Mario Rabbids Kingdom Battle is a Turn-Based Tactical RPG. The premise is that you use Mario Characters and Rabbids with guns to fight, while hiding behind cover and planning out your turns and whatnot.
Primary Weapons can be used every turn. With the exception of the Boomshot Gun, all Primary Weapons can be used in any situation. You shoot a bad guy in your line of sight, and it takes damage. Simple as that.
There are also secondary weapons that have a 1 turn cooldown. Secondary weapons tend to be more restrictive in what situations they work in. For example: the Grenaduck and the Rocket Secondary can do area of effect damage ignoring enemy cover, and they are most useful when hitting multiple enemies clumped together, but they can also hit your team if you aren’t careful when positioning. Using Secondary’s require extra thought, and they can be extra powerful if you use them in the right situation.
Now for the main topic of this post.
One of the Primary Weapons in the game is called the Rumblebang. It is basically the same as the basic gun, but it has high damage variability. It can do tons of damage, or very little damage, randomly. It tries to make up for this unpredictability by doing more damage than other weapons on average.
First off, the Rumblebang’s gimmick of “random amounts of damage with every use” isn’t very fun for the player. The fun of a tactical game is all about coming up with strategies and executing them. The rumblebang’s randomness, however, can’t be planed around and doesn’t feel very rewarding to the player. I came up with a different idea for how the rumblebang could work:
My hypothetical “New Rumblebang” won’t have the random damage variability. Instead, it’s unique thing is that it does massive damage to a single target (maybe 40% more than normal basic weapons for example), but it also has a 1 turn cooldown period where you can’t use it just like Secondary Weapons. The Rumblebang would be literally better than most other weapons because of it’s large damage output and great range, except the 1 turn cooldown forces you to constantly swap between your Rumblebang and your Grenaduck/Rocket Secondary Weapon every single turn. Both your Primary and your Secondary Weapon would have 1 turn cooldowns. I think it would be an interesting challenge for the player to time their turns to make optimal use of the Rumblebang, when they most need it. Being forced to switch between a super-high-damage single-target Rumblebang and an area-of-effect secondary weapon each turn is an interesting challenge, and more importantly, it is something you can plan around and optimize as a reward for careful planning.