• He/Him/She/Her

Oscillating rapidly between fox twink and wolf tomboy
Support local foxgirls
Profile image by @Raibys


because I saw a post a few weeks or months or w/e ago that I was mostly on board with that was like 'why do you always make your ailments suck!! If I build into ailments, let me use them!' and I was like, yes, yes, go off, you're so right, until I got to the part where they were like 'let me land Death on the boss fight because it would feel so good'

and. like.

I do not want to pretend this person is wrong. If you built for ailment success rate, and successfully landed Petrify on the chapter 7 boss or whatever, who everyone says is really hard and you just got to Skip that motherfucker, it would probably feel really good. You'd probably feel like a genius and like you're so happy that worked

But can we just. talk about that a bit longer than base animal chemical response?

Because like. You're saying you want the ability to perform a move that instantly destroys a major encounter, likely placed here in order to emphasize a point in the story, entirely circumventing whatever challenge or pathos was intended to be here by the developer, just because you want some symmetry between it and regular gameplay. Doesn't that come up on the radar as 'kinda weird'?

And here's the thing, right, if your response is 'well make it something I have to synergize for, make me need to set up the instant-kill', all I'm thinking about is how you're just describing a regular turn-based RPG strategy involving using skills across multiple party members to grant enough force multipliers to defeat a large foe. The only difference is you're applying 'increasing vulnerabilities to a random chance until it eventually works', instead of 'damage to the guy's face until its HP hits zero'.

Lemme be clear for the record that I don't think this person is wrong for wanting such a thing. I don't think this is bad game design, I don't think they should feel bad about their opinions, not at all, and I'm actively not going back to find out their name to cite it because... well for one good fucking luck it's social media in 2024, and for two I really really don't wanna make this sound like some kinda 'Bad Opinion Takedown'.

It just got me thinking, right, because I think that person is in the same boat as a lot of people who are fans of turn-based RPGs as a genre and, like, turned into adults at some point. It is not at all uncommon to get annoyed that poison just doesn't work half the time and turns spent trying are a waste, or if it does work it's Just Bad so why bother, or whatever. This is not uncommon historically, talking about it isn't groundbreaking, and exceptions to the rule like EO or whatever are super noteworthy for it.

To get to my actual thesis though: I think the real shit we need to be thinking about is entirely re-evaluating how we handle status ailments in general.

Like, in the example of Petrify or whatever instant-death equivalent I was harping on before, does anyone actually really get off on like... 'I'm gonna sit here and roll some dice to see if I can fish for an instant-kill on this regular enemy, while my actual regular damage dealers beat it to death with hammers'? Do we actually consider this healthy, or do we just not question it since the days when FF1 made Black Magic 60% instant-death by volume because it was copying the homework of early editions of D&D?

Speaking of, you know what's a real problem in the D&D game design department lately? For some reason (it's almost like D&D isn't good games), they've made it like a million years and 5 and a half plus Advanced editions of the game into their tenure and Monk's signature ability is still Stunning Strike, a move that just... prevents target creature from taking actions, if it works. Like they just don't do anything. It probably won't work but a Monk can just try that for free most of the time and if it does, eventually your GM is just gonna have to tolerate their big story boss guy getting bonked so bad everyone gangs up on him and stunlocks him for the rest of the fight they've been building up in their head for two years.

Or to pull it back to video games specifically, even shit as minor as poison. Basically every game I can think of treats it as either percentage-based damage over time (so the enemy's max HP is what matters, therefore use it on larger targets; thus, useless if bosses and major enemies are immune), or source-based damage over time (the skill inflicting the poison determines its damage and duration, so building into it becomes a necessity. Generally better, but harder to keep track of since it's not consistent; also, might not scale as well against super large bosses, since you Already Applied Your Poison, so 'what else does that character do now', and if the answer is not much they're just kinda sad)

Really what we need to do is actually consider if percent-chance-application as an excuse for effects as powerful as 'skip target's turn in a turn-based game' or 'exile target fucker' is the gameplay we want to expand upon, instead of trying to find new ways to convey the same idea. I've seen games that play around with 'failure to apply results in increased success chance on next attempt', which is... A step in the right direction, maybe? But again, you're flirting with something that isn't actually very far from 'hitting the boss increases the likelihood that the next attack kills it', you've just added extra steps.

To extrapolate a system I like from that, Monster Hunter (I promise I have more than one brain cell) does a thing I think is cool where only the literal biggest motherfuckers in the game are immune to paralysis and sleep, like 'the actual final boss and comparable scope and majesty creatures of which there's probably like 2-3'. Meanwhile, the way status works in every other case, including other types of status on those guys, is just 'one-in-three hits with a melee status weapon will apply their amount of status as Buildup. Buildup decays over time, so aggression is mandatory. At a monster's personal Threshold for that status, it applies to them and causes the status ailment. Then, reset Buildup, increase Threshold by another personalized Resistance value, and start over'. I think that's a cool way for an action game to go about it? I'm pretty sure that's how it works in a lot of things nowadays actually. Dark Souls probably counts as what popularized it, I think that's at least sort of how it works there.

There was an idea I had that was very 'rip up some floorboards and requires a specific kind of engine anyway' that I had recently and liked, where like. What if we had a different use case for Enemy Poison Resistance than just failure chance? You apply your poison, and it Just Works. Why would you fail to poison someone with a poisoned dagger. That'd involve you Missing. That's a mechanic already (better or worse). The resistance determines how much damage it deals, and now instead of that just being 'well this enemy doesn't matter so it always applies, this enemy is too important so it never works', it becomes a mechanic that directly scales to target importance in like... a helpful way. Rats or whatever take 100% of their HP in damage from poison ticks, so you can just slap them with that and then spend your turn doing combat-only sustain options if that's a thing (some games have resource management you can only do in combat, idk), then they fall over before taking their turn. Big important boss man takes some calculated amount roughly meant to keep pace with the DPS you can pump into him for this point of the game, but then you have mechanics designed to increase status vulnerability, which makes them More Potent instead of just More Likely. So if that amount starts at 1%, who cares, do your funny song and dance and start snowballing it until he's taking huge chunks per turn. That strikes me as at least different enough from 'hit him until he stops moving' to be entertaining.

And then things like stun or paralysis or freeze... I dunno, I think that needs to be handled more delicately than people treat it in general, because action economy is literally everything in a turn-based game. Pokemon as a video game played competitively basically broke wide open in gen 4, and people usually point at stealth rocks and they're right to be mad at the Literal Racism Mechanic, but I think not enough people stop and think about just how infinitely important U-Turn and similar moves are, which are literally just 'chip damage, but then also you switch out your active guy afterward'. They do so little damage, but they do two mutually exclusive things at once-- damage and switching-- and so literally everything that can run them does run them because why wouldn't you run them? Don't you like advantage? Don't you like doing more things than your opponent? Isn't that how you win?

So addressing that one is inherently complicated but I think that should just encourage people to really start fucking with the turn-based formula in general just to accommodate healthier versions of ailments that normally just stunlock a dude. Anything with a visible turn order affected by speed where guys can move more than once, like Mega Man X Command Mission or whatever, you could maybe have a stun that moves their next action a fixed amount backwards? Like, it doesn't affect their speed, it moves specifically Their Next Attack Two Actions Back (and hopefully can't be used more than once before they can move again). So it doesn't so much benefit setups that are already lapping the bosses with super high speed as it does slower team comps that need more time before the boss comes in. That could be a cool dynamic. Would do a lot to make me feel like a Slugger, like I just punched that man in the stomach so hard he fucking needs a second to come back together.

In conclusion, uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I don't really know, I just think the common talking point of 'RPG status ailments are bad and developers should just make them good' is more complicated than people give it credit, and I want to encourage people to actually reevaluate systems we've been working under for decades to figure out how we ended up here in the first place. Games have gotten way way better at handling this, but there's still so much unexplored territory, and I think that's what makes this medium cool. You can literally portray the simple concept of 'I got bitten by something I shouldn't have, and now I have venom in me' like a billion ways and honestly none of them are wrong. I don't see enough games with both systems that associate poison with exhaustion/stamina mechanics, that always struck me as a no-brainer. Not like you're at peak performance after getting attacked by a cobra.

Also, hi, I'm sorry about the super rambly nature of this post, I'm sick as fuck rn and this is something I decided would help distract me from that. I will now go chug another bottle of water and probably sleep for ???? hours.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @C-Kiri's post:

I think about stuff like this a lot and ultimately I feel like it just comes down on a game-by-game basis. Some games work really well with powerful status capabilities and others don't (though in general I think they always have more use cases that people give them credit for). Etrian Odyssey does status effects really well, but it can do them well because it has classes entirely dedicated to inflicting ailments and capitalizing on them; plus it has big enemy design that's really focused on being a David vs. Goliath situation, where a boss being locked down for half a fight is fine because when they're not they're rarely more than 2-3 bad turns away from wiping you. Statuses are really powerful, and in hyper-optimized builds landing one is a win condition, but otherwise they're just a part of the larger puzzle.

A thing about the stigma against status effects is that I think they tend to be overly weighed on the idea of "if this doesn't mulch that one boss, why bother investing in it". A lot of RPGs are way more than just the big fights, and when you consider statuses in those contexts then they feel a lot more worthwhile. In something like Dragon Quest, MP is really hard to restore mid-dungeon, and a lot of times it may be better to just put a group of enemies to sleep and beat them down instead of burning all your MP immediately with group-hitting magic. If you see a strong spellcaster, just mute them and that's less to heal up afterwards. Even instant death being able to take down just one or two targets could be someone's best use of their turn (this is why I feel it's more interesting to give status effects and instant death to support characters instead of dedicated attackers). In games like this it's fine if statuses aren't the most effective against bosses because they don't have to be; you wouldn't pop a suite of attack buffs on a random encounter, that doesn't mean you wouldn't still want them eventually, and the reverse should also apply. Of course this is the ideal where the encounters are threatening enough to be worth thinking about strategies like this, but that's a whole different topic.

I could definitely write more thoughts on this down but I'm really tired at the moment and mostly I wanted to comment on the post before I forgot. It's a good post and I like seeing perspectives on this kind of thing.

Yeah I didn't really talk about it so much because brain was hard-fixated on the idea of 'how to make ailments that Can Be symmetrical on boss fights without being too strong or too weak', but I do think it's not Bad Game Design Space to make ailments just. tactics to be employed to conserve resources on smaller enemies. 'Cause yeah, sleeps or mutes as crowd control to mitigate incoming damage matters a lot when you're actively trying to not waste your various bars, that's perfectly valid and feels good. That's fine, and feels good in games where the balance is just right that you feel really good coming out of a fight unscathed. No problems with that, it's all a game-by-game basis, just like you said.

My dumb rambly ass is just stuck on 'in a world where %-chance kill effects that most people don't even use is the norm, do we have to lie down and accept this', in this exact case. There's definitely so much more to talk about, though, and that's why I wanted to make the post and try and see if it makes anyone think, and I'm glad it's working so far, at least

Yeah, status ailments are a difficult question to have a good answer for. The viewpoint I usually end up having involves how little I'll usually care to use them in normal encounters, usually because the actual risk from the encounter is too low and the fight will be finished with minimal resources without them. Because usually in a number of games you have to use MP or TP or whatever to try and apply ailments, and depending on the game that's a precious resource you're managing.

So for me, if a game isn't afraid to have encounters that have some teeth to them it goes a long way to making me care to both try to land sleep and be relieved when it connects.

Thinking about the way you've put it has me wondering from the perspective of, like... in a game where 'ailments are good and strong when they work, and encounters are dangerous because resource management', right. What does the actual purpose of 'rush out the damage super quickly and end the encounter' versus 'apply CC ailments to make things safer before using cheaper attacks with the allotted time' become?

Because at least right now at 3:30 AM while I've still got a fever, that kinda makes it sound like the adjectives that line up are 'fast, inefficient, consistent' versus 'slow, efficient, risky'.

And, like... that's kind of the opposite of how you might want it, right? That kind of mixes things up a little bit. Since in like 95% of RPGs magic usually doesn't miss, hitting things with elemental weaknesses is going to bean down enemies in a predictable amount of turns, making that where the strategy comes in, because that becomes the mathematical constant-- 'if things go wrong, my panic buttons end this encounter in X turns'.
Because the ailments and their success rates, the thing that sounds like the tactical option, is the chaos factor. Yeah, your AoE sleep spell costs less and can work on everything... emphasis on 'can'. You already have to play around the idea that it can fail, on top of deviating from the strategy of Max DPS already just. inherently widening the window of opportunity for failure, by adding turns to a battle.

Obviously things can't be fully weighted to one side, or else you're just gonna never get the opportunity to chunk through encounters with big splashy magic or whatever, or you get the norm for easier RPGs where you ignore ailments because they suck. But I think that might be part of what contributes to them being kind of hit or miss, right...? It ends up being the wrong combination of benefits and detriments-- because you would only take slow, efficient risks if you evaluated the chance for failure as being worth it for whatever gains (saving resources, tolerating hard enemies, etc), compared to taking the safe option that you can count on as reliable and just mashing big button that removes the problem faster so they have less chance to do the thing you hate.

Maybe that's part of why the best representation of player-ailments in RPGs I can think of are like... mostly dungeon crawlers? Games where coming up for air to restore MP being rare is the entire mechanic, and not just a question of 'god do I really want to go back to the Pokemon Center/inn/clinic/whatever or can I just tough it out'.

I'm sure there's gotta be more innovative things we can do to tip the scales here, with regards to 'what actually defines the options for strategy available to me', but I'm not actually creative enough for that, at least not right now when my dumb ass should be asleep. Sorry for the big fuckoff reply but you got me navel-gazing again.

This got me thinking about how Cassette Beasts handles status effects- they make up the core of strategy there, with the type chart being about statuses, modifiers for moves including status effects, most bosses themselves using statuses in their strategies, etc. And the game uses per-fight AP to fuel moves; no need to save energy for harder fights, because you always start with 2 out of 10 points to power any action. Resource management is still there- your health and items are persistant- but your actual attack power never runs out longterm.

This does make the game more even in statuses- only a few monsters are immune to statuses, and if it's not an Archangel, you can get those same immunities and reduced chances. And ways to negate statuses or prevent them- ex calling an enemy attack, or moves like Fair Fight, Taunt, or New Leaf, are great, even negating some bosses plans outright. On the other hand, though, there's a lot of busted strategies you can make- things like spamming the high-power Headshot or Last Rites by making the only other moves a monster knows repeated copies of Random Starter, or combining Sticky Spray, added in an update, with Hypnosis to force enemies to sleep, negating how Hypnosis only works half the time while still letting you also have actual attacks.

Idk where to really go with this; I like the game partially because of the wide toolbox it offers, between the many statuses and bootleg monsters letting you get atypical types and movepools . But it's also one that added a passive move, Machine's Curse, in the DLC specifically to counter all the cheese strategies using starter effects, so it's definitely not a perfect solution to how to make status moves viable in big fights without making them overkill in normal ones.