Trash Talking in Battle (Skill?)

[BardAaron]

I am making a game which draws heavily on Celtic myth/history, and the Celts are famed for being impossible to shut up. 

I want to make a battle mechanic where you, an potentially enemies as well, can insult each other to gain bonuses, or to throw each other off.  However, I thought it would be fun to have the player have at least some choice of what to say. 

I've been trying to make this work through common events, where a "Taunt" skill calls the common event and then you choose a dialog option.  Currently, I have a "You should be afraid of me" option that debuffs their ATK, an "insult" option that debuffs their defense, and a "weird" option that inflicts a confusion state.  These are not necessarily the only options that will be available.

However, it currently pops up an "it had no effect" message before calling the common event choice window, and then afterwards doesn't give any indication as to whether it worked or not.  I'm sure I could manually insert a message that said "the enemy is confused!" or something, but I don't know how to temporarily disable the "no effect" message.

Can I do this better with a script?  If so, I'd appreciate being pointed to one.

Or else, should I split this "trash talking" into multiple skills?  I could have a "Taunt" skill that's distinct from an "Intimidate" skill, has a precise effect, and then lets the player just choose their words.

 

[Landbark]

In my game I am making my own version of Litany of Curse from planescape torment.

The skill adds invisible state 'Curse' to an enemy and calls common event, variables then randomly choose curse shown in message. After that conditional branch finds out which enemy has 'Curse' state, gives him 'angry' animation and then adds angry state that descrease stats. The game also says "Enemy is insulted".

I haven't solved the problem with no effect message, sometimes it comes out but not always. I accept it as just a chance of fate

 

[Wavelength]

Here's the method that's responsible for calling the "no effect" message:

#-------------------------------------------------------------------------- # * Display Action Results #-------------------------------------------------------------------------- def display_action_results(target, item) if target.result.used last_line_number = line_number display_critical(target, item) display_damage(target, item) display_affected_status(target, item) display_failure(target, item) wait if line_number > last_line_number back_to(last_line_number) end endIf you don't want to display "failure" ('no effect'), comment out the display_failure(target, item) line.  There are a lot of skills you can come up with that do something but the system won't recognize it and will show the failure message.  If you do want to display failure except in this one instance, then you can modify the line to only show it under certain circumstances - my instinct is that you could do something like display_failure(target, item) unless item.id == 117 (where 117 is replaced with the Skill ID of your Taunt), but I'm not 100% sure since I'm assuming the "item" this line wants as input is an RPG::UsableItem.

You can also add the "The Enemy is Confused!" message to the battle log: see the "Unsorted" category in post #5 of this topic.