CRYSTALGATE'S PROFILE

While almost any build is possible and I'm not going for the most powerful this time, I will still only choose builds that I feel has meaningful advantages. The build I choose for Arc for example, has less agility, magic defense and later even damage output than a powerbuild fighter. Still, he does gain more defense and evasion, so there are meaningful advantages with it. Meanwhile, a critical hit build would (at this point at least) deal less damage in average than a Double Strike spammer as well as having less consistent damage and gain nothing useful in return.

Anyway, for Alexis I decided to make her a fast and strong physical fighter. The restriction I put on her is that I will not put any points into defense, evasion or HP. Basically, she's a glass cannon.

The Zombie Dragon or whatever it's called, is far tougher than any preceding bosses. It had a multitarget attack which could two-hit kill Arc and Alexis. Further, the boss could use that move twice in a row and only Alexis was guaranteed to be faster than it.

Edit: I just found out what exactly Luck does. This allows for tank builds, although not until later.

Why exactly is it called Luck? It's an extremely misleading name.

Anyway, in case anyone else wants to know what Luck does (did I miss the game in any way or shape mentioning what it does?), it decides how likely you are to get targeted. Each character has Luck chances of getting targeted. If you max out Luck, it will be 29 which means you have 29 chances compared to the 4 of every other character. This is almost a 71% chance of every single-target attack being directed at that character.

post=212092
I'm going to explain how to achieve this with the magic that is attributes.

That would impress me. The lines for Attack and Defense seem to me to contradict each other. I was under the impression that Defense has half the influence of Attack regardless of what the elemental attributes are.

The closest similar thing I've heard of this error is in XP when you change the first state to something non lethal. When enemies in XP are killed, they have the first state inflicted on them which is problematic if that state allows them to move. However they are still made invisible and cannot be targeted, which differs from this error (and it's XP and not 2k3). Nevertheless, it may be worth checking if you changed the first status effect.

post=211437
Removing paralysis, sleep, and instakills from the enemy arsenal means removing that many layers of tactical depth, Shinan (or having to be that much more creative to come up with replacements) and even things like blind and Confusion or one round of 'stun' (STARSEED) can be pretty damning in a single-character game. So you're removing even more options in the name of balance, and that, as I said, is a handicap.

I think the removal of tactical depth comes from merely having one character. Imagine we have four characters and each has 4 viable options for a certain round of combat. That gives the player 4*4*4*4=256 options. Give one character all 16 viable options and the player will now only have 16 options. The removal of a few status effects is a minor hit in comparison.

More importantly however, the tactical dept is almost always only there in theory. I have played RPGs for about 15 years now and I could probably count the number of turn based ones which does not encourage you to use the same tactic for over 90% of the battles on one hand. If you do manage to create an RPG which does not encourage the player to use more diverse tactics, you have given your game more tactical depth than most other RPGs. In this case I think you can afford to lose a few layers coming from status abnormalities.

Not to say that it wouldn't be great if you can modify the way the game handles status effects to work with a single character. Still, if you can't do that in a satisfying way, I recommend just losing the status effect.

Anyway, an idea I had for making instant death work for single player. Make it always hit if the player is below a certain amount of HP or certain percentage of Max HP. Otherwise it will always fail. Further, you can give the instant death move a cooldown, if you wish so. Whenever the monster with the instant death move uses it, the player has a few turns of breathing room.

I think trying to make dialogs with nameless NPCs realistic is a lost cause. However, I do think you shouldn't make the unrealism stick out like a sore thumb. So I'd overlook if NPCs tell me something you normally wouldn't tell a stranger, but not so much if they take it one level further and tell me things you'd only want to confide to a friend.