WHY CAN'T I JUST POISON HIM A LITTLE BIT!?

post=144450
Why the player would ever want to sit there for fifteen seconds when he could just be nuking with faster/more interesting-to-execute skills is beyond me. And why the fuck would you use a 10% success Death spell that takes forty-eight seconds to cast?

I meant to say 1 Sec per hour on the clock.
The whole point of the spell is to put enough risks when using it, that the players will have to think of creative ways to distract the boss for 12 seconds, multiple times if unsuccessful, or just focus on killing it the traditional way which has less risks involved. It would be much easier to use it on extremely strong non-boss enemies.

Yeah, 10% is just way too low. There is no creative ways to 'distract' the boss when the success rate for a spell is ten goddamn percent. There's just no way around that, it's too low.

I usually reserve low effect rates for weapons that have that ability. So, a sword with MURDEROUS DEATH power will instantly kill a foe 1/10 swings (but not bosses, obviously).

Status effect, no. Elements, on the other hand, yes. Tried a trick I learned from someone on WotM to set up a boss who could, as one of his action patterns, buff himself from normal damage, to resist, to immune, to absorb on the elements the player could throw at him. Problem was, half the time when he tried to use the skills that allowed him to buff that way, the engine crashed. Haven't figured out why, yet.

You should also count how much damage the poison will do. Let's take the 50% hit rate and assume the poison does 1/10 of Max HP in damage. If we also assume that the enemy will live for two more turns, it will in average take 1/10 of it's Max HP in damage per poison casting. If the character that inflicts poison is capable of instead inflicting more damage than that via a direct offensive skill, it's never worth poisoning that foe. It gets a bit better if there are multiple foes who you can poison simultaneously, but if you have a fast paced battle system combined with a low poison damage (very common in RPG Maker games), you can forget about the player using poison.

Let's take another example, namely Blind. Assume you use it against a Giant Bat and that it has a 60% hit rate against that foe. The Giant Bat has 50% chance to use a physical attack and 50% chance to use Blood Suck which is programmed as a magical attack meaning Blind won't do anything against it. Further, if the Giant Bat attacks physically, Blind has a 80% chance of causing it to miss. Now, let's multiply the chances together: 60%*50%*80%=24%.

So, when you cast Blind once, there's a slightly less than a 1/4 chance of the spell to cause an action to fail for every turn the enemy gets. Now, killing it has a 100% chance of stopping it's actions. If the player can kill the Giant Bat in four attacks or less, it's not worth casting Blind. Now, take into account that that even if you Blind the foe, you still have to actually kill it. Also, the effect of Blind is more uneven than just killing the foe and players will typically prefer strategies that relies as little as possible on the RNG. This will further count against Blind which adds to the number of hits the Giant Bat has to survive in order for Blindness to be useful.

Even if we increase the accuracy of the spell to 100%, there's still only a 40% chance of the spell to actually do anything for every action the enemy takes compared to the 100% of it not taking an action to begin with if you kill it. The Giant Bat will need to at least survive two hits if Blindness is to be useful and ideally even more than that.

I've found that single target status effects can rarely afford to have much less than a 100% chance to hit. Heck, often a single target status effect is not worth using even if it has a 100% accuracy and is used against an appropriate foe (Blind on enemy with only physical attacks). Why Blind a monster if you can instead just take a hit and heal afterwards?

True, but I don't think that really changes my theory. If a status effect for one or another reason has a 50% chance of being useful, the player will not use it if he instead can kill the same foe in two hits, even if there are multiple enemies. As for poison, you can still count the number of turns the poisoned enemy will survive. Let's say you poison an enemy and then kill that one last. If that means the enemy gets to survive for three turns, it will take 30% of it's Max HP in damage with a 10% per turn setting. If the character who inflicted poison could have done that amount of damage with a direct attack, there's no reason to use poison instead.

Also, the idea of focusing on one foe and statusing the others often isn't as good strategy in practice as on paper. If you encounter X number of foes and they are threatening, but manageable with a good strategy, X-1 number of foes are usually no longer a threat. As soon as you kill just one enemy the battle will get much less threatening. There are exceptions like if the enemies at the same turn managed to down a character, but usually one kill is enough to make battles much less threatening.

Of course, there are solution to the problems. Still, the game creator has to actually make those solutions. This only happens if said game creator identifies the problems to begin with.

BTW, I prefer to stick with Blind only affecting physical attacks. That way I have Blind for physical enemies, Silence for spell casters and Sleep and Paralyze for both, the latter two which will have their own disadvantages. This creates a distinction between the different status effects. If Blind were to affect all kinds of attacks, it would become very similar to Paralyze who also works against all attacks. I see no difference between making attacks fail and making them not happen in the first place. Rather I make sure there are enemies who relies solely on physical attacks or at least prefers physical attacks.

post=144604
Well...that would be because 30% is almost a 1/3 chance. That's basic statistics! You can think of all percent-based effect rates this way. 25% is 1/4, 20% is 1/5, etc. This is actually a really useful way of thinking about this, because then you can choose a rate and imagine how often it would work in-game.

Hold it!

Simply using a skill with a 1/x chance of landing x times won't magically make it land. The correct probability that it will land can be calculated as

Success % = 1 - (Failure %) ^ # of times

Using a 1/x skill x times averages out to ~69% success. That is basic statistics!

post=144628
Once again, it all depends on how you design the game. What if your enemies DON'T die in one or two hits? What if you encounter a foe with tons of defense or HP? Wouldn't it be worth it to poison that guy while you take down its less-hardy companions? It's a balancing act that goes far beyond the status problems themselves!

Also, the distinction between paralysis stopping attacks and Blind making them miss would be it still costs the baddie MP to miss (assuming the game uses MP).

We can argue about this all day, but there are creative ways of making status problems useful that a game designer should try to recognize! And by no means should status problems always be the answer, either!

Of course it depends on how you design the game, anything depends on how you design the game.

Let's examine your foe with tons of HP and defense. Against that foe, poison does indeed sound viable. In fact, it sounds like poison is now a way to obvious solution. Having problems that have one obvious solution aren't meaningful either. Of course, you could give the player other good ways to deal with that foe. But if you do that, maybe the other means end up being plain better solutions and poison is no longer a good solution.

In order for, not only status effects, but any skill period, to be meaningful, there has to be situations where it's neither obvious that you should use the skill nor obvious that you shouldn't. You need to get the skill somewhere between. I do not think that creativity alone will accomplish that, it's going to take balancing. I have seen examples where people have been really creative, but rendered it obsolete by not balancing it correctly. If you have played wild Arms 3, i give you the sandcraft as an example where "Fire all ammo at once" obsoletes almost every other option.