SOMETHING THAT BLEW MY MIND TODAY? CHRONO TRIGGER DOESN'T HAVE A DEFEND OPTION.

there was a safe helm or something that if worn, the character will be in a defend pose for the entire battle

First of all, Mandela Effect...

No, but really, you guys are missing the important question... who uses defend in jrpg though?!?!

Rhyme and I were talking about ways to make defend useful without breaking the game the other day and I came up with an idea where you'd do a sort of rock/paper/scissors defense. I'm thinking about using this in a future game but basically you'd take reduced damage normally, even more reduced damage if you picked the right defense and an addition to it (like if you pick status defense it'd kick the status you would have been inflicted with back on the enemy, or if you used magical defense, the enemy might get -25 mag def on their next turn.) The idea was to promote thinking about the enemy patterns and trying to learn them so that you could use them to your advantage, without making it too easy.

Rhyme didn't like the idea much because he felt it was still too broken in the players' favour, but personally I think that if you can give your player the chance to make things much easier if they actually pay attention to what they're doing and not spamming attack or flare every turn, they deserve to be able to kick their foes in the shins and shout nernie nernie noo at them.

So for a basic example:
Enemy is going to use Poison Blade. You figure out that's their next attack so you can choose to either defend physical or status. If you defend physical you'll take 50% less damage but get poisoned and the enemy will take -25% defense next turn. If you defend status you'll take 25% less damage but bounce the poison back on the enemy for the next turn.

Of course, it could work with other systems like different choices of bonus on getting the correct block that you can equip, or having enemies change their tactics when with certain other enemies. (So a wizard would go all out with damage magic but if teamed with a knight they might default to supporting the knight instead and throwing out magic spells when they have nothing else to do, or a knight might be more offensive in nature when you fight him in a group of knights but when a healer is in the group, they aim to protect them from being attacked.)

I think the idea has a lot of promise, personally. Then again, I'm not afraid of letting a player mess around and break the game over their knees if they like. I don't get the headspace of "they absolutely must be nerfed so my monsters are always a challenge!" To each their own, I guess.


Another idea - certain things as optional half-turn choices. For example, I had one game where you could use one item on your turn as a free action. This negated the whole "do I heal or do I chance it?" mentality - if you wanted to heal and then attack, you could. But adding on that, maybe have something like choosing a half-turn action of either item, defense, observe? - so you could still attack, but you could also either use and item, boost your defense 20% or watch the enemy for weak points... that kind of thing. That way it's not a wasted turn, but it is still a useful ability to have on hand.

Personally I like defend as a heal action, which it's been used as in a fair few games. As long as it gives back a decent enough amount it's a nice addition. Or giving a boost of some sort as well. I had one game where it gave 10% defense boost for 3 turns (unstackable) and 25% HP and MP back, on top of the usual reduction in damage for that turn. That game had a high MP cost for stuff, so it was fairly useful. Sadly, game never got released, but I think it worked out just fine, personally.

Defend's problems are systemic to RPGs. The problem isn't just an action that is "take half/zero damage" has little value but the circumstances around when and why you would use that action.

The core goal of RPG battles is simple: Do optimal DPS so you can knock gigasatan's HP to zero fastest. A dead enemy has zero damage output, and you win when all enemies are dead. Tanking, defending, and healing exist so you don't die and fail while trying to drain the enemy's heal, and because recovering from death/KO is a huge DPS loss. Defending means that character has reduced/no DPS in most cases so the player needs a reason to take that action from a more optimal one, like facemashing the attack button.

(This is excluding things like mechanics, exploits, or glitches that resolve the battle too. Being able to use an elixir on Lavos Core via a glitch to trigger an HP overflow to instantly kill it is beyond the scope of this post)


The biggest reason to defend IMO is knowledge. Chrono Trigger even has a few cases of it. Why would you defend? Because the enemy is going to use an attack that spells bad times if you don't. However the player has to know that such an attack is coming and prepare for it which is something a lot of older ones simply don't do. Magus phase 2 is simple: Risk Casting a Spell (no damage) then next turn Dark Matter (big AoE damage). Even without the warning ability the player can figure out quickly that every other turn Magus is doing big damage to the party. Being able to learn that the enemy is doing something worth defending for is important towards making an action like defend worthwhile.

There is another problem though: If Dark Matter was balanced to where you have to defend to soak it, how does the player know that the first time they eat it? I can't imagine most players would enjoy going through Magus phase 1, and on the start of phase 2 not knowing Dark Matter was going to wipe them without defending and eating dirt when it hits. It's something that'll have to be taught at some point to the player before the big showdown at the end of Act 2 at the very least.

Some other games have tells or patterns for bosses the player can learn. Lunar 2: Eternal Blue is one example: The bosses have animations they play that tells what action they'll take on their turn the player can watch for. I also want to bring up 7th Saga for it's own take: Enemies would decide who they would attack at the start of a round but wouldn't act until their target takes their turn. This in addition to the player being able to choose who acts first gives the player the knowledge of who is gonna get attacked, although the value of this information is kinda niche, especially in a game like 7th Saga and it's horrible random encounters. MMORPGs are another big one, tanks have to learn the rotation or tells for tank buster abilities to know when to use defensive cooldowns.



Speaking of tanks, being able to direct enemy attacks / tanking helps defending too. This is the point of the tank role, after all what's the point of the weaker but HP tank character if they're just as likely to eat lightning bolts as the rest of the party? The most control the player had for this back in the day was usually party order where the leader of the party was more likely to get attacked than other positions. Personally I found that unreliable (quit sniping my healer DW3! ) but also likely confirmation bias too. Being able to direct attacks towards a certain character means you can focus defensive gear and buffs on them while other characters can focus on their own roles (DPS), plus your tank can make better use of the defend action and not tank your party's DPS. Combine tanking with tank busters which the player knows to defend through can be a way to make defend and tanks relevant.

Nowadays there's a lot more provoke and tanking roles in RPGs but it also leads to the tank/healer/dps trinity roles you see in MMORPGs if you're looking to make your own game different. There's also AoE tanks: They soak all the damage from an AoE ability instead of the party eating it but that can be a lot of damage on the tank and defending (or other mitigation / cheese) is required to survive some attacks else the tank dying and entering a death spiral. There's also the question of gameplay depth added by adding a tank role whose entire purpose in combat is Provoke/Cover->defend->pick nose and receive healing.



A third mechanic to consider is healing throughput. If an enemy attack deals enough damage to warrant a cheap and expendable healing action then the healing action shouldn't have the same result if the target defended or not. For example consider a party member survives with 55% or 5% HP from an enemy attack if they defended or not. If your healer has a heal they can spam that would recover that character to 100% HP no matter what their HP started at then why would you defend at all vs getting some extra DPS in? Potency and availability of healing actions is important to consider too if you can just heal away all that damage you took because you didn't defend.



This isn't a comprehensive list and it's focused on the context of older JRPGs. There's lots of different approaches you can take or take inspiration from. Defend could have other results than just reducing damage for a turn. 7th Saga again increased your attack power for your next attack which could help in overcoming an enemy's armor, although the math usually didn't work out in that favor often. Defend could give effects that last longer than the current combat round. How you have your action economy would also affect the value of defend. Defend doesn't have to take the place of another more universally valuable action like in older games.

I've been playing Divinity Original Sin 2 and one if it's neat innovations is physical and magic armor. It's a buffer on top of your current HP for physical and magic attacks, plus with the bonus that you are immune to physical or magical ailments as long as you have armor for it. With a shield equipped you get an action that's just "Raise Shields" which costs few action points and on a short cooldown (but can be silenced!) that gives a good buffer of physical and magic armor back. It's a nice safe option if you're out/low and want to avoid eating some bad ailments because you ran out of armor.


tl;dr making rpgs is hard

Another thing Defend is useful for is if you don't want to do anything at the moment. If taking any action that turn is a bad idea. Either you're waiting for something, or attacking could trigger a painful counterattack. Chrono Trigger didn't have that problem, because you didn't have to act immediately when your turn came up, but games that are structured more around turns often need, in my opinion, a way for the player to pass the turn and defend works well for that.

That said, I'm all for making the defend command more useful. I love defending in Grandia series, where everyone's acting on the action bar at the top of the screen, and you can cancel their action if you hit them with a heavy attack or special at the right time.

But what if you fail to? And they're coming right at you with a big physical attack and your turn comes up before they connect? Defending in those situations feels really good! It doesn't happen super often (I remember using it more in Grandia II than the original) but it's a situation where I appreciated the defend command, for sure.