How to make abilities on cooldown (rm2k3)

Howdy folks! In this tutorial I will be showing you how to create a simple cooldown system for abilities using Conditions. This isn’t very advanced I know, but it gets the job done.

Example: You want some type of spell to restore MP but you don’t want people to abuse it. You first think that maybe you should just decrease the accuracy or something, but nah…that feels too cheap. But what if you could temporarily disable the time that they can use the ability again? Yeah! That sounds cool.

First off, create the skill. Let’s just call it ‘Evocation’ for now. Accuracy should be 100%. Now make the Intelligence Influence 10 and the Attack and Variance 0. Don’t put anything in the restore MP box btw. You’ll be restoring the MP with a Condition, not on here. Animation whatever you like, but the default casting one works great. Follow the below screenshot if you need to.

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Now let’s have the ability inflict two Conditions. One to actually perform the spell and the other to trigger the cooldown.

Make the priority of the actual Evocation effect just one notch above the cooldown for it. The Evocation spell should restore 9% of your MP over the course of 6 turns in a balanced party of 4 fighters, but this is up to you. Make it always abate (100% chance) after the 6th turn. Now 6 turns might seem like a lot but it really isn’t. You’ll restore your MP pretty quickly. Note: If you want Evocation to prevent your character from taking any action while he’s channeling, you can do that too by just clicking the “No Action Allowed” box. It all depends on the game and how challenging you want it to be.

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To make the cooldown condition, just call it ‘Normal’ with the same font color as the Normal status. Make it prevent all abilities with an Intelligence Influence of over 10. This shouldn’t interrupt your silence skills at all really, and that’s why we chose a high influence rating for this purpose. Also check your resistances. Just set everything 100% for now, unless you want to get more complicated. 

Now the cooldown length is really up to you and the game you have. In a balanced party of 4 fighters somewhere around 50-ish is okay, but you’ll need to test this yourself and play around with it. Basically, if you want virtually no hope whatsoever that they’ll ever get to use it more than once per battle, just make it 999 turns, though that might be too harsh. You only get about 50% of your MP back when you evocate anyway remember – and it uses up a turn. ((And if you really want, you can make it fail sometimes too)) In a tough Boss Fight or long-ish battles it will be a nifty spell.

Make sure your cooldown condition for your abilities doesn’t interfere with your other status effects though! Always pay attention to the priority of your abilities. Subtle increases and decreases are way better usually, and when you add new abilities you’ll probably need to tweak things further. Make sure one extra ability doesn’t ruin your hard work, because that can very well happen. I remember when I was a beginner RPG maker user ((I consider myself intermediate now =p)) I would totally ignore priority and just change each one by 10 points or something, and I got so annoyed when I couldn’t get my abilities to work and when they kept overwriting when I didn’t want them to, etc.

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Now, you can also have an ability to Reset the cooldowns too if you want, an ability that will cure the cooldown conditions you make, but that would be on its own cooldown probably. XD

TEST:

Now to see how it works in battle. Use up some MP, and then Evocate yourself. It should be grayed out for quite some time. 

Looks like a useful tutorial for 2k3. I will let it get some traffic here before moving it to the Database

I've always wondered if someone else made an MP restoring condition other than myself...