Steal Skill Tutorial

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Author: remirez
Posted on 08/02/2004
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teal Skill Tutorial
by remirez

Difficulty: easy/intermediate

OK, there's no Steal Skill available in rm2k's basic systems. No problem. It's pretty easy to make one, here's how;

To start with, you'll need to make a skill named something like "Steal" (originality's never an issue for me, I promise). Just make this skill a Switch type which turns on a switch named something equally original, such as, er..."Steal". Also, make sure this skill can only be used in battle, you don't want your players to be able to try stealing things when wandering around your maps.

Now, in each monster party, you need to do the following:

Make an event which requires the switch "Steal" to be ON. Perhaps you'd like a message here such as "[Character name] is trying to steal from his enemies..." Bear in mind that in rm2k you cannot target a single enemy with a Switch type skill, so it'll have to be stealing from the whole group of monsters and not just a single one. Now, obviously, you won't want your stealing to be 100% successful every time (this would make your game far too easy), so you'll need to create a chance. You set a variable called "Steal chance", and set it to be a random number between 1 and 100. Now, you simply set up a fork depending on how likely you want your success rate to be. Ensure this fork has an "Else case". Say you wanted a 10% success rate, you simply make a fork which checks if the "Steal chance" variable is less than 10. For 20%, check if it's less than 20. I'd avoid chances over 25% if I were you, it makes stealing something of a ridiculously handy skill. REMEMBER: a good RPG will never be too easy. Just look at Final Fantasy Mystic Quest.

OK, now for the stealing part. Within your fork, you would simply select "Change Item" and add whatever item you wanted the character to be able to steal from the monsters in question, say a Potion for example. Then show a message saying something like, "[Character Name] stole a potion!" You can use variables here to set which item or how many you take if you like, but I'll let you work that out for yourselves. We'll just stick to the basics here. Now, add a battle animation or sound effect if you wish. Finally, add a "Change Switch" and turn the "Steal" switch to OFF.

And what about if the stealing was unsuccessful? Well, that's even easier. In the "Else" commands of your fork, simply show a message such as "[Character Name] was unable to steal!" and again, turn the "Steal" switch OFF.

That's basically it. Remember that you'll need to do this for EVERY Monster Party in your game. But, in each one, you can alter the success rate, the items to be stolen and the amount of them. You should also find it easy to alter this so you can make a "Learn" or "Enemy Skill" type ability.

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