MAKE THE PLAYER USE OFFENSE

That’s the thing isn’t it? The whole make the enemy do more damage thing, doesn’t really discourage turtling, it encourages it.

If the boss can 1HKO a character every turn (ore come close to it) you’re going to spend most of your time healing, buffing and/or guarding.

Maybe instead of making the enemies do more damage the better solution might be to give the boss massive HP and/or defences, but also have one or two obvious weakness to exploit the hell out of. An elemental weakness is an obvious one, but they could also be susceptible to states conditions like sleep. Stuff like that.

author=masterofmayhem
That’s the thing isn’t it? The whole make the enemy do more damage thing, doesn’t really discourage turtling, it encourages it.

And if you make the enemy do less damage, you´re making it even easier to turtle. If the damage is low enough, yeah, it makes it so turtling is not needed, but it also makes for an enemy that is not a threat.

author=masterofmayhem
Maybe instead of making the enemies do more damage the better solution might be to give the boss massive HP and/or defences, but also have one or two obvious weakness to exploit the hell out of.

Absolutely not. The worst kind of boss battle is a nonthreatening boss with an HP pool large enough to have a noticeable gravitational field. You're making the battle be a nearly endless boring grind. Once you figure out the boss' pattern and how to counter it, the fight should be over soon after that.

What we're trying to do here is shift the mindset of the battles from "be the last man standing" to "kill or be killed". The more I think about it, the more I feel like the solution is not in changing the bosses, but in rebalancing the party's skills.

You want to make a super offensive game? Nerf healing to oblivion! Want to make a balanced offensive game? Nerf healing less.

The problem here is not defense as a whole. The problem is healing specifically. Healing is too powerful. There is no problem with allowing players to effectively negate or reduce damage. Hell, there's even some merit to a super damaging boss that forces the player to rotate some mitigation abilities to survive. The real problem is when you can make the damage the boss deals irrelevant. If you can heal back all of the damage the boss deals, you've made it irrelevant, not a threat.

Nerf heals. Make them heal less, or make them horribly cost ineffective, or whatever, but nerf them. Turtling suddenly becomes not a way to win battles, but a way to buy time so you can win battles through other means. If you don't know what those other means to win the battles are, you're just delaying your death. And if you commit your whole party to turtling, you aren't getting anywhere. Every turn you fully spend on turtling is just a step closer to your eventual defeat. You need to have someone focusing on offense at all times to progress through a battle.

TL;DR: Start by nerfing heals, figure out how to belance the game from there.

author=masterofmayhem
And when I said “exploitable weakness” I met one that turns a long fight into a short one. Of course you have to make sure that exploit is fairly obvious for the player to figure out other they will complain about it being a long annoying fight.

And what's the difference between that and having a less gamebreaking weakness and less HP? What you're doing is giving the player only one way of beating the boss, which is a bad idea. You're discouraging creativity by giving the bosses one weakness to rule them all. And it's very easy to make a fight too easy that way. I'm convinced that the main reason why so many boss fights are trivialized in Pokémon is because elemental weaknesses double the damage dealt.

author=masterofmayhem
However I do believe that reducing healing would help make the game more difficult and/or fast-paced it that’s what you want to do. Just be prepared to have people complain about it.

Heh... A game designer that caves in with complaining from those who don't understand the reasoning behind the mechanics does not deserve to be called a game designer.

author=masterofmayhem
Good point. I’ll start by ignoring what you have to say.

That's it! I'm proud of you.

This is really good topic.

My perspective or two cents:

The game I'm working on is a Mario Rpg fan game so for us, letting the player customize the main characters to an extent was how we addressed it. This is mainly done by badges, the system Paper Mario uses. (But a system like this can be done in any traditional rpg game so it doesn't matter).

Badge Points (or whatever sysyem you'd use) aren't unlimited so using discretion on your badges makes it interesting for the player.
Having badges like "Daredevil" that decrease your Max HP during battle but boost stats. Or badges that increase critical chances, increase evasion when low on HP. Or Badges that increase the power of certain elements. Badges that teach certain skills.

There can be different approaches. Badges that address defense or focusing on ones that address offense.

You could choose a specific set for a specific battle. Just like choosing certain equipment for certain battles.

I feel like when a player has that much input on his character, it's more rewarding and fun when the plan all comes together during battle.

author=LockeZ
Hmm, I'm going to have to disagree with that statement. Your proactive tactics don't depend on the enemy's actions, so they are going to be generally the same in every battle. It's important to make the player's base skillset that they use when they're not reacting to anything fun, for sure, but reactive tactics are what make one battle different from another. So, I actually like reactive skills. I just don't like turtling.

The most effective types of defensive skills are generally proactive. As a general rule, you want to stop the damage before it happens, not after. However! Depending on how your game's defensive skills work, though, you usually at least need to know what kinds of skils the boss is going to use so you can protect yourself from them - games that have any kind of design sense at all will limit your defensive skills somehow so that you can't just be protected from everything all the time. Which means you do at least end up reacting to information you get from seeing them get used once or casting scan or recognizing that it's a palette swap of a monster that used paralysis two dungeons ago. I guess I'm just rambling now and not really making any kind of point. I wonder if people have any thoughts on when and how often to encourage reactive vs. proactive tactics? Worth a separate thread, maybe? It kind of fits here though.

Also, depending on the scenario, a stun could even be reactive as much as it is proactive. You may be using it to interrupt a big attack from the boss, which is reactive in nature.

The reason why I consider proactive tactics to be more fun than defensive ones is because they imply that the player is the one who determines the pace. I'm the badass hero... I am in control of how this battle is playing. The reason why you also want reactive elements as well is because they shake that pace up, creating highs and lows in combat tension/rhythm/whatever. Proactive ought to be the defacto because it is where actual gameplay is derived, rather than being an elaborate, fancy game of Simon Says with a resource management metagame. You damaged me? I better heal. You are about to cast a spell? I better counterspell. Like I said, ideally you want both because disrupting the player's tactics is good, but if you are reactive 100% of the time then there are no player tactics at all... like a quick time event in God of War except menu-driven. God of War is more fun when I am controlling the pace by initiating and sustaining an air juggle... but I still need to react with a dodge from time-to-time so that I have to re-approach my proactive tactics from a new angle... if that makes sense. It is a similar topic to offense vs defense.

Another way of putting it... If I'm not reacting to an enemy's action, I have more options at my fingertips. Do I cast Firaga or do I hit it with my sword? Reactive options are generally fewer because they are so context-sensitive.