6 Ways to Improve Turn-Based RPG Combat Systems
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(6) Character-centric consequences. I touched on something related to this in the last article under the rubric of providing multiple battlefield objectives. That was about giving battlefield events plot consequences. Here, however, I want to suggest to you that we should be doing everything we can to make our decisions on the battlefield have character development consequences.
Party RPGs with perma-death necessarily have a touch of that, provided that character deaths play a role in dialog and cut scenes going forward. (This happens in Fire Emblem games and in Telepath RPG: Servants of God.) But that's just scratching the surface of what is possible.
I'm going to talk about a game that isn't an RPG for just a second: Crusader Kings 2. Crusader Kings 2 is a recently-released strategy game that does exactly what I was talking about back in 2010: it models characters in an emergent way, then lets the game's story grow organically out of their interactions. This sort of emergent personality modeling completely sidesteps the supposed incompatibility of narrative and gameplay, and sports the potential to make combat interesting on a level that few (if any) games have attempted to date.
Now, I'm not suggesting that RPGs should go whole hog and ditch their hand-crafted narratives in favor of an approach like this; rather, just consider for a moment the possibilities opened up by a hybrid approach. Suppose that characters in your party had certain personality attributes, and that those attributes would impact their performance on the battlefield. Maybe one character is (jealous,) so her accuracy drops if another character of the same gender gets between her and her love interest. Maybe another character is (greedy,) and gets angry if another character finishes off an enemy he wounded. Maybe a character who gets close to death one time too many gets a (traumatized) attribute and starts having flashbacks in cut scenes outside of combat. Maybe a character subject to a missed attack that would have otherwise been fatal will become convinced that (the) God(s) protected her, changing her dialog out of combat and making her less careful in combat. I'm just rattling off examples; the possibilities here are absolutely limitless.
