Status Ailment Ideas

[TheInquisitor]

I've had a couple of ideas for status ailments recently. Just thinking about how one could spice up the traditional RPG battles without drastically changing the formula. The two I've most recently come up with are nothing ground breaking, but just put an extra spin on some of the standard RPG old favourites. Both of these skills would be required to work in an active battle system and not a turn based system.

1) First up is some new life breathed into Poison. Poison in RPGs at the moment is rubbish. You get it, take a pitiful amount of damage and then use an "antidote" that can be bought for peanuts. Surely this can be made far more sinister. It can; I call it Virus! I would consider this to be one of the worst, most dangerous ailments in a game. It would really challenge a gamer in a boss fight, especially the first time around as you might not know what to expect, or an NPC might give you a helpful warning. Maybe even the foe would provide a "helpful", insincere warning. The status ailment would work best when you have 4 people in your party and a single enemy like a boss.

Virus would be incurable. No antidotes would stop it and not even a legendary "Ribbon" or its equivalent would be able to protect our heroes. How I conceive it is that after being attacked, you have a 20 second timer over your character's head. This character would then have 10 seconds. After 10 seconds the virus would spread to another member of the team, who would then themselves have 10 seconds. By 20 seconds the infected character would die, requiring revival (Phoenix down). When they're revived, the virus is gone. If you revive a character, but another one has already been infected, they can again infect that revived party member and the devastating cycle continues. There would be only three ways survive Virus:
a) Kill off your infected party member as early as possible
b) Tactically wait until only one character is alive and near death and then revive another party member at the last minute.
c) Beat the enemy in time!

So that's the first. I think that puts a nice new spin on boring old poison and could make for a genuinely extremely challenging status ailment.



2) Second one is an adaption of Confuse. Confuse is pretty stale these days, you just start attacking targets at random. So I have designed Hallucigen. Hallucigen won't make you attack the wrong person, but it will throw you battle plans into disarray. Say you have four characters, John, Ringo, Paul and Sausages all with a unique look and unique attack skills. Say, for example, that one does healing magic, another does attacking magic, one does physical attacks and the last does items. With Hallicigen two things would happen:
a) The order of the party would get randomly mixed up, so instead of John, Ringo, Paul and Sausages on the battle screen from top the bottom it could be Ringo, Sausages, Paul and John or any other order. This would disorientate the gamer as their comfort with the usual order would throw them off.
b) To further befuddle the player, not only would the order change but so would their appearance. The battle sprite for Ringo would change to Sausages, maybe, or Paul to John. This would add extra confusion to the jumbled order of the players. The gamer himself would initially be confused that each individual character seemingly has different skills, so if you're desperately needing to use healing magic, it may come as a surprise that the wrong character has the abilities to do so.

The solution to this ailment would be simple - you'd just have to wait off the ill effects after a few turns. Then you'd return to normal. This ailment wouldn't do you any damage but its dangers would be that it would slow down your attacking play and perhaps leave your battle strategy disorganised!

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Do you think these ideas for adapted status ailments would be good in a game?

If you want to contribute to this topic, feel free to do so by perhaps offering more to my ideas or even contributing your own. The more you think outside the box, the better. However, don't delve too far into changing the dynamics to a battle system. That should be reserved for an entirely new topic as here I only want to look at status ailments and how they can be developed further.

 

[bacon]

Virus is a neat idea but it could get really tedious without anything to cure it, mainly because you couldnt survive from an attack like that without a lot of reviving. And usually reviving items cost a lot of money. Even magic wise, not every member of the party has that spell. Since you cannot really get rid unless by killing all members that have it, this could be really difficult and seems more luck based than strategy based if you get rid of it. Of course, I dont know how much this status effect will be used and what are the chances it spreads nor the rate as well. Im just saying in a 20 second slot, this would seem almost impossible.

 

[Jason]

Yeah, I'd replace the 20 seconds with like, 5 turns, if it counts down to 2, then another person will get the virus, and 0 = death etc.

It'd definitely make it more "fixable", y'know, getting rid of it, since you'll have a higher chance of killing your party member(s) off to stop it, but at the same time, still requires a little strategic thinking, do you kill him now, or let him spread the virus and try to kill the boss before all the turns are up...

 

[TheInquisitor]

Well of course all time limits and infection rate would be subject to trial testing to get that right balance. The 10 and 20 second limits were simply plucked out of the air as easy numbers to remember. It would be a tedious ailment if it came along often, which is why I think I'd personally leave it for bosses or one particularly nasty boss in a game.

 

[bacon]

If I may make a suggestion. Instead of instantly killing you, you could make it more dynamic as well. One example would be to have a party member's HP rapidly decrease until death. This could open up new options such as whether or not you cure. Another example would be that every lets say ten seconds, a new effect occurs. After the first 10 seconds, the users stats are cut. After 20 seconds, the user cannot attack and is limited to items. After 30 seconds, the user is dead. Of course this is probably too dynamic, but I prefer a little too dynamic over shallow.

Another status effect that was used, I cant remember what game, was something called disease. It was an interesting status effect that affected your hp maximum. Every time you were hit, you HP maximum would go down by the damage inflicted, and the only way to stop this is to cure it. So lets say a character is killed and you revive the player. Since the disease stays on even after death, the maximum HP would be one and you would have a tough time curing the disease without the character dying again. It was an interesting status effect that could of been taken further.

 

[Atoa]

An good variant for poison would be an effect that gradually increase effectiveness (also starting at an significant value).
Let's say something tha takes out 15% of the hp on the first turn, and increase by 5% every turn.
this would make totally necessary to cure it as soon as possible.

Another idea: an curse, that randoly causes effects or damage over time. it would be a gamble to leave it be. So the player would need to cure the curse and the other stats.

 

[EnderX]

Binary, Catalytic, Metabolic, or (if you intend to be seriously vicious to the player) Anaphylactic variants would be my preferred method.

Binary Example:
Condition X reduces attack slightly. Condition Y reduces defense slightly. Under normal circumstances, any given enemy can only inflict one of these two effects. Neither condition, by itself, is a real threat - the player, after having seen them for a while, probably won't bother to heal them.
Then you run across something that uses both of them, or an enemy party with members that can use both. And you discover that these individually weak effects react to each other - a single character getting hit with Condition X and Condition Y creates a new Condition XY, where both stats plummet to zero.

Catalytic is a modified binary, where one effect is a real threat in its own right, and the other one enhances the effect of the damaging one - turning a normal 'poision' into the variant Atoa mentioned, for example.

Metabolic is a stunt I've played around with in the past - a Catalytic condition where the 'harmless' variant is, in fact, a normally helpful condition - such as having Atoa's superpoison example trigger from a normal poison effect when the victim is put into Haste or Protect. By contrast, taking a separate negative condition (putting the victim in 'Slow', for example) weakens the normal effect of the primary condition.

Anaphylactic is, as noted, for the insanely vicious - it's a binary condition (or any of the above types, really) where the 'Condition XY' effect is, invariably, getting knocked to 0HP. Or, in other words, 'Mute' (can't use skills) + 'Blind' (lowered accuracy), neither of which deals any damage on its own, could combine for an OHKO effect. For obvious reasons, this idea should be used sparingly.

If this is not the kind of thing you wanted brought up, I apologize.

 

[silver wind]

New status, GROUND:
The battler is locked in its tracks and cannot use Attack / or skills that require physical contact with the foe. You can shoot an arrow/ cast a spell, but not attack with a sword. 'Direct attack' can be a dummy element given to skills.

A similar idea, TRAP. The foe grabs you. You cannot evade or use items, but the foe can't evade either.
(Both will be included in my -non RPG- game, but feel free to use them if you like)

 

[BwdYeti]

I think a good way to balance against Virus would be a status effect called Vaccine. One time protection against the spread of Virus. One PC gets hit with Virus, healer casts Vaccine on the party, the spread trigger only nullifies one party member's Vaccine effect, and then the infected character dies and can be revived. Put a short time limit on how long Vaccine lasts so you can't just cast it at the start of every battle with Virus using enemies, or only let it prevent spread, not the initial effect (the healer creates a vaccine for the uninfected party members specifically based on the what the infected one got hit with?)

A simpler protection could be including something that heals Virus, but is almost as costly as a revive and requires the user to spend time before it goes off; say, spending two or three turns doing nothing put preparing it before it heals the target. This allows a way around the "everyone must die to get rid of it" problem, and still carries risk on its own. For example, if the player is too slow the Virus could spread before the cure activates, so someone is still in danger.

I like the idea of combining status effects. Perhaps something between binary and anaphylactic, like a defense/stamina debuff combined with poison would cause the poison damage to leave the target with only 1 HP, or kill them if they only have 1 left. Not an instant kill, but requires constant HP healing/the status to be removed or they're as good as dead.