[awall]

Okay, I know I've been claiming this has been coming for a while, so here it is. My answer to the desperation attack issues discussed above.

In the context that I use this system, I refer to the resource that you accumulate as "fury points" and the attacks that you execute as "fury strikes." However, these are simply names; you could replace "fury points" with "limit guage" (100 fury points = a full guage) and replace "fury strike" with Limit and it'd be like FF7's system. Sort of.

There are several differences. First of all, instead of accumulating FP by taking damage, you gain FP every time your turn comes up. This means that everybody gets a few FP. However, the lower your HP is, the more FP you accumulate every turn. If you want to build FP quickly, you can sit around at low HP, but that puts you at greater risk of getting KO'ed. Worse, getting KO'ed makes you lose all your FP, so you don't want to overdo it. (You also build FP slightly faster if you have negative statuses like poison, and slightly slower if you have positive statuses like haste).

The second thing is that you get to choose how much FP you want to build up before using it. Each character has 2-4 unique attacks called "Fury Strikes" that they can expend their FP to do, and each of those attacks has four levels; Lv1 costs 25 FP, Lv2 costs 50 FP, Lv3 costs 75 FP, and Lv4 costs a full 100 FP (your FP can't go higher than 100). Higher levels of fury strikes are more powerful but take longer to build up to.

The final interesting feature of FP is that simply having FP has an effect. FP increases your chances of causing a critical hit every time you attack... but also increases the chances that anybody attacking you will cause a critical hit. So while Lv4 fury strikes are powerful, building up that many FP means you're gonna be eating critical hits left and right. Hope you can survive that, 'cause remember: you get KO'ed and your FP go back to 0.

FP start at 0 every battle and build up from there. I don't really know how much you get every turn, but I'd imagine it increases as the game progresses and you level up.

Recall that there were four main points I was trying to cover:

* A desperation attack system should help you come back from being behind. It shouldn't help (or at least not as much) if you're already winning a battle.

Those who are behind get more FP, so they can perform fury strikes more often (or use more powerful ones). Yes, the critical hit rate against those characters goes up, but their critical hit rate goes up as well, and if a character is already at low HP, critical hits against them don't make them any deader than normal hits would.

* A desperation attack system should encourage risky behavior. If you can trigger it just by sitting around and healing a bunch and waiting for it to kick in, then it's too easy to just play turtle.

If you perpetually keep your HP at full, you'll barely build any FP at all. You have to allow your HP to get low and some of those bad statuses to hit in order to get your FP accumulation rate up.

* A desperation attack system should not carry over between battles. You should not be able to intentionally get behind and take risky actions in an easy random encounter in order to build up a gauge, then head into the boss battle and unleash it all at the beginning to devastate the boss.

FP reset at the beginning of every battle. If you want to use a fury strike in a fight, you have to earn the FP in that fight.

* Desperation attacks are nice when they do something other than just causing a boatload of damage. Also, it's nice when there's variety between different characters.

Every character has between 2-4 different fury strikes that all do very different things. Just to give an example... the "thief/ninja" character has a basic damage-dealing fury strike, a fury strike that is a variant of "throw" that hurls several projectiles at once, a super form of "steal" that targets all enemies and makes multiple attempts to steal just about everything from items to GP to weaponry. You get the idea.

I believe this system addresses many of the flaws in existing desperation attack system. Because this is a work in progress, I'd definitely be interested in hearing feedback. Even if you think the system is cool, tell me what sounds the coolest and what sounds the most annoying so I can re-evaluate it. Also, if you think that this doesn't adequately solve some of the issues inherent to desperation attacks, suggest how this could be modified. I'd love to hear what y'all think.

EDIT: Also, if I didn't explain clearly, please ask for clarification. I designed this system, so obviously it all makes sense to me. But if something seems confusing to you, it's probably because I left out a fairly important detail, so I'd be happy to explain it.