WELL-DEFINED DBS OR PRIMITIVE CBS?

post=151988
Since we are on the topic here, can anyone post a link on tips of how to modify one's DBS?

For 2K3, here's one thing you can do to solve a significant problem with the DBS. The problem is that the skills can do a percentage of a normal attack - but this percentage can't be more than 100%. You can add damage to that, but the added damage isn't modified by enemy defense - which can cause serious balance issues, and make defense nearly worthless. I'm sure a lot of people would like physical skills to be able to do more damage than a normal attack, but still calculate defense normally. Magical skills have a similar problem - though there's no equivalent to a "normal" attack, it would be nice if magic defense applied to the whole damage.

The solution: Make all your elements do more than 100% damage by default. For instance, make the fire element do 500% damage to enemies by default, and then it can do 250% damage to enemies that resist it and 750% damage to enemies that are weak to it. And for non-elemental attacks, give then an element called "non-elemental" that uses the same 500% number. Wow, that's an easier hack than you thought, huh? Now each tick of "10%" of normal damage on the skill screen is actually 50% of normal damage.

In my game I also use weapon elements to create protect and shell statuses, since I think "double defense" is a garbage way to improve defense, as it tends to either be worthless or make you invincible. The method is a little too complex to describe here though, but you can look at my game Vindication. But the point is that you can use elements and statuses in creative ways to do a lot more than you think, without ever resorting to ridiculous MP-detecting battle events.

You can probably find a tutorial on ridiculous MP-detecting battle events, if you care. But they're pretty complex, and they mean you can never create enemies that drain MP, among other restrictions.

Oh, that reminds me, I used switches and status effects in Vindication to make skills that can only be used once per battle. That was pretty interesting, for a DBS mechanic. One character has 8 different skills, but you can only use of them, and then you're locked out of the skillset for the rest of the battle. The hard part was getting it to not give her another cast if she dies and gets revived.

I don't think it's fair to say that I expect a CBS to be bad. I don't, I expect them to be done in order to solve problems with the DBS. If you're going to make a CBS though, you should probably use RMXP (or VX), since you have to know how to program anyway to make a decent one, and if you know how to program then the scripting is infinitely better than wild and crazy use of events.

I dunno, Ruby is a really easy language. Having taken only managed a partial comp sci degree before dropping out several years ago, and having never looked at a script or even used Ruby before, it only took me about two hours to modify someone else's CBS to do something significant that it wasn't supposed to be able to do. There are a ton of CBSes that you can use as starting points; once you find one that's close to what you want, you can just kind of mess around with it. You don't have to make one from scratch, because RMXP has such a huge community.