Castle Paradox

[Iblis]

Despite what many people think, there is actually quite a bit you can do with the OHR battle engine. Yes, it is limited, but what tends to be vastly more limited is the game designer using it. There are so many more things it can be used for than typical FF4 style battles.

Most people who try to use it don't really do anything interesting with the attacks. You usually just have some healing spells and some attack spells, of various elements which may or may not have any effect on how the spells work. Usually the only difference between "Fire," "Fire 2," and "Fire 3" are how much damage they do (also, using numbers instead of changing the name is lame and boring). Much more variation than this is possible. For example, you could use these spells instead:

* Fireball - Nothing special here. You shoot a fireball at the enemy and it does fire damage.
* Fireblast - This shoots a stronger fireball at the enemy, and there's a certain chance that it will chain to an explosion attack afterward. So there's a chance it will do over twice as much damage as fireball.
* Firebomb - This shoots an even stronger fireball at one enemy, and there's a chance it will chain to an explosion attack that will hit ALL enemies. So you can get double damage on one and some damage to everyone else.

And different elements could work in different ways. Ice spells might lower speed or stun them. Wind could lower accuracy and/or evasion (by making them dizzy). Lightning might chain to a second and third bolt that hit random enemies. And so on. Of course, another good idea is to think up different elements to use than the standard set. While it's best to also think up a different way for them to interact than normal, I think it still makes the game a bit more interesting to just change what the elements are (as long as it's not something stupid like changing "fire" to "flame").

Healing spells could be assigned elements as well. You could have, say, "warmth" (fire), "breeze" (wind), or "recharge" (lightning). And these could sometimes chain to an attack that raises a certain stat, like fire could raise attack power or wind could raise speed, etc... Or instead of the second and third healing spells healing more HP all at once, perhaps it would take a longer time. Like "warmth 2" (it would have a better name, this is just an example) would heal the target once, and then wait a little bit and heal the target a second time. The delayed healing could add some extra challenge to battles.

Stat-altering spells can be used in very cool ways. One thing I've never seen is stat draining spells. Like, you can use drain or osmose to take HP or MP, why can't you drain attack power or defense? You could even have a spell that lets you drain from allies. You'd have to think about who to take it from. Like, if your mage drains magic power from your fighter, the latter is probably not going to miss it, but you wouldn't want to take it from another mage.

It's not necessary to always use attack or magic as the attack stat or defense or magic defense as the defense stat. Like, you might have a bow/arrow user that uses accuracy as the attack stat. Or a ninja that has some kind of stealth attack where they use evasion to attack. Or you might have a "body slam" attack where defense is used as the attack stat. Or you could use an entirely different system. Like, you might have one stat that's "physical strength" and one that's "magic strength." The former could be the attack and defense stat for physical attacks, while the latter would serve as both for magic attacks. There's really quite a bit you can do by changing around what the stats mean.

One should always spend some time editting global strings. I hate going into an OHR game and seeing all the stats with the default names. That's boring. At least spend the time changing "Atk" to "Attack" or "Strength" or "Power." It's not much less boring, but really, it's not like it takes any time to do.

And now, I'd like you all to post any and all interesting OHR design ideas that you're comfortable with sharing. If you've got some super-secret project and you don't want to give away your ideas, I can certainly understand. And I'd really prefer to confine this to ideas that can be done on the OHR, using the standard battle engine. We talk a lot about the fact that battles should be interesting, but we rarely talk about how to go about doing that. I think it's an important thing to discuss.

[The Drizzle]

I had the idea of making a post like this but never got around to it. I've actually got quite a few tricks that can be done with attacks, some easy, some more complicated. I'll post them when I have some more time.
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My name is...
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[Sephyroth]

I have something similar to what you just said for my game. The way I had it was:

Lightning: Full damage against a single enemy.
Fire: 2/5 spread damage against multiple enemies.
Ice: 3/5 single damage while lowering enemy stats.
Dark: Poison attacks.
Holy: Cure and drain spells.

Of course, any system like this is bound to be loads better than the generic Fire -> Ice -> Lightning system.
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im realy ded

[LeRoy_Leo]

You're a good... Man, Iblis. Good man. We needed someone to make a thread like this.
Minnek and I worked on converting enemies into allies once. My version destroys a target enemy sprite and replaces it with another "enemy" (sprite facing the opposite direction) that has ally only attacks which hurt the other enemies. Yeah... Pretty lame. I had that in my former Epic entry for Pepsi Ranger... Of course THAT didn't get done by the dead line and then was erased in the great computer crash of 10/11/04. It would be something fun I could try again. Has a lot of bugs to work out of it yet.

Also, I agree that chain attacks would be the simplest way to spice battles up that too many people are indifferent to. BAM!
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Planning Project Blood Summons, an MMORPG which will incinerate all of the others with it's sheer brilliance...

---msw188 ---
"Seriously James, you keep rolling out the awesome like gingerbread men on a horror-movie assembly line. "

[Moogle1]

See "Mystic Sky" and "Moogle Quest" for some interesting battle commands.
See "Babel" for an interesting (albeit somewhat poorly executed) battle setup.

Frankly, most OHR games rush the player into the battle system because they assume (correctly) that the player is used to the poorly-designed battles and no explanation is necessary and/or because the game is too short. Think Final Fantasy 4 -- you have two commands per character until you get Rydia, and that's 20-30 minutes into the game.

I'm afraid I don't have too much else to contribute to this thread -- if I had any great RPG ideas, I'd be making a great RPG. (*wink wink*)
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Slime Salad :: Independent Game Design

[Mystic]

I've actually been working quite a bit on odd/unique battle systems. My Terrible Games addition is just going be an onslaught of short battles each with a weird gimmick (In a style not unlike Wario Ware)
One of the most forgotten attack settings is the delay one. One of my battles has spells that do exact damage amounts (20, 50, 100) but each take increasing amounts of ticks to actually happen, rather than MP.

[Moogle1]

Live a Live, anyone? (The game had no MP, but certain attacks took fer-frickin-ever to execute.)

I did at one point say I wanted to make a LaL-esque battle system. Maybe I will sometime.

[Iblis]

[Fernurion]

I have been pondering such changes to the battle system for a while. These are some of the things I've come up with:

-Dodge abilities: Using the jump\land chain, players are able to remove heroes from the feild for a short time. Useful for getting weaker characters out of danger.

-Element reliant characters: A character that uses little else from elemental attacks. This makes the player plan ahead regarding what to equip or plan the next few attacks.

-Alternate Mp: Spells that use stats other than Mp, such as defence, attack or even money.

-Style switching: allows heroes to vary their stats mid-fight. For example: a hero may swap attack points for an equal number of defence points.

-"Dire spells": Spells which do a huge amount of damage, but leave the caster severely weakened.

-Merged elements: Elements that come from a mix of two or more other elements (Water + lightning = storm + earth + fire + thunder = destruction). These could lead to a variety of new spell options.

-Critical Hits: Simply an exta bit of damage from an attack.

Most of these will show up in the remake of my first game (not released owing to how bad the gameplay was). Dire spells is what I use in the game, but you could call it anything you want. There are lots of effects such as these that you can use. Many battle options are overooked, Especially chaining.

Edit: Fixed spelling and grammar

[Mr B]

Gah! I found this thread earlier today, and just now spent half-an-hour locating it again.

This is one of my favorite OHR areas to think about. There is so much that can be done, if only we'd try.

Desparation Attack:
1.) Create an attack that sets a null stat (Ctr is my choice) equal to 100% of current HP. Chain to...
2.) an attack that reduces the null stat by % (say, 75%) of max HP. Chain to...
3.) an attack that uses the value in the null stat as the base number (multiplied to 3000% damage or somesuch) against a random enemy. Chain to...
4.) an attack that sets the null stat back to 0.

This is something I've been trying to figure out for a long time, but only just recently have I got something I believe works. I haven't actually tested it yet. Basically, it works by testing to see if the character's current HP is less than % (I used 75%) of the max HP. If so, a non-zero number is stored in the null stat, and used to generate much pain. The lower the HP is, the more damage.

Assassination Attack:
1.) Create an attack that does triple (or quintuple or sextuple or octuple or quatragintuple or somesuch) damage, and stores the target. Chain it to...
2.) an attack that uses the stored target as the default target, does not display damage, does not randomize damage, and restores HP instead of damaging it. Set it to inflict the same amount of damage as the previous attack gave the target.

Ah, a personal favorite. Basically, this attack inflicts a whole lot of damage, but then restores it if the enemy is not killed. This is meant to simulate an assassination attempt; it either succeeds, or it utterly fails. I have tested this, and I know that it works.

Stat Lending:
1.) Create an attack that targets "hero not self," adds damage instead of subtracting it, has damaged based 100% off of a stat, and targets that same stat. Chain to...
2.) an attack that has a looooong predelay, damages the stat on the previous target using the same settings as step 2 of Assassination Attack, and chains to...
3.) an attack that restores the user's appropriate stat by the same value as last damage inflicted by.

I haven't tested this yet, but it should allow a hero to "give" a stat to another hero, then get it back after a suitable period of time.

These are a few of the things I have thought up and am unlikely to actually use. I'll post more when I think of 'em.

[The Drizzle]

I actually really like that assassination move. Mind if I "borrow" it?
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My name is...
The shake-zula, the mic rulah, the old schoola, you wanna trip? I'll bring it to yah...

[Mr B]

Heh, go ahead! The likelyhood of it getting used increases exponentially when people other than myself know about it. *shakes head*

[msw188]

Hmm, I've actually already implemented the idea of different elemental spells damaging different stats. However, in the current demo (Hero's Journey, I'm talking about) most likely no one would gain enough levels to acquire these attacks.

Here's an idea I've just used. I have a morning star weapon that hits enemies so heavily that 50% of the time (a chain) it does a coupld points of damage to their stun register.

I've also been doing a fair amount with non-100% chians. For instance, my swordsman has the attack Slice'n'Dice; it attacks all enemies once, and then it chains to another all enemy attack at about 90%, but from there it continues to chain to itself at something like 35% (I don't remember the exact figures now). A note to people using these kinds of ideas: think carefully about how you want costs to work with your multiple chains. Do you want the player to not know how much an attack will cost him, because he doesn't know if it will chain or not?

I have an attack that only works on the outer world map. One of your characters pours throws magic seeds at the enemies, and (usually) this chains to a pack of eagles appearing overhead who begin to divebomb the enemy after the seeds.

That's a handful of them. I'll post more later, maybe.

[Ssalamanderr]

I've got some tricks.

You can do some interesting stuff with enemies, not just attacks. Example: my Corpselord boss battle.

The corpselord appears with several minions. The minions don't do a lot of damage, but they damage attack power. If killed, a minion spawns a "dead minion" enemy, with no speed and no attacks or anything. The corpselord, however, has an attack which targets "ally not self" with a special element assigned. This attack instantly kills the dead minion but the element causes it to spawn a new living minion. You can do lots of stuff with enemy spawns. In this case you have to balance between damaging the lord and keeping the minions dead so you don't lose attack power.

I like using equippable items for interesting effects. For example, items that give you spells when equipped. I had one system where there were different sets of spell granting items. When equipped each gave you several spells, and if you had a full set you got a more powerful bonus spell. So, you could be a jack-of-all trades or a master at one set of magic. I also thought it would be interesting if instead of equipping one of these items, you could also choose to consume it, giving you one of the spells permanently, no matter what other items you had equipped.

Chaining attacks can be fun as well. In Bloodstone I have a system where you can choose to use daggers, one handed swords, two handed swords, a dagger and a sword, or two swords. Each combination of weapons had different speeds and a different chance of triggering a "critical hit." Also, if you had two weapons there was a chance you would hit with your secondary as well as your primary. So, for example if you had the combination Mistblade/Puzzle (a sword and dagger) you would attack with the mistblade, then there was a chance you would also hit with your puzzle dagger, then there was a chance of doing extra critical damage. I also made most of the daggers have effects other than just normal damage, like poison, MP drain, or ability do magic damage to harm tough enemies.

In the same game, I tried to make the weapons as interesting as possible. I think my best was the mistblade, which did pure damage but only to organic type enemies. Basically, it ignored non-living matter such as armour or undead creatures. The multiple weapon system allowed you to use this without being screwed when you ran into undead becuase you had your other weapon to fall back on.

Don't forget the non functioning stats! I used the counter stat (renaming it alchemy) for all attacks used with items. This represented characters having more skill with smoke bombs or knowing how much healing powder to use etc.

The Combo: This is a random spell list with a sequence of attacks all chained together. As you gain more attacks the chain grows longer. So, If you use the combo you could end up getting your lowest level spell and only do one attack, however if you get your highest level spell you'll do a whole chain of attacks. I like to make all the attacks cost HP rather than MP so then you have to gamble a bit. If you get too low, you won't do enough damage to finish your enemy. If you get too high, you'll combo yourself to death.

My last example also uses equippable items. I called it "disciplines" and it represented fighting styles. Each discipline boosted one stat by quite a bit. The character would have multiple spell lists, each with attacks bases on one of those stats. So, with the Flicker discipline equipped, giving a dodge bonus, your Flicker spells are more powerful. However, equip the Inferno discipline would boost your attack, and Inferno spells are more powerful, but your Flicker spells are once again less useful.

Wow, that was longer than I thought it would be. I hope I explained everything well enough.
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Ukelele no good!

[Oman]

I fiddle with the battle system so much... my spells graphics are constantly changing, and I use chaining to the fullest effect. For big powerful spells that have set damage, i.e. a spell that does 2500 damage, it chains multiple times to deal the set damage. I also figured out a way to make a random status ailment spell. Here are the instructions:

1)Make a spell list with random effects. Label it something like Disease or another cool name.

2)Make a bunch of the same spell, called whatever the spell list is. Be sure to number them!

3) Make an equal number of status ailment spells, but make varying degrees of strength for a more interesting effect.

4)Make all the spells from step 2 chain 100% to step 3.

Voila. It is actually pretty cool when done right.
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