LOCKEZ'S PROFILE

I can see some... "lines" that I feel like shouldn't be there.

I feel like you are not lining them up correctly. Which is unsurprising since it is a really confusing tileset.

My battles would certainly have to appear on the map, yes. And I definitely would not do this with a simplistic battle system. I wouldn't do anything with a simplistic battle system, these days.

Once upon a time I had a story to tell, and I mostly used the DBS to tell it. But my focus has vastly shifted in the years since then. Now I want to design a game instead.

If I thought something I did was evil I wouldn't have done it. But other people might think some things I did were evil. They didn't tell me so, though. Or I didn't believe them and subsequently forgot.

According to one of the primary schools of ethics, that action which causes the most human suffering or destroys the most human happiness is most evil, and that action which causes the most human happiness or relieves the most human suffering is most good.

However, it is generally accepted that stealing is evil, despite there being no net change in human suffering. That is to say, selfishness can be considered evil. It could even be considered the definition of evil.

My game's primary villain is someone who has had a tragedy in his past, and is now so obsessed with stopping that tragedy from occuring again and punishing the ones responsible for it that he is willing to let an even greater tragedy - the destruction of all civilization and the slaughter of most of the human race - occur as collateral damage.

Wait, no, that's my game's primary hero. Never mind.

I'm attempting to start on a new RPG. Now, given that my last one took like six or seven years to finish, and this one is going to be much more complicated, this may end up getting scrapped. But my basic premise is something that I think will solve the biggest problem I have with keeping myself interested in commercial RPGs.

In my new game, you will not be asked to do any battle twice.

If you can beat the battle once, that should be proof that you can beat it. There's no need to make you do the same thing over and over. Repetition and grind are the least fun part of RPGs.

Now, yes, I realize that the ability to repeat battles for the sake of increasing your power is considered by a lot of people to actually be the definition of an RPG. But I think this is a bastardization of what makes RPGs fun. Tabletop RPGs don't have this feature - you are presented with whatever obstacles the dungeon master thinks are challenging, and the ability to repeat them is not present. Many Final Fantasy games have this feature but downplay it a lot - you are given the ability to grind, but unlike Dragon Quest games, the game is designed so that if you simply go through each dungeon a single time and fight whatever enemies you come across, you will be more than powerful enough and will experience very little repetition. The Fire Emblem series actually already does exactly what I'm talking about, though Fire Emblem games are tactical RPGs, not traditional RPGs.

However, removing all *possibility* of repetition not only means that each battle will be doable just once, but also that each battle will have to be different, and challenging in different ways. In Fire Emblem there are only 30-40 battles per game, but in a traditional RPG there would have to be hundreds at least. Do you guys think this is feasible? What kind of battle system do you think would best suit this type of gameplay?

My initial thought is to go for a Chrono Trigger type battle system - having enemies that move around and attacks that have geometric areas of effect would certainly help keep things more interesting than a standard battle system would allow. However I'm curious if anyone has any other ideas they think would be particularly well suited for this type of game. Yay for community input!

(Also, I'm not sure this is worth mentioning, but I'm planning on filling every dungeon with puzzles that use Zelda/Lufia 2/Wild Arms style tools, to help accommodate the fact that there will have to be a lot less battles than a normal RPG would have.)

This is great, I don't think my game's custom EXP system or custom encounter system cause lag but I should do this stuff anyway just in case it does on older computers.