Combination attacks

[Fading]

My question is the following:

How do I program, in RPG Maker 2k3, to be able to use combination attacks?

Example

The player's character has a gun. He's facing a basic soldier enemy. As a skill branch, he has the Aimed Shot branch of skills. Skills which the player's character can use to shoot the enemy in specific places. One of the skills he has, is the Knee Shot. This is an aimed shot towards the knee, inflicting the status ailment Knee Shotted on the enemy. This status ailment lasts a single turn in which the soldier cannot use any actions.

Another Aimed Shot technique is the Execute skill. This kills the enemy in a single shot. However, Execute can only be used on the enemy if he suffers from the Knee Shotted status ailment. If the player's character uses the Execute skill when the enemy soldier is NOT suffering from the Knee Shotted status ailment, Execute will fail 100% of the time.

Example ends here

What would be favourable, is to let the Execute skill only be usable on that enemy soldier when he's suffering from that particular status ailment.

~ Fading

[SaiKar]

I have a strong feeling there should be an elegant way to do this without requiring a custom battle system or something. But I cannot figure it out right now. It has relevance to my current project as well so I'll be giving it some thought over the next couple of days.

[MissingName]

I'm also trying to do something similar.

If I figure anything out, I'll try to let y'all know.

Don't expect any miracles...

[Fading]

I've been trying to see if I can let attacks only work with percentages if a certain condition is activated, but I can only inflict or remove status ailments with that. I checked the condition tab to see if I can let certain conditions works in the way described above, but alas, no juice. I personally think we have to code some extra programs to it. Anyone know if a different version of RPG Maker does has the options I previously mentioned?

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Edit as of monday the 28th of September

I have looked around a bit and seem to have read of possibilities for combination attacks in RPG Maker VX. Now, I have even less experience with VX and the reviews don't rate it very high. Anyone know any information about this?

[Fading]

Apologies for posting twice, most boards don't like that. Problem is, after I edited my post it didn't even notify the board that something changed and I just want people to know I updated.

Check my post above this one for my edit.

[orewashinanai]

I'd thought about implementing a similar system before.

My idea was that every single character/enemy would have a fixed amount of hp.  Attacks had to target only specific limbs, attacks could do only a fixed amount of damage, each limb would correspond to a specific amount of HP loss, and so you could easily see what limbs were lost by looking at the total remaining HP.  You could also build statuses that triggered when a certain amount of HP was lost.

The problem is, it's just not very fun: this is very close to this old fighting game "Bushido Blade".  If you played that game thinking you were playing Street Fighter, it was boring as all hell.  The fun in Bushido Blade came from the careful blocking, parrying, and counter system, and all the timing of that.  To get a similar sort of thing in 2k3 or whatever menu-based system you were using, you'd probably need to do a lot of coding, and even then I don't see the timing mechanisms in these rpgmakers being high-resolution enough to be really good.

But I'm only a beginner, so maybe someone has a better idea of the situation?

[Felix-0]

huge wall of text for a two month bump...

[HobomasterXXX]

huge wall of text for a two month bump...

I wouldn't call it a huge wall of text, by any means.

[SaiKar]

It was also very relevant to the topic at hand. The more contribution to the topic you give, the more people should be willing to overlook the bumping.

The problem is, it's just not very fun

Kudos to you for saying this. If more people realized that hugely complicated systems there were working on ultimately weren't all that enjoyable to actually play, there would be a lot less crappy games out there, both amateur and professional.

[orewashinanai]

Sorry for the bump--I'd just been really thinking about this recently and when I saw the post, kind of wanted to discuss a little.

[fruckert]

As Sai noted, it was well worth it.