Description

The submission period for the contest is now over, but the discussion has just begun!

Forum thread here.

The results are in:

Gold - Azalathemad
Silver - Aegix_Drakan
Bronze - NeverSilent

Congratulations to them and to everyone who took part in the contest!





This is a Community episode a contest and an experiment in game design prompted by Sviel's suggestion among the many thought-provoking comments to that article. If you don't take part in the contest for fun, fame and prizes, do it for SCIENCE.

The individual goal of the contest is to design a RPG battle system and showcase it in one or a few battles, while avoiding the usual clutter of mechanisms that is a staple of the genre, with the help of some guidelines given below.

The collective goal is to search together for the essential principles of the RPG battle - the skeleton of decisions that gives them their flavor and depth.

This is more challenging than a normal contest because it rewards creative and analytical thinking rather than just good craftsmanship. On the other hand, I believe the results could greatly improve the future games produced by the community - both in terms of unexplored strategic potential, and of streamlining battle design to make game-wide balancing (which is one of the worst problems in RPGs) considerably easier.



The three elements listed below are the fundamental aspects of RPG battling. (Explanatory figures and details hidden in spoiler tags.)

They are often obscured by overly complex systems and tons of genre conventions. The purpose of this contest to see what happens when you lay them bare. I am convinced that tons of strategic possibilities have been overlooked so far, simply because they were hard to perceive under the layers of fluff.


1) All RPG systems have a common ground: damage per turn, with the goal of killing before you are killed.

Of course, in this mock-up battle with only Attacks, 1) the hero dies first, and 2) the player is bored to tears. So we must add skills and stuff. (Randomness creates variation that you have no control over, so I won't mention it here).


2) All skills/spells/buffs/items are ways of dealing or receiving that damage faster or slower, more continuously or in bursts. They control the way that damage is concentrated or diluted over time, like pushing and pulling on a rubber band. (The basic, fully stretched state is "spamming attack" as above: not exciting but it gets you there eventually).



Problems:
- the picture above suggests that countless possibilities have never been used (there are many other ways to position and combine these arrows). The most frequent improvement is agility buffs or gaining/losing turns, i.e. ways to do more complicated actions by employing multiple skills at once. But there are lots of other ways to expand on it (see Tips & Inspirations below for ideas).

- usually, healing simply erases some of the enemy's actions in an irrecoverable way. You attack n times, I heal, you attack again, I heal => no net effect, boring. Hence the huge asymmetry in RPG battles: heroes can always heal, most enemies cannot, because there's nothing more infuriating than seeing the enemy heal and erase all your efforts.
It would be more interesting to rethink healing so that the effect of an action was never canceled, but for instance delayed, or spread over X turns, or converted into something else - still there in some form, ready to be reused by future skills.



3) MP, Limit Breaks, status conditions, multiple characters and classes are ways of allowing the player variable access to the skills over time. That's because strategy is not about the winning move, it's about progressively setting up the conditions which allow that move.



Problem: in RPGs you generally have extremely basic (un)locking conditions within the battle:
- "if I have a lot of MP, I can use all my powerful spells"
- "if this character dies/sleeps/is berserk, I lose access to their skills"
- (occasionally) "if I use a weak skill I will be able to use a stronger one next"

I think this is the aspect of RPGs that leaves the largest room for improvement by far. For a battle to have more strategy, every action you take should allow new moves and block other ones, potentially for the rest of the fight. What you can do at any given moment should be the logical product of your past actions and your enemy's, if possible in more evolved ways that a binary question like "out of mana?" or "silenced?".




This all boils down to a simple idea: if you want to encapsulate the feeling of combat, what you need is
- balance of power, represented by any gauge or number (and its evolution in time),
- seizing opportunities, represented by the diversity of available options and how you get or lose access to them.
Everything else is decorative, and there is much more freedom in how you could translate this into a system than what has ever been explored in any game so far.




- Rules with "must" are requirements.

- Rules with "should" can be transgressed at your own risk, if you think your interpretation is more clever than the original rule (feel free to contact me to talk about it).


1) Game:

- The game can be made using any software, but it must contain everything it requires to run on its own.

- You can reuse the Default Battle System in clever ways, use scripts, or make a custom system of any degree of sophistication. You won't be judged on the prettiness of the implementation, only on the strategic depth of the principles beneath.

- The entry can be a single or multiple battles long (but we will judge at most 4 or 5 battles, not 40). It should not contain any cutscene or exploration phase, unless they are entirely skippable.
=> You can make an entire game out of your system, just give the judges a way to play only the 1 to 5 battles you want to showcase.

- There can be as many or as few characters & enemies as you wish. The rules suggested here should make a 1-character 1-enemy duel as complex as a full-scale battle.

2) Skill design:

- The only gauge must be HP. You can work around this rule and make MP/AP/Limit Break equivalents using the rules below, but tons of extra points will be given to contestants who instead try to do something really new.

- There must be no randomness in the effect of an attack or skill. This contest is just an experiment in RPG tactics, so the player should be able to make elaborate plans without computing conditional probabilities in their head.

- Skills should be designed to reflect principle 2) in the Rationale section above as clearly as possible
i.e. skills are ways to change the repartition of damage over time. The effect of any skill in those terms should be very clear, to let players compare skills and conceive strategies more easily. For instance, instead of directly dealing damage, skills could change the number of times a character attacks in a turn (it's easier to compare "1 attack" with "3 attacks" than to have to chose between spells that inflict 70HP on one enemy or 10HP/turn for 4 turns on 2 enemies).


- For more points, every skill should bring something new to the table. No skill should be "the same but stronger". Each skill should provide a different way of manipulating the repartition of damage over time, that cannot be produced by using other skills.

3) Skill unlocking:

- There must be rules to determine when you can or cannot use a given skill. We are trying here not to default to a simple gauge like MP: expending mana/drinking ethers is a very binary way of implementing actions that (un)lock other actions. Ideally, every action could have:
* multiple effects in unlocking other actions (e.g. a feint opens up various attacks)
* multiple conditions for its own unlocking (e.g. an attack requires the right posture, the right distance, and the right weakness in the enemy's defense)
* multiple ways to fulfill these conditions

- As much as possible, the rules for locking/unlocking should not be special cases (e.g. Fire Sword unlocks Mega-Smash), but more general logical principles. Even better if they apply similarly to the enemies' skills!

- As much as possible, locking/unlocking should be long lasting, i.e. not only dependent on the current state of the characters, but also on past actions both by them and by their enemies.

Counter-example to these 3 points: Being "out of mana" is a locking effect that
- depends only on your current state (no matter how you reached it or what the enemy has been doing)
- affects all skills at the same time
- has no real trade-off: more mana always equals more good
- and can be canceled with a single action (drinking an Ether).
By contrast, in a typical strategy game, every time you move a piece, you are closing off some possibilities and opening new ones by combination with the positions of all other pieces, so every move along the way can play some role in your victory.


- You are free to invent the detail of these locking rules, but more points will be given if they are simple and intuitive.
Example: in board games, it's simple geometry that creates these rules (a piece/unit contributes to your tactics by blocking a line of sight, or flanking an enemy...). Here you could use some sort of spatial logic as well, or all sorts of different principles (see Tips & Inspirations below for examples).


- If you have multiple battles, there can be permanent effects transferred from one battle to the next.
i.e. "items" are skills following all the rules above, except their locking/unlocking effects are not limited to one battle (e.g. a consumable item simply locks itself permanently once used, but there could be more elaborate patterns).




General tips and suggestions:

- Anyone who has trouble with the rules can ask questions in a comment or PM. I can help with things such as checking that skills are not reducible to one another, if you want to do it the mathy way.

- "one goal=one action" is the antithesis of strategy. Every action should serve multiple goals and every goal require multiple actions. Real creativity appears when you start finding ways to control the breadth of actions at your and your enemy's disposal, trapping them into predictable moves while extending your own possibilities.

- you can draw some inspiration from CCGs like Magic the Gathering. They are in fact very close to the concepts exposed here for RPG battles: the "skill unlocking" revolves partly around drawing the cards from your deck, with special effects such as reshuffling the deck or drawing more often. Notice that most CCGs contain effects that allow to bring back cards that have already been used/discarded, which is a way of making even past actions relevant to your current tactical options.

- It could be great to have a visual aid for damage repartition/displacement over turns (perhaps a graph of damage over time, in the spirit of what I did in the Rationale section) or some other way to make the effect of any skill perfectly clear and analyzable by the player.

- A suggestion: skills could displace either the same quantity of damage (e.g. 1HP if you're going the small-numbers route), or all the damage dealt in the target turn(s) (including contributions from other skills). This will make elaborate tactics much easier to figure than having a lot of different quantities or percentages. The less math the player needs to do, the more they can make clever plans.

- How much damage is moved around by a skill should not depend on some intrinsic property of the character or the enemy (e.g. elemental weakness). We want strategies to be effective because of what the enemies have done, not because of what they are (i.e. strategy rather than a puzzle that can be solved once and for all). What will differentiate them is their inventory of skills and how they use them.

- You are allowed to "disguise" to some extent the mechanical aspects detailed above to make the game more appealing or closer in appearance to traditional RPGs, as long as damage-moving and locking rules are clearly stated in-game or in a design document included with the game.

Don't go too fancy though: the goal is to expose the skeleton of RPG battles, not bury it under fluff.


Some random starting ideas:

* Why not boil it down to a single HP bar and have each group try to push it in a different direction? (somewhat like Last Word)

* What if a single attack could kill, and the whole battle is a game of counters and feints to try to get that attack in before the enemy does? (Bushido Blade style)

* What if the "rubber band" of damage is elastic, and tends to come back to its natural state over time (so that both bursts of damage and healing progressively come undone)

* Why not use many more status conditions than usual, each one affecting some fraction of the skills (like Silence prevents Magic, but less generic), or even interacting with each other.

* For instance, why not call status conditions "stances" and use concepts from martial arts or fencing to create the skill unlocking logic? (depending on your distance, your weapon, your stance and the enemy's, you can use ground fighting, feints, throws, locks and so on)

* What if there were more categories than just allies and enemies with which to interact through the skills? (for instance neutral resources in the environment)

* For a simple extension of the DBS, you could have a number of different characters with a system for switching them in battle, then group skills that should be locked or unlocked together by giving them to the same character (or make them combos requiring multiple characters), then add conditions to access/summon that character.

* A limited component of TRPG-like motion is not forbidden (think The Reconstruction), although I'd like to see contestants tread newer ground as well.

* For multiple battles, how about having enemies who have the same brute force as you, but are programmed to have an increasingly broad range of tactical possibilities? Every encounter would actually serve the overall gameplay by teaching you how to deal with them in more and more elaborate settings, instead of being its own beast that loses all purpose once mastered.



Recommendations given in the comments section:
An episode of Retronauts literally just came out that discusses RPG battle systems.

http://www.retronauts.com/?p=846.





Anyone who wants to help me judge can let me know here or by PM, I will require their help depending on how many submissions we get. I will ask the judges to read this conversation if they haven't already, so as to have an idea of what we are looking for here.

Tentative criteria for judging:


Originality (20pts): How much does the system contribute to pushing the boundaries of the genre?

Example: Can you find ways to expand on the JRPG system that are not just adding one more gauge, or one more way to get a stat bonus?

Elegance (25pts): Is the system using as few ingredients as possible to achieve its goals in a precise way?

Example: Is each skill truly different from the others? Have you found a simpler way to achieve what usually requires 3 gauges, 10 stats and 100 different items?

Clarity (20pts): How well can the player understand the system, its strategic stakes, and the reason their actions succeed or fail?

Example: Are the effects of each action clearly labeled? Does the system avoid having the player do mental calculus to evaluate the result of their actions? Is the skill unlocking logic consistent and predictable?

Depth (25pts): How much does the system allow and reward elaborate plans, creativity and tactical intuition?

Example: Can we predict how our actions will guide the enemies' reactions, allowing us to manipulate them? Is the game more than pure HP/MP/Item attrition?

Bonus (10pts): Anything a judge finds especially worthy of praise.




I don't expect that making the game will take more than a couple of days at most; however for the sake of all people with a busy schedule, the contest will run from July 27 to August 27 23:59 EST. (however I won't mind if people get the time zone wrong)




The top 3 contestants will get to choose one of the following prizes:

(x1) Any game under 20 USD on Steam or the Humble store, because I might as well make it rain, FOR SCIENCE.

(x3) A (reasonable) drawing by yours truly. Preferably characters (fanart or original, any style), possibly simple environment shots or short multipanel gag in sketchy style. You can do whatever you want with it, use it as title screen or make a tattoo or sell it on eBay.

(x1) A cameo in my future game (hey, that works for Kickstarters. NB: I'm not really expecting anyone to pick this, but I'll give details if a winner is actually interested.)

Details

Achievements

Registration

You must be logged in to sign up for Fundamental RPGology.

Teams Members Entry
If Karin finds out, I'm screwed.
Bludgeon of Inspiration
I'm below those above me.
Why did the statement game ended?
All statements below and above this one just make this one look better. :D
Complexity =/= Strategy
Brotherhood of Evil Statements
If soulkeeper finds out, I'm confused.
Gourdy might not be lazy?
The below statement is false
This statement may have a disclaimer.
The above statement is true if this statement is false.
The above statement broke the chain.
Life is Turn-Based.
Simply complicated ;_;
Fighting to the death with Seiromem!
Oh yes, there will be blood...
If kentona or soulkeeper finds out, I'd be all "whatever."
Kentona still owes me a date.
I'll release my limit break on all of you!
You're fighting with borrowed power.
LET'S. DO. THIS???
Be Like Water My Friend
At least I'll get something out of this summer.
Ayane Fanclub
THESE ARE COMBATS THAT MATTER!
+10 to all enemy stats.
TungerManU
Can't hardly Science
Im not crazy... My mother had me tested!
PetzlaProductions

Posts

CashmereCat
Self-proclaimed Puzzle Snob
11638
I think I might be too dumb for this OTL
facesforce> I am not very clear on how this plays out. Do you mean that there is a component of motion in space, as in a TRPG (FFT, Fire Emblem...)?

While TRPGs are not the main focus of this contest, honestly I see no good reason to reject it on principle, especially if what you're doing with it is original and elegant (common TRPGs are worse messes than even RPGs in terms of redundant variables).
The Reconstruction and I Miss the Sunrise are two examples of games that are unarguably RPGs while having a spatial component.

If there is no standard TRPG moving around but the environment is a variable that plays into the battle, then I have even less to object - on the contrary, I think it's great direction to explore. There's no reason to limit the things that interact with skills to "allies" and "enemies".

While we're at it, I should remark the boundary with ARPGs is probably one I'm less keen on exploring, since it pushes the whole mechanics in an entirely different direction.
CashmereCat> Allow me to doubt it ;) Perhaps the slightly mathy tone of the presentation is rebuking, but at a very basic level it's just about looking at RPGs with innocent eyes, trying to discard habitual thoughts on "what needs to be there".
You can try to simply ask yourself: if I had to represent a fight between two people/groups in a turn-based system, how would I do it? What is really important, when you try to capture the essence of the fight?

(PS: what I'm arguing for is that only two notions are important to recreate the feeling of combat:
- balance of power, represented by HP and damage and fundamentally any gauge or number
- seizing opportunities, represented by the diversity of available skills and how you get them
But perhaps I'm still obtuse and you can do even more essential than that)
Hasvers> Hmm... The best way I can explain it is that it is a event based battle system I have been working on for a while... A good example would be this:
Two gunslingers are having a duel. You can choose to aim left, center or right to try to predict where the computer will pick, with your luck stat helping, or you can pass and save ammo. After that, it's your turn to dodge. Depending on what option you make, the character might move to the right or left to dodge the oncoming bullet. Once a character has emptied thier gun of ammo, they must reload. If you, or the enemy still has ammo during this time, you can make a "shot of opurtunity", ie skill unlocked due to conditions.

Another version would be that there is a table that if you manage to dodge close enough to, you can knock over and use as temporary cover.

Both of these are completely turn based, but involve moving around in a small area by command choice. Does that make better sense?
I'd say that sounds like a solid idea. This falls under the variable environment Hasvers mentioned, should be no problem.
Agreed, why not! I've just added environmental variables as an example in the tips section.
Waaah, too complicate! =_=; I don't understand anything...
The idea is this:

Battles come down to depleting enemy HP and saving your own in various ways.
Mana, status effects, boosts and all that can be broken down to cutting down HP over time, protecting you against HP loss and so on.

The idea is fairly simple despite the wording:
Find creative ways to play around with that system. And make it tactical.
It's got to be fair and challenging, wits rewarded and stuff.

Use more than "damage taken, damage healed, then attack and repeat" until it's over.
Whether you can delay enemy turns or speed up your own or have dots or have super special moves building on top of each other. Or you hide behind bushes infight or throw stones taken off the ground, anything's fine as long as it's got no mana/focus, is turn-based and allows tactic.

Better not have thousands of useless skills, but few useful ones instead.
And, for the extra dip of awesomeness, add an interesting skill-learning, or skill-system. You want to be able to grow somehow in battle.
Marrend
Guardian of the Description Thread
21781
I might have something for this!

*Edit: What if my system doesn't have skills to lock/unlock? Would that be okay, or...?
Kinda hard to work with no randomness and no MP.

I have more questions! Yay!

1.) Since you said no gauges, can I use numerical counters instead? Or maybe symbols? I'm using a variable to determine turn progression. The variable is affected by your previous actions and your Agi stat. Because of this, turns won't always be Player, Enemy1, Player, etc. I'll use the counter/symbol as a visual indicator.
If not, then I'll just hide it from view.

2.) Is it fine to ask around the forums for technical help? Something like how to remove this, how to add that, and etc.? I'm not very well-versed with ruby yet, so I might ask a question or two there about scripts.

3.) Last one, do we encrypt the game or not?

Thank you! And sorry if that was a mouthful ;P


I'm kinda afraid that mine will end up badly.
Oh well. For SCIENCE!!! (^0^)/
unity
You're magical to me.
12540
This is a really cool idea! I bet a lot of great mechanics will spring forth from this contest!

author=Link_2112
If there's no healing, then you can only last as long as your HP. So you'd either have really short battles or massive amounts of HP. That doesn't sound as appealing as having healing.

I can appreciate the idea of simplifying battle, but some things are in games for a reason. It'll be interesting to see what comes out of this, though. I'm not going to participate but I'll keep an eye on the result.


I have to agree with Link on this point. I'm a little discouraged by the "healing is bad" comment in the Rationale section, especially since it is a rule that "Skills should be designed to reflect principle 2) in the Rationale section above as clearly as possible."

What if a designer has a fresh new take on healing? In a contest about innovation, making a sweeping statement like "healing is bad" discourages people from playing with it and doing neat new mechanics based on it.
I'm gonna sign up so that if I do have the time to do something I'll be ready. It'll push me to get out of the typical jRPG battle system dynamic, at least.
@soulkeeper
Numerical or different attempts at turns are perfectly fine.
Asking around the forums for techniqual help should be just as well, as this is supposed to be a communal contest anyhow. We'd like to see how we can help to improve battles with the results. It's about the thinking, not the craftmanship.
If someone takes up on the idea (should you need to include it somehow), that's the risk involved, although I trust you guys. It'd be way too hard to get a whole system with just one piece of information, too. Nevermind balancing.
Don't know about 3), though.

@unity
The thing about healing is that the main effect is prolonging battle, so it is rendering previous turns "useless". I personally don't mind it, but what would be a creative attempt that breaks the usual? Healing is used quite a lot.

@marrend
It's one of the basic principles, you are free to argue, but right now it is. Although your system certainly can use something similiar instead. (like the hiding behind environments, for example. I'd say that would pass as well)

I don't know your idea and how viable it is, of course. If you do think this is in disagreement with your plan, I'd say better argue why it has no need for it and have the condition be optional or pm Hasvers with it if you don't want to spill it/need to explain it in more detail
unity
You're magical to me.
12540
author=Kylaila
@unity
The thing about healing is that the main effect is prolonging battle, so it is rendering previous turns "useless". I personally don't mind it, but what would be a creative attempt that breaks the usual? Healing is used quite a lot.


If the hero deals 100 damage on his/her turn and the foe heals 100 HP, then yes, that is true. However, a good developer will make the heal/hurt exchange feel more like a tug of war than a simple negating of a previous action.

If the point of this contest is to remove the healing and make people innovate around it, then that's fine. But this is called the "Fundamental RPGology contest," and ever since Dragon Quest 1 and Final Fantasy 1, healing's been pretty darn fundamental. Not to mention that I think healing as a mechanic still has a lot of life left in it, and creative developers will come up with better and cooler ways to use it so it doesn't just feel like turn negation.
That is not what I meant at all. I said "turns", you will be healed for more than a normal turns' worth, of course. But it's still the same, it just means previous attacks come to naught which prolongs the battle. Multiple then. Still resetting battle history to me.
It's fine if your characters use it, but let's be honest, who doesn't hate healing bosses? Ultimately just need more time. Unless it serves as a turn limit (like DDS2 optional boss. Evil guy) .. well, still hated.
Status effects are differently healed of course, but that is put under the skill lock/unlocking. Muting locks skills, curing it unlocks them again.

The fundamental aspect is that it can all be explained at the simple HP bar as well. You reset part of enemy battle history, stunning him during these (not taken) attacks would result in the same HP loss/gain. You'd be where you are now.

Is healing just conventional or essential? It being there doesn't mean it needs to. And we all know prolonging games is part of the essence of any RPG. Especially commercial ones.
unity
You're magical to me.
12540
author=Kylaila
That is not what I meant at all. I said "turns", you will be healed for more than a normal turns' worth, of course. But it's still the same, it just means previous attacks come to naught. Multiple then. Still resetting battle history to me.
It's fine if your characters use it, but let's be honest, who doesn't hate healing bosses? Ultimately just need more time. Unless it serves as a turn limit (like DDS2 optional boss. Evil guy) .. well, still hated.
Status effects are differently healed of course, but that is put under the skill lock/unlocking. Muting locks skills, curing it unlocks them again.

The fundamental aspect is that it can all be explained at the simple HP bar as well. You reset part of enemy battle history, stunning him during these (not taken) attacks would result in the same HP loss/gain. You'd be where you are now.

Again, while that is true on a basic level, there are plenty of ways to make your previous actions still count even if damage you did has been restored. That's where the innovation comes in.

Healing may be overused in games, but so are other fundamental aspects like "turns," "HP," etc. You could challenge developers to make games without using these, and many would rise to the task and do so, but then you're no longer making a "back to Fundamentals" type game. Healing has always been a fundamental aspect of electronic RPGs.

author=Kylaila
Is healing just conventional or essential? It being there doesn't mean it needs to. And we all know prolonging games is part of the essence of any RPG. Especially commercial ones.

Just to be clear, I don't think healing is necessarily essential to any RPG. I just think that saying "don't use healing" is, in fact, potentially keeping people from finding cool new ways to use it in this contest.
But I'm afraid I don't completely get your point. So if it doesn't negate the status effect, then it does not undone all of it, sure. Never said it brings you back to 100% health and normal status. But then there's the fact you heal multiple turns anyhow, so you are not wasting your time.
Usually there are options to cure it with a different skill which then requires another turn to bring it back to a clean state. It's not a reset to zero, but still nulling some attack damage.
If there is not a means to cure a status effect at all, then that would be there still, yes, in contrast to stunning.
Building it innovatively would then require severe status effects, which can or can't be cleansed? I would've answered differently some time ago, but I really see just pushing back and forth. Healing is then necessary if you can't survive without the "extra-turns" you gain. But that's something you can balance out.

The point is not that healing doesn't do anything, or rewinds time, it merely leaves little room for tactic. Usually paired with mana, it's all about mana conservation and healing as much as you can with your given mana without having your characters die on you. That may work and perhaps drive you on edge sometimes, but it is not tactical. It's the exact same throughout the whole game, unless they KO you instantly/faster you could possibly heal, in which case you just abondon it completely.

And to clarify, it wasn't a "back to the basics", not time-wise anyhow, but an attempt (see the linked discussion) to break it down to the most crucial and simplest feature the RPG battle system builds on. Which is, ultimately, killing your opponent -> emptying HP.

And I it's not in the rules that you can't implement heal. It's just not advised, and it would be very hard to implement tactically. It does encourage similar effects in different ways (negating enemy damage).
If someone had a cool idea, he'd probably use it anyways. Because if he has one, it's gotta be damn innovative or he would not think of it. It's damn difficult.
Marrend
Guardian of the Description Thread
21781
@Kylaila: Well, basically, I'm aping (or attempting to ape) the dueling system of the Suikoden series. If you're unfamiliar with that, the system boils down to a rock-paper-scissors mechanic. So, there really isn't as-so-much a locking, or unlocking of abilities. It's more about reading what your opponent is saying, and being able to guess what he or she could be doing based on that.


Actually, I have a small demo of this idea already. Two if you count Chance Encounter. The submission I would make to this would be more similar to Chance Encounter, but, with certain changes to the system to support for multiple duelists.

unity
You're magical to me.
12540
author=Kylaila
But I'm afraid I don't completely get your point. So if it doesn't negate the status effect, then it does not undone all of it. But then there's the fact you heal multiple turns anyhow, so you are not wasting your time.
Usually there are options to cure it with a different skill which then requires another turn to bring it back to a clean state. It's not a reset to zero, but still nulling some attack damage.
If there is not a means to cure a status effect at all, then that would be there still, yes, in contrast to stunning.
Building it innovatively would then require severe status effects, which can or can't be cleansed? I would've answered differently some time ago, but I really see just pushing back and forth.
Healing is then necessary if you can't survive without the "extra-turns" you gain. But that's something you can balance out.

I'm not interested in debating with you exactly how Healing can be done without "erasing the history" of the battle. People like Craze and Fomar0153 have already made progress on those mechanics and I'm sure there are future developers who will do so in ways I can't even imagine. The whole point is there is still unexplored potential when it comes to healing in RPGs.

author=Kylaila
And to clarify, it wasn't a "back to the basics", not time-wise anyhow, but an attempt (see the linked discussion) to break it down to the most crucial and simplest feature the RPG battle system builds on. Which is, ultimately, killing your opening -> emptying HP.

Okay, then that's fine. However, both the name "Fundamental RPGology contest" and the early Dragon Quest background seem to suggest otherwise. Like I said in an earlier post in this thread, "If the point of this contest is to remove the healing and make people innovate around it, then that's fine." Carry on, then.

EDIT:

author=Kylaila
And I it's not in the rules that you can't implement heal. It's just not advised, and it would be very hard to implement tactically. It does encourage similar effects in different ways (negating enemy damage).
If someone had a cool idea, he'd probably use it anyways. Because if he has one, it's gotta be damn innovative or he would not think of it. It's damn difficult.

Even if healing isn't strictly prohibited, this part already sends a clear picture of how the judges view it in the contest:


It's clear that the judges already believe the statement "Healing Bad!" to be true, therefore even if it's not illegal, people are already highly discouraged from doing so. Again, that's not necessarily a bad thing if that's what the contest is about.
author=unity
Okay, then that's fine. However, both the name "Fundamental RPGology contest" and the early Dragon Quest background seem to suggest otherwise. Like I said in an earlier post in this thread, "If the point of this contest is to remove the healing and make people innovate around it, then that's fine." Carry on, then.

I'm sorry for the confusion.
It is a bad spotlight, yes. But with the desired idea in mind, that is the intention, as the intent is tactic building (planning long-term, if you can call it that) rather than damage control. Although saying "bad" is judging, you're right.

@marrend: Will look into the demo, thanks! As the stragedy revolves all around "how" you can determine what attacks are going to be used, I'll just have to take a look.

Edit: It's a rather simple pattern. The taunting is natural and not really deceiving. It's very easy to figure out the pattern and go along with it.
If the fights were fairly short this could make the time to make out enemy intention crucial. Not tactical in longer fights, though. And if we consider deceiving and no randomness involved, it is less logical and more guessing/trial and error. Which isn't bad, but not the most desired result given the rules.

You could perhaps add some additional attacks once you use one command in a row - that would trade more predictable attacks to more follow-ups.

It's just a demo, of course. But I'd advise to beef it out somehow.
Hasvers will have the ultimate decision, of course.