So what kind of game will this be, anyway?

After poking around the internet and looking at different ways of making games, I've decided on how the game is going to be.  At least at first.  I had this naïve fantasy of creating a text-based adventure which involved into a text-based adventure with graphics which evolved into a turn-based RPG which blah blah blah, but that unsurprisingly turns out to be more trouble than it's worth.  To strike a balance between "hitting the ground running" and "learning video games from the ground up," I'm going to be using RPG Toolkit to create something that runs about like Chrono Trigger.  I figure that if a finished product ends up looking even that good, I'll be happy.  I'll also work on, ahem, "backwards compatibility" sometimes if I hit a brick wall, and maybe step back to text-based adventures if I'm unsure of how to move forward with my real project but I still want to learn something about video games that day.

OK, so the goals are:

• A top-down 2-D RPG with turn-based battle mechanics.
• Battles will take place "in the world" like Chrono Trigger (as opposed to having their own screens, like in Final Fantasy's SNES incarnations).
• Main focus will be on story - how things go in the world based on how the player resolves conflicts.

This last point is probably the most defining feature of the game.  Sure, the player will be able to kill his/her way through the game; but the main character will pretty much be able to take combat for granted.  "Combat" itself I want to be just one of multiple ways to resolve conflicts; other ways would be avoiding conflict with stealth, or deterring it with crowd control (CC) effects.

To explain this with an example (half for you, half for me), let's say a soldier is standing guard to the drawbridge of the castle we need to enter.  The main character could certainly storm the gates by approaching the soldier with a weapon at the ready.  But a professional soldier might be able to kill one of the main character's companions before he was dispatched.  So the player may also choose to seek an alternate entrance, to attempt to bribe the guard, or - if negotiations break down and combat ensues anyway - to use CC on him for a couple turns until he doesn't feel like fighting any more.

But that's a little far off right now.  At first, I have a feeling I'll be concentrating on things like "can I walk in the world" and "does the man fall down when he has zero HP?"  That's just where I want things to go eventually, but I think I can use successive approximation to bridge just about every gap there is in between.

OK, let's warm up RPG Toolkit and see what kind of damage I can do!

Edit:  You guys, vectors are complicated.