THE RISE OF THE COMPLETE HEAL AFTER EVERY BATTLE GAME

I rather like them. The idea, I feel, is that the challenge is in the battle, not the extraneous parts outside of the battle. That is, the challenge is to stay alive through that one battle. It should, ultimately, be coupled with strategic challenge.

Unfortunately some who do use this tend to take this to mean 'make battles longer duuuurrr' which is just... ugh. Obnoxious. Especially when the battles are boring and strategy is basically 'beat monster with skills over and over again oh he ded'.

To get the most out of this type of system you really need to have an engaging battle system, one of a kind monsters, and challenge. Otherwise it's all for naught and just makes the battles boring for going on too long.

I've only seen one game do justice to this system and that was in the IGMC. Battles were fun - you wanted to stay in and steal from the enemies. The speed of the battle was dictated by you, not insane health or defence (for the most part) and enemies were rare and varied enough that you didn't facepalm apon seeing them. Indeed, you kinda wanted to run into some again for their goodies. It's a very good system if you can easily dodge enemies, too.

(I can't remember the name of the game - there were so many! - but it was one based around a pilgrimage and had custom faces which were quite nice.)

Hell, I don't even mind if you make the battles just secondary to the plot and exploration. This is also a great idea for a non-item game or a game that deals in battles being secondary.

I dislike the style .. since frankly, the single battles rarely make up for the loss of item and mana management.
Never had battles that were much better than the ones without the auto-heal, either. By harder they usually mean "longer" which is .. very annoying.

Usually, for really tough fights - aka boss battles - you already are able to save beforehand. So a game over does not eat up your time.
Where you can customize a lot before battle, it gives you a chance to rethink your strategy.
I always feel like not getting any downside from losing is taking away from the fun. In the end, if you can repeat it continously, you can often make up for last missing bits with luck. You can also often just come back later.
There are always enemy groups that are harder for your party to deal with than others - and are no threat anymore if you are fine if you just "skip" battles with these.

It pushes you to do the very best of your abilities. One of my favorite games is definitely Devil Survivor - a SRPG RPG hybrid concerning the battle system. You will lose a lot, but you can always make it work if you put your mind to it.
The thing is, tactical RPGs heal you after the whole fight, but there are many fights in one battle. But even then, not getting a game over, not getting "punished" for screwing up .. if I am just taken back to the screen, it feels empty.
If I feel no consequences whatsoever, I feel less inclined to try harder at all. Why should I bother? It doesn't matter anyway.

I also find it odd that grinding is supposed to be a mechanic. Grinding is a different way of going about strengthening your party - it should not be mandatory. The dungeon length should suffice to get you to a point where you can make it work.
Thinking that skipping resource management means that you spend less time wasted on grinding is no point at all. If you need to redo passages of the dungeon, then you will scale up the enemies accordingly. If you just go through there once, you will make them easier to fit the level you are most likely to have.

Unless you want to take out levels and such as a whole. In which case .. please don't make dungeons at all.

The idea of making battles more like puzzles is not bad, although puzzles aren't my favorite thing. However, putting those battles into the pacing of your standard RPG is not fitting the model it is supposed to work for.
If you want to go for non-linear battles, sure, go ahead. But finding non-linear battles .. that challenge you and make you able to adapt .. is such a big hurdle it's so rarely done.
I'll be honest and say I don't expect all games that take this approach to live up to such expectations.

I've never played an RPG with a system like that, but some potential problems I could see with it:

-The start of every battle feels the same. Since I can always use all of my skills at the start of the battle, there is going to be one superior combination of actions that I would always want to use at the start of every battle.
-The end of every battle feels the same. Spam your strongest skills to finish off the enemies. The loss in mana won't matter because you get fully restored after each battle anyway.

author=Milennin
I've never played an RPG with a system like that, but some potential problems I could see with it:

-The start of every battle feels the same. Since I can always use all of my skills at the start of the battle, there is going to be one superior combination of actions that I would always want to use at the start of every battle.
-The end of every battle feels the same. Spam your strongest skills to finish off the enemies. The loss in mana won't matter because you get fully restored after each battle anyway.

You seem to assume that all games that use it don't think of these things before-hand~

Try both Cope Island and Pale Echoes (both are on-site) and you'll see how it can be used effectively.

Just a general idea - in Cope Island enemies hit hard and fast and you have to be on the ball to survive battles. They're not hard but they are a challenge and even if you whip out your best skill it's not a guaranteed win card. Skills are made with care so that each of them are useful so there's really no 'this is the best skill to use all the time'. Instead it's a case of 'this skill works well against this but this skill is faster and will do this to enable me to use this other skill so that the first skill is able to hit properly' and so forth.

As for Pale Echoes, each battle is a puzzle - there is some flexibility but there's no 'this one skill trumps all'. You have to think about what skills you're going to use and when to use them in order to win. Battles can be fast or slow, depending on your choices and how well you think on your feet or plan ahead.

See, the idea is to plan battles so that the loss of mana is required. Make it part of the plan, not an afterthought. Each battle is different, requiring different skills and different combinations... well, play those games (Cope Island is relatively short, about an hour long. Pale Echoes is about 2 hours, maybe 3. Depends on how you play.) and you'll understand what I mean. Mana isn't a resource you have to worry about because its use is expected, necessary even. You have to use it because if you don't you die. Boom. Use dat shit.

The resource management is contained to battles instead of bothering to deal with them outside of battles.

It's not like you don't always use your strongest skills every single round in FF7. The only difference is you have a stock of sixty ethers and thirty tents to use between battles.

Part of the goal when making a game like this is to make the skills play off of each-other in interesting ways. Since the battles are longer, the player's skills can build off of each-other in combos. For example, maybe on one turn you use a skill that lowers the enemy's defense for two rounds, and then the next turn you use a skill that deals damage and stuns them, and then the next turn you use a skill that deals doule damage to stunned enemies but costs 100% of your MP, and then the turn after that you use a skill that absorbs the enemy's MP... But to keep this interesting different strategies need to work better on different enemies, and the enemies need to be doing things to try to interrupt your combos. If they use a debuff that makes you take quadruple damage for one round then you'd better defend or healing instead of spending that turn using the attack that costs all your MP like you were planning. If they summon a new enemy then you might need to change targets even though it breaks your combo. If they make themselves resistant to fire with a defensive buff, then one of those skills isn't going to work as well. Figuring out how to adapt your strategy for each encounter becomes the main form of gameplay.

This kind of gameplay is super fun to me, but obviously really difficult to do in battles that only last two rounds. But you can't have battles last eight rounds and then also have 20-30 random battles per dungeon with a lot of repeat battles, holy shit, that's terrible. The battles are basically all minibosses, so they should only be fought once each.

You can actually totally do this kind of game without healing after every battle though. In Born Under the Rain, which you mentioned in the OP, you can only carry a certain number of potions and you have to conserve your items across the whole dungeon, which is really no different from conserving MP. HP and MP are refilled after each battle automatically, but be serious, you would refill your HP and MP after every single battle with items if that weren't the case, because the next battle is always another miniboss. The only difference here is that step is done automatically for you, and the maximum number of items you can carry is reduced to compensate. It doesn't really change the feel of the battles in this case, it just saves you sixty seconds of micromanagement.

I really won't attempt to defend the battles in Born Under the Rain because basically I spent the entire development cycle working on making the player skills good, and ended up with a bunch of generic enemies. The player skills required longer battles to function, so that's what they got. I was prepared to make maybe a dozen unique battles that would test the player's use of these skills, but then was given over a hundred maps to fill with enemies. As a result many enemies feel like filler, because that's exactly what they are. You're right that it's definitely not the way to do this kind of system. This is what happens when you make a game in three weeks. (At least some people seem to like it - I don't think five long generic battles instead of fifteen short generic battles is inherently bad, it's just not to most people's taste.)

The way to go, like several people have said, is to make every enemy feel like a truly unique fight, where you have to come up with a customized strategy. I think on hard mode the differences in enemy behavior become meaingful enough to accomplish this, but 90% of players can't actually beat the game on hard mode, and normal mode just fails at what I wanted to do. Easy mode ended up okay... maybe?

Milennin
I've never played an RPG with a system like that, but some potential problems I could see with it:

-The start of every battle feels the same. Since I can always use all of my skills at the start of the battle, there is going to be one superior combination of actions that I would always want to use at the start of every battle.
-The end of every battle feels the same. Spam your strongest skills to finish off the enemies. The loss in mana won't matter because you get fully restored after each battle anyway.

you're assuming that a game like this would use traditional mana, and that enemies are boring as fuck. i'm honestly a little sad that you would think this. have some faith in your fellow developers, and/or use your imagination!

anyway i've done this style a few times, although only wine & roses has been mentioned. i also used it in teenage costume squad, which probably isn't as good but shows off how the style can work with a large party.

the most important thing to keep in mind when making a game with healing post-encounters is that you should give the player something new every single encounter. only of my biggest complaints about ff13 (and i know i'm not alone) is that you would pass the trial of TWO WOLVES AND A ROBOT, showing that you could beat that encounter. then you would fight that exact same encounter three more times. when attrition is not an issue, this is a slap in the face to player because they've already proven their abilities. there's also a certain joy as a dev in having one fight be a moderately challenging encounter against BIG GUY, and then the next encounter is against TWO BIG GUYS. you can almost smell the player's urine.

edit: also my game jam entry worked this way but i have no idea what my other two teammates did for three weeks so there are no battles or anything, just my maps/scenes. so. i would have had a third example =|

It makes sense in almost any game with an emphasis on difficult encounters, whether that's Final Fantasy Tactics, the campaign mode in a Halo game, or the story mode of Starcraft.

By adding resources that carry over between battles, the player always feels the need to conserve their strength. As a result most of the battles will feel like they are not that big a deal. They might still be very difficult, but the difficulty feels self-imposed and the players know they totally have the power to beat every fight easily. They just don't want to beat them easily, because there might be something harder later.

Contrast this to a game where you are refilled after every battle. Whether or not it's actually any more difficult, the battles will feel more difficult because the player is experiencing that difficulty despite going balls-to-the-wall.

I went with this type of recovery in Iniquity & Vindication because it's a game where you surf on the back of a shark while having a sword fight against a shark surfing on the back of a crocodile while escaping a tidal wave. Making the player hold back to conserve resources was not appropriate for the game. (i went with it in born under the rain cuz, uh, oh hey look at that distraction)

author=Crystalgate
What if you could use the RNG make it so that what actions the two wolves and a robot takes alters what actions the player needs to take to defeat them? A second encounter with the same troop is not the same unless the RNG happens to make it the same then.

The tricky part about this is that the player will assume the "two wolves & a robot" encounter is always the same, even if it isn't. People who have played even a small bit of RPGs knows there's randomness scattered in everywhere: critical hits, misses, attack patterns. For the fights to require different strategy, the RNG would have to have a much larger effect on the battle - but then you're misleading your player by presenting them with what looks like the same exact thing, when you could have just made another encounter.

It's not entirely unworkable, but re-using battles in a system like this doesn't seem worth the risk. Since you've designed each individual battle around strategy & tactics, even the easier ones will be more stressful and time-consuming to the player than your typical RPG encounter. In addition, they will require more balancing on your part than normal. Because of that, I think it makes more sense to have less battles overall, but make each one a unique and interesting challenge.