Fire Emblem: Life And Death system showcase 

I feel that unpredictability and an element of chance makes tactical games a lot more fun as well as being a lot more realistic.

@@PuissantAlgernon Respectfully, who finds gambling fun?

@@JasonGodwin69 Loads of people find gambling fun! Games of chance are some of the most popular games in the world! What's more, the fact that tactical games with a random element adds an enjoyable level of unpredictability, meaning that you have to rethink your plans on the fly, attempt high-risk high-reward gambits and so on. For me that's much more enjoyable than a game which depends solely on playing "correctly". It's also a lot more realistic in the sense that in the real world, things often don't go the way you expect them to, and there's no way of knowing exactly what's going to happen.

@@PuissantAlgernon Me fielding my dodge tank to "realistically" dodge everything and Enemy Phase 90% of the map in one turn with vantage wrath crits

@@JasonGodwin69 As opposed to fielding your defence/HP tank and doing exactly the same thing. The thrill of seeing your nimble swordmaster dodge almost every attack, the hoping and praying they don't get struck down by a lucky hit from a strong unit - for me, that's the kind of thing that makes Fire Emblem worth playing.

Eirika has a character? I'm just using her default pictures for placeholder text while I work on the art. Can't rush art.

Vulnerary is an adjective that means used to promote the healing of wounds, as herbs or other remedies. But "Health Potion"? Everyone knows what a "Health Potion" is. It's a Potion of Health. A Potion that restores your health, or Health Points, or Hit Points, or Life Points.

You know he was being sarcastic right​@@JasonGodwin69

​@@JasonGodwin69imo vulnerary is kinda iconic to FE

Whoops, typo. The tutorials are at the start of the game.

Ogey.

ogey (i don't know how to remove rating from the stat screen.)

"For every 'ogey', there must be a 'rrat'."@@JasonGodwin69

I did it. I removed Rat from the stat screen. *sad Baelz noises*

I can respect opinions even if they're wrong!

@@JasonGodwin69 I shall stick to my wrong opinion, but this is stuff you made is cool.

Fire Emblem! Heroes!

Fire Emblem 3 Hopes OST

Peak dialogue. I'm sure I won't look back on this writing in ten years and cringe. Having fun is my goal, this isn't Shakespeare and I have no illusions about it being Shakespeare.

Class power and class utility balances the weapons in my game, not accuracy or individual damage numbers. I'm taking some design lessons from Fire Emblem and Advance Wars and Kaga Saga games, and some from other games. My goal is to make something unique. Player feedback will help me balance the game when it's out.

The "Life And Death" system streamlines Fire Emblem's core stat calculations. LIFE is your HP. AND is the lAND you can cross in a single turn. DEATH is the damage you inflict when attacking. Weapons add to your Death score using a stat boost, with a damage number of 0, making it easy to see the user's DEATH score and weapon power at a glance.

Who really likes it when RNG influences the outcome of a game? Gamblers, that's who. Gamblers who think betting on a 30% dodge rate is good strategy but cry foul when they miss a 70% hit chance. Fire Emblem is supposed to be a strategy game, not a gambling game. The Weapon Triangle barely matters or doesn't exist, while bow/magic weaknesses severely impact the usefulness of fliers but only in games where they aren't OP. Pick a lane, Fire Emblem! Are we supposed to care about what a unit uses and what class they are before sending units to damage HP potentially at the cost of HP? Is it really a "strategy game" if your strategy is to make Seth or NosTank Robin or some Dodge Tank beat everything without a second thought? The first time I played Fire Emblem Fates, I liked Rinkah so much I restarted the game as a man to marry her. But then she was so RUINED by RNG she became useless! She never got the stats she needed. My infamously terrible luck inflated my perception of her in one run and ruined my perception of her in the next. There's an epic Fire Emblem youtuber whose name I forgot, HE TURNS CORRIN'S DRAGON ATTACK SKILL OFF so its random chance to boost damage can't ruin his meticulously planned distribution of damage and EXP and support growths. He puts so much effort into minimizing RNG's effect on his gameplay and sometimes it still happens anyway. It never adds to the game. If you're playing smart you don't rely on or need crits and dodges, not unless you're on a luck-based RNG hell map like Battle Before Dawn. Darkest Dungeon's RNG adds to the game, adds to the tension and fear of loss and failure, but Fire Emblem's does not. When your guys die in Darkest Dungeon you have options. When your guys are weakened in Darkest Dungeon you have options. When Fire Emblem takes away your best unit because of a 1% crit chance, that's not something the game was built around handling. Sure, a loss here and there won't matter much in the grand scheme of things, even if it was completely undeserved and feels awful. But bad luck can ruin your run. Bad luck can put you into a negative spiral of losing your options and missing out on optional resources you need. Fire Emblem is great and all but I want to experiment with things. I don't just want to rehash what came before like when Disney's Star Wars tried filling their films with "comfortably familiar" reused material. Some things are different because I want to try out my idea to "fix" flaws, others are different to make my game feel more like my game and less like somebody else's game, other things are different to work better with other changed things. One flaw I really want to fix? That thing where you have to postpone taking out the boss, even if he's attacking your primary unit clump and could be destroyed easily, because taking him out finishes the map and stops you from taking out other foes or finishing map objectives. Taking the boss out should (in maps where it makes sense) cause foes to surrender, giving you EXP. My game adds complexity in new areas, so I'm removing the illusion of complexity in other areas.

@@JasonGodwin69 90% of players/gamblers bench rinkah before getting the perfect level up. Jokes aside I am interested in what you'll be cooking up

​@@JasonGodwin69counterpoint: fire emblem was designed to have an emergent narrative produced by the rng. fe1 barely has characters, but has a massive number of units, and weak enemies make it easy to take units off the bench although this philosophy has been moved away from in the main series, kaga's later games also embrace rng, with berwick saga having very low hitrates for most of the earlygame and a rng-based weapon durability system and being near universally beloved by people who have played it

​@JasonGodwin69 sure but now you've made the game too predictable. It'll become boring really fast. Almost no one will use this mechanic.

​@JasonGodwin69 The randomness actually adds quite a lot to the game's storytelling, though. Even the best plans can be thrown off by something unforeseen happening, and you're never truly safe unless you have a near perfect plan, which no one on a blind playthrough can possibly have. Having things go very wrong and then having to deal with the consequences is a core part of what makes fire emblem such an appealing series to me, and without that, it stops being a war strategy and tactics game and starts being a fantasy medieval puzzle game. Still, a fantasy medieval puzzle game does sound pretty damn interesting, so I'm interested to see what you do with this project!

It's both a strategy game and a puzzle game. It's a strategy game because you have to think, and a puzzle game because incorrect answers won't have (SKILL//2)*LUCK% chance to be accepted as correct answers.

@JasonGodwin69 most every game makes you think, especially if you're going to play at a high level. Removing all RNG though also removes a lot of the thought process per turn and boils it down to "does character take more damage than they have health?" Part of building a strategy is looking at the risk/reward aspect of every move. What you currently have to show off for this new system looks like it removed all the risk aspects so long as the player pays the slightest bit of attention and can do low level subtraction/addition

@@sielklavar Risk aspects? The risks of your choices, to be meaningful, should be set in stone and never be influenced by RNG. Send Eirika five tiles north to be attacked by seven enemies, and trust her Crit Resistance to make a Crit that zeros her instantly unlikely, and trust her Forest Terrain-boosted Dodge Chance to let dodge enough attacks so that her remaining HP will let her survive this until she leaves four enemies alive around her preventing the remaining three foes from reaching her, and hope you level up halfway through your foe's turn and get a Speed point to keep her final attackers from doubling her, and all the while you have to hope she doesn't crit anyone and ruin your plan... Is this a good strategy? Only if the dice rolls support it. It's a strategy you can try again and again, resetting the game each time, performing different actions beforehand to change the Random Number Generator values... But it will only be a good plan when it works, and you have plenty of time to keep trying. There's no risk involved, really. Nothing bad will happen to you if you lose. Your save file doesn't delete itself if you lose the Lord and take some RNG-influenced world with it like in Minecraft. Anyone who'd say "Just plan around the RNG and don't push your luck so much" is missing the point intentionally. Luck has no place in a true intellectual puzzle. No matter how hard the player tries to minimize RNG's negative effects on the strategy aspect of the game, it can strike at any moment. When you lose Units and fail objectives in my game it should be the fault of choices you made, not dice rolls. Strategy game, puzzle game, call it what you want. I don't believe the player should ever be put into a situation where his best option is to "Pick a God and pray". Then again, maybe I'll make a game later that intentionally adds more RNG and more redundant stats to the game. That experiment should be fun.

@JasonGodwin69 if the risk is entirely set in stone then there isn't ever actually risk. If you know making a choice is going to always fail then you just simply don't make that choice. Losing a unit to RNG can be annoying at times sure, but in a game where you're up against easily manipulated AI like Fire Emblem that's the closest thing you can get to the actual challenge of being against another player. Without rng every move can be plotted out perfectly ahead of time, and making the same moves will always give you the same results leaving you with a very quickly solved game.

You literally removed all strategic gameplay from the system, its just substracting now, no meaningful choices per round, no risk/reward possibilities. Like the other commenter also said, this gets boring pretty fast

I don't know when people started thinking a strategy game is "a puzzle game, not a strategy game" if it's stricter with what inputs it's willing to call correct.

@@JasonGodwin69 good question!

It's possible to lose units to unlucky crits and beat bosses with lucky crits, but unlucky crits can also ruin your support and EXP maximization and enemy manipulation strategy by giving your units kills your plan didn't plan for. The only way to minimize RNG's effects on your game is to play like you're always afraid of the RNG Sword of Damocles swinging down on you.

(LIFE - 10)//2 + DEATH That's the rating calculation equation.

​@@JasonGodwin69 nah, the rat stat is how many rats they had for breakfast that morning, clearly

Why would you say that?

@@JasonGodwin69 It's overly simple? There wouldn't be much to think about other than calculating all the exact damages beforehand. Unless you add more stuff it'd just be a game entirely about checking ranges and doing addition and subtraction.

@@Win32error854 which is different from normal fire emblem... how? /j

@@Win32error854 Outside of speedruns, when was the last time a Fire Emblem game made you plan something beyond the simple addition and subtraction you describe, such as "Get this unit to X spot with X item by X turn by any means necessary without losing units"?

​@@JasonGodwin69 FE planning is about having an initial idea and adapting every turn to changing circumstances because the results aren't guaranteed and certain. It works because there's a degree of uncertainty and a significant dose of rpg elements. There are good games that work with something close to certainty, like into the breach. But those are not tactical games, they're more puzzle based.

Are people posting about it in discord servers or something?

Can't tell if trolling or genuinely retarded. Probably both.

That's funny, in one beta build of my game each character's defensive and offensive stats were adjusted by their remaining HP percentage. This was scrapped because Lex Talionis's numbers weren't correctly displaying these numbers, and calculating "My first attack reduces his HP from 40 to 20, he will have 50% HP remaining, meaning my Attack Stance ally's attack for 7 damage gets a 50% boost" for each damage interaction became a bit of a pain after a while.

What exactly did awakening introduce? Rally skills and pair up, right? Almost every other mechanic had already been in the series at that point, as far as I can tell

@@edwardking9359 Some elitists like to point to Awakening as "The moment the series went from hardcore intellectual strategy game to embarassing anime gacha weeb trash, and lost absolutely all of its self-respect and respectability and became too easy to be cool". But do you really need your favourite series to appear respectable on the surface before you can feel comfortable being seen liking it? To hear them tell it, overnight the public perception of Fire Emblem went from "That inaccessible Strategy Game with permadeath for hardcore 300 IQ psychos who make Dark Souls players look like casuals" to "That anime weeb booby RPG anyone can beat with sufficient grinding and DLC spending money".