THE CONTEMPORARY TOUCH: TRADITIONAL RPGS FOR A NEW GENERATION

kentona
What's an E and what's a WP?

Hesufo
E: Energy, limited resource, its skills build WP
WP: Dynamic, renewable resource, gained by using E-Skills and basic attacks

Yes. WP is "Weapon Points." You build E based on your basic attacks and double the cost of any E-skills (so Easy Target would build 4 WP). Energy is my catch-all "MP" since I didn't want different mechanics for different classes (which would cause issues when switching mid-dungeon).

Hesufo
The system is actually fine. I suppose the mage classes' basic attacks are fireballs and shit?

Not entirely. Staff-, Spear-, Bow- and Gun- weapons are for mages or at least support them. Staffs and Guns are built especially for mages; spears and bows simply have some magic-influenced attacks. Since classes permanently affect your base stats as you level them up (something I really liked from DQIX's passives), spears and bows are good for characters that build both rogue and mage classes. A staff's basic attack is a weak non-elemental spell, but it's other techniques are all supportive - buffing the user's MGC/MDEF, lowering Energy costs this turn (good for some other classes, too!), or putting a foe to sleep. Guns are fully offensive, but half of their damage comes from MAT and their WP costs are high (works out well for mages whose spells also tend to cost a chunk of Energy, thus building lots of WP!). Guns are also good for spellrogues currently in a rogue class, since rogues have the highest ATK.

Hesufo
etc. etc. (I have admittedly dropped Obelisk: Devilkiller due to this)

Good, it is terrible aside from "LOOK I CODED A THING." I agree with everything here.

Hesufo
From the looks of your system, you are trying to reconcile aspects from your latest battle systems and the dynamism of dungeon crawling, which isn't bad at all and I think is all it takes for a traditional-styled RPG to stay relevant to your audience.

This is the idea! I told NewBlack recently that I really need to figure out the roots of the genre before I continue trying to break it. That's the goal here, and I'm glad you approve.

LockeZ
This is definitely a target audience problem, because I love that shit.

no, obelisk is just really bad. this game should appeal to both types of people !!

prexus
No offence, I love the work you do and the creative shit you come up with, but it sounds to me like you are using "Traditional RPG Formula" as an excuse to have a shitty narrative. I agree with you that an RPG doesn't need a narrative, not in the slightest, but a shitty narrative (lol princess crystals demon lol) is worse than no narrative at all. It would seem that you want to make a gameplay heavy game. Which I love you all the more for; but why don't you just make it a Dungeon Crawler and skip this "Traditional RPG Formula" non-sense?

How is "I have actual characters and an actual world" indicative of this? :< My rantings about a need for narrative are unrelated to this project. I'm gameplay-oriented, yes, but part of the whole point of this game is practicing world-building. My primary villains are actually purposefully "shitty," but only in that they are PURE EVIL. I'm just going to quote more NewBlack convos here (slight unmarked spoilers if you give a damn):

NewBlack

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People (myself included, to a lesser degree) have mainly complained about the lack of well... "Fluff" in your games so I guess this makes sense, albeit pretty drastic. Personally I thought edifice had a lot of soul, it was just that you had to work for it. Like I said before, you make compelling stuff but there's a feeling of "toss me a bone here o_o" sometimes, when it looks like there's a lot to give but it's not being given. I guess you have the "hook" part of game making down pretty damn well :P

Craze

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Oh this game is still pretty evil in that sense, at least if you pursue Daphne. The love interest is entirely optional, but the (con?)quest begins at the very start of the game to provide you with some direction - <REDACTED>, but in the short term should be a decent hook for new players.

On the flipside, this game will be a lot more forthcoming than Edifice about... everybody else. I'm trying to make interesting NPCs (and sheep) that both help develop the party and the world. The villains are a little shallow/entirely and unrepentantly evil for the sake of dominion and evilness, but I'm still trying to 1) make them active in the world space (I mean, seriously, the world is cloaked with night, and entire continents are sundered in half) and 2) make their lieutenants interesting. The Seraphim work for the Demon King who works for/summoned the Moth Queen... the Seraphim are who you interact with the most, if you do their sidequest chain. (SO MUCH IS OPTIONAL.) They're angels, but they're pretty much True Neutral. They work for the Demon King because he is a powerful entity, and an angel without a leader is worthless.

kentona
Why not just try collaborating with someone who is experienced in those areas?

MAH GAM

In all seriousness, though, that's kind of what this topic is. As for actually working with somebody to put the dungeons together or something... this game is practice for doing things like that. Craze needs to learn the genre fully before breaking it. That's why I'm asking so many gosh-darned questions and communicating with so many people!

author
Honestly? I say keep monsters off the world map. Nothing will discourage me more from exploring the world than getting jumped by monsters, and I like a world map you can actually explore.

If people need a place to grind, well... they can go hit up the dungeon they just left.

LockeZ
Not that I mind random battles on the world map. It's one of the few places where I think they're justified. If you remove all battles from the world map, you better make it way smaller than you were planning, because exploration becomes pretty stupid and boring when there's nothing happening along the way.

Bolded my reason for keeping it. There's purposefully a lot of space to walk around and explore, with plenty of doo-dads and collectibles to find. The game strongly encourages you to search every nook and cranny of the world map. This is my favorite thing about DQ games, honestly.

That said, I've already set up/implemented rules for encounters (thankfully I wrote a script that helps with regional encounter management a while ago):

• On flat terrain, the encounter rate is very low. You might get into a single battle walking over a screen of grasslands, and it's possible you won't see anything
• Walking through forests greatly ramps up the encounter rate, and hills even moreso. Marshlands and charred terrain also bump up the encounter rate, but only slightly
  
• Going through deep water with your boat can result in occasional encounters, but it's a rare event (although beware what lies the murky deep...)

I'm trying to promote exploration while making the true wilderness riskier.

LockeZ
As far as dungeoneering goes, I think how your "flee" option works is extremely important. Especially if most battles are dangerous. You want it to work well enough that it's not worse than using normal attacks 100% of the time, but you also don't want people to just be able to flee from every battle and explore the dungeon with no danger and get to the boss without using any of their resources. I kind of like the FF4 method where it causes you to drop gold. Maybe drop some other resource? Gold, MP, items? Maybe you can only run away so many times per day? Maybe running away costs some kind of energy points, which get refilled by winning battles? Maybe you can just remove fleeing entirely since you have touch encounters, I dunno.

I think I might make fleeing either 100% with certain items (smoke bombs or whatever), or have it expend some of your Energy. Or... both. This is something I didn't think about until now, so thanks for bringing it up. I'll probably have a ~70% flee success rate (modified by cumulative party AGI vs. cumulative monster troop AGI) that expends 5% of your precious Energy, as well as smoke bombs that are insta-escape. I always liked those in the Xenosaga games.

LockeZ
Enemy respawning is important too. But how you want to handle this depends heavily on how you want to handle XP grinding. In old fashioned RPGs, level was king, and grinding was the number one way to overcome all challenges. I'm pretty sure you're not going to do that, but it sounds like you might come closer to it than you did in, say, Diablocide with its one-time-only battles, or V&V with its near-total lack of rewards from battles.

Definitely closer to it. XP will be pretty loose, what with the open class system where each class has its own level per character. At the same time, I've been planning from the very start to use scaling enemies... not Oblivion scaling, but ranged scaling. CAVE DUNGEON X might be L3-7, with rats that are always a level under you and some rare basilisks that have a unique range of L5-10 and are always two levels above you. "Your" level would be your party's current average, so yeah, the game's level minimums will still punish you for taking four L40s and a L5 into a L35-45 dungeon, but at least it'd be set to L35 instead of L40? (And the XP, should you keep the n00b alive, would be amazeballs for that character.)

As for respawning, I plan on having it be whenever you move between floors, because I'm a dick (RESOURCE MANAGEMENT, ESCAPE WITH YOUR HIDE). There will be some groups that only have a chance to appear, though, and that chance will diminish as you kill more shit in the dungeon. Enemies will never completely disappear, but they'll slow down as you extinguish their lives. I've always thought that was a fair way to do dungeons in this kind of game, although I've only ever seen it done with dwindling random encounters before now?