Fairness in RPG gameplay

[Pete for President]

I highly disagree with all bosses being susceptible of every status ailment. That would make the game a breeze if I could beat them all by casting petrify, stop, or death.

Maybe those status ailments shouldn't be in the game in the first place, or like already mentioned by Mirage their effects could be adjusted to make them less extreme. Stop could maybe just cancel out 1 turn or move before resetting, petrify could take 5 turns to "fully petrify" something, and death well I think just shouldn't exist.

Vagrant Story does things well in terms of status effects. A Paralysed enemy can still cast spells and perform special attacks. A Numbed enemy can still attack normally but no special attacks. Silenced... well you get the idea.

Also I think bosses/enemies in RPG's have a lot missed potential in the way they hardly use status effects on the player. Child of Light was one of the first I have played where enemies really used debuffs/buffs to their advantage and I had some really challenging battles because of this.

Magimaster in FF6 is a complete dick. You have to have fought him before in order to win. There's no way to predict that it will do ultima, and no way to lower ultima's damage significantly.

Immunity to almost all status effects is also unfair. It makes a whole class of magic useless for the fights that matter. In some games, it makes an entire character class useless in certain fights. Thing is that debuffs are often way overpowered, which they need to be if people are gonna bother with using them in random encounters rather than just spamming attack. At the same time, that level of potency makes them dangerously overpowered against many bosses.

The obvious solution here, is of course to make bosses more resistant to the effects than random monsters. For example Blind, it lowers accuracy extremely much on random encounters. They go from hitting you 95% of the time to 5% of the time, an accuracy drop of 90%. A boss starting to miss you 19 out of 20 times is way overpowered, so why not just have it resist blind instead of being completely immune? Where a random encounter loses 90% of its hit rate, a boss could be losing 10-15%, going from a 100% hit rate to a 85-90% hit rate. You still can't rely on blind to make you win, but it's certainly going to give you a few lucky breaks, save some MP you'd spend on healing, and so on.

I like this idea. I also like the potential it has to make things stack. Say if you want to reduce a boss accuracy even more you'd have to invest a vast number of turns to debuff that attribute, starting at 10% reduction, 20% when you cast Blind again, etc. I think status inflicting party members would also be more used throughout the battle, rather than just inflict the thing and then get swapped out.

Or just do instant death spells like so:
If you expect it to take on average 50 turns to kill the boss, then make it so the instant death spell has like a 1.5% chance of hitting. So you are probably better off just whittling it down, but the option is always there.

As much as I like the idea of having the option to kill a boss with Death, the RNG bothers me a bit.

Maybe this could be an option: imagine casting death is instakill, but it takes 8 turns to "gather power and cast", basically unable to do anything else but charge this move. Within those 8 turns you'd have to keep the casting party member alive with a suiting defensive strategy with the other party members. Imagine how tense that could end up if the casting member is slowed down by slow, turning it into 12 turns to cast. But if you make it through, the reward is grand.