Elements, Weapons And Such

Today we're going to look more closely at some features of Weapons in RM2K – specifically the elements (called 'Attributes' in Don's rip) that weapons can be associated with. As I was writing this, I realised that the elements section alone is pretty dense (and also mostly just blocks of text lel), so I've decided to push the part about status injuries (called 'Conditions' in Don's rip) into the next post instead of overwhelming everyone (including myself) with an information overload.

Fake mlem

But before we can get into any of that, we need to know where the definitions of these elements (and statuses) are actually coming from. And you've guessed it right, it's the database.

Go ahead and open up the 'Elements'/'Attributes' tab in your database. You'll see that it's pretty small, with just a few panels.

Elements tab in database

On the left, we see a list of Elements that are already in place for us. We can see the usual elements – fire, earth etc. - but we also see stuff like Sword and Hit/Shock, which you might not think are traditionally considered “elements”. Fact is, an element can be anything in your game-world. You can call them whatever you want, and they'll behave in the same way regardless. We can make up our own elements in the game, none of the defaults are mandatory as such, but they sure are convenient to use in your first few games.

On the right, we see 3 settings -

1. Name => Is whatever we want to call that element.
   

2. Attribute Type/Classification => There are 2 types identifiable by the RM2K system – 'physical' ('weapon' in the rip) and 'magical'. The main difference between these two is that if you have any 'skills' that have one or more physical attributes, then these skills are only usable by a character if they have equipped a weapon with all the exact same physical elemental properties. It doesn't matter if your skill is a combination of physical + magical elements, it cannot be used unless the character wields a weapon that has the same physical attributes associated with it. This gives us a chance to create special weapon-specific attacks in our game. Magical attributes have no such limitation.
   

3. Damage Multiplier/Rate of Effect => Here we see a list of letters (let's call them symbols) and some percentages next to them. These symbols in fact represent the level of strength or weakness against the selected element. From A to E, we move from weakest against selected element -> strongest. The percentages are called damage multipliers, and are used by the software to calculate the damage an enemy or character takes from a skill or weapon imbued with this element.

If you see the 'Actors' and 'Enemies'/'Monsters' tab, you will find both have a panel called 'Element Rate' (or 'Afflicted Condition' in Don's translation). Here is where the symbols from the 'Elements'/'Attributes' tab come into play. For example, if we set our player's Fire 'rate' to A (by clicking on the symbol in the 'Fire' row in the Element Rate/Afflicted Condition panel), this means that whenever our player gets attacked by a fire skill or weapon, the percentage mapped to 'A' (in the 'Elements'/'Attributes' tab) will be multiplied to a base value to get the effective damage our player actually takes.

In the default settings, we see that for Fire, symbol 'A' means 200%. This means that, without any other modifiers being present (such as shields or accessories that specifically provide Fire resistance), our player will take twice as much damage as a character without a weakness to fire.

Similarly, if our player's Fire 'rate' is at 'E' – in the database, we see E for fire means 0% - then our player will not take any damage at all from fire spells or weapons. The same logic holds true for enemies/monsters as well.

The symbols A -> E must always have percentages in descending order, as the engine expects it to be so. The values for symbols A, B, C and D can be between 0 and 1000, while E can be -999 to +1000. A negative percentage value for E indicates that the monster/character is supposed to absorb the damage as health. Now I haven't seen anything to that effect in my tests against monsters so far, so I'm not sure how that works. Also, negative values don't work in Don's version.

Using this, with some forethought, we can set up different classes of monsters in our game – monsters that are, let's say, resistant to fire, but weak to water, or resistant to dark spells, weak to holy. We can even configure each class of monsters to have specific sets of spells according to their natural affinities and weaknesses to make a more well-rounded enemy database for our game. We'll look at how in later posts about battles specifically.

This part of the database settings can take a while to get used to. If you're not looking to make RPGs with a heavy emphasis on battles to begin with, then using all the default monsters and element settings everywhere works great. If you'd like to play around with this aspect of weapons and monster battles, then you have to fiddle around with the settings and keep testing with test battles ('Troops'/'Monster Party' tab) yourself to see how each setting affects damage received or imparted. There's no other way around this except by getting your hands dirty and experimenting. If that sort of stuff interests you, then you're going to have fun building your own system of elements and deciding their effectiveness in battles.

What I like to do is create a 'test' enemy with a high HP and low ATK, SPD, moderate DEF to test all my weapon elements and status changes on, and see how they affect the amount of damage I'm able to deal to the monster.

So let's say I want to check how much damage a weapon with element attribute 'Sword' does on average to a monster depending on its resistance/weakness to 'Sword'. I will pick any one weapon and give it an attribute of 'Sword' (in the 'Items' tab), then keep switching between the symbols for my test monster's Sword 'rate' (in the 'Enemies'/'Monsters' tab) and running battle tests from the 'Troops'/'Monster Party' tab to see the variation in damage. Suppose I don't want to use the default element damage multipliers for my game. Then, I would keep changing the multipliers and testing in this way to ensure that the variation is neither too extreme nor too subtle as to be pointless.

The 'test' enemy's configurations in the 'Enemies'/'Monster' tab

Behold

My test weapon of choice, whose config I change according to what Element I'm testing

Setting up a test 'Troop' for the battle tests

ze test battle

How does this all help with weapons?

Now, you would have seen the 'Element' panel for weapons, shields, armours etc. while setting up items in your database. That is where we can assign elements to our weapons, knowing the effect this will have against enemies/enemy attacks.

If we equip our character with a shield that has the 'Fire' element, we know that our character's natural weakness/resistance to fire (as set up in the 'Actors' tab) will become more resistant. Similarly for offensive weapons, when we assign an attribute of, say, water, we know that this weapon is going to deal more damage than average to enemies weak to water, but less damage than average to enemies resistant to water.

The 'average' I mean here is the damage a monster would take from this weapon if there was no element associated with the weapon at all (i.e., weapon imparts only pure physical damage). This 'average' is not really the same as having a damage multiplier of 100% (i.e., a 'C' element rate), but those are details we really don't need to worry about unless we want to geek out about the platform. If you mess around with the settings and carry out tests enough, you'll be able to intuitively pick up how to handle these settings well enough to tweak them how you want to in your own games later on. You can also, of course, never tweak them at all, and stick with the default values – these can certainly still give the player a good experience while playing your game. For this demo game, I highly recommend using the default settings.

Before closing this post, I want to highlight how the characters themselves can similarly have different affinities and weakness levels to various elements in the game. This can be set in the 'Actors'/'Hero' tab under 'Element Rate'/'Afflicted Conditions'. Having different levels of resistance for different elements can make your characters seem more realistic, and make battles against different monster classes more engaging.

Next post will be similarly theoretical (though hopefully shorter), and about status injuries in the game.

Until then,

- Feelin' Like A Moose On Ice