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EQUIPPING "SOULS"
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Rast
27
Rast
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CloseMy game, as some know, is lightly based off of the Final Fantasy Legend series. One playable race in that series(Monsters) had a unique system where after the battle they might have a chance to eat a certain type of meat from one of the enemies. This could radically change how powerful they were and what type of skills they had.
A lot of people I've asked and/or had test my current project said they enjoyed the meat system from FFL, but I want to do something slightly different, so here it is: What if instead of eating meat, you had a chance to harvest said enemy's soul instead? It would serve a similar purpose, but be more forgiving. Here's a basic idea of how it'd work:
1) After a battle you have the chance to absorb one of the enemy's souls. Accepting this automatically equips the soul(and destroys any soul you currently have equipped).
2) The initial equipping of the soul gives you new monster abilities(which are permanent), and stat boosts(which last until a new soul is obtained, or the soul is removed). You can't manually unequip souls, and they give both good and bad stats.
3)You can unequip the soul by visiting a certain NPC who, for a cost, will "rend" the soul from said monster. It might have other minor penalties(haven't ventured much into that). The preferred method would be to find another soul to absorb, thus granting you different stat bonuses. Another possibility would be increasing the power of already learned skills(if the soul you absorbed would grant you a skill you already know).
Any thoughts on a system like this?
A lot of people I've asked and/or had test my current project said they enjoyed the meat system from FFL, but I want to do something slightly different, so here it is: What if instead of eating meat, you had a chance to harvest said enemy's soul instead? It would serve a similar purpose, but be more forgiving. Here's a basic idea of how it'd work:
1) After a battle you have the chance to absorb one of the enemy's souls. Accepting this automatically equips the soul(and destroys any soul you currently have equipped).
2) The initial equipping of the soul gives you new monster abilities(which are permanent), and stat boosts(which last until a new soul is obtained, or the soul is removed). You can't manually unequip souls, and they give both good and bad stats.
3)You can unequip the soul by visiting a certain NPC who, for a cost, will "rend" the soul from said monster. It might have other minor penalties(haven't ventured much into that). The preferred method would be to find another soul to absorb, thus granting you different stat bonuses. Another possibility would be increasing the power of already learned skills(if the soul you absorbed would grant you a skill you already know).
Any thoughts on a system like this?
Desertopa
775
Unless there's a strict progression whereby the souls the new souls always offer better bonuses than the ones available before them, I think you might want to consider giving the player some way to store souls that have already been obtained and reequip them, if not at any time, then by visiting the same NPC who allows you to unequip them, otherwise players may end up doing a lot of annoying backtracking to reacquire souls of monsters that aren't available in the current area for the stat bonuses after taking on new ones for the moves.
How much incentive do the players actually have to unequip souls at any point, rather than simply absorbing new ones as they encounter them?
How much incentive do the players actually have to unequip souls at any point, rather than simply absorbing new ones as they encounter them?
Rast
27
Souls from stronger enemies would offer inherently better bonuses. There's no real reason to unequip a soul - Some souls, however, would have penalties to defense or agility, and as battles(and the chance of a soul dropping) are random, it just feels right to have the option there just in case. I already have souls implemented(though freely selectable and can be equipped at any time), and I'm working on balancing them so that to bad never outweighs the good or cripples the character.
Ideally you'd never need to flat out remove the soul, but having the option seems to be the fair thing to do regardless of how well it's implemented. On that subject, though, I could come up with an actual incentive - Some sort of reward for removing a soul, perhaps. If you have any suggestions in that area, I'm listening.
Perhaps rending a soul would give you points which could be used to upgrade monster abilities? Or perhaps a much harder to balance system where rending a soul would offer a permanent boost to relevant stats based on the power of the soul(and likely based on the stat's current value and/or a limit, to prevent farming weak souls for massive boosts over time)
Ideally you'd never need to flat out remove the soul, but having the option seems to be the fair thing to do regardless of how well it's implemented. On that subject, though, I could come up with an actual incentive - Some sort of reward for removing a soul, perhaps. If you have any suggestions in that area, I'm listening.
Perhaps rending a soul would give you points which could be used to upgrade monster abilities? Or perhaps a much harder to balance system where rending a soul would offer a permanent boost to relevant stats based on the power of the soul(and likely based on the stat's current value and/or a limit, to prevent farming weak souls for massive boosts over time)
Desertopa
775
If there's literally no incentive to unequip souls, I wouldn't bother with it, but I think it should be possible to offer interesting incentives for doing so. You said that replacing one soul with another destroys the old one, so maybe unequipping them doesn't. If you can keep souls which you've acquired and then removed with the soul render, then you should be able to find something interesting to do with them. Maybe rended souls become consumable items, or can be traded in for some sort of goods or services, or both. You might tempt the player with mutually exclusive bonuses, where one might acquire souls from a unique monster, and choose between some valuable use, or trading them in for some other valuable thing, one a one-time-only basis.
Rast
27
My only issue with that is that the game has a very open-ended party system - You don't even need to bring a monster, and while it'd be nice to offer an incentive to have a Monster in your party, I don't want it to be mandatory in order to get specific rare items. I suppose one solution to that would be to make said items only usable by monsters, so that players who preferred not to have a monster wouldn't miss out.
Desertopa
775
Okay, I didn't understand from your first post that the system in your new game would only apply to monsters. That definitely limits how much impact you'd want to give it on party construction, but making the items only usable by or on monsters does sound like it could be a viable solution.
McBick
1339
I would just go with the meats. Its simpler and less work since you already have it implemented.
Rast
27
I don't have meats implemented - That's the system I was basing this off of(but not trying to duplicate).
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
Soul Shepherd is just like this, except instead of just one race it's the entire game. Souls, which are dropped by enemies, change your stats and teach you abilities. Since you have three other races also in your game, you probably don't need as much complexity to your system as Soul Shepherd has, but it might be worth looking at if you want ideas. Warning: Soul Shepherd is EXTREMELY FUCKING HARD
Cliffnotes version with explanations of why each thing is the way it is:
- Defeating an enemy gives you its soul about 1/4 of the time. Rare enemies drop their souls more often. Personally I'd have made everything 100% drops if I were designing the game, but whatever. In your game you probably want the drop rate of souls to approximately match the number of battles it takes for a human/mutant character to gain that many stats by leveling up. For example, let's say a human takes 10 battles to level up, and has to gain 2 levels to get the same number of extra stats that the new soul provides. Then figure out how common the monster is: if fighting 10 battles means you'll fight that monster 6 times, then you'll fight it a total of 12 times in the time it takes the human to get two level ups. So its soul should have a 1/12 drop rate.
- I think it's important that you can get a soul from every single enemy in the game, not just certain types of enemies, since it makes the race a lot cooler and a lot easier to understand. Plus, other races can gain XP from every enemy in the game, so it's only fair.
- In Soul Shepherd you equip souls from the menu, they're not applied automatically like in SaGa. Equipping a soul destroys it, but you can get more easily. The main reason souls are destroyed when equipped is to keep the player from switching to a healer soul every time he casts heal spells outside of battle to get triple-effective healing.
- Every soul has the exact same stats, elemental properties, and abilities that the enemy had when you fought it. This means if you pay attention to the enemies you can figure out what the soul will be like and decide who to equip it on. And if you look at the souls you've collected you can see enemy's elemental weaknesses so you have an advantage if you can remember that next time you fight them.
- You learn a soul's abilities by equipping it and killing stuff until you have enough AP to learn the skills. I like this as it encourages getting lots of souls, and also encourages sometimes using souls that aren't the style you'd normally use, although there's a limit to how many abilities you can learn at once. This skill-learning system is the main reason why you can store souls and equip them later - you don't want to replace your current soul when you're only halfway done learning its abilities. If you have skills learned a different way you could probably make them be equipped instantly when the battle ends, though do make sure you give the player a choice and tell them details about the new soul and how it compares to their current one.
- Aside from equipping new souls, there are other ways to become more powerful... which is good because otherwise new enemies you've never beaten before would always be stronger than you. You can gain HP and MP (but not other stats) by leveling up, you can keep a certain number of abilities from old souls you've mastered, and you can wear equipment. It's also good because otherwise the game doesn't feel much like an RPG! You don't want the stuff the player did to become more powerful to all become instantly obsolete every time they get a new soul. You want them to be accumulating stuff over the course of the game.
- Different souls have different stats, so you can create different types of characters based on what enemies you use the souls of. Some have magic stats, some have physical stats, some have healer stats, some are tanks and some are glass cannons, etc. They have as much variety as the enemies do. Otherwise the whole system would be quite boring! This is also a second reason to let the player store souls for later use - if they decide they need a healer, they don't have to backtrack two dungeons and fight until they get the soul they need.
- Souls also get used for other things in Soul Shepherd (like synthesizing equipment) but I wouldn't do that in your game, since you have other races too. It's too much complexity, and would get weird if the player has no monsters on their team. Just let monsters equip them, that's enough.
Cliffnotes version with explanations of why each thing is the way it is:
- Defeating an enemy gives you its soul about 1/4 of the time. Rare enemies drop their souls more often. Personally I'd have made everything 100% drops if I were designing the game, but whatever. In your game you probably want the drop rate of souls to approximately match the number of battles it takes for a human/mutant character to gain that many stats by leveling up. For example, let's say a human takes 10 battles to level up, and has to gain 2 levels to get the same number of extra stats that the new soul provides. Then figure out how common the monster is: if fighting 10 battles means you'll fight that monster 6 times, then you'll fight it a total of 12 times in the time it takes the human to get two level ups. So its soul should have a 1/12 drop rate.
- I think it's important that you can get a soul from every single enemy in the game, not just certain types of enemies, since it makes the race a lot cooler and a lot easier to understand. Plus, other races can gain XP from every enemy in the game, so it's only fair.
- In Soul Shepherd you equip souls from the menu, they're not applied automatically like in SaGa. Equipping a soul destroys it, but you can get more easily. The main reason souls are destroyed when equipped is to keep the player from switching to a healer soul every time he casts heal spells outside of battle to get triple-effective healing.
- Every soul has the exact same stats, elemental properties, and abilities that the enemy had when you fought it. This means if you pay attention to the enemies you can figure out what the soul will be like and decide who to equip it on. And if you look at the souls you've collected you can see enemy's elemental weaknesses so you have an advantage if you can remember that next time you fight them.
- You learn a soul's abilities by equipping it and killing stuff until you have enough AP to learn the skills. I like this as it encourages getting lots of souls, and also encourages sometimes using souls that aren't the style you'd normally use, although there's a limit to how many abilities you can learn at once. This skill-learning system is the main reason why you can store souls and equip them later - you don't want to replace your current soul when you're only halfway done learning its abilities. If you have skills learned a different way you could probably make them be equipped instantly when the battle ends, though do make sure you give the player a choice and tell them details about the new soul and how it compares to their current one.
- Aside from equipping new souls, there are other ways to become more powerful... which is good because otherwise new enemies you've never beaten before would always be stronger than you. You can gain HP and MP (but not other stats) by leveling up, you can keep a certain number of abilities from old souls you've mastered, and you can wear equipment. It's also good because otherwise the game doesn't feel much like an RPG! You don't want the stuff the player did to become more powerful to all become instantly obsolete every time they get a new soul. You want them to be accumulating stuff over the course of the game.
- Different souls have different stats, so you can create different types of characters based on what enemies you use the souls of. Some have magic stats, some have physical stats, some have healer stats, some are tanks and some are glass cannons, etc. They have as much variety as the enemies do. Otherwise the whole system would be quite boring! This is also a second reason to let the player store souls for later use - if they decide they need a healer, they don't have to backtrack two dungeons and fight until they get the soul they need.
- Souls also get used for other things in Soul Shepherd (like synthesizing equipment) but I wouldn't do that in your game, since you have other races too. It's too much complexity, and would get weird if the player has no monsters on their team. Just let monsters equip them, that's enough.
Rast
27
After a bit of thought and a fair amount of work I've implemented a somewhat simple system. Monsters now have several types of Absorb skills - They can absorb HP, MP or "Soul" from an enemy. Using any absorb skill on an enemy will allow the monster to see and absorb the soul at the end of combat, provided the following conditions are met:
1) The enemy's soul can be absorbed
2) The enemy is either killed by the absorb attack, or killed shortly after
3) An absorb skill is not used on another eligible target
Absorbing HP and MP does less damage and isn't likely to be fatal, but can help the monster recover. Absorb Soul does substantially more damage, but has a much higher MP cost to use. Upon finishing combat you'll be notified that a soul can be absorbed and given a brief description of it(specifically, the name of the soul, type(offensive, defensive, etc) and element). Choosing to absorb it destroys your current soul and replaces it with the new one. You can also choose to disregard the soul.
At the moment no skills are learned from absorbing a soul, as the system is currently incomplete and undergoing some tests. Any thoughts on this idea?
1) The enemy's soul can be absorbed
2) The enemy is either killed by the absorb attack, or killed shortly after
3) An absorb skill is not used on another eligible target
Absorbing HP and MP does less damage and isn't likely to be fatal, but can help the monster recover. Absorb Soul does substantially more damage, but has a much higher MP cost to use. Upon finishing combat you'll be notified that a soul can be absorbed and given a brief description of it(specifically, the name of the soul, type(offensive, defensive, etc) and element). Choosing to absorb it destroys your current soul and replaces it with the new one. You can also choose to disregard the soul.
At the moment no skills are learned from absorbing a soul, as the system is currently incomplete and undergoing some tests. Any thoughts on this idea?
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