A "COVER" ABILITY?

I believe it is technically possible; you mostly have to work your way around a switch for the cover activation mode, but I think you will have to make extra pages like if "Monster" targets "Hero" then have a fork suggesting if "Covering" is turned ON then probably have a still sprite of the defender as a battle graphic targeted at the victim the monster wanted to attack (which means you must inflict a dummy condition of "Normal" to the defender except you don't see him in his appropriate spot in battle since he is busy blocking attacks for his allies).

I haven't really tried this, but I imagine this must be somewhat relevant to the actual thing? Then just refer to the damage algorithms (I swear I had a link to it but cannot find it) to do the damage instead to the defender.

Or just have the cover ability turn on a switch that you use to limit what actions the monsters can take. Create duplicate versions of their skills that have that switch as their activation condition, a high enough priority to prevent regular skills from triggering and are switches themselves. Then just handle the animation and damage to the tank through battle events.

This is the reason a game I'm working on has only three possible party members who can do it, and yeah, I use it as more of a taunt/Heat (Xenosaga terminology) move than a pure Cover.

Hm...so there's no "true" way of setting up a Cover ability as I suspected then? Seems quite daunting to do, though probably much easier if only one character had the ability and one set up duplicates of everything and whatnot, right?