LOCKEZ'S PROFILE

LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
The Unofficial Squaresoft MUD is a free online game based on the worlds and combat systems of your favorite Squaresoft games. UOSSMUD includes job trees from FFT and FF5, advanced classes from multiple other Square games, and worlds based extremely accurately upon Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, and Final Fantasies 5, 6, and 7. Travel through the original worlds and experience events that mirror those of the original games in an online, multiplayer format.

If a large, highly customized MUD, now over 10 years old and still being expanded, with a job system and worlds based on some of the most popular console RPGs seems interesting to you, feel free to log on and check it out. Visit uossmud.sandwich.net for information about logging on.
Born Under the Rain
Why does the jackal run from the rain?

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Born Under the Rain Review

Awesome, it's fun to see a new review on RMN several years after the game was released.

sorry everyone. I ignore the dozens of emails I get daily about ad solicitation for rpgmaker.net

Wait, are they offering to pay you actual money? Or is it just like "For every person who clicks on the ad on your site and then goes on to actually buy our product and continues their subscription for at least two years, we'll increase your site ranking on our advertisement master list and send your contact info to additional advertisers"?

How to fix thief

I don't think it'll surprise anyone that the dude who named himself after Locke from FF6 actually likes how Steal works in traditional Final Fantasy games. I like the idea of sacrificing your turns now and taking a single weaker character in order to gain long-term benefits and get better equipment to increase the strength of the rest of your party. I feel like that's a reasonable trade-off. You just have to get the ratio right, so that the amount of power you're giving up and the amount of time you're spending feels mostly OK compared to the amount of power you're getting.

I think telling players what they can steal and removing all of the randomness are bad solutions in a traditional RPG. Players who do and don't take a thief with them both have to feel like their choice is reasonable. They shouldn't know it was the right or wrong choice. Too much information kind of ruins it honestly.

Treasure chests in battle that give nothing if you don't steal from them before the battle ends are a really good solution though, if you don't want the player to know WHAT they can steal but do want them to know WHEN they should steal. This would go a long way towards freeing up the thief to actually fight enemies the rest of the time.

Just limiting the Steal ability to once per battle would accomplish a similar goal, though.

I will also share an alternate stealing system that I used in the Unofficial Squaresoft MUD, which is an open-world RPG. The open world aspect combined with the huge number of enemies made a traditional Final Fantasy style Steal ability not work, so instead I put a thieves' guild in the central town (actually it's Tantalus from FF9) that sends the player on missions. These missions are all theft-related but usually only in a thematic way. Each mission the player completes earns them one "lead", which unlocks the ability to steal a specific piece of powerful equipment from a specific species of monster. Then the player has to hunt down that monster and use the "Steal Equipment" ability on it, which might take 20 or 30 tries to work, making the monster slightly stronger each time it fails. Because it's basically an MMORPG, you can only do one mission every 60 hours and can only steal one piece of equipment every 20 hours, but in a single-player open world game I think it would be better to let the player do the missions one after another and make each piece of equipment stealable only once.

Aside from that equipment-stealing system, the rest of the Thief class in the Unofficial Squaresoft MUD is mostly based around stealing combat items and then using them. The game only lets you hold one combat item at a time, and which one you get from an enemy is random but is weighted based on the enemy's creature type. The class also gets a few other powerful abilities on cooldowns as you gain levels, such as a Pilfer MP ability that steals MP and a Free Energy ability that deals damage based on how much MP you stole with Pilfer MP, meaning that you can't really use it until you've expended your MP with something like white magic spells. And also Steal Coins, which steals money once per minute based on how much money the monster would drop when killed, and Coin Toss, which tosses the money you just stole for massive damage, expending it. And Thievery, which just deals physical damage based on how many times you've use any steal skill since the last time you used Thievery, to a maximum of about 20.

Awful haikus

Where is admin please?
Rpgmaker.net
It important thank.


Message Liberty.
Or if it's a business thing,
massage Kentona.

Awful haikus

Don't post amogus
Ding ding ding ding ding ding ding
That's a bit sussy

At what point do you declare your project "finished"?

There are no finished games, only abandoned games.

Born Under the Rain: Parts 16 (Hard)

CONGRATULATION! A winner is you!

Board Game Stages & Levels?

Man, I hated the dumb board game minigame in Disgaea 5. It was sort of like Mario Party except the minigames were replaced by a math formula and dice roll that made whoever was higher level usually win.

Monster Design - Mirror Maniac

"Only one opponent is real and there's some kind of clue" is one of those gaming tropes that works vastly better in real-time combat than in turn-based combat. If you have a minute and a half to sit there and see the clue then it kinda loses all tension.

I've tried to make similar mirror/clone bosses in turn-based RPGs and never found a really satisfying way to do it. You can kinda get away with making only the real one (or only the fake ones) counterattack, if they don't shuffle their position too often. Making the fake ones reflect attacks feels like a nice nod to the "mirror" thing, and also makes AOE attacks feel like a trade-off - you are guaranteed to identify and hurt the real target, but at the cost of taking a bunch of damage yourself.

But it still doesn't really feel satisfying to me on its own. I'm sure it would be fine if it were just one small piece of a boss puzzle, and the boss also had other abilities that played into the mirror image aspect. Give the player various other reasons to worry about when to use AOE attacks and when to do something else instead of attacking.

Let's Play: Skinker's Quest - Parts 01 & 02

I'm three minutes into the first video and you've said "Well, now." 6 times.

Well, now, thanks for the playthrough videos!