SO YOU SAY YOUR GAME HAS STRATEGY

Your monk boss is literally the sixth battle in my new game. Haha. Great minds think alike, maybe? Though being in the first dungeon, my version of it *can* be survived by defending - stunning is just way more effective. I'll have ones that have to be stunned later in the game.

Hmm, my most clever RPG bosses? I think I'll have to pull from UOSSMUD rather than from an RM game. My RM2K3 game doesn't have anywhere near enough complexity to really post anything from, since it's just the shitty DBS.

UNO_D is a funny boss I created for UOSSMUD. His story is that the evil necromancer Thorn attempted to use dark magic to mind control a horde of monsters to attack the main city, but sneezed, and accidentally mind controlled the code that runs our Uno minigame instead. UNO_D draws a card each round, based on the Uno cards. If it draws a number, it deals that much raw damage x100 to all players. If it draws a Skip, one player can't use any skill on their next turn. If it draws a Reverse, it swaps all status ailments and buffs with one player. If it draws a Wild Card, it deals quadra-elemental area damage. DrawTwo, it drains half of one player's max MP. DrawFour Wild, it inflicts every status ailment in the game on one player, and lowers their HP to single digits (basically assuring death). It's not immune to any status effects except ones that prevent all action (like stop and paralyze). But the Reverse card makes other effects risky. If you cast regen on yourself for instance, and it steals regen from you, it will heal itself as fast as you can damage it. Not so great if you're wearing an auto-regen item (although being a multiplayer boss, you can flee and come back with different equipment). But without status effects, you can't stop it from murdering the hell out of you, so you have to keep reapplying them and walk a thin line between using too many statuses and not enough, along with making really good use of esuna and dispel. Adding the Skip and DrawTwo on top of that means you might not be able to use esuna and dispel when you need to. And the DrawFour Wild skill is prevented by silence status, so you have a real incentive to inflict ailments on it.

Another good one from the same online game is the Heavenly Knight. Not strictly a boss, it's still one hell of a challenge. It's designed as a 1v1 challenge, and has some cool mechanics to keep other players from interfering. Every time someone attacks it, it counters with an area attack - this means that you take too much damage if you have extra people fighting it. It also has a skill called Heavenly Explosion that does massive holy-elemental damage, which becomes 25% more powerful for each player in the fight room - so even healers are bad to have around, though if they can heal and buff you well enough, bringing one is still a potentially beneficial tradeoff. Every round, if any player is at full HP, it uses Fatal Blade to lower their HP to 2/3 before using whatever other move it was going to use - so it's good to stay *almost* fully healed. It does lots of demi-type attacks and lots of elemental magic attacks. It has one spell that will definitely kill you if it hits, but is every element at once, so if you are immune to *any* element you'll be immune to it. It's All-Ultima move deals more damage to players with more max HP, so if you're using max-hp-increasing buffs to get around the Fatal Blade problem, or have just generally built your stats to make yourself into a tank, you'll be in much more severe danger.

Hmm. Arc Knights are fun. Like Heavenly Knights, they're more of a sub-boss. In addition to buffing themselves intelligently and using area attacks, they like to turn the player undead so you can't cure yourself (until you esuna away the zombie status), and they drain HP from you any time you're not undead (so if you can heal yourself, he starts healing too). They also cast debuffs on the player that drastically lower one stat (semi-random, player's highest stat is most likely), last a good long while, and can stack with themselves. So their stat-reduction skills gruadually turn you into a worthless mook if you don't win fast enough.

I really like this topic. POST MOAR BOSSES.

A boss in one of my game is a necromancer who you fight in a graveyard and keeps resurrecting and healing up to a limit of four zombies. It takes a couple of hits to take out each zombie so of course it's best to take out the necromancer first but the zombies still attacking you can get annoying. The best trick however is to defend until all four zombies have been ressurected and use an AoE sleep spell and aim solely on the necromancer. Which would keep the zombies from attack for about five turns.

This is abysmal because there is exactly one correct way to tackle this boss. Craze said it, this is merely crowd contrololol. Why can't you put the Necromancer himself to sleep, buying you some time to buff your party so you can slap the heck out of him when he wakes up...? Do you have a healer who can actually target the enemies, too, using their Undead nature against them? Maybe someone has a curse that makes enemy attacks heal you, so you can hex a couple of the zombies with it? Maybe something is interesting about this?

And the DrawFour Wild skill is prevented by silence status, so you have a real incentive to inflict ailments on it.

So this entire boss battle boils down to "use status effects but be careful about using status effects"

I used a strategy approach to BE:D (which is a puzzle, not an RPG), and now I'm applying the same principle to a modified DBS I'm working on: easy-to-reach goal, but different levels of success. In BE:D it's easy to kill a victim, but hard to get good ratings. I'm using some sort of rating system in battles now. They're easy to finish, but you need thinking and strategy to get the good rates. It's a way to add strategy without adding imposing difficulty.

author=Craze
lockez, I'm not going to read that, paraphrase or be ignored.

Sorry, I thought this was a thread about complex battles, not ones that can be summarized in a sentence or two. Plus, I was attempting to actually describe how the different elements of the battle work together, to give them more meaning. Oh well, I can at least use bullet points instead of sentences.

Incompetent Thief Duo
- Battle must be won within two minutes
- Both thieves have auto-regen which cannot be dispelled
- Each thief uses healing items on the other thief
- If you inflict undead status on either one, they will use remedies to remove it after a few rounds
- When one goes down, the other enrages, doubling its speed

Inverse-Escort Gauntlet
- Chain of 8 battles in a row
- A friendly NPC aids you in this fight by using various offensive skils each round
- NPC does not take damage
- If you take more than 15 rounds to kill a group of enemies, the next group will join it -- this prevents turtling and letting the NPC do all the work
- Monsters have randomized status immunities/weaknesses
- After all 8 rounds, fight a boss, the NPC helps with the boss also. Boss is simple.
- NPC leaves, fight another 8 rounds without him, enemies have less HP this time
- Fight the NPC, who has been mind-controlled
- Fight the scientist who mind controlled him, she summons another weak monster every single round
- Then she transforms, of course

In one of my ideas, it was a game where you played as a single character against some enemies (one version was first person and another was top down action). You would know you could regenerate energy in direct sunlight or heat and weak against the cold, and as the game goes on the enemies all know this and load themselves up with icethrowers and the like.

Part of increasing the difficulty as you went on was to create groups of enemies designed for the purpose of having a huge advantage over the player character since it was just you, so the game would become really hard if you didn't think of different ways of stopping enemies. Like the grenade launcher shield people, just firing at them does nothing and they're constantly shooting explosives in places they'll think you'll be so its hard to dodge (think if the Spartans had much larger and heavier shields they could shoot grenades through).

Just because the idea about any single enemy can be summarized in only one or two sentences, doesn't mean the strategy is too simple. It's this naive notion that to add depth you have to add complexity when all it does it annoy and confuse the player. Threats need to be easily and quickly identifiable, but dealing with them should still be a fun challenge.

A boss in Iniquity and Vindication has the ability to enact FFTA-style laws that forbid certain types of abilities, and cycles through three different laws throughout the battle. Every other round he changes the law. One of the three laws he can enact is Forbidden: Healing. So for two rounds, you can't heal. If you are low on HP when it comes up, you have to stun the boss or debuff its attack power to survive.

Change luck values to affect damage and status chance rolls by increasing its own luck while reducing the party's.

Creates a weaker clone of himself and tries to confuse the player which is which.

Create a minion when damage received in a single hit exceeds a certain threshold.

Create up to three minions while only taking damage when a minion dies and can attack when all three minions are on the field.

Be a jerk.

Become immune to the last three elements used against the boss which disappear after three turns after becoming immune.

See above but with four elements.

Hit things hard.

Also hit things hard with damage being proportional to HP.

Redirect damage received two turns into the future/past and can become invulnerable to damage for a turn. Subject to change. A lot.

Reduce Agility to zero killing character's base hit chance before using hit-everybody attacks.

Die.

author=Crystalgate
However, the problem is doing all that while not making the patterns to easily adaptable.

A wide variety of character skills and talents, mixed with bosses & enemies that require effective use of particular skills, or combinations of skills, to win - that's what it boils down to. You could probably break it into a mathematical equation, with the longer your "combination" creating different tiers of difficulty:

1) Boss casts Haste, you must cast Slow on him or Haste on yourself to keep up.
2) Boss is weak to Fire and deals AoE damage, so you must cast Fire spells and use Cure-All. But then he casts Fire Resistance, so you have to use Resistance Breaker or switch to Ice Spells.
3) Boss is Immune to Elemental Damage, has high physical evade, and slowly respawning minions who have low HP but deal massive damage. You have to kill the minions, cast 100% Accuracy on the Knight, who hits with Fire Shatter, making the boss weak to fire, and then blast him with Fire spells while his shield is down.

But those are specific counters. The even more interesting boss fights have multiple ways to take them down. Maybe you take down Boss 3 by Ice Shielding yourself against the minions (who do Ice damage) instead of killing them every few turns. Or maybe you have an attack on the Knight that always hits for low damage, and you turn it into a fight of attrition. Leaving those kinds of choices up to the player can make the game more interesting.

P.S. I mentally imagine Craze making his avatar's face whenever he posts.

A pattern is actually a great way to make your players use their wits; for example, Mario games start with a simple slow, waddling goomba, maybe a floating Koopa, and top it off with a Hammer Bro. The difficulty ramps up later when players are faced with many enemies at once, and forced to use what they learned (really, you made them practice it) all at once, and quickly.

Similarly, a pattern in an RPG boss fight uses patterns: Once your player realizes your bosses have exploitable weaknesses in their patterns, they'll enter boss fights carefully, analyzing what the boss does, how he attacks, until they spot the turn they can bash him for 20,000 damage. You can make the player use their wits by hiding this weak spot very carefully - maybe their character has to use a specific ability at the right time to open up the gap, so to speak, or maybe you need three characters to perform certain actions in the right unbroken order to deal massive damage.

The pattern does have to be identifiable, however, or it's not a challenging fight - it's just a dick move. You make it identifiable by teaching it to your players slowly over time - like in Mario - maybe they have to use a few special abilities on minibosses or enemies, and the final boss requires a concert of everything they've learned so far. If you want to make the game more challenging, you can always increase the pace the player is forced to learn, or be less forgiving about mistakes.

author=PsychoFreaX

author=kentona
Battles are about identifying patterns and then adapting to that pattern. In fact, that pretty much summarizes all games.

Just make sure that your bosses have an identifiable pattern and you'll probably be okay.

They don't all have to be. The battles I'm talking about are won with wits and understanding of your character's abilities. My boss fights are mainly a test of those. Much like a card game. I do know some other really underrated games that involves wits in battles.

your wits are your capability to recognize patterns and adapt to them, I think you don't have any idea what you are talking about. card games are a series of repeating patterns

"just get used to how the boss fights and you'll be okay" to "understand how the boss fights and find an appropriate counter".

this is the exact same fucking thing. getting used to the boss' strategy = learning how the boss fights