Castle Paradox

[msw188]

Screen-size limitation should not be an issue. If there are more than four in a party, we can have the pictures staggered or something, or leave it up to the author to realize that they should probably draw their hero-battle pictures smaller. I'd feel fine having no battle graphics at all if there were a case where having more than four heroes improved gameplay in some fashion. In short, I feel that the attitude always ought to be: the more choices the game AUTHOR has, the better. It is then his (or her) job to allow or limit choices for the players.

Okay, this is getting off-topic (with no small thanks to myself, the topic's author). Gizmog1's ideas sound pretty interesting in a realistic sort of way, but (as he himself points out) pretty rough from the gameplay standpoint. Any other ideas?

[Iblis]

What if you could have as many or as few characters in your party as you wanted to? But with a catch: with each character added the battle becomes more complex and more difficult. A beginning player would be better off using only a few characters, and only the most freakishly advanced players could use all of them at once.

Of course, you wouldn't want to do this in a game with a huge amount of characters. And you'd need to create some mechanism by which having too many characters can be a liability. You'd need some method of dividing player focus, so that they need to focus on each party member and so the more members there are, the harder that is. It'd probably have to be an active system, with turn-based dividing your attention would present no problem. I'm not sure what the specifics of the battle system would be, but I'm sure it can be done.
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[msw188]

Just reading Iblis' post, the first thing I thought of was having a stat like MP 'pooled'. That is to say, the party as a whole has some amount of MP, as opposed to single characters having their own store.

I don't think that I like this idea though. I'm sure there are more interesting ways of balancing out a large party that would render this idea useless. I can't think of any concrete ideas right now, though...

[Valigarmander]

Not that anyone gives a crap what I think, but I think that size limitations in a party is a good thing. As it's been said a hundred times before in this thread, a small party of three or four heroes is efficient and easy to manage, while a honking mob of thirty people is not. I think in some cases, huge parties would be a good idea, like in tactics or strategy games. Not in your standard OHR games, though. Four people should be plenty.

[Joe Man]

now, managing multiple parties would be interesting... Oooh....
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Last edited by Joe Man on Fri Dec 13, 1957 1:21 am; edited 2,892 time in total

[Valigarmander]

Here, here!

(Are you listening, James?)

[msw188]

I'm fairly certain that multiple parties are already possible with current plotscripting methods. At least, I would say that something like the multiple parties in Kefka's Tower of Final Fantasy III are certainly possible. But the original question of this topic is never addressed: Why should the heroes split into multiple parties, with only four per group? Final Fantasy does not make any attempt at giving any explanation (not that that is necessarily a bad thing, just trying to get back on topic).

[Valigarmander]

I was already aware that multiple parties would probably be possible with plotscripting. I'm just too lazy to script it all.

[LeRoy_Leo]

The original question, which I at first missed, was "Why?"...
Support characters usually work good with the game-play, but story wise they were a big, fat question mark.
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Planning Project Blood Summons, an MMORPG which will incinerate all of the others with it's sheer brilliance...

---msw188 ---
"Seriously James, you keep rolling out the awesome like gingerbread men on a horror-movie assembly line. "