SLASH'S PROFILE

author=Craze
Whoever said that 90% of RPGs don't have "pick who gets attacked" in any form:

-All FFs, most prominent in FFI (DQ-style), FFIV (forced rows) and FFXIII (provoke as Protector)
-All DQs (first two slots take brunt of hits, third takes fewer and fourth takes even fewer
-Etrian Odyssey series (forced rows + branching tanks (EO3 is the best))
-Any game with a 2D playing field (wRPGs; Torment, Baldur's Gate, etc. allow positioning - not 2D as in Tales of)

Pretty sure that's at least 10%, especially since everything else is a derivative of these games. =D (Well, reverse derivative in EO's case, but EO2/3 are actually playable (get EO3)).

Yo!

True true. All of the FFs add it in some form (Cover in FF7 was great). although I've only played DW3 so I wouldn't know. I also forgot about "Row" tanking, which has been around since the SNES as well (or earlier) - Obviously RM2k3 had this as well, even if it was poorly explained. I was thinking of stuff like Chrono Trigger, Super Mario RPG and Earthbound.

That being said, a lot of these RPGs have random-based "tanking" - ex. putting someone in the first slot only increases the chance that he is hit - so it boils down to "put big guy in front, swap him out if he gets really low" which is, in my humble opinion, a lackluster mechanic.

Active tanking has so much more potential. If you can guarantee that the next attack is going to land on a certain character with a "Provoke" skill, all of a sudden you have an amazing game dynamic. You can queue up a heal, put him in "counterattack mode", give him some +DEF buffs, or whatever your game may allow, and watch your strategy unfold. Rather than hoping the hit goes where you want it to based on the luck of the dice, you can plan a whole battle strategy with proactive tanking. This is a mechanic MMORPGs like WoW have already embraced to great effect. I'm sure someone will make an RPG with a mechanic like this and it will lead to amazing fun battles.

Unpredictability leads to scary enemy AI ("please please don't attack my 3 HP mage") and non-tank-based targeting should be kept in games (especially with smaller parties) to keep the pressure on the player, but seeing some more active tank possibilities would be great. AOE attacks also help put pressure on the whole party, so it's not just the tank's HP that matters.

(This is going to devolve into a rant about RNG, so I think I'm just gonna make a topic about that)

(Hell, what about a system where every character in the party has the opportunity to use "Taunt" command, but it can only be used once every three turns? Random targeting, but the possibility to save a dying member from one fatal attack)

It's a lot easier to create a single, solid story where the main character has no choices - or has choices that are meaningless and largely don't affect the story. If you've ever played Golden Sun, the game allows you to answer questions like "Will you help me?" but even if you say no, your party will just say, "Of course we will! Isaac, quit being a dick."

With a game like Dragon Age where every choice is meaningful, the story feels less important. I didn't feel nearly as connected with the plot in Dragon Age - part of that was the "go wherever you want first" dealie-o. It's also a HELL of a lot harder to build a sturdy story when your player has the option to dick around in the forest or something instead of going to the castle.

That being said, the project I'm working on right now completely revolves around choice while trying to hold a narrative together and you need quite a few tricks. You can save all your teammates and bring them to the final boss, let them all die and face him alone, seduce different chicks, stop an assassin, take a bribe from the assassin, rough up a businessman, etcetera. I planned the game to be 1-2 hours long so that the results of your choices aren't terribly hard to calculate, but considering at least half the cast can end up dead, there is a lot of variation in the story . I can only imagine the headache Bioware has when they try and pull that crap.

Finish a demo of Abraxas this weekend!
Finish Abraxas by January 31st!
Dick around with lots of GameMaker tutorials til I got that shit straight!
Begin work on an awesome GameMaker game!

author=Orig
A girl bought me Justin Bieber's autobiography. It's a short book needless to say.

dump her immediately
never return her calls

Thanks guys! I figured I'd tool around with the basic tutorials and such for a little while - I'll probably start picking up on schoolwork and things so I won't have time for a full-fledged project anyway, and minigames are fun too.

I definitely plan on picking up Pro, since 25$ is worth it for the features of an engine that could make Spelunky and the like.

But now that you mention it - how difficult is the scripting? I have a lot of experience with languages like Python and Actionscript (and even more with Java/PHP). Is the GM language similar to those?