Fun and Challenging Bosses, How would you do this in a Turn Based System? Options

[userjosh704]

I hate boss battles that force you to use some strategy you would never in 100 years actually use. It sucks. Example: In FF5, there's a boss whose only weakness is Magic Sword. I don't use MagSwd because I don't like it, all of the sudden I am forced to go grind ABP for an hour so I can get ahead. I never used MagSwd again for the whole game. Don't make that boss! Don't force the player to have to use a strategy that they don't like. If anything, make a boss who can be beaten using more than one strategy, whatever suits a player's play-style.

How about a boss who punishes the players for exploiting it's weakness?

[psychofreak]

I could think of mountains of strategic boss designs for atb, but turn based? That is pretty limited. I supposed a lot of my ideas could still work if the player always moves faster than the boss but that can't always be the case. Well some of the ones from some games I'm going to make when I got time and energy that would definitely still work include:

- A boss with a bulk up mode where both his offense and defense are doubled, though this state only lasts for a few turns(3-5ish) then he goes back to normal. Some strategies that could work here is saving your crowd controls for this occasion when he bulks up.

- Another one is more for a 1v1 boss at a stage of the game when the player doesn't have the resource to prevent sleep. The boss has a spell that can put your player character to sleep and heal spam before attacking you and the damage will wake you. You do however have a poison spell that you can inflict on yourself so the next time sleep is inflicted, the damage from poison will wake your character.

There's more, but I only feel like posting these two.

Anyway, I see you really are putting thought into your boss designs and that's great. Remember not to just inattentively throw roadblocks in front of the player assuming, "Yep! I gave them a challenge!" coughff13cough.

Also, though it's great to have a variety of bosses with unique special abilities that make them a challenge, it's the mechanics of the whole fight you should design well and opposing the boss is the player. Make sure they have a variety of abilities such as skills focusing on DPS, AoE, Stun, Sleep, DoT, buff, debuff, healing etc.

After all, what strategy could the player apply if they don't even have options right? One thing I have against most commercial games for is making pretty much every status effects useless against bosses which doesn't leave too many options for players. Ironically doing so threw out the ones with the most strategic potential.

This post has been edited by psychofreak: Apr 23 2013, 07:45 AM