The anti-mash Options

[ZarroTsu]

Remove the 'attack' command completely.

Instead, characters start with, and learn, a much larger number of skills than normal.

MP regeneration is optional.


EDIT: This might need to be moved to "Design Critique". Although I fail to see the difference between these two forums.

This post has been edited by ZarroTsu: Nov 4 2012, 07:18 AM

[LockeZ]

O...kay, you very briefly described a general archetype of character skillset design

Did you... have anything you wanted to say about it? Or wanted to ask for opinions about? Or was this just an imperative command to all users?

[Shaddow]

This actually doesn't seem like too bad of an idea, at least in theory, it would require a lot more skill balance, but could give a more skillful feeling for battles. It kind of makes me think of monster raising games like Monster Rancher or Pokemon, as they do not have just an 'attack' but everything is skills.

[Ratty524]

... Okay? What solution do you propose for the fact that the player will be lacking of a costless skill that can be used in effort to save up your mana-costing skills?

For me, the problem isn't the attack button itself. If I find that all I need to do is mash attack to defeat an enemy, it means that the enemy itself isn't posing enough of a threat to warrent the use of skills. So the solution, as I propose, is to make enemies smarter. Why not, from the beginning of the game, create enemies that are so high in defense that spamming attack would be an impractical method to kill them? In turn, you might want to create skills that have a low mana cost so that it will encourage the player to switch between making basic attacks and skilling a lot more.

[LockeZ]

... Okay? What solution do you propose for the fact that the player will be lacking of a costless skill that can be used in effort to save up your mana-costing skills?

No one suggested making every skill cost an unreplenishable resource. That's POSSIBLE, of course, but it would probably require you to severely limit the length of your dungeons, or even design the entire game around the idea of fighting until you run out of breath. But there are like a billion ways to do this without encountering this problem, with or without using mana:
- Give the player a variety of free skills that aren't Attack
- Give each character an MP recovery skill
- Create some skills which increase MP while other ones cost MP
- Recover MP gradually each round, or each battle
- Allow the player to recover MP at specific points in dungeons, possibly making each point usable one time only
- Use some other resource instead of MP in your game, such as energy, rage, limit, etc., which recovers on its own by a different method
- Include lots of recovery items, or even attack items, forcing the player to use them if he wants to keep fighting beyond his MP limit
- Fully heal the player after every battle

For me, the problem isn't the attack button itself. If I find that all I need to do is mash attack to defeat an enemy, it means that the enemy itself isn't posing enough of a threat to warrent the use of skills. So the solution, as I propose, is to make enemies smarter. Why not, from the beginning of the game, create enemies that are so high in defense that spamming attack would be an impractical method to kill them? In turn, you might want to create skills that have a low mana cost so that it will encourage the player to switch between making basic attacks and skilling a lot more.

Making enemies take a billion hits isn't a good solution. That doesn't accomplish anything. Making them smarter can help with this, and is always a good idea to do in any case regardless... but if you have a game that allows the player to infinitely grind exp, then at some point he's going to become strong enough that the battles aren't interesting any more. But yeah - if the player can win without thinking, then the player shouldn't be fighting that enemy. If he is fighting it, then either you're giving him enemies that are too easy, or he's stronger than he's supposed to be.

Let's be clear, though: "Attack" is just another physical skill. The only thing that makes it different from any other physical skill is the fact that it has its own spot in the battle command menu. It also happens to be kind of boring. But if a lot of your other skills are equally boring, then getting rid of it isn't inherently helpful. It can still make a slightly more interesting dynamic if you create a resource-conservation game, though.

This post has been edited by LockeZ: Nov 5 2012, 08:44 AM

[ZarroTsu]

Personally, if it was NPC anti-mashing you wanted, I'd go so far as to make every random encounter an event-handled situation wherein the enemy troop actually used its individual advantages to a tactical advantage. Two goblin mages and a fighter for example, straight up force one mage to cast sleep first, another mage to buff the fighter depending on the result, and the fighter defends, charges, attacks, or uses another skill depending on the previous two actions by its party.

But that's a different topic altogether.

[LockeZ]

Enemies don't really have to act the way the player would act in order to create a tactical challenge for the player. They just have to act in a way that the player can counter. Your goal should be to create battles with specific player tactics, not with specific enemy tactics. After all, it's not the enemies that need to have fun playing the game.

If the player's optimal tactical counter for 75% of enemy strategies is to use the same skill over and over, that's when you have a problem. Most often, that skill is your normal attack, but I've played games where you just cast Firestorm or Spincut or whatever every single round, and it's not any more fun. You have to heal MP every ten or fifteen battles, and the spell animation takes longer, but otherwise the battles are still just as boring as Suikoden battles.

[Clord]

This is just simplistic example but.

You and enemy gets three different basic attacks, which are shared between enemy and the player.

Fast Attack / Quick Attack
Normal Attack
Slow Attack / Charged Attack

Quick Attack is executed immediately and does bonus damage if enemy is using Charged Attack.

Normal Attack can counter Quick Attack and cause counter damage.

Charged Attack can counter Normal Attack and can cause counter damage too.

Each turn there could be for example have phase where you and the enemy can apply various buffs via various items and abilities.

This post has been edited by Clord: Nov 6 2012, 03:54 AM

[amerk]

I still think the original idea behind Eden Legacy handled it best. Unfortunately it was changed because too many people disliked the concept, but the idea was:

Instead of an attack option, you had skills. Each level up, you were given an option of 2 possible skills. Generally, the first skill offered was weaker, but had a more definite hit ratio, whereas the second skill was stronger, but had a high miss rate.

Instead of MP, you had energy. Each time you leveled up, the amount of energy grew. Each skill took off so much energy when used, and if you ran out of energy, you were required to spend one round either using an item or Defending in order to replenish the energy.

This made it so that you had to think carefully about which skill to use, especially if you wanted to end the fight right away. In spite of whatever flaws the game may have, I've yet to see this idea implemented in any other game.

[Ratty524]

Making enemies take a billion hits isn't a good solution. That doesn't accomplish anything. Making them smarter can help with this, and is always a good idea to do in any case regardless... but if you have a game that allows the player to infinitely grind exp, then at some point he's going to become strong enough that the battles aren't interesting any more. But yeah - if the player can win without thinking, then the player shouldn't be fighting that enemy. If he is fighting it, then either you're giving him enemies that are too easy, or he's stronger than he's supposed to be.

I was throwing out the billion hit idea just as a suggestion to alleviate the button mash fest. The goal behind it was to tell the player right off the bat that he/she needs to do more than hit "Attack" to win. But aside from that, have you played Earthbound/Mother 2? The way encounters were handled were pretty nicely done in that game, in the sense that you can just instantly kill off weaker enemies in the overworld so that you don't need to waste time fighting a brainless, easy battle. It was part of what made that game fun and challenging.

Let's be clear, though: "Attack" is just another physical skill. The only thing that makes it different from any other physical skill is the fact that it has its own spot in the battle command menu. It also happens to be kind of boring. But if a lot of your other skills are equally boring, then getting rid of it isn't inherently helpful. It can still make a slightly more interesting dynamic if you create a resource-conservation game, though.

From my own interpretation, the purpose of "Attack" is to conserve the use of spells to begin with, and is sort of a default action to take when you cannot afford to use spells. In that regard, however, there should be more of a dynamic with its use. I believe the recent Dragon Quest games actually did something where if if your character is holding a particular item and uses the "Attack" command, they get refunded health/mana to use spells again. Something like that allows for strategic play.

[LockeZ]

I have come to actually really hate the Earthbound solution -- because you still get experience and gold. If the game can recognize that the battle is trivial and let you skip it, then that's great and fine, but it shouldn't still reward you for it with level ups, thus making even more battles become trivial. Becoming stronger should ideally require actual gameplay, not grind, and especially not grind where you don't even enter the battle screen but just walk back and forth between rooms and get a never-ending stream of instant, painless, lightning-fast exp.

So, IMO, if a battle is easy enough that you can win without any strategy, it shouldn't grant exp any more.

[bulmabriefs144]

I have the opposite problem, that of magic that is more effective than physical. Of course, it forces you to use up resources, but it also sort of becomes "strongest attack skill wins."

The workaround I made was the occasional enemy with Reflect at start for magic strong parties. And physical strong, we have enemies with the Ghost condition added at start.