New to RMXP, requesting help with guild card effects in shops and battles

Firstly, I'm quite a newbie when it comes to RMXP and what I'm asking may involve something rather advanced so forgive me if I've gotten in over my head and don't understand the answers, but I am trying! I know nothing about scripting but I do know about basic eventing with variables and switches etc.

I wish to make a guild system in which the player can join any one of multiple guilds and get appropriate benefits from being in that guild, benefits which improve further as the player gains higher ranks within the guild. To mark the player's rank, they keep a card item that I've already created (a different item for each rank within each guild). Now, how to use that card is confusing me so I'll just describe some things I want to happen and just where I'm getting lost so hopefully someone here can help me.


1) Shops. Someone in a merchants guild should be able to buy products for a cheaper rate and sell them for a more expensive rate.

The first thing I tried was to create copies of items, each with different prices to reflect the player's rank benefits (for example: a shield costs 50g normally, then a copy of that shield costs 45g with the lowest ranked merchants guild card, 40g with a rank above that, etc all the way up to 25g at the highest rank), but these items don't stack together as they should so I consider this to be a failure. The other option I tried was using choices in the event and after each choice the game would check which card the player had and ask for the appropriate amount of cash but that requires the player going through 10 pages of text in a 20 item store so that's sort of a failure too... Does anyone know of any other ways to do this?


2) Battles. Someone in a combat guild should occasionally be able to find allies on combat fields to aid them in battle randomly.

My problem is that I don't really understand how to do battle events at all, especially randomly. Is there a way to have someone temporarily join a random battle occasionally and then go on their way again after the fight is won? The power in battle and commonality of these wandering friends should also reflect which level card the player possesses.


3) Levelling the card itself. As with the above examples, the merchants guild card should level whenever enough things are bought or sold and the combat guild card should level whenever enough enemies (not as per troop but per enemy within each troop) are defeated.

Again, I'm running into similar problems. Shop processing doesn't seem to allow for events within it that would allow me to set some sort of variable whenever something is bought or sold so I'm wondering if I need to go back to the 4 choice menu again but that really seems like such a bad model compared to normal shopping... Battle processing, again, I don't really understand well enough to get variable+1(or +2 or +3 depending on how many in the troop and identifying which troop it is on top of that) events into random battles... I do have some stable quest events that can level the card as well but I really want it to be up to the player how to level their cards so if they don't want to do quests they can go out and fight or sell things or whatever.


Any help with these issues would be very much appreciated! Thank you!

1) It's possible to do this with events. I use "possible" in the loosest sense of the word, because it would take a massive amount of work with conditional branches and item duplicates. The biggest problem is that the duplicates would show up in different inventory slots. It's doable but it's clunky, ugly, and not worth the effort. You'd definitely want to rewrite the shop script(s). I know nothing about scripting, so I can't help you here.


2) This one could actually be done with events while still seeming like it's scripted. However, it would take a lot of tedious work. Again, I'd recommend using scripts for this one.


3) Off the top of my head, I know that a Fighter's Guild card could be made to level up by killing monsters in one of two ways:

a. Making custom battle events for each troop that check when one monster is at 0% HP and changing a variable (card experience or something) accordingly.

b. Making enemies always drop items that can be redeemed at the guild headquarters for card experience.

The other ones, though, would need scripting. Best to use scripting for it all.



So, as it turns out, the things you asked were very advanced. They're very good ideas for making guilds more important than just being quest chains, though.

Thanks for your reply, Mjustin!

1) That duplicates problem is one I ran into before and, yeah, if you have 5 prices (and thus inventory slots) for one item, things get out of control...

3b) That's an idea I hadn't thought of, thanks a lot! I've actually come across that sort of idea in a game called Brave Story New Traveller (a Japanese RPG for the PSP) so I don't know why I didn't remember it. Sometimes you can't see the wood for the trees.

I've looked into scripting a little but it's all so intimidating

Thanks for your feedback! I really like interlinking different aspects of games and trying to make the whole thing more interactive than the traditional storybook with "fight this, fetch that" quests that seem to be the main adventure RPG format at the moment. Not to say that those games don't have their good points, a well told story can make any game great, but it just seems like there's so much more potential to really immerse yourself in and interact with the world...