What are your opinions on how (in an RPG battle) to prevent a player from using the same attack/spell over and over again, without making the player feel restricted? maybe enemies gaining a resistance to the attacks? thanks. Beware... it is the §ign of the Æther...

ammo

You could have a cool down period between each use of that spell or you could have the player have to posess a cirtian amount of power or magic points to use spells and make the spell cost a lot so they could not keep using it with out running out of magic points. Or cirtian enemys would learn your spell if you kept using it on them.

Matthew
WebMaster
www.Matt-Land.com

Repetitive use increases the risk of unpredictable results. Eg using your fireball spell too much might just fluke a firestorm spell ... with you in the middle.


"NPCs will be inherited from the basic Entity class. They will be fully independent, and carry out their own lives oblivious to the world around them ... that is, until you set them on fire ..."
"When you are willing to do that which others are ashamed to do, therein lies an advantage."

Here''s one possible solution. If you have multiple types of mana (say one for each of the 4 elements) and they all regenerate at the same rate, you could then have skills use up different amounts of each mana. For example, a simple firebolt could use fire mana, and a poison spell could use both water and fire mana. This would mean that the player would need to use different kinds of spells to get the most effective use of their mana, without actually forcing them.

Starfall

You could use the D&D way. You have a spell book and then out of that you have spells memorized. Each spell has a circle and you can only memorize so many spells of a given circle based upon your intelligence and level. Nothing prevents them from memorizing all they can of a given spell.

There are two big reasons why people use the same spell over and over. One is real-time and having to cast multiple times in a short period of time. The other is a poor choice in spells such that one or a few spells are useful and the rest are basically useless. A very similar problem is a good selection of spells, but a poor selection of critters to use them on or situations to use them in. If it works then why would they try something else?

In order to prevent the player from using the same attack again and again, you must make the Artificial Inteligence of the Character the player is attacking capable of addapting to the players strategies.

Another option would be to use a tactic-based combat system, as described in one of the threads in the Game Design forum. I cannot remember exactly right now, but it would involve removing some control from the player in combat, and allowing the player to simply select from a list of tactical options or modes. Theoretically allows for incredibly complex combat sequences...

Hope that helps...



Brent Robinson
"Ich bin deinem Vatter!"

I plan on having temporary max hp penalties for certain spells. For example, each time a spell, say Doomsday is cast, the caster loses 15 from their max mp. This can go all the way to 1, until they rest at an inn. This encourages players to uses all spells, not just the best.

I always thought Diablo and Diablo 2 did a fairly good job of it. Namely, they gave the monsters resistances and weaknesses, and strung out spell availability. For instance, pure-damage-wise fireball is the most powerful learnable spell, but laval lords and certain mage types are totally immune, and others are immune to varying degrees. On the flipside, certain lightning casters have a weakness to fire. Zombies and skeletons, and Diablo himself actually, are very vulnerable to holy bolt, but the spell doesn''t even work on creatures that aren''t undead. This pattern of weaknesses and resistances coupled with a large number of creature types makes the player switch quite frequently among the spells they have. The most powerful overall spell in the game, Apocalypse, is only available in staff form. It cannot be memorized (well, unless you cheat). To further complicate things, it''s very difficult to get certain spells until you have enough experience, and in Diablo 2 it''s impossible to get certain spells until you''re a certain level.

-fel