What was your favorite RPG maker fight system? Why?

As I mentioned last week I am following the Yanfly comic and making a basic Harold Dungeon crawler game. Nothing fancy, nothing too wordy, just a wee little game. The enemies are spelled out for me so technically I should just set things up the way they say too, slap them on the maps and be good to go, right?

I wish that were the case.

What I have learned so far is that random battles have their place. They are, to me, good for grinding items and for questing*, but not XP. XP based fights needs to be measured and controlled in the way it's given to the player or one of two things will happen: Either you will get frustrated by the pop-up fights when you don't need them, or you will have to wander around to grind to get strong enough to fight the next set of monsters.

After play testing my first dungeon at least five times I didn't look forward to any of the encounters past the bare minimum. Thus I am going to strip out all random encounters and lay out measured fights so that there are 'just enough'.

I really, really don't want to though. Math for me is a little hard, I'm going to have to event some region triggers for each monster on each map, and I have to balancer all of the drops and treasures. Not to mention I might have to rebuild several rooms in the dungeon!

Random battles are easy to toss together, easy-ish to scale for the 'dev's expected player progression' and only needs a few seconds to set up on the map. And I'm lazy, impatient and a little stupid. 

I want to do things the easy way. This is a throwaway game, right? For practice? For my pwn benefit?  Who would even want to play my trash practice game?

But there's the reminder. This IS practice, for my own learning, and for personal growth. If I'm not having fun playing it my self then why not program something I will enjoy? Why not do it 'right'?

Keep the math so simple even my dumb brain can grasp it! Imagine numbers as wedges, right? Or labeled steps on a staircase? It can't be that hard!

But it is because I've never done this before and the information out there is vague and not specific, but at the same time very nuanced and detailed in all the ways I either already know or don't need. And that's just the overviews. The battle formulas are still written in some kind of arcane nonsense and I've studied them for days.

I REFUSE to toss in plugins anywhere until I have sufficiently learned the engine. If I can't make the basics good and fun what good will tossing fancy plugins do me?

My quest for the BIG HAROLD GAME continues. My attempt to make a small Harold game looms before me. And every week I come here to document that and remind my self that the real fight is against my own ignorance and laziness. 

As always I would love your suggestions and advice. I have two questions for this week:

How do you make your fights? What has been your favorite RPG maker fight system and why? (I guess that's technically three questions, but like I said I'm not good at math! ^_~)

~Me

BONUS VIDEO: This echoed what I was feeling and explains things better than I probably can!