gamedesign.dev: Status effects

So, the climactic fight in a fantasy story is, usually, a one-on-one duel between the daring underdog protagonist and his nefarious rival, with blades clashing, evenly matches, yet the protagonist wins either through luck or skill. Which is, y'know, pretty great. Before that, though, the protagonist likely has to deal with other encounters. Maybe they have to defeat an opponent sharply more powerful than they, and must resort to trickery of some sort. Maybe they are caught with their pants down and must prevail in otherwise difficult situations. These are more interesting to me, because it favors ingenuity more than direct battle skill. It's a shame RPGs nowadays don't like actually doing that, though.

Status effects are nothing new to most RPG veterans. There's the usual array of status effects, like poison and sleep and blindness and silence, and some RPGs like to mix it up with weird status effects like zombification or turning into a mushroom or whatever. Additionally, there are ways to decrease (or increase) the various stats available to both player and enemy, termed debuffs and buffs respectively. Many games offer these, yet very few of them actually bother to make them worthwhile.

A term I've come up with on my own, but which has it's own variant on various game forums, is "turn economy", or the value of a given action per turn or whatever. The basic gauge for this is the damage your average fighting guy does on an attack. Status effects, debuffs, and buffs tend to screw this up, usually because they're so powerful. Take, for example, the silence status effect. Traditionally, a silenced character cannot use any spells at all. Against a character reliant on spells, this can neuter them completely. Similarly, if you use a debuff on their primary attack stat (probably intelligence in this case) you can cut their abilities down to nothing. Buffs, meanwhile, increase your own stats, possibly raising your magic defense so they can't hurt you. These all mess with the turn economy because they can win the fight before it truly starts, making a conventional attack pointless until you've done this.

Naturally, game developers recognize the threat such things would pose. The climactic final duel isn't so climactic if you can load the final boss up with debuffs and status effects until they can't do a thing. Unfortunately, the usual method of fixing this is the worst: making boss encounters immune to any status effect that would win the battle. This throws the turn economy the other way: any turn spent using a status effect on a boss that's immune to it is a turn wasted. The same tends to be true of debuffs. Meanwhile, your characters have no such luck: bosses can use the worst status effects and debuffs against you with impunity, unless you happen to have equipment that blocks it or whatever.

However, they can't make your own characters immune to their own buffs. The usual solution there, then, is to give bosses a move that cancels out all buffs on the player. This causes the turns (not to mention magic points or items or whatever) used in buffing to be wasted, save for the small damage returns from the usual rigmarole on combat. It also discourages the player from using buffs if they know a boss can dispel them, or if they can figure out what triggers the dispelling move, they may simply buff as much as they can without triggering it. Long story short, status effects, debuffs, and buffs are either no-brainers or false choices in almost all implementations.

I've seen a few games have a "berserk" status effect, which raises the attack power of the character, but locks them into only doing physical attacks (usually default attacks, and not physical techniques). I consider this one of the best ways available to handle the problem of all three at once: status effects come with both a benefit and a drawback. If a character is put to sleep, have them recover a decent amount of health each turn (and stop making it so attack spells don't wake them up, I'd like to think people wake up when they catch fire). If a character becomes blind, make their magic attacks stronger and make up some explanation about sensory deprivation being good for inner knowledge. If you buff a character's speed, lower their accuracy since they may not be used to the speed boost. And lastly, make it so you can use these status effects on both teammates and enemies. Cause the death knight to go berserk so he can't use his evil magic, and then blind your mage so they can nuke them without the death knight setting up a defensive spell (which maybe locks out healing?)