SLASH'S PROFILE

Thanks you guys! I've pretty much figured it out.

I just have a common event that checks how much EXP the party has and levels them up accordingly. An EXP variable is added to after every battle, and the common event is called. If they level up, there's a message and fireworks!

When I started making my RPG, a friend said it didn't matter because all RPG battles are easy. You either know the trick to the battle or don't. Once you learn the trick it's a matter of repeating the cycle of turns that works until you win. Although this could be said about ANY game, it inspired me to add a little thought process to my battle system.

It's the typical RM2k3 ATB system, with a few distinct changes:
1) You start every battle off with full HP/MP. No longer is the game resource-bound, and this allows me to make each battle challenging and possibly deadly.
2) MP starts off at 100, and abilities use anywhere from 10-100 MP. A character's MP recovers a little bit whenever anyone takes a turn, and recovers a lot after one of your turns. This encourages people to stop hoarding MP for boss battles, and skills are used with less hesitation. Some discipline is still necessary though, because you never know when you need to heal.
3) Each character can only use one item every three turns. Items are very powerful.
4) Every time you take an action, you gain some "Hot Blood" which boosts a stat or gives you other power-ups. The more Hot Blood, the more power. When it's full, you can use a "Deathblow" doing critical damage to an enemy, but your Hot Blood drops to 0.

I've made regualr enemies hit hard and fast. I balance stronger enemies who do good damage with weak enemies who do amazing damage.

My bosses are flavorful with heavy scripting. My first boss (pretty easy) uses big attacks but then takes triple damage afterwards, so you save up Energy and your Items and blow them all after he gets weak. The bosses also shout taunts, and there is a lot of dialogue between characters and between the two parties. The second boss is a team of two who hit hard. Once you take out one, you should save your Deathblows or other good moves for the second one, because he berserks.

Critique is very appreciated, btw :D

EDIT: Sorry, I realize I ranted more about the system then about the battles. I've started off the game with some fairly easy battles (still challenging but not terribly complex) because the players don't have the abilities that make for more complex battles yet. I think the "energy" system will let me make more interesting fights though.

What if you made each orb affect each character a little differently?

For example, a Mage-Orb turns a Mage character into a super-mage, or a Warrior into a Warrior-Mage, or a Priest into a Priest-Mage.
You could even go so far as to name each class a little differently for each character. A Warrior w/ a Mage orb would become a Battlemage, but a Priest with the same orb would become a Diviner, or something.
So while it would be possible for people to min/max by only equipping orbs to the character that is already that class, they could also mix and match for a more varied party.
This would probably be more work depending on the system you're using and how many characters you have, but it could be done by determining base statistics and skills by both the class and the character itself.

And I just realized that my idea is getting very similar to Golden Sun, heh. Damn, I thought I was being creative.

I just decided to scrap a choose-your-own-party system from my game because some of the characters were unnecessary and frankly, it was too much work for me and too little reward for the player.

To address the first post, if you're giving the player 17 characters, either force the player to use them at least a little bit if you're going to force them to use them at the end, or don't force the player to use them at all. Otherwise, near the end of the game the player's going to have a dozen characters he has no idea what to do with.
On the other hand, if you don't force the player to do anything, he will likely pick his favorite 4 and never, ever switch. Maybe he'll have 1 or 2 backups for when a character leaves.

FFVI did do this very well, by introducing most of the characters early enough, having them constantly join, leave, and split up (switching available chars around), and making dungeons which used all of the characters well.

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As "mainstream" as it may sound, I've started to really like the idea of implementing gimmicks with bosses.

"Gimmicky" sounds bad, but if the boss has a particular strategy, it makes the player use his brain. The boss should be difficult or impossible to defeat without using the strategy, and easy or at least possible to defeat once you've figured out the trick. Even after figuring out his weakness, the boss should still be a challenge.

A boss who eats his minions for health is an awesome idea. To expand on it:
1) You could make it so that the boss has a limited number of minions to eat, and killing them is easier than removing the extra HP from the healing, thus forcing players to stop hitting the boss, use ALL-attacks, etc.
2) The boss could spawn minions once in a while, and eat them after several turns, giving the player time to defeat them.

I've tried to design my game to incorporate more strategy into boss fights. Some ideas I've had are:
1) A boss that uses a super-move, very noticeably (displays a message) that is barely survivable (if your party is at full HP, meaning that you can't constantly eat it, but maybe you can survive one.) You can stop it, however, by stunning the boss when he's going to cast it (in a small but reasonable timeframe).
2) Bosses that are susceptible to poison, blind, sleep, slow, debuffs, etc. The bosses are defeatable without these status effects, but much harder. For example, you could make two powerful side-arms with a lot of HP and a core boss. You only have to defeat the core to win, but you can't ignore the side-arms or they will wreck you. You must keep them slowed, sleeped, or stunned while a couple of characters wail on the boss.

Adding minions or parts to a boss makes the possibilities endless, and you can use them to make bosses that require a lot of thinking on the player's part.