STATISTICAL COMBAT SYSTEM

I don't want to play a combat system where so much is left up to chance.

I can't feel like I accomplish anything when stuff goes well, and I feel terrible when things go south and like I didn't deserve for that to happen. Serious agency issues.

1) I don't know if you are aware of this but literally every RPG has an element of randomness in its damage calculations

2) Too much randomness is just frustrating. If I perform the best possible actions, and make absolutely no mistakes, I should not randomly fail.

3) The main purpose of randomness in an RPG, usually, is so that when you fight the same enemy multiple times, it's not always exactly the same. This lets designers increase the length of the game more easily without having to create 20-30 new enemies for every dungeon.

4) A secondary purpose of randomness in an RPG is so that every upgrade the player gets is meaningful. If you upgraded your damage from 350 to 500, but the enemies you were fighting had 600 HP, the upgrade wouldn't help you at all! They would still take two hits to kill. To solve this, damage is randomized a little in almost every RPG, so that the upgrade will increase the likelihood of killing the enemy in fewer hits.


Your system doesn't really seem to be serving any purpose that I can see. You just came up with some random formulas that you hadn't seen used before. If there is a purpose to what you're doing, you didn't do a very good job of explaining it.

It sounds like it has potential to be overly arcane or obtuse, and lead to a lot of frustration. Have you ever played a game by the developer Idea Factory? That's what *not* to do, at least in my opinion.

author=Sviel
If we consider skills, a high miss rate prohibits strategy as you can't be reasonably certain that your skill will land in time.

From the way he described the other things he's thinking about adding, it sounds like he doesn't really know how to add any meaningful amount of strategy to the game in the first place and isn't sure what a strategy-driven RPG even looks like.

I can sympathize. There are a lot of RPGs out there with almost no strategy whatsoever. You pick your highest damage skill or your cheapest skill, and you use it over and over until you need to heal. Then you cast your highest power or cheapest healing spell and go back to attacking. Repeat until you beat the game.

But if you don't want your game to be like that, it doesn't have to be! It's certainly not easy, but many of us spend a lot of our time trying to design interesting skills that interact with each-other, balancing the different options against each-other, and creating some skill tension that makes the player's choices meaningful instead of inevitable.

Making shit just randomly not work won't create this level of strategy you're looking for. It'll create some unpredictability, but in order for unpredictability to alter the player's strategies, first you have to give the player a good selection of balanced stratgies in the first place. Longer-term strategies in battles are much more succeptible to being interrupted and thus randomness will affect them more. For example, if you have a skill that does 5x normal damage but requires you to charge up for two rounds beforehand, then the chance of an enemy doing too much damage to you before you can finish it is a very real risk for the player to weigh. You might need to stop and heal instead of finishing your attack, thus wasting turns. But notice that this randomness is based on what enemies do - not on your skill simply randomly failing. And also notice that good planning on the player's part can eliminate the chance of failure - by bringing multiple healers into the battle, or by buffing the defense of the character who's charging up, for examples.

One way to start would be to come up with skills designed to deal with specific situations, and then start creating enemy behavior that creates those situations. For example, when I started making Iniquity & Vindication, right in the first dungeon I started creating one of the main things that I wanted the player to have to respond to. Enemies either use offense-boosting buffs on themselves or defense-lowering debuffs on the player that last one round, so that the next round you will take a ton of damage. The player has one-round stuns as well as defend skills in order to respond to these enemy strategies. The goal here is to create some reactionary gameplay, so the player has to pay attention to what the enemy is doing instead of just to his or her own status.

Another way to start would be to create player skills that interact with each-other to create interesting skill rotations. Skills that become usable, or more powerful, after other skills are used. This will inherently create some minor complications for the player to figure out - not every battle is the same, and the players will, at the very least, need to change their strategies based on how long they think the enemy will survive. The bigger complications will then come from things enemies do to try to interrupt your skill rotation. Some enemies might straight up paralyze/silence the player, but more commonly they'll do subtler things like temporarily boost their defense, summon additional enemies, or do enough damage that you have to stop and heal.

These are just a couple things to think about. Giving the player a few situational attacks like cleave skills and ranged skills is definitely a good start, but won't be nearly enough on its own. Especially if you're linking those things to specific weapons - the player won't be able to know what he needs before the battle starts and won't be able to change his weapons after it starts. That's fine up to a point - the player needs to find a way to prepare for all types of situations. But once you're in the battle, the player's choice is pretty black and white, unless you layer that with several other types of complications.