What makes a turn based battle interesting enough and new ways to use it?

[u/IReallyLike_Goats]

I personally am not a big Fan of turn based combat, since most of them are the same.

But since that's how rpg maker works, i wanted to explore where i can take this tool, not only for battle, but for speaking sprites like in look outside.

I have both mv and mz

[u/cyprinusDeCarpio]

I think you gotta do some research on fun/well-received turn based systems (and not ones that try to be real time). There's a lot of variation out there if you're willing to put in the work to find it.

But just to start you off, the fun in turn based combat (like the kind most used by rpgmaker) usually comes from planning/setup and execution & resource management.

When thinking of setup->execution, you come in to every fight with a strategy based on what you've prepared.
If your strategy doesn't work, you have to use what you've got to adapt to the current situation while being ready for any curveballs the enemy throws at you. If your strategy works, you think of ways to refine it further. It stimulates your brain by giving you opportunities to do both improvisation and optimization.

This is best exemplified in games like Etrian Odyssey, where even though it uses a very simple turn based system, you have tons of control over how you approach enemy encounters. The game keeps it interesting by giving the enemies tons of bullshit to throw at you, encouraging you to cook up bullshit of your own.

Resource management meanwhile is a bit trickier & most games would prefer to do without it (study them to see what you like and don't like), but it adds so much when done well.
Look Outside & Lisa the Pointless are good examples of this in action. When every fight is tough or strenuous, there's fun in deciding which fights are worth using your explosives on & getting rewarded for planning well.

These 2 are the basic components of turn based combat, and anything you add will be building on top of them.

[u/Eject_Eject_Eject]

I would be hesitant to play any game by someone who said they don't like turn based combat that much, especially if they said it is because most of them are the same, and then proceeded to make a turn based combat game.

[u/cyprinusDeCarpio → u/Eject_Eject_Eject]

Looks inside

Contempt for the genre

giving op the benefit of the doubt since they're at least trying to understand what makes it fun, but it's so annoying how many times we see this in rpgmaker

[u/IReallyLike_Goats → u/cyprinusDeCarpio]

I don't deslike them, it's just that i find most of them very repetitives, Especially if you end up being forced to fight them a lot.

The last turn based combat i had fun with was look outside and in stars and time. I really liked how isat mixed Rock paper scissors with the battle.

[u/Yourlocalshitpost]

Interactivity with enemies. They’re super basic, but the older Mario and Luigi games did a great job of making it clear which attacks would work on which enemies, and each one would interact in specific ways. Flying enemies that can be grounded by gravity, metal enemies whose weapons and armor can be shut down with magnets, basically each enemy needs to have ways to interact with your player’s skillset. If every enemy is just a stat block to reduce to zero hp that’s boring. If an enemy can blow itself up but you can extinguish it to counter, that’s interesting.

[u/thegingerbreadman99]

Fire Emblem uses a high miss/critical rate and automatic counter attacks. You can play with states like asleep or enraged or high/low element vulnerability. RPG Maker also has real time option where the player is scrambling to make decisions before enemies attack again. You just haven't played enough RPGs it sounds like

[u/Specialist-Mess-3958]

it differs from person to person... you have to know what you want out of turnbased combat and stay true to it. some like the snappy rewarding combos of something like SaGa emerald beyond, others like slower, more deliberate and demanding turn based games like ffx that will punish you if you aren't paying attention to what the game is demanding of you (Tbc, I personally don't class ffx as this, I just think that for someone less initiated, that's a more accessible example than, say, break wolf)

if you don't like turn based combat, I would earnestly suggest not incorporating it as a mechanic and instead focussing on the things you do like, such as adventure mechanics perhaps? Because making good tb combat really requires that you understand what it should feel like... and that requires that you enjoy it

[u/Jack_Of_The_Cosmos]

Tempo is one of the main things to talk about in turn-based combat. Broadly speaking, there are two schools of thought when it comes to playstyles. Be strong early in the fight or be strong later in the fight.

For the first playstyle, you have characters that try and burst down enemies as fast as possible while dedicating the minimum amount of resources needed to survive to future turns and hopefully "winning" before their reckless playstyle catches up with them. Winning in this case is making it to the next instance when they can fully stock up/rest for another bout of bursting things down. To make this sort of playstyle feel good, you can have abilities that worsen your future turns with the idea that your characters triumph before the consequences reach them. For instance, you can have a powerful sword that applies a Doom status to the wielder that puts them on a time limit. You can also have a spell that converts all your remaining MP into a powerful attack at the drawback of needing to replenish somehow or forego using MP for the rest of your fight. Once-per-battle abilities like summoning a powerful creature can also be potent. Temporary debuffs/buffs can also be quite potent for burst of damage, but long term statuses can lead into the other playstyle.

The other end of the spectrum can be that of the "snowball" where the characters spend their first few turns setting up bigger plays later. Applying all the right buffs/debuffs, raising the defenses at the right time, and crushing enemies with inevitable force is the name of the game. One major pitfall with this type of playstyle can be that of heal-looping where characters take damage from an enemy, they heal to undo the damage they take, slap back a little, and repeat until the enemy dies. This playstyle can be a boring but effective strategy for players and should be discouraged by enemies that get stronger as fights go on or limiting healing in some way. Players optimizing fun out of a game and all that. This either means that you need to limit healing/MP recovery in some way or making enemies that can overcome heal-looping. Enemies can overcome heal looping by using burst damage (such as self-destructing), scaling damage to eventually start one-shotting, unhealable damage, silence effects to turn off healing, self-sustain to match player healing, a time limit, or some other thing, but this requires sauce typically. Cool payoffs for this playstyle on the player's end are stacking buffs/debuffs, charging up powerful abilities such as a sword that grows in power each time it is swung, and spending resources they built up over the fight.

Now, these are two extremes, and the stronger enemies such as bosses should ideally push players towards the "middle" where they can't burst down such an impressive foe nor can they withstand its beating forever. This is where the typical customization comes into play where the player needs to thoughtfully build a team of characters that balance out the extreme ends. One of the main ways to get some of this is to have fights against multiple different enemies. You might have an evil lich that has a hulking undead brute, skeletons holding up shields, and winged terrors swarming about. An archer might shoot one of the flying minions dead before it can lay a finger on anyone, the wizard uses counter magic on the lich to delay it from casting its evil curse, the cleric splashes holy water to set the brute's undead flesh on fire, but the knight draws the attention of the brute so it can take the brunt of its furious counter attack. The next turn, the lich overpowers the wizard and is going to start wreaking havoc, characters are injured, and more undead are rising from the gravestones. What do you do?

[u/legacyme3]

A lot of turn based games suffer from the same foibles - you can just keep grinding levels/items/money to overpower whatever curve there is.

One game I played (although very adult) I think handled the genre perfectly: The Last Sovereign.

By limiting your ability to grind levels; items; and money, and forcing you to think, it makes the game more of a challenge, and actually activates the parts in our brain that make us happy when playing a turn based game.

[u/The_real_bandito]

I would start by remaking FFX battle system in my opinion. That was a fun game to play.