So, in my (single player) RPG, there is one stat that represents health, fatigue, and mana. We can just call it energy here. Every time the character dodges a hit, the stat goes down, every time a spell is cast, it goes down, an attack made, it goes down, etc etc etc. So, when the character's energy runs out, the character passes out, aka, goes unconscious. At first I was thinking this would be a situation where the the screen goes dark and the character either dies from being attack while knocked out, or wakes up if it is determined that nothing will attack him. I just realized though that this is a great opportunity for a little minigame where maybe the character has some sort of out of body experience and has to defend himself for a minimum time or until all threats have passed when he wakes up. I need some suggestions on what sort of minigame to make this. The character needs to be forced to stay by the body, and needs some alternate way of interacting with the enemies that he fell too.

Ghost interactions: plays like a TD. The body is in the middle, and enemies come from all sides. You can make traps and towers than will hurt/block them, you have to survive X seconds. You could even have it so that your initial fatigue is determined by the amount you did in ghost form: using less ghost powers will start you off with more stamina

Why do you want a minigame here? What is the core mechanic for your game? Is the minigame going to support this core mechanic?

Let's say your combat mechanic is kind of like wow, you press buttons to cast spells, but of course more sophisticated and better, because you're awesome like that and smarter than Blizzard's design team. Why would you distract from this awesome combat by forcing your player to play some completely unrelated minigame so they can respawn? It's just going to be distracting at best, and super annoying at worst.

Well, because you are assuming things that are incorrect at best and foolish at worst. First, my game is single player offline, not a massively multiplayer online game. Second, my game does not revolve around level progression and item acquisition.

Blizzards design team did quite a fine job at achieving their goal of making the game addictive by trapping players in a loop of constant achievements with the promise of more coming soon. That isn't my aim though, and I'm not quite sure why you think I am here to imitate or top Blizzard. In truth, though I quite like their games, none of what I am doing has the least bit to do with their designs.

So, now that I have addressed this issue of you thinking I want to be Blizzard and make the next WoW, I'll take this fairly from the top.

I want a mini game at the point where the player is knocked out, killed or both, because it keeps the player out of combat for a time, which serves as the actual punishment, while giving the player something else fun to do so they don't feel very punished. The idea being that if you are invincible via not dieing, reloading immediately, or re-spawning immediately, then there is no motive to play well or improve your skill in the game. I want the player to want to be good, therefore I have to motivate the player to improve when he fails.

Next, the core mechanic of the game is rather a loaded question because there will be a number of activities that will be fairly constant throughout the game. True combat will probably be the predominant one, but calling it the core mechanic sells short the importance of the others as those other mechanics are not simply there to support the combat. For instance I hope to foster a fair amount of actual role playing through careful control of all the mechanics int eh game such that they do not interfere with aesthetic and role play based chooses about the character. That is in fact a core mechanic, if you like, that the combat in someways will have to submit to. As such, this particular minigame can support the combat, but it can also support the players role play of the character, or any other "core" mechanic I so choose.

Moving on to your assumptions about my systems. First lets say that because most RPGs feature click and cast attacks and spell casting I suppose they most all work "kind of like WoW" but you are also right that mine will be a bit more sophisticated in some ways because, yes, I really am just awesome like that. And I really am smart enough to know how to design something for a particular purpose, such as single player enjoyment over mindless addictive farming to feed an achievement and progression addiction.

I do believe though that I already mentioned good reasons to 'distract' from this 'awesome' combat, namely to force the player to stop and assess his own failure in hopes of the player becoming mindful and not mindless in how he proceeds in a fight.

So, in light of all that, if I want the player to fight with a slightly complex combat system which can do with some practice and even mastery, I might want the player to stop when he fails and take a breather from it to assess what happened. Forcing a timer of some sort makes players get up from the game. Making the player reload or just re-spawning immediately some how leads to no punishment and therefor little motivation to player better. So I think a minigame of some sort to get the player to do something else while not actively removing him from the game might be a good way. The minigame should be related and note wildly different from the combat situation, but fit the change of context. Additionally, if at all possible, it should even help the palyer figure out how t fight more effectively.