GREATREDSPIRIT'S PROFILE

holy cowabunga

e: I even saw it earlier because I was subscribed to it! jesus my brain is broke

BT 1 is good, personally don't care for v8 but I can respect it. Also my list is 100% serious and unironic because I want more games to have movement tech like Wild ARMs where I furiously bonk into walls trying to optimize gottagofast.


e: also good Unlimited SaGa battle music: ultimate!

Defend's problems are systemic to RPGs. The problem isn't just an action that is "take half/zero damage" has little value but the circumstances around when and why you would use that action.

The core goal of RPG battles is simple: Do optimal DPS so you can knock gigasatan's HP to zero fastest. A dead enemy has zero damage output, and you win when all enemies are dead. Tanking, defending, and healing exist so you don't die and fail while trying to drain the enemy's heal, and because recovering from death/KO is a huge DPS loss. Defending means that character has reduced/no DPS in most cases so the player needs a reason to take that action from a more optimal one, like facemashing the attack button.

(This is excluding things like mechanics, exploits, or glitches that resolve the battle too. Being able to use an elixir on Lavos Core via a glitch to trigger an HP overflow to instantly kill it is beyond the scope of this post)


The biggest reason to defend IMO is knowledge. Chrono Trigger even has a few cases of it. Why would you defend? Because the enemy is going to use an attack that spells bad times if you don't. However the player has to know that such an attack is coming and prepare for it which is something a lot of older ones simply don't do. Magus phase 2 is simple: Risk Casting a Spell (no damage) then next turn Dark Matter (big AoE damage). Even without the warning ability the player can figure out quickly that every other turn Magus is doing big damage to the party. Being able to learn that the enemy is doing something worth defending for is important towards making an action like defend worthwhile.

There is another problem though: If Dark Matter was balanced to where you have to defend to soak it, how does the player know that the first time they eat it? I can't imagine most players would enjoy going through Magus phase 1, and on the start of phase 2 not knowing Dark Matter was going to wipe them without defending and eating dirt when it hits. It's something that'll have to be taught at some point to the player before the big showdown at the end of Act 2 at the very least.

Some other games have tells or patterns for bosses the player can learn. Lunar 2: Eternal Blue is one example: The bosses have animations they play that tells what action they'll take on their turn the player can watch for. I also want to bring up 7th Saga for it's own take: Enemies would decide who they would attack at the start of a round but wouldn't act until their target takes their turn. This in addition to the player being able to choose who acts first gives the player the knowledge of who is gonna get attacked, although the value of this information is kinda niche, especially in a game like 7th Saga and it's horrible random encounters. MMORPGs are another big one, tanks have to learn the rotation or tells for tank buster abilities to know when to use defensive cooldowns.



Speaking of tanks, being able to direct enemy attacks / tanking helps defending too. This is the point of the tank role, after all what's the point of the weaker but HP tank character if they're just as likely to eat lightning bolts as the rest of the party? The most control the player had for this back in the day was usually party order where the leader of the party was more likely to get attacked than other positions. Personally I found that unreliable (quit sniping my healer DW3! ) but also likely confirmation bias too. Being able to direct attacks towards a certain character means you can focus defensive gear and buffs on them while other characters can focus on their own roles (DPS), plus your tank can make better use of the defend action and not tank your party's DPS. Combine tanking with tank busters which the player knows to defend through can be a way to make defend and tanks relevant.

Nowadays there's a lot more provoke and tanking roles in RPGs but it also leads to the tank/healer/dps trinity roles you see in MMORPGs if you're looking to make your own game different. There's also AoE tanks: They soak all the damage from an AoE ability instead of the party eating it but that can be a lot of damage on the tank and defending (or other mitigation / cheese) is required to survive some attacks else the tank dying and entering a death spiral. There's also the question of gameplay depth added by adding a tank role whose entire purpose in combat is Provoke/Cover->defend->pick nose and receive healing.



A third mechanic to consider is healing throughput. If an enemy attack deals enough damage to warrant a cheap and expendable healing action then the healing action shouldn't have the same result if the target defended or not. For example consider a party member survives with 55% or 5% HP from an enemy attack if they defended or not. If your healer has a heal they can spam that would recover that character to 100% HP no matter what their HP started at then why would you defend at all vs getting some extra DPS in? Potency and availability of healing actions is important to consider too if you can just heal away all that damage you took because you didn't defend.



This isn't a comprehensive list and it's focused on the context of older JRPGs. There's lots of different approaches you can take or take inspiration from. Defend could have other results than just reducing damage for a turn. 7th Saga again increased your attack power for your next attack which could help in overcoming an enemy's armor, although the math usually didn't work out in that favor often. Defend could give effects that last longer than the current combat round. How you have your action economy would also affect the value of defend. Defend doesn't have to take the place of another more universally valuable action like in older games.

I've been playing Divinity Original Sin 2 and one if it's neat innovations is physical and magic armor. It's a buffer on top of your current HP for physical and magic attacks, plus with the bonus that you are immune to physical or magical ailments as long as you have armor for it. With a shield equipped you get an action that's just "Raise Shields" which costs few action points and on a short cooldown (but can be silenced!) that gives a good buffer of physical and magic armor back. It's a nice safe option if you're out/low and want to avoid eating some bad ailments because you ran out of armor.


tl;dr making rpgs is hard

To expand on Darken's solution: We have Hero Higgins who at some point we want to find the EXP to next level on. To do so we make a clone of HH in the database with the exact same EXP curve, we'll call it Clone Higgins. Then when you want to find HH's EXP to their next level you take Clone Higgins and set their level to HH's level+1. RM2k3 will give Clone Higgins the amount of EXP needed to reach that level which you can then assign to a variable. You take Clone Higgin's EXP and subtract Hero Higgin's current EXP and that will give you the EXP HH needs to reach the next level.

Example with numbers!

Hero Higgins is lv10. Our level curve is 10,000 EXP to reach level 10, 14,350 EXP to reach lv11 (not real RM2k3 exp numbers). Hero Higgins has 11,840 EXP right now. We want to find out the EXP remaining:

1) Assign Hero Higgin's current EXP to variable 1. V1 is now 11,840.
2) Set Clone Higgin's level to 11. The safest way is to reduce Clone Higgin's level by 99 then increase it by Hero Higgin's current level. So something like:
3) Assign Clone Higgin's current EXP to variable 2. Since Clone Higgins level was set to lv11 in step 2 his current EXP would be 14,350, the EXP required to reach lv11 with our curve.
4) Subtract V2 by V1. 14,350 - 11,840: 2,510. This is Hero Higgin's EXP needed to reach level 11, available to do what you want with it.

I can throw together a demo project tonight too if it'll help.

I'd suggest looking up the RM2k3 EXP algorithm and implement that in event code. Take a character's level (and if each character has different EXP curve parameters the ID too), calculate the EXP needed to reach character level+1, then subtract their current EXP. It'd be better than the hell of 99 conditional branches. idk the algorithm off the top of my head and my google-fu can't find it but it's hopefully in the help documentation.