Anyone who’s played any of the old school RPG games, especially ones within the Final Fantasy franchise, should be familiar with the concept “Preemptive Attacks”. I can’t list the number of times these tiny whims of fickle RNGenies have saved (and just as many times killed) my party! But sadly, I haven’t seen this mechanic used in many modern RPGs and that’s a crying shame! It’s an interesting addition to any battle system and a great way to add extra depth as well!

Judging by the fact you’re here, I think you feel the same. Or you’re just curious. Either way, let’s get to how you can add this function to your own RPG Maker project. The best part is IT DOESN’T REQUIRE CODE! You can use this in any RPG Maker just with the tools available in the Event Commands and Database!

STEP One:

Go to the States tab in the database of you RPG maker of choice and create a new state (call it whatever you want). Set it to last only one turn and go away.

STEP Two:

In the Troop tab in the editor, pick any Monster Group you want to running this event on.

STEP Three:

Here, you’ll only need three things:

• 1 Variable

• 2 Conditional branches

First make a variable (call it ‘Preemptive Attacking’, if you want) and set it select to a random number in a range. Between 1 and 10 would be best(and easiest), but, do you. Next Make the Conditional Branches, one for your party, the other for the bad guys.

For the party’s Conditional, set it to run if the variable (the one you made earlier) is greater than 8, meaning 9 or 10. Within the branch you can add some text like, “We surprised them!” and then change the enemy state (tab 3 in the Event Commands menu) to your newly-created one. (see last image in Step One)

The Enemy’s conditional runs if the variable is less than 3, giving you either 2 or 1. In this branch, you can have text saying, “They ambushed us!”. You then change the party’s state (tab 1 in the Event Commands menu) to the one you made earlier.

What’s all this mean? Well, what you want to happen is for these conditions to only come about 2 out of 10 (20%) times, either way. This way you won’t constantly be jumped by the enemy or break your game with easy first-turn murder sprees.

Why go through all this, you ask? Especially when the likes of Yanfly, SumRndmDude and HimeWorks have made plugins to do this very thing?

Easy, simple implementation. I don’t know about you, but I’m not that deft with code to be able to make any changes to plugins if need be, so I need something I can modify easily to fit my game. With this, you can tailor it in many ways to add flavor to your game.

• Use a special item that adds to the variable, making it easier to ambush an enemy.

• Have a cursed state that make the enemy more like to ambush you.

• You can have a monster catching (mini)game where you get better chances to catch when the prey is surprised.

And so many more ideas that can benefit from something like this! I know it’s not the world's greatest discovery or even all that elegant. I just hope this can be of use to someone, someday. Feel free to change it how you need, but most importantly, have fun with it.

All the best to your RPG Maker game deving and DON’T GIVE UP!