CRYSTALGATE'S PROFILE

I second what LockeZ is saying. The best way to make healing interesting is to make sure there are a lot of other things the player wants to do and healing then becomes an issue of figuring out which character(s) can best afford to spend a turn doing so. The title says "Making Healing Interesting with Multiple Healing Characters" but I think it's actually harder to make healing interesting with only one healer. If you only have one healer, then it's obvious who will heal.

author=unity
Also, if you make a character who can both dish out a lot of damage with offensive spells and also heal the party, can you encourage the player to use both rather than just saving all their MP for healing? I suppose you could have the two types cost different resources?

Most RPGs are set up so that healing is the most cost efficient way to spend MP. However, there's no rule saying it has to be this way. You can change around the MP cost of skills so that an offensive spell is more MP efficient, at least when used in a smart way.

author=Milennin
Avoid a lot of backtracking. Let the player unlock shortcuts to get back to the main path quickly after finishing exploration of a side path.

Alternatively, make the exploration happen in a loop rather than an one way path. But yeah, avoid long walks back.

The formula I posted is not as exponential as some here seem to think. It's true that attack is squared in the formula, but attack is also placed in the divisor.

If enemy defense is zero, 4 * a.atk ** 2 / (a.atk + b.def) is equal to 4 * a.atk * a.atk / (a.atk) which is equal to 4 * a.atk. So, if an enemy has zero defense, each point of attack gives you four points of damage, exactly the same as the default Ace formula. Actually, the default formula will almost always give you four points of damage per attack, the only exception is if the enemy's defense is more than twice your attack at which point you deal no damage in either case. With my formula, you get four points of damage or less per attack, never more.

16 atk < 16 def = 32
32 atk < 16 def = 85
64 atk < 16 def = 204

16 atk to 32 atk yielded 85/32 = 2,66 times the damage and 32 atk to 64 atk yielded 204 / 85 = 2,4 times the damage.

Let's see what happens if we use the default formula instead.

16 atk < 16 def = 32
32 atk < 16 def = 96
64 atk < 16 def = 224

Here 16 atk to 32 atk yields 96 / 32 = 3 times the damage and 32 atk to 64 atk yields 224 / 96 = 2,33 times the damage.

Those results are rather similar.

If attack and defense are equal, both formulas yield the same result. However, if you then change either one of those, with my formula the damage will be closer to what you get with equal attack and defense than it will with the default Ace formula.

Contrary to what the attack squared part may indicate, my formula does not yield more extreme results than the default one. In fact, I designed it for the opposite purpose, to yield less extreme results. It's just that the attack squared part may look scary if you don't realize what having attack also placed in the divisor does.

"b.mhp * 3 / 10" will do it.

But why do you request something and then say it's as a problem? If you want a healing spell to be dependent on a caster's attribute, then you can't also want the spell to always heal X% HP.

I have not claimed that we need to make a pessimistic assumption about all games, I addressed the fact that this assumption is often done and offered my thoughts on why that is. However, our discussion has indeed not been very productive.

Anyway, it's hard for me to tell how my "broken core" should be fixed since it's a very broad topic and there is no single right way. However, here's a process that I think is basic, useful and still skipped by a majority:

When you design a skill (or include a pre-made default skill), check if a situation where the player would want to use the skill actually happens in your game, and that often enough to warrant the skill's inclusion. Do not think "skill X buffs status A, so it's useful when you want to buff status A", make sure your battles generates situations where buffing status A is worth spending an action that you could have used for something else, like dealing damage.

Let's use a sleep spell as example. There are various ways you can handle it.

You could design enemies that justify using the standard sleep spell. The enemy has to do something threatening enough so that the player is interested in stopping it from taking actions. The enemy also has to be decently durable, killing an enemy also stops it from taking actions, so putting it to sleep is only useful if it's considerable faster than killing it. The sleep spell must also be reliable.

You can alter the skill, often by granting the skill an offensive purpose. You could reason that if an enemy is asleep, it's not moving, so someone attacking it can easily aim for a weak point and thus deals double damage or always scores a critical hit. The player loosed damage output by casting a sleep spell instead of attacking, but if an asleep enemy takes double damage, the player will be able to recover the lost damage output.

If you can't/don't want to do what it takes to make the sleep spell useful, axe it. There's no point for it to exist then.

Go trough this process for every skill. Do not just think "this character has status effects/buffs" and then hand that character a series of status effects/buffs. I'm positive this is more often than not what the creator did if a character has say a poison, blind, silence, sleep, paralysis and charm skill, 4+ buff skills or other notable series of themed skills. However, doing so is a fail-safe way of rendering a large percent of the skills useless. Even if you give a character such a series of skills, examine every single skill individually.