RPG WITH NO REPEATABLE BATTLES

Well, as an example, hmm. Have you played World of Warcraft? The game has hundreds of different bosses, each of which requires a different strategy.

A given dungeon might have five bosses. One boss that summons three different kinds of minions - one with 1 HP that poisons you, one with moderate HP that attacks normally, and one with high HP that makes the boss and all other minions invincible for as long as it's alive. Then a second boss that sends orbs of fire flying around the room and attacking anyone they get close to, while he picks party members at random to paralyze and drain HP from until he takes enough damage to drop them. Then another boss that summons 30 minions at the beginning of the fight, and periodically makes itself invincible and summons a stronger minion, which you have to kill within a certain amount of time or the boss heals itself and goes berserk. Then another boss that is in a field of mushrooms that cause various effects if you hit them with area attacks. Then a final boss that makes each party member fight weakened illusions of the other four party members.

This is an example dungeon that is ripped directly from WoW, but the game has that kind of variation in each of 60+ different dungeons and raids, and all without ever relying on player-specific abilities. And it's hardly the only game in the world to have good strategic boss fights. But I'm not sure what kind of battle system I should use to maximize the amount of strategy I can create. (Don't say tactical RPG, I want to have dungeons, dammit. Though I might allow some type of movement in battle.)

post=144982
I agree some kind of extra battles would be easier rather than having a pure set number of battles it would be restricting on the player if they're struggling on a boss and know they can't retry and train a bit more to overcome it when they know all the other monsters have already been beaten.

I'm pretty sure every action, shooter, adventure, strategy, and platformer game ever made has managed this just fine. So that is not something that concerns me even a little bit. And I HATE, HATE, HATE the idea that boring repetition can be done in place of actually completing the challenge. That is the worst idea anyone has ever come up with. Why would you want to create a challenging and fun boss, and then encourage people to grind goblins for an hour instead of beating it?

If a battle requires strategy to win, then it's essentially a type of puzzle.

No matter how good your puzzle is, it's only fun to do once. After that, you already know the answer. Imagine a puzzle game, maybe it's Picross or Sudoku or a crossword or just block puzzles, where the player has to solve each puzzle five to ten times in a row before they have enough XP that the next puzzle becomes attemptable. That is how grind in RPGs feels to me.

If a battle doesn't require strategy to win, it is a shitty battle and needs to be redesigned, especially in a game like this.

If I find that I am running out of ideas for battles, I will cancel the project.

post=144992
Whatever you do, if this is a system with a strongly customizable player party (which I gather from the "not simple" comment), I highly recommend you add in some kind of way to practice battle an enemy (group) from the menu. Nothing discourages customization quite like being unable to experiment with your build.

Definitely noted. A great point. In a normal RPG you get to try out your new setup on normal battles that you already know you can win, before jumping straight into a new boss. If every single battle in the game is essentially a new boss, then I will probably need to add something like Saga Frontier's skill-testing system that it had at magic shops. It let you go into a mock battle to try out spells before you spent the money to buy them.

I am definitely open to the possibility of reusing the same enemy in different formations, as long as you can't do exactly the same things to win again. Hell, pixel art is my least favorite part of game design, so it's probably inevitable. I do want to change things up enough to keep every single battle exciting and dangerous, but I agree, there's such a thing as too much also.

I wouldn't want to make none of the battles have any similarities at all with each-other - it would be like learning an entirely new game every time a battle starts. Which, despite the success of Wario Ware, would be really terrible in an RPG. Strategies in subsequent fights can build on each-other without being quite the same.

Good things to think about, thanks.