Of Friends and Foes - Beginning RPG Maker VX Ace - page 45

Figure 3-8. The Enemies tab of the RMVXA Database
In the preceding figure, we can see Slime, one of the Japanese RPG genre's weakest but most iconic monsters.
The Dragon Quest series has cute slimes, while RMVXA's rendition is more of an amorphous blob. Like actors,
enemies have eight stats. They also confer rewards—in experience and gold—when defeated and can also potentially
drop items for the player. Slime has no items to drop, however. You can set up to three items for an enemy to drop,
with a probability of 1/X (where X can be any number from 1 to 1000). I personally don't recommend drop rates lower
than 1/128, but that's mostly because I have not played an RPG in which most of the item drops are rarer than that
( Dragon Quest 8 , if I recall correctly, had a few 1/256 drops, but they were situational at best).
Action Patterns are what give an enemy most of its bite. The lowly Slime can only use the basic attack that we
saw a few pages back. With its 12 ATK, it won't be winning any damage records in the near future. I'll be discussing
Ratings in detail later in the chapter. Last, Features are back and used for enemies in much the same way that they are
for actor classes. Slime has a 5% chance of missing on its attacks (95% HIT), as well as a 5% chance of dodging physical
attacks (5% EVA). Its attacks render physical damage, and it suffers double damage from ice-based attacks. You can
give enemies resistances and immunities to types of damage and status effects (defined with States in RMVXA). This
discussion has been a bit long, so let's touch on one last section before applying all that we have talked about so far.
Figure 3-9 shows off the Troops tab. You could design a thousand monsters, but you must actually form them into a
troop for them to initiate a valid encounter. The RMVXA Lite troop limit is 30. The very first troop in the list is a pair of
Slimes. Let's talk a bit about each of the commands available.