Jamie's Guide to Cool Ability Effects

[Rolina]

That's the thing, though... super powers is often the go-to science fiction thing.  Psychic falls under that.  I'm kinda sick of that - what if this was a world where such things were impossible thanks to the laws of physics?

If you really wanna do that, I suggest a Star Wars hack, since the Force fits that perfectly.  Personally, though, I prefer a superpower-free approach - it's something I've almost never seen.  Even freaking Xenogears/saga had a mystic element going in it...

[Aile~♥]

Update with information on value overflow for Healing abilities. It's really weird how the game behaves when that occurs. I don't even get it.

[leaf]

I love this thread.

[Durza]

That heal overflow sounds interesting. I'll have to check if going even higher results in damaging the target or restoring small amounts of HP and PP.

[Misery]

Update with information on value overflow for Healing abilities. It's really weird how the game behaves when that occurs. I don't even get it.

I tried using heal overflow quite a while ago in hopes of getting damaging attacks using the heal formula, but in my disappointment I failed to notice the other effects you described...

[Kide]

Healing Overflow: It turns out that Healing abilities actually use a signed 16-bit value for their base power. But the editor doesn't know this. So what you do is you set the ability's power to something just over 32767 (I used 33000), so that it will overflow to the most negative value possible, or at least close to it. This has an odd effect. At such extreme levels of negative healing, the game will not actually damage the target. Instead, the target's HP will be fully restored (though it still says "[character] recovered -31500 (or whatever) HP!") and, for whatever reason, so will their PP. If you were hoping to fully restore HP and PP as well as some other effect, this will free up the secondary effect slot for you!

HP and PP full restoration? I've seen this already, and in an even weirder way, when trying to change HP limit to over 16,383, for both enemies and PCs. I don't know for sure, but I believe the game is coded to reset HP and PP values when something... unusual happens, like healing negatives. However, this thing worked a little differently for my case. Any value over 16,383 could cause this issue. The higher the value, the more frequent the resetting happened.

But in the case of your discovery, if the problem really is the healing negatives, I think not all values over 32,767 would cause it, while some lower than that could. I say that because the healed HP depends on elemental power. So, if a character with 149 Power used a 24,000 base power healing ability your effect would still happen. But if this character had 104 Power instead, you would indeed be healing around 24,000 HP.

Edit: Yep, confirmed. So I believe there isn't a universal value you can use for this effect if you want it to always work, since elemental power may range from 76 to 200.

[Aile~♥]

Yeah, I know about that. I discovered it the hard way. But what does work is to make your healing ability non-elemental, so that any value around 33000 will cause the glitch.

[Kide]

Ah yes, you're right. I keep forgetting things can be non-elemental...

It's a bit of a letdown, though, being limited to a single element (or the lack of one in this case). But at least it works.