ARGH. Design decisions make my head hurt.

[Bosola]

As a few people know, I'm currently creating an FF7 mod for PSOne. It's quite radical, and is intended to provide a comprehensive 'rebalance' to the game.

One of my objectives was to make element and status vulnerabilities intuitive, and debuffing less luck-reliant, meaning that players can rely on their memory and skill rather than the random number generator. The problem that I'm facing is: to what do I attach certain status vulnerabilities, making them 'intuitive' without being either OP or useless?

For instance, we might make large creatures vulnerable to Mini, but many of these creatures are reliant upon physical attacks, so that might be OP. If we make *small* monsters Mini-prone, then what's the point? These creatures don't rely on physical attacks anyway, though I suppose we could give *all* creatures a large variety of moves to counter that.

Another problem is that I have to make consistent decisions on status vulnerabilities, but without these statuses compounding one another to make a certain monster completely impotent. For instance, if I say that debuffs 'exaggerate' the natural attributes of their targets, we might say

Large bulky creatures - slow, sleep : Small, spazzy creatures - berserk, mini.

Berserk + mini = a pushover, of course, as does slow + sleep. But if we do the opposite, then

Large, bulky creatures - mini, berserk...

ARGH!

Any ideas? I need to deal with the following status attributes. Here are my thoughts so far:

Death (living things) / Petrify (the non-living?)
Slow (large monsters?) / Mini (small creatures?)
Berserk (stupid monsters, 'low' on the evolutionary ladder) / Sleep (intelligent entities)
Silence (all - have monsters able to deal a variety of attacks) / Poison (anything organic)

Stop likely replaced by paralysis - it's a bit OP - and now suits everything.

Thoughts?

[titeguy3]

Hm, here's my two cents, feel free to borrow ideas if any of them sound good to you:

Death: all "small" enemies should be susceptible to death to make attacks like Odin's "Double edged sword" useful, but enemies that only appear by themselves and have substantial HP should be immune (like dragons, for instance). Undead enemies should get "recovery" when death is used on them.
Petrify: Stuff that shouldn't be feasibly able to turn to stone. Metal/stone/rock enemies like golems or Icicles or those weird things that look like bed-frames should be immune to this.
Slow: Already slow monsters (like Iron Man and Wolfmeister) should be immune to this.
Mini/Frog: Small creatures should be immune to mini, but susceptible to Frog, and vice-versa for decently sized monsters. Huge ones should be immune to both.
Berserk: Everyone should be berserk-able except for high-level magic using enemies like tonberry, since this attribute helps some enemies and hurts others.
Sleep: Only Biological/organic enemies. No sleeping robots or inanimate objects.
Silence: Same as sleep
Poison: Same as Sleep and silence, only with poison element in consideration.
Stop: Nobody is immune to stop except for most bosses, but the success rate is slim.
Paralyze: Should be effective on all enemies except for bosses and enemies with countdown attacks (like the X-Cannon in Midgar final mission)

[Bosola]

Those aren't bad ideas, but I may end up going with:

Berserk (large monsters) : Mini (small monsters)
Sleep (organics) : Paralysis (Synthetics)
Slow (heavy) : Confusion (light)
Death/ poison (living) : Stone (non-living)
Silence - humanoids

It's then a matter of redesigning *monsters* so that no particular status cripples them. For instance, humanoid mages can still use status-inflicting physical attacks, and monsters appear in varied groups, so that no one spell can allow someone to plough through an entire dungeon.