[Mandrake]

ok, let's skip wether or not it should be active time/turn based or real time. We'll take out real time, since that would be entirely diffrent (in aspect of how things should work) than active time or turn based.

What I was wondering about here is, what do you think of diffrent rpg combat systems? Of course people seem to clamour for more complicated systems and added complexity....but FF8's combat system (to me) was the only part of it that bored me to tears....how simple/complex should we make a skill/level up system? How should magic be handeled? Should it relate to the world system? Do you perfer levelling up to skill based combat? How about buying/selling weapons and armor? Do you find it pointless or worthy of extreme attention to detail? How much should tactics play a part? Should enemies be visible on the map or not?

How would your ideal combat system work?

BTW, this is basically a query that I'm doing for studying how I thikn the changeling's combat should work. So feel free to post away and try to sway me into your thinking.
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"Well, last time I flicked on a lighter, I'm pretty sure I didn't create a black hole."-
Xmark

http://pauljessup.com

[BigManJones]

My Favorite Combat System of All Time.
By: BigManJones

My very favorite combat system in an rpg game has got to be the combat system used in the Avernum games by Jeff Vogel. I liked it because by skillfully manuevering your party and casting spells you could really kick the crap out of a much larger, powerful party. The funnest battle of all was fighting the dragon (don't remember the dragons name) in the Giants lair in Avernum I. Its like chess with rpg characters almost.

[Happy]

I think you should make it a real time system, Mandrake.

Heh.

I think the "active time" system that you're referring to is a turn based system trying to be real time. It's pretty close, actually (in a pseudo kind of way), save for the moving part that's usually associated with real time systems.

Why not make a real time system that tries to be turn based? That is, let your character move around a bit but still have the charging that "active time" systems usually have. More charging for more powerful attacks.

I'm going to be putting a system kind of like this into Perfect Weapon, and well, anything that uses the RNM engine (currently under reconstruction). You can change the attacks/effects (such as item use) for certain buttons, and I might even throw in a combo system. But I digress.

Complexity is not a problem if it's still intuitive (that is, user friendly).

[white_door]

I think the key problem is the difficultly level. Most rpgs of this style are normally quite good about difficult levels.. you don't have to pick an easy, normal, or hard setting.. instead it works like so:

1. easy - go out of your way to fight extra enemies - walk in circles for random encounters - spend time leveling up before you go to the next boss

2. normal - just go through the game and fight what comes to you... don't take any shortcuts.. make sure you get all the items and chests allong the way - make careful use of your resources and you will gain some levels along the way and some after killing the boss

3. hard - run from everything you can! run through the dungeon and skip teasures unless they are really cool - you will gain most of your levels at the boss.. you only have to level up when its gets too hard... and you should do it against hard enemies to go up fast.. then get on with it!

This can be really cool.. as the difficultly level adjusts to your style of play.

In some PC rpgs you can to pick a difficulty level in the options or at the start of a new game. Which can also work.. but not as well in my opinion.

I found in ff8, that no matter what I did.. the difficultly level was just too easy.. I think the first time I died was on the spaceship on disc 3. To me with out the risk of dieing I just can't get excited about a battle. Furthermore the battles still seemed to take a really long time.. So it was like.. "Lets just cover up out bad level design by making the battles really long so that the people will stab his/her eyes out and won't see anything."

[LeoDraco]

Er, it really doesn't matter, as long as the developer makes the system fit well into the game. Take, for instance, FFX: technically speaking, there are no levels (in the traditional sense) in the game, and yet you can improve your character by traversing the sphere grid. While traversing is a (potentially) tedious process, it can be rather fun; especially when you start customizing the grid to uberize your party.

However, I think one of the better systems that I have enjoyed, has to be that of FFT: there were many jobs, each of which had 8 levels that could be plowed through, each of which had a variety of skills, and there was a strategic aspect to building your characters, and setting them up for battle. Characters had levels (seperate from the job levels), that just affected base stats. Armor afftected HP/MP and attack/defense stats. While buying armor wasn't a complicated process, there was a lot of it, and specific jobs could only equip certain types of it; so you would spend time treking to the local trade center to aquire the latest and greatest.

I prefer systems where characters can use each other's weaponry/armor; while I am a fan of the final fantasy series, the fact that characters could not use the same items (in the last four), is a bit off-putting. One of the better parts of Tactics was that you could have several different characters all use the same armor.

Combat in Tactics was also fun; while the battles are typically longer than in your normal RPG, they were pseudo-strategic. It mattered from what angle you attacked your opponent. It mattered (for some job classes) where you attacked from. (For instance, the Geomancer class has an attack which will do a different geomancy, dependent upon what ground the Geomancer unit is standing upon.)

Magic was one of the more interesting aspects of Tactics: there were (somewhere) around 7 or 8 different mage classes, each with their own skills you could obtain. Magic took time to cast, which was part of the pseudo-strategy. But the best part was the cheese job: Calculators could immediately cast whatever magic they had learned in previous jobs (with a few exceptions), on single squares/units.

The point is, that Tactics was flexible enough so that no two people playing the game would have the exact same line-up; you played with the jobs that you thought were cool/good/etc.
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"...LeoDraco is a pompus git..." -- Mandrake

[Rainer Deyke]

The main problem in RPG battles is that they get tedious. Battles get tedious when you're no longer making decisions but just pushing buttons. Some ideas for avoiding tedium:

• Keep the frequency of battles down.
  
• Challenge the player with a steady stream of new monsters that require new tactics to beat,
  
• Give the player a steady stream of new abilities that allow new tactics.
  
• Let combat take place on a 2D map instead of just forming lines as in Final Fantasy. This can add a lot of variety to combat, since terrain and formation can now influence tactics. Five goblins hiding behind bushes require different tactics than five goblins attacking from different sides.
  
• Make the interface quick and easy to use. Ideally combat actions shouldn't require more than a single keystroke.
  
• Don't let animations slow down the combat. This is especially a problem in large scale turn based battles.
  

More specific answers to your questions:

• I prefer skill-based systems over level-based systems, as they give me more strategic options.
  
• Moderate complexity is good. If it's too complex, it just becomes tedious again.
  
• Magic is a complicated subject worthy of a new thread. I think this is mostly a world-building question. What kind of magic exists in your world? How common is it? Who uses it? I have several ideas for cool magic systems, all completely different, all fun.
  
• Buying equipment can become tedious if I have to do it all the time, especially if it involves a lot of min-maxing. On the other hand, it can be fun in moderation. Being able to afford a new weapon should be an accomplishment, not something that happens every time I enter a new town.
  
• Enemies should be visible on the map.

[LeoDraco]

[Rainer Deyke]

[LeoDraco]

[dak246]

Best combat system ever in my opinion:

Ragnarok online

Its simple, isnt turn based ( which is my opinion gets repetitive and boring, especially when trying to level up ), and the best part of it is that you arent forced to engage in combat, i.e. monsters dont attack you; they just frolic around the forest, desert etc. going about their business, and if you choose to fight them then they will fight back, but if not you can travel in peace. This is great for a game where locations arent tied into the scripting and you may constantly travel back and forth between various cities, or regular games where you might end up back tracking later on. Personally i always prefer non-turn based games, but if you plan on having a party made up of multiple characters then i think its the best choice ( only choice really ).

[Rainer Deyke]

[Jihgfed Pumpkinhead]

Okay, my turn. I've been pretty good about keeping my posts short recently, but I make up for it here, so you've been warned.

Simplicity vs. Complexity in Battle:

Obviously they have to be balanced. Actually, I think the balance found in most popular RPGs is pretty good right now, and pretty much what I'd recommend. Season to taste. It's true (from what I hear) that Final Fantasy 8's combat sucked, but (again, from what I hear) that's not really because of being too complex, but of being, well, just silly, and the sort of system you have to spend hours using before you can reap the benefits (or, so I hear, at least).

A lot depends on how your party system works. If you've only got one character, you pretty much have to make it either (a) real-time, which you hate (with reason), or (b) insanely complex and nuanced.

If it uses a relatively large party (4+), you can probably get by with a simpler system (fight, defend, magic, "special move", run) and count on a variety of situations to produce the complexity for you, without sacrificing intuitiveness or predictability. That's what I'd recommend.

That said, it would be extremely cool to play a really tactical RPG. I love the strategy/RPG hybrids, like Final Fantasy Tactics, Ogre Battle, and Bahamut Lagoon.

So you're feeling bold, though, I'd recommend (as Rainer always does) using "tactical" combat, with characters moving all over the place. It might be nice to do that and take it away from the grid, even.

The problem with this though is that battles take a long time, which is annoying when the battle's trivial; so, some sort of auto-calculate or auto-move is necessary.

Levelling Up:

Flat levelling sucks; let the player decide how his characters improve. Most of the ways of achieving that are equal, so far as I'm concerned. It can be absurdly simple and still be fun.

Magic:

Since your game's called Changeling and presumably has magic intimately involved in the story, I think the magic in the battles should be part of the world. In most games, though, it doesn't really matter.

Magic seems to be fairly well handled in most RPGs, I think, so I don't have too many recommendations on improving it. Avoid useless status spells that only affect enemies whom you could kill with one hit anyway, though.

Equipment:

Equipment's great. I like just about everything that unites the battle system with the world map and the course of the game as a whole. Equipment's useful because it makes you think about the battle when in town, and think about the town when in battle.

Do make sure that equipment is not specific to a single character except in very special cases, do stagger the intervals at which pieces of equipment increases, and do not make it so that every character can afford to upgrade at every opportunity. Also, consider making it hard to come by money in battle, and instead have people give rewards for tasks done.

More flavour text with equipment is something that would be nice; however, it's a fair amount of work, particularly if you want to get it right. I don't mean that every sword should have a paragraph of text, just a simple "A bastard sword is a great, two handed blade which blah blah blah".

Random Encounters vs. Visible Enemies:

As to random encounters vs. visible enemies, the only real intrinsic advantage I see to using visible enemies has is what I mentioned above, the way it ties combat into the world map so neatly, as well as making sneak attacks and fleeing and such much more exciting, as opposed to just saying "you were sneak attacked".

But, if you're going to use random encounters, I'd really recommend that you vary the likelihood of an encounter happening depending on the terrain. Roads and such should be relatively safe and free of battles, so that you can quickly move from place to place without getting swarmed. This should solve Rainer's main problem with them, I think (an objection which is perfectly valid if you don't do something like what I suggested).

Some Other Stuff (it's almost over):

Status ailments (and bonuses!) which carry over from battle to battle are just great, and they're really great if they have some effect on the world map. The only problem is that they can be viciously powerful if you don't have the appropriate item. Maybe give the healer a beginning spell which drains all his magic, but heals anything?

Perhaps the ability to recruit enemies?

That's it.

[ThousandKnives]

Visible Encounters:
I like the way these work sometimes, other times not so much. I don't really see the issue with leaving a map screen to regenerate enemies, I have yet to see an RPG where the map loading times were comperable to the length of a single battle. My main beef with them is that they often punish you for going up stairs/through doors. When you've got a maze dungeon and you end up having to re-fight 10 battles just because you went through a door to get a treasure and came back, thats just ridiculous. I like in RS1 where the direction of contact with the visible encounters re-arranges your party formation (attacked from the left and your left-side party members are in the front row, etc). I like how the enemies in Mother 2 often moved in strange patterns instead of straight at you, and whether or not you were facing them determined surprise.

Status effects that carry over:
This is a case-by-case thing. Sometimes it's really cool to have those lasting effects. But in RS2 for example, all of your HP and stats effects were recovered after every battle. You started every battle totally fresh and the game STILL had probably the hardest battles ever. In Mother 2, your characters could get so messed up in battle that your map controls would keep changing around. That was pretty fun.

Tactical systems:
Fire Emblem: Geneaology of Holy Wars is one of my favorite RPGs of all time. The game consists of 12 huge battle maps, during the course of which many many things happen, and when your characters die they dont come back. And you also have to pair your men and women up to get optimal descendants for the second half of the game. Every action has to be carefully calculated though, which while kinda cool can also feel VERY constricting. It's nice to have a little slack here and there to play with. FE4 did not encourage experimentation, it encouraged unending perfection. Its nice in some games, but I'm glad not EVERY RPG demands so much.

Control over Growth:
Sometimes this is nice, sometimes not so much. Given too much control over development I (and many others I suspect) have a tendancy to mold all of my guys into a particular mold that exploits some unbalance in the game's battle system. It's not really fun having all your guys be basically the same though. I like being given characters who are tough to work with, and figuring out ways to solve battle problems with them despite the fact that they suck. Also, you must then protect your weaker elements, which adds to the challenge.

How games are hard:
Heh, running from every battle (as someone suggested) does not make the game hard, usually it makes it impossible and doing so is not fun at all. Fighting every battle drains your resources faster in long dungeons, thats not what I call easy. Ways I make games harder or more interesting is by setting little goals here and there, like beating an optional dungeon at the earliest point you can get there. Or beating a boss without exploiting its weak point, or trying to save up for an expensive item or level up beyond reason early in a game. Sticking with a goal despite it taking forever to achieve is not easy. In fact, its hard. It's hard in a different way from figuring out how to beat something with less than is expected, but it is hard nonetheless. Both are fun things to try.

A variety of battle musics:
Its amazing how, given how great RPG musics have pretty much always been, only a few select RPGs have bothered to offer more than one random battle music. I spend how much time in battles over the course of the game? And your composer spent all that time making 80 story musics I'll hear once and I'm stuck with the same 1:30 battle loop every few minutes. Mother 2 had about 10 battle musics, determined by the type of enemies you were fighting. It was amazingly refreshing. Breath of Fire 1 had different battle musics for the beginning and middle/end of the game. Mystic Arc had 4-5 different battle musics depending on the dungeon you were in. Its a simple things, but its SO refreshing.

Lots of enemies:
Lennus 1&2 assault you with TONS of enemies in every battle. This makes things so much more interesting. I strongly vote for the presence of fewer, larger encounters. Smaller encounters and smaller party sizes tend to be less entertaining. I was already disappointed when FF5&6 dropped to 4 member parties, I was disgusted with the drop to 3 in FF7. Obviously, if you give more allies and dont make the enemies harder, the game becomes easier, but if you give the player more allies and then EXPECT the player to overcome more as a result of having more resources, its a great thing.

Encounters for the sake of encounters:
Sometimes, you just feel like "why am i being encountered here?" It's just not a fun feeling. Skies of Arcadia is a classic example. Why is the overworld filled with useless simple encounters? It pretty much ruins the fun of flying around, especially given the stupid loading times and enemy/ally intros (another thing that must be thrown away). If someplace doesnt have a reason to give encounters, it shouldnt have them. Period.

Well, thats all I can think of now. Glad to have thrown my own little essay on the burner.

[i_is_mandrake]

heh, Happy, real time is not fun for me. If I want to play an action game I'll pop in Gauntlet Legends or Contra. I hate it when my action is mixed with stories. If I want stratigic battle, I'll play an RPG.

Also- the active time I'm talking about is not what I will use. I mention it because the basics of magic and etc are the similiar to turn based, and so can be discussed.

Originally I was going to use an Arc-theLad style strategy chess engine with the Changeling, but have recently decided against it after playing Lunar for three days straight. If I could get it to work like it did in Ultima 4, then yeah I think I would do it- but how many people this day in age want to press 'a' for attack? And after playing Breath of Fire 5 and XenoSaga, I also combining the classical PC one-button to do something combat with a console style game can be confusing, frustrating and annoying.

Now onto visible enounters: the only advantage I would see to this is making a seamless world. But since I'm not using the seamless world idea anymore, I think visible cneounters might not be as beneficial. Esp since they they have been implemented most of the time. For example, in Chrono Trigger, Lunar and BOF5, visible enounters just make it so that EVERY encounter is one you have to engage in. Which is annoying, and makes me want to smack the game developer. Now in older Ultimas the combat seemed to work quite well with visible encounters- but I'm not sure if I can balance it as well as those games had. Also- the ones in Lufia 2 worked out quite well....but I'm not sure if I'm a fan of this style.

[Rainer Deyke]