MAKE THE PLAYER USE OFFENSE

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So why the hell do you care how someone else plays a game!?

Because we design games?

While I do think that it's a valid point that most people don't just defend+heal their way through games, it's also quite valid that if a game designer provides a player with the ability to play a certain way, that way should not be 'boring' for the player. I think the initial path we took of finding ways to 'discourage' defensive play may not have necessarily been the right one (why include the possibility at all if you're just going to actively discourage it after all) and instead it may be better to think up ways of making defense more fun and less likely to bog down the 'flow' of a fight.

Of course, factors such as if the game itself is turn-based or ATB-based (or something else entirely) and what the party size is (the chance of an enemy attacking a party member who is using Defend is much higher in a party of two than in a party of five for instance) and other such matters can all make quite a big differences in the effectiveness of certain methods.

Here is an example I thought up of how to make defense more engaging and less likely to slow down the flow of combat. First, only give one character the Defend skill and make enemies direct their attacks to this character when it is used; giving it to multiple party members just raises the chance of 'wasted turns' defending against enemies which decided to attack a different party member. Second, this is a 'complete defense' skill which not only mitigates all damage, but reflects it back at the attacker(s). Third, the skill comes at a high risk; using Defend to block a large amount of damage over the course of a fight (or perhaps a certain number of hits) will 'break' the character's shield until the fight ends, which will not only remove the Defend skill, but which will also significantly reduce the character's maximum HP (at least 50%) until the fight is over. This way, Defend is actually a great offensive tool which doesn't break the flow of combat while coming at a high price if it is overused.

Well, if we're talking more about a specific game which will definitely have defensive buffs and healing spells, that probably changes things around a bit.

Healing spells are, in my opinion, almost always boring and by their purely non-offensive nature will make the fight last longer. This is especially true for several of the games you mentioned like Final Fantasy VII as they generally give some sort of extremely strong party heal which quickly turns into a matter of 'heal more damage per turn than the enemy can deal and you win'. Healing tends to only really become interesting when it is attached as a form of life-drain to offensive skills, when it is a more passive thing (ex: the Regen spell or games which heal you while defending), or when it is more of a life-transfer thing which damages the caster.

As for defensive buffs, I don't really think buffs/debuffs are much of an issue unless you go the Final Fantasy route with the horribly simplistic Shell/Protect system. Adding in an outright defense boost is almost always boring, it makes more sense to just have an effective offense debuff to use on enemies, perhaps with a bit of damage attached to it or a status ailment. Buffs like Haste or ones which boost offense are generally fine since they speed up the flow of combat while giving players the decision to choose between dealing damage (or healing) now or effectively skipping a turn for more long-term benefits. If you want to make them more interesting, you can just have them wear off quickly or limit the amount of buffs a character can have at any given time or even give them direct offensive capabilities (ex: the Prince class in Etrian Odyssey III can temporarily enchant the weapons of party members, but can also use another spell to remove this enchantment early in order to deal a large amount of burst damage).

Something to keep in mind is most RPG's (and nearly any game in general without one-hit kills) are extended battles of attrition by nature; unless you go the Final Fantasy XIII route and make each fight in its own little vacuum (which has drawbacks of its own), the entire point of non-boss fights is generally just to weaken players little by little. As for the outright Defend ability, I really think it's utterly worthless unless a gimmick is attached to it as, aside from fights where a boss has a 'use defend or this charged attack will kill you' ability, I usually go through entire games without ever touching it.

Lastly, if your worry is for 'What if the player isn't properly leveled?' there are ways around that. For example, you can just stagger the experience curve so that players will generally hit Level X by the end of a specific dungeon, but Level Y requires significantly more experience and wouldn't be easy to reach until the next dungeon where enemies will also give larger amounts of experience. Another option is to just take the Dragon Destiny approach and only level up the party at set intervals in the story so, aside from gear and item supply, the player will always have the appropriate capabilities for an area. Of course, it's also possible to just outright throw away leveling entirely and think up a different form of stat/skill progression.

DA2 gets crowd control down so well that it's basically game dev porn. It's a shame that the internet decided to hate DA2; it's one of my most favorite RPGs (although fuck the repeated dungeons). DA:O was good, I thought, but then I played DA2 with its menus and skillsets that faaaaar outclass Origins. Warrior/Rogue is just so boring in DA:O. :<

also i would just like to say that i beat da:o with warrior!human!noble/alistair/morrigan/zevran and only poultices since i refused to teach morrigan how to heal thank you very much (i played on hard too, bitch)

too bad that'd be pretty much impossible in da2 unless you had two defense-oriented warriors consistently (bye-bye fenris)

I dunno if this helps at all, but how about a debuff that deals damage? Even if the debuff misses, you're still dealing damage. The damage wouldn't be as much as a skill whose sole purpose is dealing damage, but I would think this kind of thing players would use more often than a skill that just debuffs.

How to make the player focus on attack rather than defense? Simple, just make the enemies have heavy defense ignoring moves, or moves that are so powerful armor is going to do you no good. Make it Demon/Dark Souls hard. One mistake = death.

theory: in order to turtle your enemy into submission, you must be capable of healing more HP per turn than you lose. if you're losing HP faster than you can heal it, then you can only turtle for a limited amount of time. the less time you have to turtle, the more important it is to play offensively. thus, the key to encouraging offense is to manipulate the relationship between incoming and outgoing hit point.

the first option is to increase the amount of damage the enemy does. this is what kentona's idea of enemy damage output increasing over time amounts to, and i see no reason why it wouldn't work. i don't think it's necessary to invent new battle mechanics to accomplish this, however. monsters don't need to deal more and more damage, they just need to deal more. as long as they're dealing more than the white mage can heal, the player's ability to turtle is finite and you can effectively if loosely set a time limit on the battle.

the other option is to reduce the amount of healing available to the player. simply having weaker healing magic will accomplish this in all cases, but there's no need to be so on the nose. a subtler approach is to split the white mage's duties, say, between restoring hp and remedying status effects. if give the enemy a sufficiently powerful status-inducing skill and allow him to cast it with ample regularity, the white mage will be forced (or at least incentivized) to spend fewer turns casting curaga and more casting esuna. supposing the status ailment is threatening enough, and supposing nobody else is as well-suited for removing it as the white mage character, the player should find his defensive position compromised and be compelled to destroy the enemy before his few precious hit points are depleted. the exact effectiveness of this depends on the nature of the status ailment (some need more immediate care than others; the relevance of some such as blind or mute depend on the character's role), the frequency and accuracy with which it is inflicted, and the exclusivity of the ability to remove it (if the black mage can simply use an echo screen, the white mage needn't sacrifice a turn for esuna). by variny these factors, along with the strength of the enemy party, you should be able to adjust the demand for offense to any degree you like.

mind you, this assumes you only have one healer in your party, and that that healer also has an esuna-type move. then again, if you only have one healer, how hard can you really turtle?

(this also assumes the costs of healing are low enough that the player can turtle indefinitely. it should go without saying, but the more your cure spells cost, the less time you can turtle for.)

also keep in mind that time is a precious resource for players, and when they can, they'll fight hard and reckless to save a few seconds. i think time costs have a huge factor in determining a player's strategy, in fact. speaking for myself, the time event in which i'm most likely to turtle is when i encounter a boss and i haven't saved recently. i'll play defensively, even though it's slower than playing offensively, because it reduces the chance of dying unexpectedly and having to spend hours recovering lost progress. if my strategy is more defensive than it needs to be, i'll shift as far toward offense as i can afford to, since it's faster than straight-up turtling. conversely, if the time costs for dying are low (that is, if i just saved), my first attempt will usually be oriented toward offense and then shift toward defense as is necessary. that way, even if i'm defeated, i haven't really lost anything. i also tend to fight more offensively against unfamiliar random/non-boss encounter groups - not because i fear the time costs of losing, but because i expect the odds of facing those costs are so small enough that i can get away with trading some security for a little speed.

other costs for losing count here as well, if you have them, but time is the main one. in the absence of other penalties for losing, players will only focus on defense insofar as is necessary to minimize time costs. for this reason i might contend that turtling is not "by default, the best strategy", even if it is the one most likely to result in victory.

author=Crystalgate
I never understood the point of MP restoring items,

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!)
--
One thing I'm gonna do is make the player heal a special character throughout the boss fight. The special character could be some random NPC, the boat your party is on, that expansive house in the background-stuff like that. If it's destroyed; gameover.

That gives your healer something to do, and, of course, it becomes nigh impossible to heal that special party member if you take your sweet time killing the boss.

And as another note,
making fights where you need to survive, and be defensive is always fun.
Don't make your players think that offense is EVERYTHING TO WORRY ABOUT, EVER.
That's not healthy for your project.

author=Craze
my favorite way to not spam normal attack


is to not include a normal attack

(Yes, this could just become "my normal attack is Fire," but that's why you make a more interesting system than "okay you now have Fire.")

I might also put a 1 turn cooldown on Normal attacks so that people can't spam them.
Vegabond did the whole no-attack thing pretty well.