Let's Design #2: Status Effect Parity

[Mogri]

Have you ever noticed that regardless of how beat-up and rugged your own party may be, you never come across enemies with status ailments or anything less than perfect health? Most games treat the player and the enemies differently: it's rare for a game to make monsters fight each other. Everyone versus you.

The side effect of this is that status effects tend to be more useful for the enemy than for you. Disregarding the fact that enemies are immune to status effects as often as not, enemies only exist within the scope of a single encounter. Meanwhile, that poison spell the slime cast on you? It's still ticking away at your health, even though the battle ended already.

The most trivial way of "solving" player-enemy parity (and I put "solving" in quotes because it's not readily apparent that it's a problem per se) is to completely restore the heroes' health and status between battles. Every battle starts at square one. Games that do this include Final Fantasy 13, Legend of Mana, and most SRPGs.

But let's swing the pendulum the other way. What are some ways we can make status effects fairer for the player without removing their persistence? For starters, one example might be poison effects in a more action-oriented RPG, where you can afflict poison then kite the enemy while he slowly dies.

Side discussion: I mentioned that enemies always show up in perfect condition. Is there any value in challenging this norm?

[msw188]

I haven't thought about this too carefully yet, but for what its worth, I know that in Dragon Warrior 2 and I think 3 and 4, enemies showed up with variable HP amounts. As in, one slime might start with 8HP, while the same one next to him started with 7HP.

In addition, Final Fantasy games have monsters with status afflictions, but these are disguised as 'inherent properties' of the monster in question. Thus there are monsters that start out poisoned (although the poison is usually called something else), and others. Now that I think about it, this existed in Dragon Warrior games as well. There were enemies that could start out asleep, or confused. It was often for a comedic effect more than for an actual gameplay effect, but not always.

[Bob the Hamster]

It would be cool if running from a random enemy formation could preserve the state of that formation, so if you ran into them again later they would still have the damage that you had dealt to them in the previous round.

That would actually be reasonably scriptable in the OHR right now, although you could only preserve stats, not affliction registers.

[mjohnson092088]

if your game had a time system, some enemies could be sleeping at night when you encounter them. or, maybe some enemies that don't belong in certain places could be inflicted with status ailments. for example, say your hero was being chased through a poison swamp by enemy soldiers. your party had the forsight to equip poison resistant charms, while the enemy soldiers end up suffering from the toxins during your encounters.

[FnrrfYgmSchnish]

Mentioning enemies being affected by status effects/being worn down some already when you encounter them reminds me of Doom Gaze from FF6 and the "running" legendary Pokémon in the main-series Pokémon games, who don't get their HP restored when they run from you.

I'm not sure about Doom Gaze, but the Pokémon don't even get status effects cured, which leads to some kind of silly situations like Raikou running away... even though it's asleep, or frozen in a block of ice, or paralyzed, and probably shouldn't be able to run very fast (or at all.) Of course, you don't exactly need to run too fast to get away from a normal 10-year-old kid.

Those are more like boss battles than random enemies, though. The only "already-weakened random encounters" I can think of are those critters in FF6 that have something like 2 HP and automatically die from poison/seizure damage in one turn; their other stats (except defense) aren't horrendously weak compared to other weak random encounters, so they come across as more "regular critters that are sick and dying because of the destroyed world they're living in" rather than just really weak joke monsters.

I guess the easiest way to simulate enemies having already been in a few fights before running into you would just be to give them lower HP than an enemy in that part of the game would usually have. As long as the enemies can't heal themselves mid-battle, the fact that this lowered HP amount is technically their max HP wouldn't really matter too much.

It seems like having specific random-encounters keep their weakened status would be kind of pointless, though, unless (like you mentioned) it's in an action-RPG type system where the critters are still running around on the map even after you (or they) run away from the fight. Keeping track of a specific random encounter's HP (at least in a game that has actual just-from-walking-on-the-map random encounters) just seems like it would be more trouble than it's worth.

[Baconlabs]

I should go ahead and mention I've already planned something with this.
I have this zombie-fleshgolem-abomination enemy (probably won't be seen far from the mad scientist keeping him alive) that has a fairly severe "bleeding" poison effect on him. He's also got paper-thin defenses, huge power, and a mountain of HP that surpasses most bosses.
Because of how much health it loses each turn (and how much the player will lose each turn, this thing hits hard), the strategy becomes either a slugfest or an endurance match.

Apart from special circumstances like this, I see little reason to break the norm and throw out a dozen random injured / crippled enemies. If an enemy is going to be hit with a status affliction before battle, I say there'd better be a good reason, and it'd better be an interesting battle.

[Mogri]

I have this zombie-fleshgolem-abomination enemy (probably won't be seen far from the mad scientist keeping him alive) that has a fairly severe "bleeding" poison effect on him. He's also got paper-thin defenses, huge power, and a mountain of HP that surpasses most bosses.
Because of how much health it loses each turn (and how much the player will lose each turn, this thing hits hard), the strategy becomes either a slugfest or an endurance match.

That is actually a really great idea.

[shakeyair]

You could have an enemy that starts off with any sort of debuff (strength, defense, speed, whatever) and during the battle the effect wears off. This would make certain high-damage skills more worthwhile to use on that particular enemy in the field, leaving you wondering if you should kill it quick and dent your MP, or take the HP hit and have a more drawn out, difficult battle.

The idea of a very strong enemy that is slowly killing itself is interesting to me. Kind of like Motrya-easy version or whatever was submitted to the fight contest. But obviously more complex and without the joke ending.

I've been considering ideas for level up systems in which you have to work on characters somewhat separately (or level up their stats from a joined pool of points) and this would make it even more interesting. Have you been ignoring your healer? Time to get punished. Haha.

[Spoonweaver]

How about a monster that is under a condition like Muted. that can then be cured by another monster. This would then cause the monster to be able to attack with all sorts of powerful spells and such.
In the OHR you'd do this by giving the monster a spell or 2 that cost more mana than it has, and then giving another monster the ability to increase mana beyond it's max.

In the same line of thinking, you could have a monster that transformed into a better version of itself when it's mana was high enough, and then back again when it's hp reached a low score, or reached 0. The you could start the battle with these hurt creatures that get healed by a mage or something.

in both the cases above, you wouldn't have to always include the mage monster. So that the player would get a sense that the monsters were hurt or hindered in some way.

Though I guess at the same time, it would just seem like the mage had some really cool powers.

[NeoSpade]

I think a traditional gargoyle style enemy would be interesting (and do-able), starting in the stone state then having say another enemy curing it or a hero casting magic on it (not necessarily the cure spell but maybe a spell of the opposing element e.g. Water).

Similar to what I'm doing with my current game, using MP as a Rage/Tension% makes for some interesting use of MP Poison and MP Regen, having a boss start with 100MP that starts with MP Poison, then using instead and else chains with <<or>> MP% chains means the boss changes tactics based off how much it has, with 100% giving it strong attack and high super move chance, and 0% giving it good magic but terrible attack with chance to Regen.

Wait, was this about starting battle with effects, or are suggested use of new (possibly non-stable) features with status effects also welcome?

[Spoonweaver]

It seems to be about monsters starting off at less than perfect health/status.

Something occurred to me when I first read the post. Who's to know whether a monster has perfect health? Monster health bars aren't really seen in the OHR so maybe some of those monsters aren't in perfect health. It's really all in how you present them. You could have a "Hurt Bugbear" appear early in the game, and then later in the game a normal "Bugbear". This would definitely show the played that some of the monsters are hurt some of the time with no real tricks involved.

[Mogri]

How about a monster that is under a condition like Muted. that can then be cured by another monster. (snip)

Chrono Trigger did a bit of this - there were monsters like Alkaline and Acid that did cool things when they were in battle together, but also appeared separately. This is a really great idea if you can communicate it to the player properly.

Something occurred to me when I first read the post. Who's to know whether a monster has perfect health? Monster health bars aren't really seen in the OHR so maybe some of those monsters aren't in perfect health.

That's another issue altogether. What if we're talking outside the confines of the OHR?

Wait, was this about starting battle with effects, or are suggested use of new (possibly non-stable) features with status effects also welcome?

Whatever you like.


Along a similar vein, it's become popular in recent games to have a little interfighting that doesn't initially involve the player. FF13 has a few encounters where the enemies are initially fighting each other and FF12 will occasionally throw in non-hostile NPCs who wander around and attack enemies. Other games feature this as a one-off, like when Cyan is an uncontrollable ally in FF6 or Vivi is caught by the plant monster in FF9. This is seldom explored in any depth, but it seems like you could do interesting things with it.

[mjohnson092088]

Along a similar vein, it's become popular in recent games to have a little interfighting that doesn't initially involve the player. FF13 has a few encounters where the enemies are initially fighting each other and FF12 will occasionally throw in non-hostile NPCs who wander around and attack enemies. Other games feature this as a one-off, like when Cyan is an uncontrollable ally in FF6 or Vivi is caught by the plant monster in FF9. This is seldom explored in any depth, but it seems like you could do interesting things with it.

fenrir-lunaris did this in a few games, like timestream saga and vikings of midgard. helping an ally in vikings sometimes gives you a new skill.

james paige also did this in wandering hamster, where bob gets eaten by the jormungandling.

and obviously, baconlab's viridia takes full advantage of this, as the allies are one of the few ways you actually win a battle.

but, these are all characters. it'd be cool to make environmental targets. say, for example, you're fighting a powerful monster in a cave. your magic and weapons don't work. but what's this? you can target a stalagcite? wonder what that'll do... it'd be pretty easy to create stuff like that.

[shakeyair]

But, these are all characters. it'd be cool to make environmental targets. say, for example, you're fighting a powerful monster in a cave. your magic and weapons don't work. but what's this? you can target a stalagcite? wonder what that'll do... it'd be pretty easy to create stuff like that.

The issue with this is how obvious the targeting is. It works as a one-off trick (the beginning of Super Mario RPG) but as far as adapting it into a real gameplay mechanic, I'm not sure.

Ideas:
Maybe a little more interesting would be if you have to use a certain attack. This would have to be effectively yet subtly told to a player. Using the stalactite example, perhaps you could have one character who has some sort of rock-breaker technique (with a better name) which maybe gets introduced somewhere with rock monsters. (or taking an earlier example, on a gargoyle to kill it before it wakes up) then a targetable stalactite appears, but no attack other than this rock-breaker one will make it drop on an enemy.

Beyond that, for formations, perhaps you could have an area with multiple things to target. And these would buff and debuff certain enemies.

Say, using the cave, you have:

-an unlit torch
-stalactite

and you are facing (these are not terribly well thought out in regards to setting):

-cave dweller
-archer

-lighting the torch with fire increases your accuracy, and causes the cave dweller's eyes to be overloaded so its accuracy is greatly diminished. however, the archer now shoots arrows through the flame which do more far damage.

-dropping the stalactite does good damage to the archer, but the cave dweller picks it up and wields it as a club, making its attacks much stronger

And then you can get into situations where enemies can target the environment as well and eventually things could become very strategic.