ANARYU'S PROFILE

If you want a truly great example of RNG taken too far, try the latest Lunar remake for the PSP.

Every round your turn order is pretty much random - everything else about the combat was great, very much like the PS version with really nice updated graphics.

Are you looking for running in 4 frames, or just running in general?

If you want a standard 2K/XP/VX running sprite - that's a big challenge since 4 frames isn't enough, standard running is 8-9 frames for all the states, same as walking.

But since walking is such a small movement versus the site of a small sprite, you can 'fake' the walking version - I think running is a lot harder to fake with only 4 frames.

Personally I look at random chances like this as warnings signs to check for undeveloped features or unnecessary clutter.

A 5 to 10% chance for random double-damage criticals? This is a cry for an interesting mechanic that can give players some real "choices" in your game.

Take those random calls and turn them into a player option - for example keep criticals, but only have them do 50% damage and make them an inherent and high chance on certain weapons or during certain conditions. Some examples:

1. Making Critical Hits ignore dodge/miss/evasion - instead of increased damage criticals introduce a new counter for player tactics to utilize, increasing depth and lowering unnecessary redundant mechanics.

2. Weapons: Daggers give a person a 50% crit rate + a bonus based on their DEX score - rolling your thief into a high DEX stat and using daggers versus swords or a bow makes them play differently and fill a different role.

3. Conditional Criticals - sleeping or stunned or other status effects allow critical hits instead of random chance. Maybe even an enemy going "off balance" if they miss a character, similar to the SMT series.

You can mix these together as well, making criticals always hit, but making only some weapons allow criticals, and make it easy for them to customize the character to hit crits almost every time but at the cost of of another advantage like high STR or HP.

Mix these theories with all the "random" elements - dodging might only be possible for some classes or special armors that are otherwise weak; or based on enemy condition or status.

Another example: Maybe everyone has "Stances" they use to decide if they try to dodge attacks or just lower the damage and take the hit - here you can pick which enemies should be tackled by which build, enemies using a dodge stance can be dealt with by the dagger user and the other who's just absorbing blows can be handled by the character based on normal damage.

Specialize some casters as a class that allow you to mess with enemies - instead of having a team prepared to specialize with each foe you can use that method to control them and your other characters can focus in more normal areas (and you get away from mages just being glass cannons and instead being tactical weapons.)


Staying consistent is important! One of my most annoyed moments ever was in Persona 3 - I had been playing heavily underleveled, using elemental strengths/weaknesses and defenses to handle bosses in Tartarus, then they introduced a new mechanic that became standard-fare afterwards - Almighty damage.

They built me up into using these elemental mechanics, and then took everything away by giving enemies an attack that hits all party members, does massive damage, and can't be reduced by elemental values.

I was left with only a couple options instead of the usual much more broad array - twice I nearly beat the boss with my underleveled party, each time by going completely offensive and getting those 'lucky rolls' - but to no avail, as it got close to death it'd just spam that attack for several turns and we'd all die.

Finally I was forced to level up enough to get the second level group healing spell and just spam-heal through the fight to win - was pathetically easy and boring like that and really left me disappointed.

author=Drakonais
I'm pretty sure the tool I'm talking about (puts a marching ants border around the selected tiles) could select an entire map. And the right-click and drag method unfortunately makes the autotiles reformat themselves when pasted. Guess my only options is to play Tetris with my tilesets.

Hold shift when pasting and it won't.

Also, if you want to copy an entire map, just copy the map itself - could be troublesome if you have a ton of events.

You want to have a fun read-up on tanking: the MMO City of Heroes has one of the and most specialized tanking systems in any game, if you want someone to tank you found a "Tanker" class character.

http://cityofheroes.wikia.com/wiki/Tanker

The primary Defensive sets are:

Dark Armor: Focuses on lower enemy accuracy or causing status effects to them (Fear so they hit less, etc), healing yourself by sucking life force from nearby enemies, and offers better elemental defense and defense from the rare damage type Psionic.

Fiery Aura: Focuses less on the pure damage reduction to keep a higher aggro rating by causing more damage to surrounding foes and managing how they move by setting them on fire.

Ice Armor: Protection based on defense instead of resist (which equates to dodge instead of damage reduction) - increasing your maximum "healthy" using layers of ice and making foes slower and hurt less by the cold air and icy protection and to mitigate when that 200 HP punch isn't turned into a zero (by being a miss), but instead is an actual 200 HP hit!

Invulnerability: Highest standard damage reduction against the most common damage types, and most skills are more effective by keeping the Invul tanker surrounded by foes (main skills grants extra defense for each foe in melee range, etc) - absolutely no psionic protection!

Stone Armor: All around average - uses a combination of defense and resist to reduce damage from all sources. Grants some advanced generation of health and better status protection, but slows the tank down so it's harder to run around and grab aggro from adds.

Willpower: Better status protection and some advanced regeneration based on how many foes you're fighting, but the defense and resist bonuses are less, this is your typical "tough guy" type of tank.

Due to the structure of the game, tanking was more important in CoH than any other game I've played.

But each Tanker class had at least one major weakness, either a very particular status effect they didn't resist, or a lower status resist (ie. if you get put to sleep 5 times you can only defense against the first 4 until the first wears off) or lacking against one particular damage type (Psionic most often) - or they were good against everything but not great.

Tanks need to have at least one or two mechanisms to make them vulnerable - don't give these to a lot of foes, and make it obvious when they do have them - makes them immediate targets for removal either through another means (debuffs or status effects) or require the player to adopt different strategies to cope with the situation (damage bursts to remove or a stronger character with lesser tanking abilities to keep the hate of that one while the tank handles the rest.)

For Example:

Imagine one character is designed to be a tank and depends on keeping appropriate defensive skills 'active' to protect against damage types (versus just having a crap-ton of HP or defense on armor) and using aggro mechanisms (including limited use "OH SHIT" buttons) - but certain enemies have skills that can turn off those defenses, creating a period of time where your tank is weaker until they've spent a turn or two reactivating them. This makes those enemies more effective for the tank to NOT handle or to synergize with their team and have them taken care of in another way (see: characters-who-are-not-tanks.)

Also imagine there are only a couple ways to directly heal your characters in combat - pure "heal spam" is removed! Another aspect then becomes managing your resources before they run out - and you can't suddenly refill your stats with items - you can't use items! And while you had some healing "OH SHIT" buttons if you chose, those are on a long timer and you needed to span their use out.

The tank suddenly becomes important AND a focal point for combat. Your focus revolves around managing your enemies so each class can do what they specialize in (either by design or by your choice.) What enemies can do becomes more than just "Which one should I spam attack against first?"

Summary:

The point is tanks should be powerful, but need to have natural enemies to neutralize them somehow (and ways for you to counter that neutralization - mix up "best" ways for with a variety of enemies to make varying tactics.)

And do not ignore the aspect of how the tank plays - what's involved managing aggro and defense? Are you an offensive class as well? Is it frustrating because the way you want to play the character is blocked by need (ie. you want to smash faces with all your cool sounding "Smash Face" attacks - but you can't spare a turn from keeping a different game mechanics satisfied?)