Code talk: Attacks

Jun 10, 2012 21:46

Today’s topic:

Attack Levels:
Attacks have power levels measured from 0 to 15, where 0 is a no-damage attack and 15 is a world-shattering attack. An attack’s Mana cost is determined primarily from its Level. Here’s part of the scale:

Level 1: Extremely weak attack. Usually found only in attacks meant to inflict statuses.
Level 3: Basic punches, blasts, and so on. Attacks of this level and below cost 0 Mana.
Level 4: The weakest attack that costs Mana. Narratively, any attack weaker than this does not represent any serious effort from the attacker. This is the lowest possible level for a Finisher attack.
Level 5: A strong Free attack. Clobbering someone with a dumpster.
Level 7: An extremely strong Free attack or reasonably powerful Special attack. Dropping a building on someone’s head.
Level 10: Extremely powerful Special attacks.
Level 13: Extremely powerful Finishers. It is fairly rare to have any attacks this powerful, but not so rare as to stand out as anything more than very strong.
Level 14: Once-a-series events. Many of the final-form final episode Finisher attacks fall here. Attacks this powerful make people stand up and take notice. Starlight Breaker.
Level 15: World-shaking attacks. Attacks this powerful are extremely rare and are usually only found on main series antagonists.

Attack tiers:
So, notice how I used the terms Free, Special, and Finisher above? Well, those are our three tiers of attacks.

Free attacks can be created on the fly by anyone, and are usually not pre-created in the character (there are some exceptions where a character may have some pre-set on them; I am looking at you, Cure Blossom, and your Blossom Butt Punch). Free attacks may have up to 1 Flag without penalty. Free attacks are unable to KO a target by way of damage, because that would be too anticlimactic. Free attacks top out at Level 7 (not finalized). Free attacks get a slight Mana discount.

Special attacks are pre-created on the character and may have up to 3 Flags with no penalty. A Special is any of the attacks you often hear characters yelling out in a series. Special attacks top out at Level 10 (not finalized), but not everyone has a Level 10 Special attack. Level 10 is for the more powerful Specials like Divine Buster.

Finishers are pre-created on the character and may have up to 5 Flags with no penalty. Finishers are those attacks which usually involve stock footage and are used to destroy a monster of the week. Finishers tend to be very powerful (though not always), and it is rare to be able to use a Finisher more than once in a battle.
On top of everything else, Finishers are assigned a threshold number based on how powerful they are, which determines the distance your Morale must be from 0 to use them. For instance, if a Finisher has threshold of 80, it means it can only be used if your Morale is either 80 or above or is -80 or below. On the positive end, this represents a triumphant finale to a battle, fueled by confidence. On the negative end, then the Finisher becomes an act of desperation, your last attempt to give it all you have when all your other options are exhausted.
When firing a Finisher, the Accuracy always takes the absolute value of your Morale (so -80 Morale would be treated as 80 when calculating Accuracy). Immediately after a Finisher has been resolved, hit or miss, damage or not, your Morale is reset to 0.
If your target survives the Finisher, they’re given the option of using their own Finisher in response, regardless of their current Morale (though this is only for their next action and does not carry on past that). They don’t necessarily have to target the one who failed to finish them off, but it’s considered polite combat etiquette to do so, rather than to use the opportunity on someone else.
That means there are three ways to activate a Finisher: sufficiently high Morale, sufficiently low Morale, or surviving someone else’s Finisher. Of note, no matter how many Finishers you survive, you may never use a Finisher two rounds in a row. This usually will only apply to a boss mode situation.

Because, especially for long series, as characters grow stronger, older Finishers often become used as Specials later on. You see this a lot in Pretty Cure series, where the first few Finisher attacks can be fired off casually much later in the series. When characters grow to that point, there are a number of options. They can opt to just take the current attack and change it from a Finisher to a Special with no other changes. Because this may put a Special over Level 10, it will cost more Mana to use. The other option is to lower the Level of the attack, thus lowering the Mana cost. (We’re still working on details of how we want to do this, as it’s not something that will come up immediately.)

Speed
Every attack has a Speed associated with it. Speed can range from -50 to 50, where -50 is the slowest and 50 is the highest. Speed is a factor in the to-hit change of an attack. The faster an attack is, the more accurate it is. The slower an attack is, the less accurate it is. All attacks are, at a default, 0 Speed.

Attack Flags:
Every attack may have one or more Flags. These Flags offer some sort of effect in combat.
All attacks get a number of Flags for ‘free’: 1 in Frees, 3 in Specials, and 5 in Finishers. I use ‘free’ in quotes because you are allowed to exceed that amount by up to 3. So a Free attack could technically have up to 4 Flags, a Special up to 6, and a Finisher up to 8. So why the ‘free’?
If you exceed the base number of Flags for the attack tier, you incur a penalty to Speed. A Free attack with 2 Flags will have a Speed penalty. One with 4 Flags will have an even larger Speed penalty. Inversely, you don’t need to use all the allowable Flag slots. If you leave any slots empty, that attack gets a bonus to Speed. A Finisher that only uses 2 Flags, leaving 3 of its allotment open, will get a Speed bonus for those empty slots.

There are a number of categories of Flag types. I’m going to list some examples, but this list is by no means comprehensive.

Flags that penalize certain Reactions: I haven’t talked about reactions yet, but there will be some (think Defend and Evade from SRT, but not quite so binary - I will probably post about Reactions next time). Certain Flags may penalize certain Reactions. Barrier Break, Homing, etc.

Flags that debuff: There are two tiers of these. As an example… Exhausted is a Flag that debuffs Power and Force. Cripple also debuffs Power and Force, but has a chance to apply a larger debuff - this won’t happen all the time.

Flags that affect Morale*: We have two of these: Psych and Quip. If you successfully hit with an attack that has the Psych Flag, it will have a positive effect on your Morale. If you are hit by (or fail to defend against) an attack with the Quip Flag, it will have a negative effect on your Morale.
*Technically, these affect Attitude, something which I have not talked about yet. Morale and Attitude will be in a future post.

Miscellaneous Flags:
Banish - does extra damage to the powers of Darkness (yes, this will be an Ability), but does zero damage to anyone else. Most of Sailor Moon’s late-series attacks do this.
Purify - does extra damage to the powers of Darkness, but normal damage to anyone else.
Barrage - the attack is made up of a large number of smaller hits, and its damage can vary considerably.
Bind Break - the attack clears all debuffs on the user, but costs more Mana to fire.
Splash - the attack can hit more than one target.
There are a bunch of others, but these are some examples.

Power and Speed Flags: There are two special Flags: Power and Speed. These are the only flags that can be taken more than once, up to a maximum of four times. They can never be taken together, and they may never be on an attack that exceeds its normal Flag allotment (in other words, you utilize that ‘3 over the limit’ thing if there are any Power or Speed Flags involved). Power and Speed are opposites of each other: the Power Flag increases the effective power Level of an attack while reducing its Speed, and the Speed Flag does the opposite. The advantage here is that there is no change to Mana cost.
A Finisher with 4 Speed Flags will be the fastest possible attack you can get, but will be significantly less powerful damage-wise than something else that costs the same amount of Mana. Similarly, a Finisher with 4 Power flags will do significantly more damage than another attack with the same Mana cost, but will also have bottomed-out Speed. (In the current design, the only way to reach the maximum 50 Speed is with 4 Speed Flags, and the only way to reach the minimum -50 Speed is with 4 Power Flags.)
Speed and Power Flags both operate under diminishing returns. The first one will offer a greater adjustment than the second, which will have a greater change than the third, and so on. It will probably be rare for an attack to have more than one or two of these, but the option for up to 4 is there.

That’s it for Attacks today! Next time I will do… hmm, not sure. I’ve got a few options to pick from. I’ll probably make another post later in the week to ask what you guys want to see next.

Edit: Something I forgot above! One more thing that all attacks have. They're marked either Magical or Physical (to determine whether they use Magic and Spirit or Power and Vigor). They're also marked either Melee or Ranged, which doesn't actually do anything here but will come up in Reactions.

combat

Previous post Next post
Up