MAKE THE PLAYER USE OFFENSE

author=Clareain_Christopher
I feel as though it helps add fun to early game, because you don't have a lot to worry about at that point. But...>.<
Okay, if you do not want to add those items, Fine. As long as the player isn't spamming normal attack.
(The issues I have with people thinking this way. It's not a bad idea- I think the same way too -but if you can't be bothered to add a few TP skills, or Cooldown skills, DON'T, PLEASE, DON'T DO THAT. AT ALL. The game will suffer!
Ranting over. Sorry if I broke rmn WITH MY RAGE!)

In my experience, it tends to be early game where you have to worry about MP since you have few to no MP restoring items and little money to replenish them. As the game goes on, I get more and more means to conserve/replenish MP.

Anyway, I'm currently trying another approach to the offense vs defense issue. Defensive skills are granting offensive benefits as well. Sleep causes physical attacks to deal double damage, so as long as you attack the sleeping enemy before it wakes up on it's own, you get back the damage you lost from putting it into sleep. Successfully tanking an enemy (attack misses or deals low damage) grants TP, which is then fueling offensive skills. This obviously doesn't get the player to concentrate on offense, but I think it ensures the battle won't be drawn out and long winded.

author=Crystalgate
In my experience, it tends to be early game where you have to worry about MP since you have few to no MP restoring items and little money to replenish them. As the game goes on, I get more and more means to conserve/replenish MP.

And that is exactly what I don't like about RPGs in early game. MP is such a scarce resource that you can't spend it in order to improve your battle capability, because you may just need that one heal. I'm also a potion hoarder, so that may have something to do with it as well.

And that is also why I'm planning on having every single skill in my game use a resource that is infinite, but limited, very similar to Ace's default TP. It stays at a set maximum for everyone throughout all the game, it regenerates through the battle, and skill effects are balanced around their cost relative to the unchanging maximum, which means that with proper damage per level scaling, there is no incentive at all to make direct upgrades of previous skills. (Looking at you, -ga spells!)

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Also, I think Guild Wars 2 is worth taking a look at as a case study, as one of its design goals was precisely what is being discussed here, except translated into a multiplayer environment. The behavior you're discussing here is pretty much single player tank & spank.

No direct aggro manipulation is one of the things done to prevent tank & spank, but it's pretty much irrelevant to us unless someone is implementing a custom aggro mechanic in their game. Moving on...

Enemy damage is high / player survivability is low. Sure, you can heal, but you're only delaying your death. Heals are simply not powerful enough to allow you to simply heal back the damage done. Even the warrior, the class that combines the highest base HP with the best armor, will be butchered in seconds if the player is simply expecting to live through the hits. This means you're fighing to kill your enemies before they kill you instead of simply outlasting them in a battle of attriction. It also shifts the defense focus from reactive health regeneration to proactive damage mitigation and prevention, which is a much more agressive form of defense.

Access to healing skills is restricted. There is one slot on the skill bar dedicated to healing skills. Just one. And most of them are just self-heals with added effects. There are some healing skills in your weapon and utility slots sometimes, but they're few and their effectiveness is much more reduced than that of the dedicated self-heals of slot 6. Which brings us to...

Outgoing heals have been severely nerfed. This is related to the previous two points. You are considerably less effective at healing others than healing yourself. You can make a character that focuses on healing, but as I said before, you can't heal beck the damage done. Healing will buy you time, and that extra time may be what you need to have success in the battle, but you can't prolong a battle indefinitely.

Defensive skills are more resource intensive than offensive skills. The MP equivalent resource was removed somewhere during development, but you are still managing a resource. Time is that resource. defensive skills have significantly longer cooldown than offensive skills. Let's look at an example, the Guardian's skils Judge's Intervention and Merciful Intervention. They are both teleports, but one offensive and the other defensive. JI teleports you to an enemy and burns the nearby enemies, while MI teleports you to an ally and heals them. JI has a cooldown of 45 seconds, while MI has one of 80 seconds. This means that a player will be using JI, the offensive skill, much more often. For those with traditional MP systems, you simply have to make defensive skills cost more MP than the offensive skills. This regulates how often the player will be able to use them.

Heal skills do something other than heal. This doesn't necessarily make the playstyle more offensive, but it makes healing less boring. A heal skill that gives the healed character a defense buff as well is much more interesting. Or maybe an attack that deals damage to an enemy and heals an ally as well. Or maybe passive healing that happens every time a certain condition is fulfilled. (GW2 example: the elementalist class can have a minor heal happen every time a spell is cast) By making the heal spells more interesting than just single heal, party heal, regeneration, you are making healing more fun. It adds a new layer where even two skills that heal for the sam ammount and have the same cost may be more useful than the other in specific situations depending on the secondary effects, and figuring out the right situation for the right heal is fun.

author=Craze
I hate it when games are all up into that potion hoarding (hullo FF). Players also make themselves sound like the culprits, but really the reason why all that shit stocks up is the game's fault. It's giving you resources to prepare for... nothing, because the challenges don't necessitate the use of those resources. If you cut out Esuna, made status effects more potent, and nerf spell healing (maybe Potion-types explode to heal the whole party, and a White Mage can only heal single targets (the WMG class would then get more of a war priest vibe with holy magic, weapon blessings and armor)), items would be used, because they have to be.

Final Fantasy 4... Sort of. I mean, it doesn't fit your exact criteria but if you play it without grinding for levels, it is extraordinarily well-tuned and challenging such that it demands a variety of consumables be used and managed. Disregard the version we got on SNES.

Anyway, I made some post at one point in another thread sort of about this... The label I give it is "Player-driven combat rhythm," which was just my wordy way of saying "make the player use offense." I forget which thread it was and I'm not particularly inclined to reconstruct those ramblings again here. Maybe I'll actually properly document the idea and put it into an article at some point.

Oh Craze, I think I love you~
I've been trying to break the whole 'must keep items forever!' thing by actually giving items and nerfing healing but all I got was complaints. >.<;
"It's too hard." "My skills aren't powerful enough." "I keep dying."
Use your fucking items, bitch!

...
Sorry, off track a little, but I hate when people complain about balance without actually trying to use the shit they have in their arsenal. It ain't all about weapons, armour and skills, y'all!

My RPG I'm working on, I totally agree with all these ideas. I WANT the player to use their damn inventory! The White Mage only has single target healing spells and if you need more healing than that, you need to have other characters use items to make up the difference. Sure the Blue Mage can learn a full-party heal spell, but it gets nowhere near the capability that the White Mage can heal in one shot to a single character, but its spread out over the entire party, so its a toss up.
As far as -ga spells go I have them. But like someone said earlier, they cost a lot more and your MP pool doesn't go up THAT much (unless you grind to 99 which is impractical in my game and I literally make you cry in pain doing it. The highest XP giving enemies stop being useful around level 70, so you really MUST grind if you gotta be overleveled) so the cost-effect is highly useful when you want to level the playing field quickly by taking the hit to your MP in the hopes you can remove the enemies faster.
I am using the standard rm2k3 battle engine, but I've modified it all around the idea that you MUST use everything I've given to you. Some enemies may be well beyond your abilities most of the time (the fact and they level up twice along with you throughout the game). But if you utilize status debuffs and status buffs for yourself, they are actually useful and can cripple that enemy you thought was impossible. Ever heard of a boss being vulnerable to side effects? It is true in my game! Even the final boss isn't immune! Sure he's immune to the more dangerous debuffs, but you can put Slow on dat mutha!

Well the White Mage is also a debuffer and buffer as well. And since I'm making both types of spells ACTUALLY useful in my game, he is not utilized just for healing but for turning the tide in battle as well.

author=Liberty
That's what I did do - minus the cap on items. Monsters have upward of 20% chance to drop healing items, could drop multiple items at that, and there was a lot of treasure scattered around. A lot. A lot, a lot - most of it a combination of healing items, damage items and money, with a few new equips thrown in. I like me some treasure.

One character even has a Pharmacy perk where they do double healing with items. Items that already heal 50%. That's an almost full heal right there.

Then I hope you have a lot of monsters that can do 70% or more damage to a character per turn, otherwise you’re in for a pretty easy game. Unless that’s the goal in which case; nice job.

author=LockeZ
If you want to alleviate hoarding, one method that works is to try imposing a very low cap on the number of each item you can hold, and making enemies drop the items or treasure chests have them quite often. If the player finds one when his inventory is full, he feels like it was wasted. So if you make his inventory fill up when he's holding 3 potions and 3 herbs, that's going to happen all the time, and as a result he's going to keep using items as often as he picks them up - not because he has to, but because there's no reason not to. It also limits unlimited HP/MP recovery really effectively. Secret of Mana did this, for an example you've probably all played.

for this to work as you say, i think, the player needs to have reason to expect that any items he uses will come back to him. i can't speak for anyone else, but when i played secret of mana i had no such feeling, and so i tended to heal with magic instead of items when possible - because what if my non-healer characters need them later? of course, the hoarding instinct is not as strong as with elixirs in final fantasy. without some assurance of replacement, though, i think the low supply cap only encouraged me to hoard more. most my liberalness in consumption, in my estimation, came from the fact that since i had so much mp available for casting cure water, a single chocolate is just a drop in the ocean.

when you can have an assurance of replacement, though, you're absolutely right. this was the case in x-men legends (which allowed you a max 15 healing potions) and baldur's gate: dark alliance (which let you have a lot more in theory, but limited you by your carrying capacity). in both games, enemies dropped healing items consistently and plenty more could be found in boxes and barrels; as long as you weren't gulping them down too fast, you could count on the high replacement rate to keep you close to max. this was aided by the fact that in both games there was essentially only one type of healing potion. in secret of mana, you have candies, chocolates and royal jams, and if you don't know which type to expect the enemies will drop, then there's no assurance of replacement and so you're more inclined to hoard. this is not an issue in xml, wherein there is one type of healing potion, or in dark alliance, wherein there are three healing potions of differing strengths, but which can substitute for any other because they're limited by weight and not individual number.

i say none of this to contradict you, lockez, i think we're very much on the same page. i think we just had different experiences with SoM. i only mean to emphasize that you need both the low cap and the predictable replacement rate to encourage active item use (along with sufficient need for such use, of course). having one without the other (or neither, as final fantasy prefers) only facilitates hoarding.

more than an anti-hoarding measure, though, i think low item caps are a great way to discourage turtling. you touched on this in your post, but it merits expansion because, as both seeric and crystalgate alluded, available resources are a major factor in predicting offensive/defensive playstyles. putting a limit on these resources seems an eminently simple solution to indefinite turtling without having to implement new battle mechanics or disrupting the traditional dynamic of rpg battles. 7th saga, for all its flaws, got this point right. you could only carry 9 of each item, and healing magic was either weak but efficient or strong but expensive. you supplies could actually last you quite a while - but the bosses in that game don't kid around, and if you're not consistently dealing a certain amount of damage, you'll lose the battle to attrition. hence, you must attack whenever you can afford to, even if that means risking some defensive integrity. unfortunately, while 7th saga succeeded in making the demand for offense high, so too did it require much defense, and supplying both in sufficient quantities was often unfairly difficult (for some character pairs more than others). regardless of this, the low item caps vividly demonstrate how limited healing resources can encourage offensive play.

also, i suspect putting an upper bound on the player's potential survivability would make it easier for the designer to balance challenges. so i suppose there's something for everyone.

edit: further props to crystalgate for acknowledging that you needn't add or change game mechanics just to encourage offense, and for searching for simpler and more elegant solutions.