So I've got a battle system idea that I'd like to run by you all.

Battle takes place simultaneously in two worlds - the physical and the spiritual. Characters can switch between the two worlds at the beginning of each turn with no penalty. Different characters get different bonuses and penalties depending on which world they're in. Same thing with skills & spells. Characters can only target characters in the world they're in unless there are no enemies in that world in which case they can target anything in either world.

Seems like such a battle system wouldn't take much longer than a standard battle system while substantially increasing the level of strategy involved. I'm thinking you'd select commands for each character in standard menu-based fashion with the only difference being a world switch button that can be used to switch worlds for the currently selected character.

As for the story/gameplay tie-in, most of the characters and enemies are undead so everyone in the game having the ability to switch between the physical and spirit realms isn't too far fetched.

Yeah. Basically, when you enter a battle, you've get two battles going on simultaneously - the physical world battle and the spirit world battle. When you enter in commands for your characters, you decide who fights in the physical world and who fights in the spirit world and then that character is stuck in that world for that turn. Each turn, you have the opportunity to switch worlds for any characters you wish.

That's actually a really nice base concept for a battle system. Planning to do a demo game of it?

I've got a similar idea knocking around in my head, only the "spiritual" world is a virtual world, ala "Ghost In The Shell".

Hacking is a phase at the beginning of the combat where various possibilities of hacker/hacker combat is resolved in a final fantasy style turn based combat section, and which is followed up by a Shining Force style tactical battle - success in the hacking can deliver one party or the other a huge advantage in the tactical battle, since any hackers left standing will be able to use their virtual selves to good effect during the fight.

Armour comes in two types - "normal" RPG style armour, and cyborg parts, which are more or less permenant and can't be removed - only be replaced with parts of increasing complexity. The complexity of your parts determines your vulnerability to hackers, but delivers MASSIVE bonuses in tactical combat.

It's also the kind of combat you'd want to keep to a minumum. A battle like that could take a hell of a long time to play out. Of course, this is all massively unrealistic and will never happen, but a man can dream, eh?

It does suggest though, that multi-world combat systems are the wave of THE FUTURE, because any time I have a decent idea, a huge developer produces a much better version than I imagined in a timeframe that suggests they must have started before I did.

He don't know us very well, does he? ;)

sounds like an interesting idea. i haven't heard of such a battle system before!

good luck programming it!