Weakness only Damage

[kranasAngel]

So an idea I came up with was to have a game where there were 4 or 5 elements, but enemies and allies could only be damaged by elements they were weak to.
For example say we use Fire, Water, Wind and Earth. Fire is weak to water, so all Wind Earth and Fire attacks will deal 0 damage to a fire elemental creature. Only Water element attacks are even capable of damaging them.
It could offer some interesting gameplay decisions as it forces the player to bring with them all 4 elements at all times, but it could also make certain character's useless if no enemies are weak to the elements they have access to.

I still think the idea could work though, maybe all skills deal damage and have an effect. For example poison deals water damage which can only harm fire enemies, but it also poisons the target which can effect all enemies.

Any thoughts?

 

[CleanWater]

I think that any elemental weakness idea is always interesting in a game, but it should not be so extremist.

Like, if a enemy is fire element, water damage does 200% damage and fire deals 0 damage, this way wind and earth don't become completely useless in this situation.

 

[onipunk]

Yeah, I'm not much of a fan of a 0-damage elemental system. My thinking is in comparing it to the Golden Sun series, which is built entirely around the four classical elements. If characters were only damaged by one element, then anywhere between 50-75% of your party would be useless offensively-speaking in certain battles, unless you went really deep into the class system to give everyone access to spells of that element, and even then you'd have to change it for every battle. I think reducing the damage to 25-50% to imply a resistance, giving the other elements maybe 75% damage to show they're not specifically damaged by that element, and then 100-125% damage to the weak element is a much better way to go and stops you from having characters who can't do any damage in certain situations. Under your system, the final bosses of Golden Sun (the first game) are all fire-elemental, meaning the only person who could harm them in her default class is Mia, your water mage, who's not built to be an offensive character since she has the only multi-person healing spell in the game and you wouldn't be able to use your actual offense-based characters against the final bosses at all. It's an interesting idea, but it is a bit extremist. People do expect certain mechanics to be standardised in their RPGs, and telling them that most of their party could be redundant in some circumstances is a tough pill to swallow. Giving each element additional states that can be inflicted is an okay idea, but it comes off a bit of sloppy seconds when you want to damage an enemy but end up doing nothing and having to wait for the poison to do its job. It could also draw out your game hugely if only one character can inflict damage to a boss and the others have to settle for chipping away at its health by using normal attacks or inflicting states and debuffs on it while waiting for the one useful character to finish the job.

 

[Poryg]

I think element resistances are good things if well balanced, instead of 0% element damage, because if we reference Pokémon, once you kill all pokémon that can defeat Shedinja, it's basically over. It can be a good boss, if you provide a logical reason as to why he has such an immunity and you warn the player beforehand.
In my game I made it that there were 6 elements in 2 groups (basic and special). In basic elements it was very simple.
One element caused doubled damage and made heals hurt instead.
One element's damage was cut by half. Buffs and debuffs were canceled.
And someone's own element was consumed. Damage was healed instead,
Then I had light and dark, special elements with their own rules.
However, as I was creating this system, I noticed how difficult it was to balance...

 

[kranasAngel]

I see... that does make sense.
Again, it doesn't seem to be a good idea, but I kinda want to see if I can make it work just for fun. What if it was set up like this.
1: You don't need to scan enemies to determine their weakness, it is told to you from the begining
2: There are 4 elements and 6 party members. Each party member can use two elements. (Fire-Wind, Fire-Earth, Fire-Water, Earth-Wind, Earth-Water, Wind-Water)
3: There are 3 party members in battle at a time and you can swap characters mid battle so that way you can make it so that all party members in battle have fire attacks.

I think this could be used as a way to force the player to experiment with different party compositions as any given party member can only deal with 50% of all enemies thus forcing you to switch them out whenever they come across an enemy they cannot damage

4: Enemies could also morph changing elements and forcing you to bring out other characters.

 

[Failivrin]

Magic the Gathering occassionally features cards with multiple elemental immunities. Only some cards have this feature, and they are usually expensive to play.
No idea if that helps, just brainstorming. Haven't seen a system where all characters have multiple immunities. I would think the biggest danger would be potential to make player strategies too cut-and-dry. Maybe make the mechanics for switching players something unique and challenging, since the player will have to switch often; without special challenge and rewards for the action of switching, it could start to feel like a chore.

 

[kranasAngel]

Maybe make the mechanics for switching players something unique and challenging, since the player will have to switch often; without special challenge and rewards for the action of switching, it could start to feel like a chore.

Hmm... what I was thinking was to have each character have a wildly different moveset. I was thinking along the terms of a basic class system, lke the Bravely series. By the end of the game you usually have a set party composition of a few classes, (say warrior, mage, and rouge) and as such you have little incentive to really change which classes you are using.
By making some characters useless in a given situation, the point is to force the player to use all of the characters, so the challenge comes instead from being adaptable and seeing how different part compositions play off of each other.

So like: Warrior A deals damage at the cost of HP and is healed by Healer B. The real challenge or intrigue would come from how to effectively use Warrior A if you have to swap Healer B out for Mage C. Essentially how to make every character useful with every other character, if that makes sense.

 

[Kes]

This sounds a bit like making the player change the party just for the sake of making them change it. It takes little (no?) account of differing play styles and gives little (no?) scope for the player to develop their own strategy. If the player does not play exactly as you intend, they're doomed. That does not automatically make it appealing.

 

[onipunk]

Making characters "useless in any given situation" as you say just really doesn't sit well with me, especially in the context of a class system. Why give the players the freedom to express themselves through their playstyle if you're going to limit or outright negate that expression by making it useless? People settle on a party composition that doesn't change because that particular setup is something that works for them and is enjoyable for them to play - my Bravely Default party of three Ninjas with Spellblade and a Spiritualist/White Mage might not have been optimal but damn if I didn't have a blast. If I'd been told that party was unusable and I'd have to create a new one and train up their job levels from scratch, I'd have been very annoyed.

Unique mechanics are good, and it's good you're trying to put as much thought as possible into making this work but every solution I can think of creates more problems. RPGs have been around for three decades, and if no-one's ever done a system like this before, there's probably a good reason - it just doesn't look like it's going to work.

 

[kranasAngel]

Hmm.... yeah it's probably best to abandon this huh. Still I appreciate everyone at least bouncing ideas off of me.

 

[onipunk]

Sorry if I came off overly harsh, if you're dedicated to this idea there are ways you could make it work. Making it less extreme for one, instead of outright negating damage, lower it for non-effective elements and give a bonus for effective damage to incentivise good party composition but not force the player to switch their party out constantly. A player's party might not be optimal, but if they enjoy it you should facilitate it and make it possible for them to use their chosen party for the majority of the game. As a further way to incentivise optimal party comps, maybe include a ranking or reward system based on how many turns it takes to defeat an enemy? Something similar to Bravely's bonuses for one-turn kills, or getting extra items and/or equipment for finishing a battle within a certain number of turns. I'm no scripter so I don't know exactly how you could implement such a system but I'm sure it's possible.

In short, it's a useable idea if you switch your way of thinking about it from being to force players to play the way you want them to, to giving them a reward if they do but not punishing them too harshly if they choose not to.

 

[kranasAngel]

Making it less extreme for one, instead of outright negating damage, lower it for non-effective elements and give a bonus for effective damage to incentivise good party composition but not force the player to switch their party out constantly.

I agree with you that could work. But this was more of an interesting idea, than a good one.
How about this though.
Your party of 6 is divided into 3 active members and 3 reserve members.
All skills cost large portions of MP, and as such after 5 or so attacks an active member will have no more MP to spend
Reserve members regenerate 25% MP every turn.
The turn a party member is swapped in, they gain a bonus based on how much MP they have remaining.

In this case, rather than building a singular party composition, you're dealing with an ever changing party composition. This is what I was trying to create earlier, party members are constantly being swapped out creating a churn.

incentivise good party composition but not force the player to switch their party out constantly. A player's party might not be optimal, but if they enjoy it you should facilitate it and make it possible for them to use their chosen party for the majority of the game.

I think I wasn't clear on what I wanted to do. Swapping party members mid-battle is the point, they should be doing this frequently especially in battles and the point was to make it so that the player couldn't use the same party for the entire game forcing them to have an ever changing party composition.

Again, I'm not saying it's a good idea, but I thought it was interesting to think about. The whole point of creating a feel of impermanence where everything is constantly changing.

 

[velan235]

I think most SMT series fit those , but yours is just the extreme step version of it. basically in SMT and persona , 90% of the times you gonna hit the enemies with weakness or you will having a hard time except you are overgrind or vertically has higher status.

if you already take it to the extreme (boolean true-false style , either you deal damage or not) , why not start designing at that point? rather than use vary of JRPG number , make it a true-false condition like chess. maybe something of like deckbuilding. ie. hellflame will always do 3 damage , raindrop will heal for 4 health etc. etc. just make sure you give some feedback if player use non-weakness so it doesnt 100% useless. ie. hellflame deal 3 fire damage , but also create a "flame" environment that halven water damage next turn or some skill that deal 2 elemental damage (3 earth damage and 2 wind damage of example) because the idea of RPG combat is dynamic with the situation (except , again if you want to create a constant battlefield like chess where there are small to no variable to calculate).

deal only weakness-damage is a good basic, but you can't stop there. you need to add action and reaction to the ability and actor , or else its just plain tic-tac-toe with skin

 

[kirbwarrior]

I dislike the idea wholly. However, I enjoy playing Devil's Advocate.

Rock-Paper-Scissors is the simplest system that uses this, boiled down. Only Scissors does damage to Paper. No other choice works. In a single player rpg like Skyrim or psuedo-rpg like Bloodborne, this can easily work since figuring out what works is part of the game and switching how you play your character around is the norm. But that doesn't translate well into the traditional jrpg. To work there, it's probably best to do something like giving each character every element but one, so they one element they can't beat, and/or to incorporate secondary effects into every attack as though you can't do damage with it. For instance, Pray does Holy damage to all enemies and heals your party. If there are no Dark enemies, then you merely heal your party. If you only do the second, then the damage source of your party changes with each battle but the roles of your party don't change.

 

[Silenity]

A little late to the thread you could always do something along the lines of regular damage, extra damage, halved damage, and absorbed damage for elements.

Fire element will heal when hit by fire.
Fire element will take extra damage when hit by water.
Fire element will take normal damage when hit by earth.
Fire element will take half damage when hit by wind.

Something along those lines.

 

[kirbwarrior]

incorporate secondary effects into every attack as though you can't do damage with it

I'll elaborate, because I've been thinking more on this idea. The main part is divorcing "damage" from "role". Build each party member as having a role in combat (buff, debuff, status, protection, healing, etc. or a combined class of effects). No one is based around dealing damage. Each person has many (maybe all but one) elements to pick from with their abilities, and damage becomes almost no concern because it is secondary to what you are doing in combat. This makes combat quite complicated, and probably a little too much so for traditional random encounters, but how you play your party isn't punished. Outside of combat, equipment determines who does how much damage, and planning ahead lets you figure out how to approach battles better; "Hmm. Volcano will have tons of fire elemental enemies, so I could focus my money on equipment on someone who will be constantly using water abilities, but I know there are some earth monsters and focusing none on the members who can do wind damage won't work..."

Then it becomes more of a reward for changing up tactics, instead of punishing for playing how you want to play.

 

[Wavelength]

It sounds like you've already seen the light of reason, but I just want to fixate on one sentence because it might help you sharpen your design skills:

It could offer some interesting gameplay decisions as it forces the player to bring with them all 4 elements at all times

Do you see the flaw here? Any time you are forcing the player to do something (because every other possibility will be completely ineffectual), there is no interesting gameplay decision to be made. In fact, for all intents and purposes, there is no decision to be made at all! You've actually robbed the player of the opportunity to design interesting party compositions like "three fires and a wind", because inevitably at some point they will run up against a fire monster and there's literally nothing they can do to fight it.

If you are looking to offer interesting decisions, make it so that every decision that could be made is a feasible solution as long as it's played well. Make it so that the different decisions are qualitatively different in terms of the experience they offer the player, but also so that every decision can feel right to the person that made it! It's a tricky art to master, but it can go so far in terms of making your game experience a good one.

 

[SOC]

I think it might feel a bit exhausting after awhile having to play like that, it's a lot of constant decision making that taxes you eventually.