VERSALIA'S PROFILE

WHAT GAMES NEED NOW MORE THAN EVER IS LIGHT EFFECTS.
DON'T GIVE IN TO THE DARKNESS

Let's talk about Information as Power, which I haven't seen mentioned yet. Information can be one of the most valuable commodities in an entire game. When a player accidentally wanders into an extremely high-level area and dies rather abruptly (which has happened to all of us at some point) they learn several lessons. One of them is obviously "this area is too dangerous for me right now!" but they also get context clues about why, even if it's metaknowledge or genre awareness ("this evil castle has an ornate and spooky-looking tileset, it must be endgamey"). Information control is something all game designers have to think about, whether it's how detailed to make your explanations of mechanics, when to introduce those explanations, and how to inform the player using contextual clues and feedback (like the above scenario).


Pillars of Eternity has an excellent Bestiary progression where many of the entries are ????'d out, and fill in slowly over time, as each kill of a certain monster adds EXP to that monster's bestiary entry until it is complete. If you go out of your way to make sure you mop up all the kobolds in the nest, your reward is a completed bestiary entry, which means a ton of very specific data at your disposal for any time you run into a Kobold again in the future. If you don't care to make sure you get every single one, it'll probably get finished eventually anyway, and you still get a bunch of useful information revealed - just not as much. I don't care if I get zero EXP for my characters for the entire endeavor if I'm now armed with enough info to kill the Kobold King a whole lot easier!

In Romancing SaGa, you don't have a lot of information about how the passive skill/stat progressions work until you get it through gameplay feedback (watching it happen and recognizing patterns). In fact, SaGa games are well-known as some of the most opaque and arcane systems beneath the hood; imagine how nice it would be if they leveraged information as more of a reward commodity! Your reward to the player for reaching The New Town could be a fortune teller who gives you hints about a particular character's stat growths or preferred weapons, so that you can anticipate this without having already played the game before or looking it up on gamefaqs.

What I am saying is that game designers should push hard to think about why your mind goes right for "EXP POINTS" or "BIG SWORD" when you think of power progression, and smash that box (in the weak spot you revealed from info rewards). KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

I've done a lot of effects with "sharing" and conditional healing. FOR EXAMPLE --

-Aisling gains the ability "Cold Steel" which converts her weapon to deal Water damage
-Aisling also gains the ability "Lifespring" which heals her whenever she deals Water damage
-Rylan gains the ability "Overgrow" which is a buff that heals all allies for 50% as much whenever the recipient is healed
-Rylan uses Overgrow on Aisling, Aisling uses Cold Steel and Lifespring, so whenever Aisling attacks she gains 50 HP and all allies get healed for 25

You don't necessarily need more resources to make Healing interacting and interesting. If you purposely design skills to be able to do some form of conditional recovery or enhance each others' form of recovery you immediately add several layers of complexity. Maybe Aisling has super high armor so she doesn't actually need to get healed very often, so you want to combine Overgrow with the party member who can Regenerate themselves instead? It doesn't need to be a complex number of actions to create a complex thought process behind which actions in which order.

Guild Wars Mesmers had particularly interesting support and healing mechanics (and Guild Wars as a whole had a refreshing take on heals in general but I degress). EXAMPLE:

AUSPICIOUS INCANTATION - Enchantment Spell. Your next spell restores you for 200% of its MP cost. That spell gets +5 cooldown.

CHANNELING - Enchantment Spell. You gain 1 MP for every enemy in the area when casting spells (OR! you can flip this and make it 1 MP for every enemy hit by your spells - it's a form of MP Efficiency based on the number of enemies you can hit with a single ability; MP Efficiency and HP Damage Prevention are very valid 'healing' tools!)

DRAIN ENCHANTMENT - Destroys one of the target's buffs and heals you for HP and MP

ENERGY TAP - Deals 7 MP damage, you gain 2 MP per point of damage dealt
ETHER FEAST - Deals 3 MP damage, you gain 50 HP per point of damage dealt

MANTRA OF LIGHTNING - Stance (Long-duration self-buff) - +50% Lightning Resistance and you regain 2 MP when being hit with lightning damage


There are a ton of very simple tricks like the Mesmer support spells that you can layer together for increasingly interesting effect~

it's become the new corfaisus ship

let's not make "several people discussing differing opinions" a thing. it's not a thing it's rational discourse. i'm probably to blame for being long-winded but i don't like having my statements taken out of context or wildly misinterpreted

in other news, you guys maptools is great


Doing a """ tabletop """ game makes for a truly challenging and rewarding creative environment; every map, sprite, dungeon and enemy has to stand solely on its own merit, and you get to make changes and adjustments on the fly as you experience the game right along with the players. Everybody should do it once

author=BizarreMonkey

You should work on your composition; that "fuckin dumbasses" seems really out of place, because that's a rather stilted and composed bit of dialogue for a pirate dog. Crass it up a bit. "Y'ever hear someone say 'i juss got this new thingee here, it were a steal'? I steal it right from 'em and tell 'em 'NOW it's a steal!' Yarr harr harr"

okay don't say 'yarr harr harr' that's bad, but you get my point