AGGRESSION, OR A.K.A 'AGGRO'.

In a turn based game if healing causes hate(which it should) then it will balance out. The player won't be able to set up a perfect defense. I prefer games that make good use of it. I can't actually recall any turn based RPG's that I've played that even use it, though.

It would be cool to have icons that indicate who has the most hate on an enemy, or make that part of a job's skill set. Like Scan. Have a job that can shift hate, maybe reverse hate. Clear hate. If a tank has max hate on an enemy, give it a skill that increases hate beyond the limit and causes the enemy to go into a rage mode of sorts.

I'm going to start out by paraphrasing something I said in one of my articles about giving the player ways to deal with things that enemies do.

If the player plays the game utterly perfectly, making absolutely no errors, he or she should succeed. Ideally, this applies not just to the battle as a whole, but to each thing that each enemy does, as a sub-challenge. If the player performs perfectly, making absolutely no errors, he or she should be able to "win" against the ability. In games where the player can dodge attacks with proper timing, what this means is pretty straightforward, but in a traditional RPG, it gets murky. Extremely few enemy skills can be completely dodged.

So it's not about taking no damage. It's about the player feeling like he or she succeeded against the ability, by whatever criteria the game defines that. However, in too many RPGs, especially simpler and older ones, there's no criteria at all. As long as the enemy's attack doesn't kill someone, the player kinda "succeeded," but it feels totally unsatisfying because there was still almost no way it could've gone any worse.

Taunting the boss to attack someone less vulnerable instead of someone more vulnerable is a common way of dealing with threats in any RPG that has tanking. If the enemy attacks the tank instead of someone squishier, the player feels like they succeeded at dealing with the enemy attack. This is why tanking has become popular in RPGs: it gives the player a response to most of the things enemies do.

The player wants to feel like they beat each challenge, not just like they survived it.

The tanking adds another dimension to combat, which is almost certainly a good thing for 99% of RPGs, though as Craze said, the downside is that it also removes one. In exchange for gaining control over enemy targetting, you lose the need to think about and plan around healing targetting. I feel like, in terms of creating depth, you probably come out ahead, as long as tanking is more interesting than casting Taunt on each enemy and having good stats.

Craze is correct that positioning is a layer of depth that MMORPGs have that single-player RPGs don't have, but controlling multiple characters is a layer of depth that is only present in single-player RPGs. I think these two things balance each-other out just fine, giving the player plenty to think about.



Also, Craze, you can definitely use status effects and targetting to create the same approximate fight as you'd get from the positioning. The MMORPG version of that Good King Moggle Mog fight for example uses an AOE attack centered on the tank, and all the melee classes have 2 seconds to get out of the red circle or they take damage. The JRPG version of the fight would instead go briefly into a counterattack mode where it counters any hero that physically attacks. Or alternately, for a status-based solution instead of a targetting-based solution, the JRPG version could apply a status ailment to several characters which causes damage on the next round. Characters could then defend to reduce the damage from the status, and some classes would have skills to remove the status.

In fact I feel relatively confident I could recreate that entire boss in VX Ace, even if your game didn't have tanking. Do you want me to? (You don't even have to use it, I kinda want to do it now just to prove it's possible.)

I'll take that challenge. What website has the most detailed list of abilities used by the boss?

author=LockeZ
I'm going to start out by paraphrasing something I said in one of my articles about giving the player ways to deal with things that enemies do.

If the player plays the game utterly perfectly, making absolutely no errors, he or she should succeed. Ideally, this applies not just to the battle as a whole, but to each thing that each enemy does, as a sub-challenge. If the player performs perfectly, making absolutely no errors, he or she should be able to "win" against the ability. In games where the player can dodge attacks with proper timing, what this means is pretty straightforward, but in a traditional RPG, it gets murky. Extremely few enemy skills can be completely dodged.

So it's not about taking no damage. It's about the player feeling like he or she succeeded against the ability, by whatever criteria the game defines that. However, in too many RPGs, especially simpler and older ones, there's no criteria at all. As long as the enemy's attack doesn't kill someone, the player kinda "succeeded," but it feels totally unsatisfying because there was still almost no way it could've gone any worse.

Taunting the boss to attack someone less vulnerable instead of someone more vulnerable is a common way of dealing with threats in any RPG that has tanking. If the enemy attacks the tank instead of someone squishier, the player feels like they succeeded at dealing with the enemy attack. This is why tanking has become popular in RPGs: it gives the player a response to most of the things enemies do.

The player wants to feel like they beat each challenge, not just like they survived it.

The tanking adds another dimension to combat, which is almost certainly a good thing for 99% of RPGs, though as Craze said, the downside is that it also removes one. In exchange for gaining control over enemy targetting, you lose the need to think about and plan around healing targetting. I feel like, in terms of creating depth, you probably come out ahead, as long as tanking is more interesting than casting Taunt on each enemy and having good stats.

Craze is correct that positioning is a layer of depth that MMORPGs have that single-player RPGs don't have, but controlling multiple characters is a layer of depth that is only present in single-player RPGs. I think these two things balance each-other out just fine, giving the player plenty to think about.



Also, Craze, you can definitely use status effects and targetting to create the same approximate fight as you'd get from the positioning. The MMORPG version of that Good King Moggle Mog fight for example uses an AOE attack centered on the tank, and all the melee classes have 2 seconds to get out of the red circle or they take damage. The JRPG version of the fight would instead go briefly into a counterattack mode where it counters any hero that physically attacks. Or alternately, for a status-based solution instead of a targetting-based solution, the JRPG version could apply a status ailment to several characters which causes damage on the next round. Characters could then defend to reduce the damage from the status, and some classes would have skills to remove the status.

In fact I feel relatively confident I could recreate that entire boss in VX Ace, even if your game didn't have tanking. Do you want me to? (You don't even have to use it, I kinda want to do it now just to prove it's possible.)

author=LockeZ
I'm going to start out by paraphrasing something I said in one of my articles about giving the player ways to deal with things that enemies do.

If the player plays the game utterly perfectly, making absolutely no errors, he or she should succeed. Ideally, this applies not just to the battle as a whole, but to each thing that each enemy does, as a sub-challenge. If the player performs perfectly, making absolutely no errors, he or she should be able to "win" against the ability. In games where the player can dodge attacks with proper timing, what this means is pretty straightforward, but in a traditional RPG, it gets murky. Extremely few enemy skills can be completely dodged.

So it's not about taking no damage. It's about the player feeling like he or she succeeded against the ability, by whatever criteria the game defines that. However, in too many RPGs, especially simpler and older ones, there's no criteria at all. As long as the enemy's attack doesn't kill someone, the player kinda "succeeded," but it feels totally unsatisfying because there was still almost no way it could've gone any worse.

Taunting the boss to attack someone less vulnerable instead of someone more vulnerable is a common way of dealing with threats in any RPG that has tanking. If the enemy attacks the tank instead of someone squishier, the player feels like they succeeded at dealing with the enemy attack. This is why tanking has become popular in RPGs: it gives the player a response to most of the things enemies do.

The player wants to feel like they beat each challenge, not just like they survived it.

The tanking adds another dimension to combat, which is almost certainly a good thing for 99% of RPGs, though as Craze said, the downside is that it also removes one. In exchange for gaining control over enemy targetting, you lose the need to think about and plan around healing targetting. I feel like, in terms of creating depth, you probably come out ahead, as long as tanking is more interesting than casting Taunt on each enemy and having good stats.

Craze is correct that positioning is a layer of depth that MMORPGs have that single-player RPGs don't have, but controlling multiple characters is a layer of depth that is only present in single-player RPGs. I think these two things balance each-other out just fine, giving the player plenty to think about.

I sorta understand this. In MS's dojo party quest, the aforementioned distract could stall attacks for like a few seconds, so one time, despite the enemy being higher level, because of the stall, our party was able to pin the monster. So rather than feeling like a one-sided thing, it was an actual strategy thing (btw, I was a cleric, so this strategy on my part didn't really deal much damage on my end, but the pin made him fall without dealing more than like two hits).

I wonder if you could simulate this, by having plugins and code that change the battle format (from no conditions to surround, similar to that first boss in FFX, where you can shift around him). And some "distract" (enemy turns to one side or the other, stalling one turn and only attacking that side) and D&D flanking damage.

I think on RpgRevolution (now defunct) one group game in planning involved terrain effect where elevation was involved (basically, the party was on a balcony. Ranged attacks could hit, as could spells and flying enemies. But not melee at ground level. In would be cool to manage strategic issues like this.

Yeah, but the healer can't do anything about that. What are they going to do, not heal as much? The only way they can do that is for the tank to take the adds instead of the damage dealers. Threat caused by healing is there to force the tank to get a minimum amount of aggro on all enemies, it's not there to encourage the healers to not heal.

Anyway, that's not really what I was referring to, I meant that the healer no longer needs to decide which party member to heal each round. They always heal the same person, because only one person is taking damage. In practice though, I suppose this ends up not actually being true because normal enemies get in a hit or two before the tank picks them up, and bosses always have ways to hurt other people (often by summoning normal enemies). Also, in a single-player RPG, it would be much more managable to have two characters each holding aggro on a different enemy, even in a three-character party. Maybe your game's aggro isn't about making sure one character takes all the damage, it's about making sure no one is getting attacked by two enemies at a time, because none of them are actually tanks. FF12 was like this, it had aggro but everyone was a squishy (at least the way I played), so you just wanted to use the aggro to try to distribute enemy damage evenly.

In the few non-MMO RPGs I've played that had an aggro system, this usually translated to frustration, because the monsters ended up ALWAYS attacking the same character. This just let to extremely boring boss fights because they were 100% predictable.

It also often translates to very cheap tactics. Boss got a strong fire attack? Give one character fire resistance gear and then make him keep aggro.

It can also be the opposite around, frustration because one of your characters keep dieing. Like you have that one really strong attacker who is weaker on offense. But if I attack with him, since he deals most damage, he will get attacked by all the monsters and die. So I can't even make use of his offensive, instead I have to use the "Defense" command with him until the other characters dealt a bit of damage. So what's the point of having an offense-focused character in the first place?

The only time it might work out really well is when:
A) It's not 100% determined, but rather a chance, so that there are still surprises.
B) There are plenty abilities available that have a "Taunt" like effect, that give battles a lot more strategy then just "Deal most damage with your tank so he gets attacked".

The aggro system in Deadly Sin 2 was a good start I guess.

I play a LOT with aggro in my RPGs.

Especially recently.

The thing is, it's frustrating to have a character who is good at taking hits not take the hits, and your more fragile guys take more damage, screwing up your whole strategy and stalling the battle as you try to salvage things and then you end up making no progress at all.

So I try to find ways to make tanking useful and viable, but not perfect.

Like, I'm working on Mayhem Maiden right now (I'm going back over the combat system, at any rate), and while it's preferable to let the Designated Tank take all the hits, she can't just take them all effortlessly. Enemies hit hard, meaning that your mage will have to take time away from nailing elemental weaknesses and buffing the party to heal her so she doesn't die next turn, unless, of course, you used a turn on the "jack of all trades" character to have her set up a "heal 50% of a random ally per turn" skill, and it just HAPPENS to hit the tank (or you have another character use an item, of which you can only carry a limited amount of).

The idea is that while tanking is good and saves more vulnerable party members, it requires you to do other things to protect the tank as well (like putting a "heal a little bit if you take damage" status on her, or a Defense buff or MaxHP buff to take the edge off), or she will die and leave everyone vulnerable. This is leaving aside things like party-wide attacks, the fact the mage can temporarily lose access to her healing if she uses too many spells, and enemy skills that hit random party members and are either less, or not at all affected by Aggro/Draw Rate.

Oh, and the fact that as the main physical damage dealer "warms up", her aggro rate goes up as well (AND she loses defense), meaning she will eventually start competing with the tank for enemy attention quite well, meaning you'll need to start using the Cover mechanic too for those hits that sneak through.

I think the Etrian series does a fantastic job of this, although it has an edge in that the designated tank there literally can't tank forever due to limited MP concerns.