HASVERS'S PROFILE

author=Avee
Anyway, what I'm saying is that I felt like the rules were limiting and I just want to make sure they may not be interpreted that way. Maybe just change that line about "must" and "should" rules.

Thanks for the input, I promise I will think about it. It's not a catastrophic change for sure, but for now I really believe it would do more harm than good if contestants didn't have a strong incentive to push themselves outside the box (if only by trawling the comments for suggestions on how to go around the rules - I mean, the fact that you can circumvent it creatively is actually written right next to the rule! ;) ). It's a thirty years old box we're talking here, so it takes some effort to unbox ourselves.

Edit: On a fundamental level I would just like, as much as possible, to prevent contestants from spending time and effort to produce a battle system that will very probably not fit the spirit of the contest. If that means raising a couple alarm flags with apparently arbitrary rules, I'm fine with it, although I will rethink it if I'm given strong enough arguments.

author=Avee
I disagree with "The only gauge must be HP" because it limits creativity.

Well we've suggested quite a few ways to play around that rule already, but I'm sure you'll invent even better ways to deal with skills. Having skills that unlock at low MP is equivalent to having skills that unlock when others are locked; by not limiting this to MP you can have more than simply one dimension (the high ones vs low ones). That's just one example of why I think that doing away with MP forces you to be more creative, in the end.

As for passive stat bonus, you could do away with stats as well since they are themselves modifiers on skills; there's no difference between doing something that lands you an attack bonus and using a skill that is also an attack buff.

author=CashmereCat
Is sexual healing allowed

It is in fact mandatory. This contest is now officially Marvin Gaye-themed.

author=Ilan14
If there must be only a HP bar, how do you stop your character for using his most powerful skill with no restrictions? There can be a shop in the game? Do I have to implement an unconventional way of learning skills?

In addition to Kyla's explanations, I would say the idea here is to avoid having a most powerful skill. Skills should be ways of doing different things, not the same thing but stronger.

As for what decides when you can use a skill, you're free to choose - you could decide that some skills become available only based on certain status conditions, or certain past actions by the player or by the enemy, or more elaborate ideas. It's like learning (or forgetting) skills during the battle, if you wish, or you could also take inspirations from deck-based games such as Magic the Gathering, where the actions you can do vary in time because of what you have in your hand.

You can even be devious and give some skills a HP cost, in effect reducing HP and MP to the same gauge (but that's been done before by Deltree and others so I'd prefer something new).

The only difference between items and skills is that item consumption is permanent between battles. If you have only one battle or a few, you could forget about items completely and not worry about how to implement them. Since there's no long-term management of gold here, buying items/equipment is not really different from choosing between different characters who already have the corresponding skills and stats.


Marrend> That's a good way to start. It remains quite one-dimensional (i.e. more of the same) but you can improve on that concept. Alternatively, instead of having the enemy pick their action at random and warn the player about it (which means that the only challenge in the battle is about reading message boxes correctly), you could give them rules for which action they pick depending on past history, so that the player knows that defending too much will cause the enemy to switch to attack, and so on. Thus there would be trade-offs: if I defend now, I don't lose HP, but I become more predictable and the enemy can beat me.

Welcome on board to everyone who's joined the contest! I promise no math is required unless you want to ;)

unity> Okay this point about healing seems to be really unclear, so I've updated my wording (may require refreshing the page). I've never said that healing is forbidden or the idea of healing is absolutely bad, I'm only unconvinced by the part where some of your (or your enemy's) previous effort vanishes into thin air and is totally unrecoverable; I'm perfectly fine with people rethinking healing to make it tactically relevant, and I have actually suggested a couple of ways to do so.

My hypothesis is that anything that flat-out cancels out the effect of past actions (instead of delaying it or converting it into something else that can still play a role in the future) will have rather terrible consequences on tactical depth, leading to the simple game of attrition that Kyla described. There are basic mathematical reasons to believe that, and we can discuss them if you're interested. But this is not a dogma, we're here to learn and if your game proves me wrong I will be glad to have corrected my views!


karins_soulkeeper> I would prefer no encryption since it might help us judges play around with the system more easily. I won't make it mandatory though, in case you are using custom resources or so and are afraid of them being stolen. Perhaps a public encrypted version, and a private non-encrypted one sent only to the judges would be a decent compromise.
Feel free to ask anywhere for technical help.


Marrend> I agree with Kyla, it would be cool if you could beef up the system in terms of tactical possibilities, i.e. how your choices right now affect your choices in the future. Instead of skill unlocking, you could perhaps keep the same basic skills but have "effect unlocking", i.e. what they do depends on more than just what the enemy is doing right now. (Imagine the effect of having your adversary defend again and again, or charge like a berserker many times in a row; there should be incremental aspects to it).

CashmereCat> Allow me to doubt it ;) Perhaps the slightly mathy tone of the presentation is rebuking, but at a very basic level it's just about looking at RPGs with innocent eyes, trying to discard habitual thoughts on "what needs to be there".
You can try to simply ask yourself: if I had to represent a fight between two people/groups in a turn-based system, how would I do it? What is really important, when you try to capture the essence of the fight?

(PS: what I'm arguing for is that only two notions are important to recreate the feeling of combat:
- balance of power, represented by HP and damage and fundamentally any gauge or number
- seizing opportunities, represented by the diversity of available skills and how you get them
But perhaps I'm still obtuse and you can do even more essential than that)