Then you design your armor so that, based on the damage and HP of players and enemies, this is roughly the kind of numbers you end up with. Then you play test, and tweak from there.

 

[LostFonDrive]

Ultimately, I would try to take a step back and remember that in an rpg, everything is about the number of "hits" that a character can take. You look at the damage that players and enemies are dealing, you look at HP, and you think ok, my squishy mage should probably be able to take 10 hits from a regular enemy...my tank knight should probably be able to take double that, at least starting out in the early levels. Then you design your armor so that, based on the damage and HP of players and enemies, this is roughly the kind of numbers you end up with. Then you play test, and tweak from there.

Those numbers seem a bit strange to me. In most games I've played even the "tank" characters rarely survive 10 hits let alone the "squishy" ones.

 

[jonthefox]

10 hits for a squishy mage is probably a bit too high yes - I was just giving an example. Ultimately, it's a preference and choice that the designer has to make.

 

[WickedWolfy]

Found this the other day

Spoiler: Guarding and Armor

This might be an interesting concept to apply to "gear" in general.
The other thing to consider with heavy armor is agility. If you use speed-based combat plugins, the user might be slower or faster, depending on how much gear they wear.

 

[Tai_MT]

Now, here's my problem:
Since I use very small numbers for stats, Yanfly's Armor Scaling plugin makes tanks feel very underpowered in the early game. They could only tank an extra hit or two as they stand now, and they'll only reach their full "defensive potential" once mid-late game. That would make the player not want to invest on the tank, and instead favor a damage dealer or a support instead.

However, with the normal a.atk * 2 - b.def formula, tanks are extremely overpowered with the way I've set up the stats. Not only would they have ridiculous damage resistance, but a tank can not deal damage to another tank, which could cause an infinite loop in battles, with the right conditions. That is why I've dropped the b.def from most of my skill formulas.

I'm in the same boat. I use small numbers for my stats as well. However, my armor dumps decent to large amounts of stats into a character. Equipment is fairly important in my game. Level ups, not so much.

That being said, I think you should tackle your tanks differently. If you're relying purely on stats to make them "tank", then they're kind of one-dimensional. Don't get me wrong, if you're making an RPG where that's the point, then there's nothing wrong with it. But, if your goal is simply to make a tank, then there are other ways to do that.

I'll use my own project (for shameless plug reasons... as well as because it's got the relevant examples) to illustrate. I'm using 3 defensive stats. Defense. Magic Defense. Reflex (renamed from Luck). Because you can tweak a damage formula any way you want... you don't always have to use "Attack" or even "Defense" for everything. Some skills hit your Luck stat (notably, Thief skills, or skills that would be fast) and they use the Agility (renamed to Speed) stat to attack with. Some will hit your Magic Defense. Some will hit your Defense. I've got a "Tank" for each defensive stat, but how they go about it is different from character to character. This could be in what equipment they're allowed to equip, which Elements they are Weak to because of their equipment, or in what Skills they have at their disposal. But, the main thing a player will remember is that only about a third of all incoming attacks will use the "Defense" stat to mitigate damage. So, it's important to bring the right equipment for the job (or the right character, in some instances).

So how would you deal with this problem? Removing the Armor Scaling plugin would render both Defenese and Magic Defense almost completely useless, so there's not much point or thrill getting new armor.
I was thinking of experimenting with barrier points, another one of Yanfly The Great's plugins. Instead of having a Defense negate a portion of damage received, why not start the battle with a number of barrier points equivalent to your Defense? Armor would be valued not only because of the HP increases and other buffs, but heavier armor would grant you more barrier points. Think of Ablative Armor in XCOM 2. Even if your character gets hit, there's no need to use valuable potions or waste magic to cure them.
It sounded pretty good, until I realized that it would render Defense buffs and Defense penetration skills useless. Besides, what would I do about Magic Defense? This system could work on a very simple game, but I'm aiming for something else right now.

Personally, I find that you should really only use a plugin if you could only solve something no other way. If you want to create a game where armor scaling is a feature, then you'd use an Armor Scaling plugin. But, if all you're trying to do is balance damage and defenses, there are far easier ways to do it without use of a plugin.

That being said, I think there are ways to simply mess with your armor that you might not have considered. It's possible to have armor with all sorts of effects on it. Small percentage chance they won't get hit... Large chance that they'll take a hit for their allies... Counter Attacks... Reflect Magic... Resistances to specific types of damage...

While the "Ablative Armor" idea sounds interesting in concept, I feel it would better lend itself to a system in which armor and weapons have "durability" and you need to spend money to repair those things. Maybe your armor can consume only so much HP of damage for you before you start taking actual Health Damage. You could then add another stat to armor that might be valuable to players... High Durability. But, you'd need a whole new plugin for that. One I'm not sure exists.

Personally, I simply solve the problem by letting my Tanks equip armor that boosts their already high defensive stats... But make it possible for them to encounter enemies that don't hit those defensive stats... So, they're massively powerful tanks in one area... or maybe two if the player uses them correctly, but that third will destroy them.

I'll give you an example. My starting "Plate Armor" (all four pieces of it) will give you a cumulative 31 points of Defense. My characters start with roughly 10 points of Defense. Essentially, it's a 300% gain on a stat. Early in the game, nothing will be able to inflict damage on you that uses "Defense" as the stat it hits against. But, here's the downsides: -13 Reflex stat and 199% (it's almost 200%) Magic Weakness with about 118% Piercing Weakness. Any attack that hits your Reflex stat for defenses is going to do 13 more damage to you than it otherwise would. If that attack is also Magical in Element, it'll do even more damage. Or, if it's a piercing attack (let's say, it's the bite of a Wolf, a fast bite), you can add an extra 20% damage (it's 18, but we're rounding up) to however much damage you just got dealt. You'll need high HP to deal with those hits. Or, to round out your defensive stats. Or, just bring a tank to deal with Magic instead of Physical Hits. My armor works a lot like that. It specializes characters. Or, helps them exploit their specialization.

I am at a tight spot, and I was hoping to hear some of your thoughts. How do you design your armor? What makes them interesting and how does it work with the rest of your game? Perhaps I should make my starting numbers bigger instead of numbers like 2 - 6... Still, that doesn't solve the underpowered feeling of the tanks early on.

You don't have to make your starting numbers "larger". In fact, the larger the numbers, the harder it becomes to balance your game, especially once you get out of "early game" and approach "mid game". Some people don't have a problem balancing large numbers. I do, so I don't bother trying to do it.

What makes my armor design" interesting" is that it exists to accentuate character builds. It doesn't just exist to arbitrarily increase a number value. Further on, not everyone can equip every armor type. The main character of the game (you can never swap him out) can equip every armor in the game except Cloth Armor, Bucklers, Short Bows, Long Bows, and "Books". The first "Mage" character you get can only equip two kinds of armor: "Casual Clothes" and "Cloth Armor". The first "DPS" character you can get can only equip two kinds of armor: "Cloth Armor" and "Plate Armor". BTW, Cloth Armor is the mage's equivalent of "Tank Gear". My DPS character has elemental weapon attacks, so he can specialize them as physical hits (being a physical brawler with elements) or he can specialize them as magical hits (they'd do magic damage to enemies as well as elemental damage). Depending on what you're doing, you can gear him towards being a "Mage Slayer" type character where he uses Cloth Armor to tank Magical hits... Or, you can gear him towards a "Warrior Slayer" type character that uses his Plate Armor to tank those hits. He has very little answer to Thief type characters. There are probably even other builds for my DPS character than those two. But, those are two obvious ones a player will notice when they get that character. The armor they choose to equip on them will determine how they will play that character. What they will do with them. All my armor works like that. Characters have access to what they need in order to make a "build". Players are free to "mix and match" as they please, but their access to equipment determines their primary builds.

As for solving the problem of underpowered tanks early on. I simply solved that with their Skills. I have a Defense Tank you get sort of early on. He's got skills that buff his Defense stat. His skills can also buff the Defense stat of allies. Even more, those two can stack together (because they're separate States). Increments of those stats are +25%, +50%, +75%, and +100%. Consider that you could have a 50% bonus for a few turns, and that's pretty powerful early game, even if you have to spend turns to obtain it. Likewise, he has a "Limit Break" simply called "Siege Breaker". His defense stat minus the enemy's attack stat, then hit with a multiplier (initially it's 1.5 multiplier, it goes as high as 4x multiplier). So, if a player decides to focus entirely upon jacking Defense into that character, it turns out they've got a very powerful Attacker as well. Someone who can potentially one-shot some early bosses. The Skills you give your Tanks are just as important as the armor they've got equipped. Never forget that you can also give them armor that makes their Skills more powerful to use either.

On another subject, what do you think about armor that scales with the wearer? Does the idea of never having low-level armor, and instead have a variety of armors which buff and debuff different things sound appealing? Most armor would be equal, and you could equip different armor for different builds and resistance against certain types of enemies. Personally, I find it very appealing.

To be honest, it was this aspect of Final Fantasy X that I hated the most. Armor I obtained at the beginning of the game was still equipped to me by the end of it, because there was nothing overtly better until I could craft stuff into my armor slots myself. At which point... It didn't actually matter. Because, it was all "percentage increases", which meant my stats on the sphere grid mattered a lot more than what I put on my armor. Oh sure, I could get a 20% buff to Defense, but if my Defense stat was already low, then it was wasted.

I don't really like things to "scale" with me. May as well not have equipment at that point and just have your damage formulas scale.

But, that's just my opinion.

 

[Wavelength]

We always talk about skills or weapons as obviously they are fantastic for being flashy and look cool, but as a tank lover, I'm more thrilled to find a new armor than a weapon. Not only does armor tell about the wearer, it also protects and keeps you warm at night.

A fire spell could also keep you warm at night! And for that matter so could a giant stuffed animal... although we don't want to embarrass Tear.

===

About Armor Scaling and Damage Formulas: I haven't tried Yanfly's Armor Scaling myself, but after thoroughly reading its page, I think I get the gist of it, and I believe that your problems are simply a matter of formula and scale, rather than anything conceptual. When you are working with small numbers, having such a large base divisor (100) is obviously going to make any stat that directly adds to (or subtracts from) this divisor pretty insignificant. Defensive stats aren't going to feel good at this level (especially in the early game).

If you and your enemy are dealing 5 * 100 / (100 + 5) damage to each other, and you have the opportunity to either change the numerator to 10 * 100 for your attacks by raising your ATK stat to 10, or change the denominator to (100 + 10) for enemy attacks by raising your DEF stat to 10, well, you're getting 20 times the overall effectiveness of choosing the attack stat.

With a multiplicative formula like this (which is MUCH better for most purposes than an additive formula like a.atk * 4 - b.def * 2), I've generally found that setting the base denominator to a level around the players' starting DEF stat to be a good place to start - and then you can figure out other stats like ATK and HP from there, depending on how long you want battles to last. This means that you could either raise the stats in your game so that DEF starts out around 100 for most characters, or you can play around with the denominator or formula.

I'm not sure whether Yanfly's Armor Scaling lets you change the denominator from the front end, although I'm guessing it would be an exceedingly easy change to make on the back end if you can read code. The other option is to dump the plugin and simply use multiplicative formulas for all of your skills. A formula I use in one of my current games is a.atk * [power of skill, usually between 10 and 100] / (b.def + 10) and I think that this would work well for your game since you are using "small numbers" for stats that I assume are 1 to 2 digits.

===

About Armor that Scales with the Wearer's Level/Stats: I think it's a nifty idea, and the goals of keeping armor relevant for several hours, reducing the "armor treadmill" effect, and freeing up room for more horizontal choices between equipment are all noble goals that this kind of Armor That Scales With You would serve well. However, keep in mind that this will likely cause the player to find a piece of armor they like a lot at some point in the game, and stick with it forever. Any new armor (or at least most new armor) they find will be useless, because the armor they already have is objectively just as powerful, and it suits the player's style more and the player has more experience with it - so why change it out for something else? Depending on the kind of experience you want to provide, this might be acceptable, but more likely it won't. Here are a few different ideas for implementing the idea in a form that won't run into this "never change" trap:

• Have general "tiers" of armor that scale to certain levels and then max out. For example, the equipment you'll find in the first town's shop and the first dungeon is Tier 1 equipment, which scales until you hit Level 20. It might have the same stats as Tier 2 equipment when you're level 15, but that Tier 2 equipment is allowed to scale until Level 40. Four or five tiers of equipment should be enough. This way you can hold onto your equipment for a decent span of time without any drawbacks, but eventually you're strongly encouraged to swap it for something new since it will stop its scaling after a certain point.
• Similar to the above, have base values of stats for equipment and scale somewhat with your level, but not quite enough to keep up with higher tiers of armor. For example, Wood Armor might scale with the formula (20 + 0.5 * Level), Bronze Armor might scale at (30 + (Max of 0 or [Level - 20])), and Gold Armor at (50 + (Max of 0 or (2 * [Level - 40]))).
• Allow the player to upgrade their equipment using collectibles (gems, spirit energy, materia, whatever suits your game and systems). This can take the form of customization (blank slots that you can fill with increasingly powerful collectibles), or more simple "recipes" where you need to find a certain combination of collectibles to upgrade your gear to the next level. (In such a system, the armor would not scale by itself with your level, but you'd have the opportunity to upgrade it throughout the game to keep it relevant.)

 

[Nhale]

Personally, I deal with armors having lower numbers than the damage (pe. Inicial damage in the early game is ~15 and inicial armors with defense of 1 up to 5) and I use the simple final damage - armor for the formula. So each point of armor reduces the damage by 1. But, to prevent it from becaming too op, the formula also has a minimum damage, that I like to be 33%, so even with a full tank, it will never take 0 damage. Armor is only obtained from equipment, a few passives, and a few spells, so leveling up usually don't increases the armor.

 

[Aesica]

I might as well just share what I'm doing in my game with both armor and guarding to see if it appeals to anyone:

In general (some abilities are of course exceptions) the damage formula I'm using is:

a.atk * [skill modifier] / (1 + b.def * 0.01); // physical damage
a.mag * [skill modifier] / (1 + b.mdf * 0.01); // magic damage

A few things about this:

• As one might guess, this formula favors higher armor ratings, as I intend for the tankiest characters to be able to gear up to about 500 def (or mdf), so an attack that does 5000 damage before defense would do 833 damage to someone sufficiently geared.
  
• 30%-50% of the way through the game, I intend to have the values flatten out so that the value gained by obtaining a new piece of gear after that point is a new obstacle the player is able to overcome (fire-resistant armor before heading into the volcano, confusion-resistant helmets to thwart something that frequently uses confusion attacks, etc) rather than the typical numbers bump.
• Some things found later in the game may actually have lower raw stats, but offer some benefit that still makes it feel like an upgrade. Would you want to use the basic +50 def hat or the +10 def hat that nullifies silence and reduces MP costs by 25%?

As for guarding, this was inspired by how shields work in the really old SaGa games for the black and white gameboy. How the Guard command functions depends on whichever shield you have equipped. Guarding with a Wooden Shield might only reduce physical damage by 30%, while doing so with an Iron Shield would offer better protection at 50%. Guarding with Final Fantasy 6's Force Shield (a shield that does little physically, but is highly magic-resistant) might reduce magic damage by 75% but do nothing for physical damage. Guarding with Dragon Quest's Shield of Strength might give the typical 50% physical/magic resistance while also restoring HP to the user, etc.

Now, if I could just get guard to work by pressing right on the actor command window, Final Fantasy style, rather than having it clutter up the command list...

 

[Guanto]

So maybe one Armor not only reduces damage taken slightly, but has thorns on it so that it deals some of the reduced damage back to the attacker.

Love this and had so many big ideas revolving around it awhile back, until I realized the guy taking pot shots at me with his longbow would mysteriously be getting stuck by my thorn armor as well. Ugh.

Personally, I find that you should really only use a plugin if you could only solve something no other way.

I know how to "Like" a post, but how do I indicate I LOVE a sentence?

 

[mauvebutterfly]

Love this and had so many big ideas revolving around it awhile back, until I realized the guy taking pot shots at me with his longbow would mysteriously be getting stuck by my thorn armor as well. Ugh.

One workaround for this would be to have a "thorn" element that the armor effect uses, and to give range weapons 100% thorn resistance.

Heck, you could even use this to give a meaningful distinction to reach weapons, by giving spears or whips a 50% thorn resistance or something.