CRYSTALGATE'S PROFILE

You should also count how much damage the poison will do. Let's take the 50% hit rate and assume the poison does 1/10 of Max HP in damage. If we also assume that the enemy will live for two more turns, it will in average take 1/10 of it's Max HP in damage per poison casting. If the character that inflicts poison is capable of instead inflicting more damage than that via a direct offensive skill, it's never worth poisoning that foe. It gets a bit better if there are multiple foes who you can poison simultaneously, but if you have a fast paced battle system combined with a low poison damage (very common in RPG Maker games), you can forget about the player using poison.

Let's take another example, namely Blind. Assume you use it against a Giant Bat and that it has a 60% hit rate against that foe. The Giant Bat has 50% chance to use a physical attack and 50% chance to use Blood Suck which is programmed as a magical attack meaning Blind won't do anything against it. Further, if the Giant Bat attacks physically, Blind has a 80% chance of causing it to miss. Now, let's multiply the chances together: 60%*50%*80%=24%.

So, when you cast Blind once, there's a slightly less than a 1/4 chance of the spell to cause an action to fail for every turn the enemy gets. Now, killing it has a 100% chance of stopping it's actions. If the player can kill the Giant Bat in four attacks or less, it's not worth casting Blind. Now, take into account that that even if you Blind the foe, you still have to actually kill it. Also, the effect of Blind is more uneven than just killing the foe and players will typically prefer strategies that relies as little as possible on the RNG. This will further count against Blind which adds to the number of hits the Giant Bat has to survive in order for Blindness to be useful.

Even if we increase the accuracy of the spell to 100%, there's still only a 40% chance of the spell to actually do anything for every action the enemy takes compared to the 100% of it not taking an action to begin with if you kill it. The Giant Bat will need to at least survive two hits if Blindness is to be useful and ideally even more than that.

I've found that single target status effects can rarely afford to have much less than a 100% chance to hit. Heck, often a single target status effect is not worth using even if it has a 100% accuracy and is used against an appropriate foe (Blind on enemy with only physical attacks). Why Blind a monster if you can instead just take a hit and heal afterwards?

There are many ways to make the player feel like a badass. I think the best way is to actually allow a good idea from the players have a great effect. That means if you plan for an encounter to be difficult, but a player figures out a great way to stack the deck to his advantage, allow the encounter to get much easier than originally intended. If you can play out the encounter in a way that's it's now rather easy, but the player can see how much harder it would have been if it weren't for his great idea then he's definitely going to feel like a badass. In other situations the player may roleplay his character in a way that makes said character a badass.

Of course, there's always the risk that the players fail to make themselves or their characters come off as badasses so I guess the "let's pit them against demon-lords" idea is a safeguard where the DM tries to make make the characters into badasses if the players fail. Still, I would suggest first and foremost giving the players a chance to be badasses by their own actions. Heck the safeguard isn't really that safe, you can easily end up just making the demon-lord threat feel generic.

In the same vein, I would advice against relying to heavily on powerful sounding foes in your RPGs. Without a good writing to back it up, it's guaranteed to fail against a large percentage of players.

3 - Town-Wilderness structure
Almost every RPG I know uses a town-wilderness structure, where towns are the places you get rest, shop and talk, and wilderness (forests, deserts, caves) are the places you fight. Sometimes you'll fight in the town or talk in the wild, but it doesn't affect the basic structure much. It's obviously very easy to avoid this formula, but people probably still use it because it keeps a good sense of pacing to the game.

I definitely agree, but I think the pacing is the key here. One reason I like RPGs is that if the pacing is good it will switch activity before the current activity gets boring. By allowing the player to switch activity it's possible for the game to remain fun longer.

Also, since this topic seems to be about RPG conventions, I submit getting stronger and learning more skills. This is a so popular mechanic that many other genres became more RPG like in this respect. In fact, "RPG elements" often refers to exactly this.

This mechanic has both an advantage in terms of story and gameplay. Story wise it makes the player feel that the characters are getting better and better. Gameplay wise it's a way to introduce more options gradually so you won't overwhelm the player.

The graphics looks great and from the description I've seen you seem to be going with a story telling that fits the atmosphere provided by the graphics.

I tried to play the game, but the message boxes are blank and I see no Font included in the folder.

I remember only needing Cure and All to break FF VII. FF VI is also a game which pretty much breaks itself.