Grab System 101

Finally made enough progress on the grab system implementation and UI to make it functional enough. Here is an introduction on how it works.

Units may have certain abilities that can place an opponent into a grab. They might come in different flavors. For example, some may have higher chance to hit, but costs HP or MP. Some may be ranged and pull the victim into you. Shown here is a simple development ability with almost guaranteed chance to hit.

If the grab attempt is successful, then you get to choose which grab position to use. Unlikely HR and HRT, individual positions may have different statistical impact and certain positions may be more effective by default, or perhaps when targeted at weak points of the opponent. Aso unlike HRT, units have to learn different grab positions instead of having everything available at the start of the game.

A slight aside on the grab system. I decided to go with a 1 victim, 0 to M attacker(s) implementation. (M is a limit, currently is at 4) This means things like solo moves, 1:1, threesomes are possible, but a single attacker, 2 victims grab is not.

Also, unlike HRT, threesome+ moves are only usable when the quota for attackers are met. Meaning that you cannot use a threesome move with a single attacker. This is because the positions are often animated with the assumption that all the characters are present, and playing the same animation, but with missing characters just make it looks weird.

How it works now, is that when a new attacker joins, he/she have an opportunity right there to change to a new position immediately, and everything then works out from there. (Doesn't work yet)

On each unit’s turn, if they are in a grab, instead of picking from regular abilities (like attack or move), they are restricted to pick a choose from a Grab Action. They kind of function just like regular abilities, but more specific to influence grabs. For example, the attacker gets to choose actions like “Dominate,” “Commit,” “Switch” whereas the victim gets to choose actions like “Escape”, “Reverse” and “Recover.”

A new concept introduced is “Advantage”. The idea is that Advantage determines (and restricts) what options are available to each participant and influences their success chance and effect. For example, Escaping chance for the victim may get lower and lower as the Advantage turns more against their favor. Conversely, if the victim gains enough Advantage over the aggressor, then the victim can easily Reverse the situation and turn it into their favour.

A note here is that Grab Actions are not set in stone and units can acquire different ones throughout their journey. And I totally want to make a grapple-focus character a thing. And it shall be quite effective in a one versus one situation, but with weakness against groups (because non-grabbed enemies can interrupt) and weak to enemies not susceptible to grabs (for example, slimes).

NOTE: the success chance on individual Grab Actions are a simple fixed value on the gif, but will be dynamically calculated when fully implemented. Models/animations are just placeholders.