CRYSTALGATE'S PROFILE

I prefer to have whatever is needed to understand what's going on spelled out. The more in-dept, but not necessarily needed, stuff can be put in a journal or otherwise be a bit buried. If you do make part of the backstory buried, then I suggest you make sure that both what's on the surface and what's buried is interesting. You can make a character appear bland, but have interesting backstory if the player does a bit of digging, but chance is I won't dig at all.

I would like to point out the difficulty in getting resource management right.

First off, as I already mentioned you will need to put a lid on how many healing items the players can pack. A dungeon that can run them out of 99 X-Potions and Hi-Potions will be boring in one or another way.

Second, you have to make skills effective at saving resources. Let's say that the most economic healing spell costs 10 MP and heals 100 HP. That means 10 HP per MP. Any other spell has to in one or another way beat that. Let's also say you have a fire spell that costs 8 MP. Presumable, by casting that spell instead of just hitting attack, you kill an enemy faster. Well, by killing that enemy faster you have to prevent more than 80 HP worth of damage from being inflicted on your characters for that skill to be more effective at resource management than simple taking the hit and then healing afterwards. The same goes for any skill that isn't healing, by using it you have to be able to prevent more than it's cost in MP x 10 points of damage.

You can "solve" that problem by making one white mage who has the healing spells and one black mage with offensive spells. However, black magic is still ineffectual compared to white magic, it's just that you now have a character who hasn't any other chose that sticking to that ineffectual magic.

Now, let's assume that you do manage balance spells so that when properly used, non healing spells can be more MP efficient than healing spells. The second task becomes to balance the strength of your enemies so that if you stick to attack and heal you will run out of MP before you make it trough the dungeon, but if you use skills properly your MP will be sufficient. Unless you squeeze the enemies between those two points you will not create a game that requires (or worse, doesn't even allow) intelligent skill use to manage your resources.

This is made somewhat harder by the fact that how good your characters stats are changes how MP efficient healing is compared to other spells. If you have higher stats than expected, that sleep spell you have will become less efficient. It will still put the enemies to sleep (unless you're one of those who are paranoid about status effects actually working on enemies), but those enemies would have died quickly anyway thanks to your higher offense and during their turns they would have inflicted less damage due to your higher defense. So, the amount of damage the sleep spell prevents decreases if your characters becomes stronger. Meanwhile, you healing spell will either heal just as much HP as before or even more depending on how that spell in constructed.

Players having different stats becomes an issue in games where equipment management is a factor. There's a good chance that if you want a game with resource management, you also want equipment to be part of the resource management.

It can get really tricky to get it right and most quick solutions to that problem either doesn't work at all or creates other problems. I hope I see someone pull it off though.

Resource Management, or "Just a little... bit... further..."

CONS
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+Can easily be bypassed by grinding for potion money, or for levels so powerhouse your way through. A limited inventory can somewhat limit this.
+Each battle is not a fight for life and death, but reduced to a drain on resources. Fight monsters, try not to die, cast cure, move on. Only boss battles are interesting.
+Possibly hard to balance, making sure that the hero will have just enough cash to make it through can be challenging.

You pretty much have to limit either inventory or how much gold the player can get. Even if the player doesn't grind, you have very little control over how much gold he/she acquires. Experience for example, follows a diminishing return. Take a look at default Arches/Aluxes. He needs about 11k exp to reach level 20. Double that and he gets to level 24, very far from twice of 20. Due to the diminishing return, you make a good estimation of what level the player will be unless he deliberately breaks the game. However, gold has no such diminishing return. Worse, if we assume the game is balanced with the assumption that the player spends half the gold on equipment, then the player getting twice as much gold means he has thrice as much to spend on consumable items. Even in less extreme cases you can easily break the economy. If the player gets merely 1,2 times as much gold as expected and again, half is supposed to be spent on equipment, the player now has 40% more gold to spend on consumables than you accounted for.

Also, let me add another conc, it's hard to wary the dungeons in length. Imagine you want the heroes to break into a mansion. A mansion is probably going to be smaller than a mine. However, can you make that mansion equally draining on resources? You could make then enemies there much tougher, but that can confuse the player and make him assume he's supposed to be stronger than he is.

I tend to give my characters skills in more than one area since I believe that making characters to specialized decreases the tactical element. After all, if you have one character who's only good at using offensive physical skills it will be obvious what he should do every round. Regardless of whether or not I'm right in that, I do make my characters capable in multiple areas, so if I have two characters who's main draw is physical attacks they will still differ in other areas. Also, I do have ways to differentiate between two physical attackers even if we only count the physical skills.

In one now abandoned project I had two physical fighters. However, one was a strength fighter while the other was a dexterity/agility fighter. I set the game up so that against low defense enemies the dex/agi fighter could do about the same amount of damage as the strength fighter, but against high defense enemies his damage would plummet. Meanwhile, the dex/agi fighter is good at hitting evasive enemies while the strength fighter will miss a lot if he targets them. They also defend differently, the strength fighter has high defense while the dex/agi fighter has high evasion.

While this is definitely a very existing problem, it also often goes the opposite way around. I tend to overlook flaws more often if I'm having fun than when the game bores me. When I'm enjoying a game I can think "the story is subpar and sometimes doesn't make sense, but the point of the game is and not the story" which doesn't really work if the game is boring. Of course, this means that if a game starts slow, it can affect my judgment for rest of it since I'm now noticing more flaws. I don't think I can just turn off my analytic thinking if that happens though. Over-analyzing things what I do and that's not just limited to games.

Anyway, it has also happened that I've found a game to be boring, but stuck to it because there is potential and being an RPG Maker game, there is a chance of improvement if the author is given the right feedback.