DRAWBACK MECHANICS IN SINGLE PLAYER GAMES

This is a hard question to answer in general, as I can't think of any drawback system I universally like. It really varies depending on the context of the battle system. So I'm just gonna ramble a little and maybe something will resonate.

Say you're playing an RPG where you could summon allies during battle similar to SMT games. Each summon could cut your max health by a specific amount as well as some penalties depending on the monster. Summon a fire elemental, for example, and your character's fire resistance would drop. Releasing the monster would eliminate those penalties.

This might be skirting the boundaries of what you call a drawback mechanic, but there was a specific ability in a game I can't remember the name of called "weapon break." Say you have a fire rod in your inventory. You can equip it like a weapon, or you could "break it" and unleash a powerful, field-clearing fire spell. It's a strong spell, but it was unleashed by destroying the rod, so you lose the weapon.

I like buffs that increase and decrease elemental resistances at the same time. Deploy an ice shield to boost your ice resistance and lower your fire resistance. That'd make you think harder about when best to use those buffs.

Bravely Default has a neat mechanic where a party member could "brave" and take their next turn immediately, but with the obvious cost of having to wait longer until you could input commands again.

There are ways to make it work, even with the ability to buy as many as you want.

If you have a Golden Sun style inventory system where each actor has ~15 slots to hold their equipped weapons, armor, accessories, and consumables. Equipment doesn't stack, so an actor would run out of space quickly, and so you would never have 30 extra fire rods. Maybe one or two. Maybe give the rod to someone not normally good with magic to give them more options in battle.

Maybe breaking a weapon doesn't remove it from your inventory, just prevents you from equipping it? You could take it to a town to have it repaired at a blacksmith or somewhere.

Perhaps you can only break weapons you have equipped, and you can't change equips during battle.

If your game's economy is tight, then buying 30 fire rods would likely be a terrible idea in the first place.


A combination of any of these could make equipment breaking a viable drawback mechanic without being too harsh that players would never even consider it.

I tend to think most drawbacks that work in multiplayer games work well otherwise too. Like the "lost turn" risk management. Blood Bowl has an excellent system (though being multiplayer) where if you fail any action the turn is over and you no longer get to make any more actions. So it's all about managing the possibilities of doing risk-free actions first, or doing a risky action to open up a space to maneuver into.

The drawbacks I generally don't care for are random debuffs. Mostly because I just don't give a crap. I like the simple easy-to understand drawbacks. if I get a 5% reduction in speed for three turns after using skill x I really don't care. It's pretty meaningless. I found this I think in Pillars of Eternity which had a lot of buff and debuff skills thrown around all over the place. It's also quite similar in Darkest Dungeon but I think there it works better because generally the cost of actions are quite clear. But even so i think even there there are maybe two or three too many stats that could be cut down a bit.

I think an interesting way to build an entire battle system around these kinds of drawback mechanics would be a setup where every skill affects subsequent actions in some way. For example, a certain ability could become more expensive every time it is used, or even increase the cost of all skills for a while.

In fact, apply this effect to every skill, make it stack and last for the rest of the entire battle, but also have skill costs be slightly reduced automatically after every turn. Then, if different skills increase skill costs by different amounts depending on how powerful they are, you have a drawback-based battle system that still revolves around simple MP/resource management. The player would have to think twice about whether to use abilities that increase skills costs by a large amount early in order to gain a quick advantage, or save them for later so they don't have to deal with extremely high costs for all their other, weaker skills for a long time.

Now, whether a system like that would actually be fun to play, I couldn't say without trying it first. But I think it might be one of the most fundamental, minimalistic approaches to this topic, anyway.

They can work, as long as the skill or system is useful enough, and the drawback can be played around.

I don't tend to do it for individual skills, but I do have an example of an entire character being based around a drawback.

A character in Mayhem Maiden will gain "Hate Levels" as she does damage. As this increases, her defense will go down and her Aggro/Threat/Draw Rate will go up, which puts her at more and more risk, and requires the party's Tank do more to protect her.

However, this also comes with a risk/reward mechanic. Her most powerful skill grows dramatically in power the higher her hate level is. At level 1, it's nothing to write home about. At level 3, it not only hits the enemy with a stun, but it can take out just about a third to one half of a boss's HP. At the max of 4? On top of the heavy damage, for the next few turns she gains a followup attack on all her skills. These are HUGE and feel worth dealing with the drawback in order to cash in on the rewards. It's an integral part of what makes the character fun.

The kind of drawbacks I hate the most are skills with imperfect accuracy. If the risk/reward is pure RNG succeed/fail, I'm not happy, especially if you used the skill because it was a good time to use it and the game just said 'lol no'.

This extends to instant death skills with .01% accuracy, especially the ones that have no effect otherwise.

Drawbacks I like tend to be of the type LockeZ mentioned, where the drawback can be avoided by playing cleverly. For example, in Pokemon, the move Shell Smash doubles your offenses and speed, but leaves your defenses in the shitter. But there's an item that will negate stat losses once per fight, so you can use Shell Smash exactly once without your defenses vanishing. The cost is that you can only hold one item, so you've committed to your choice, and also a stat drop from something other than Shell Smash could negate your strategy.

I tend to be okay with drawbacks as long as what you're getting out of it is worthwhile. In single-player games, there's no excuse for skills that can barely justify their use, let alone any consequences they may have. It has to be worth the consequence, and the consequence should matter, too. It's basic materiality.

author=NeverSilent
Well said, halibabica. If you ask me, RNG in turn-based games is kind of stupid in general, since it's completely out of the player's control, and you can't do anything about it.

I would say I disagree strongly with this. Now I will admit that I am not a fan of too much randomness. Usually by having one or two random things in what is otherwise a pretty non-random environment. (for example a game with lots of healing skills there is one that only works 50% of the time. There is no reason to ever use it over the safer options)

Now I'm saying that making everything random is not "too much randomness", because when everything is determined by RNG the law of averages take over and the game starts becoming about risk management rather than occasionally failing a "sure thing".

Take for example one of my favourite genres the one of turn-based tactical games where attacking enemies nearly always have a percentage chance and often there's also rules for stuff like suppression (making even a missed shot useful sometimes). In many of those games the mindset (like also in Blood Bowl) is "what happens if I fail this action?" and the whole game is about managing that. If I run out of cover with my shotgun guy and miss the 70% shot I had at the enemy and he is now exposed. If I didn't think that would happen it's really my own fault. But I may have accounted for the possibility of failure in my planning and maybe have a backup where instead of moving another guy to a different position I now have to use this guy's smoke grenade to make the chances that the shotgun guy survives to the next turn more likely.

Now this is not actually on topic but I think RNG can be used to great effect even in turn-based games. In fact turn-based games tend to have more RNG generally than real-time games. I guess it has something to do with the fact that a fast-clicking player can overcome the RNG anyway so why even put it there. (And you get dumb things like lining up a shot perfectly in one of the elder scrolls games but still missing because there was a hidden die roll)

In most cases RNG means you need to pay a bit more attention to the battle screen.
Attention and strategy all aside, missing something means you need to pay attention to that happening, and react to it. Be that in chugging a health potion or otherwise.
As most games have little in that department, it IS a nice change of pace to just need to pay attention.
Some too focused games tend to let you look only at your own skills and plan with them, while ignoring alll else. And that's okay, but I do like the effect it can have to follow through with what your attacks do.

There is a limit to how far you can take it, and protecting you from just getting an unlucky unshot for your team members (especially early on) sounds like a good idea. Missing things is one thing, getting randomly critted another. I really haven't had too much of a problem with this though.

I remember SMT IV having a mechanic where hitting weakpoints (additionally to all the advantages of more damage and extra turns) would sometimes bring the attacking demon (on both sides) into a "smirk" state, which basically meant .. they dodge everything and deal incredible damage the next turn. AKA enter godmode for a turn.
There was no way to really deal with it other than wait it out in the best case, and getting torn apart in an easy random encounter when you were unlucky and ambushed. While at the same time completely overpowering you for all important fights.
That's a bad mechanic, for sure.


I tend to not like draw-back mechanics as much (I suppose I'd need to play more card games?). I prefer safe and slow impossible to counter tactics hahaha.
I think they can be fun, but usually they end up useless in practice (like items that give you perpetual poison state for immense stat boosts, or that one belt in Grim Dawn that boosts your overall attack quite a bit, but returns it to no gain and being slowed and lower resistances for a few seconds quite frequently).
And if you have "lower def for more attack" or something, usually it just means setting up for a strong attack, which can be done with normal buffs as well, only sometimes your character dies in the process *shrug*
A lot of the drawback effects mentioned (like that pokemon thing) are just waay too specific for regular use. There is this thing you can only really safely/effectively use in conjunction with this one item, or armor, or something. It just means deciding on that playstyle, or having that equipment, in all other cases it just makes the spell boring and "less useful" than others.
I mean, they are still nice effects and if you can safely ignore them, all good. But it doesn't feel all that impactful and more like a fun gimmick.

Bloodseeker's (Dota 2) buff where the target gets increased damage but also receives increased damage. If the target or someone you were attacking (if you buffed yourself) gets killed, you receive a percentage of the max health of the target or the one that you attack (depends on the skill level). The increased damage received also scales with the increased damage, so that kinda works out.

Timbersaw's Whirling Death is a giant, whirling blade that deals damage in an area and destroys the trees in its path but your right-click (primary attack) doesn't work when the skill's active.

Pudge's Rot is self-explanatory. You deal damage while you also get damaged by it as well. You would only use this if you're desperate or you managed to corner someone who can't escape your wrath.

Monkey King's Tree Dance gives you camouflage, the drawback being sluggish and unable to use some skills and your primary attack.

Channeling spells are as of the same with the camouflage, but you have to stand still for maximum effect.

Drow Ranger's Marksmanship gives you quite a lot of agility, with the downside being if an enemy hero is near you, you lose the passive ability entirely.

Then there's Oracle. A hero with skills full of drawbacks that can counter almost any hero (another being Doom due to his powerful ultimate, Doom).