I'm currently making a game for RPG Maker 2. Right now I'm calling it Sword of Vengeance. In one section of the game I want to have a dungeon called Trials of Valor (Valor is a God) in which my monk character must complete in order to head to Temple of Buddha. I want each trial to represent a good trait of a monk. For example I plan to have one trail where you have to sneak around a monster (he's too powerful to fight) to get to the other side. This would show the trait of wisdom. These are the traits that are giving me a problem:
Courage
Compassion
Patience
And Restraint.
Any suggestions? Thanks for your help.

patience would perhaps be a trial where you are told to wait for a certain amount of time, and you fail if you move at all during that time.

Restraint might be similar to the Paladin Trial in Final Fantasy IV (If you've ever played that.) where Cecil had to defend for several turns of a battle in order to become a paladin.

Courage - Could involve a situation where the outcome is uncertain (perhaps a tough mini-boss?) or a situation where you need to traverse a trapped area and navigate through traps that are damaging you. You know you're gonna be having a tough time of it, but you forge ahead and weather the storm. Courage will keep moving forward through the gauntlet, while cowardice will give up.

Patience - Could involve a difficult maze or perhaps a maze of invisible walls. Or a maze where you need to flip levers to remove obstacles that block your path. You need to spend time learning, through trial and error, how to navigate your way through the maze. Patience will keep trying, even during times of frustration, while impatience will find itself easily frustrated and give up.

Restraint - Could involve a situation where you are surrounded by valuable treasure that belongs to someone (it would help if the person who it belongs to is in the room with you and tells you how much he's willing to part with). You can take as much as you're allowed, but taking more than that will fail the challenge. To make this a bit more puzzle-like, maybe have numerous piles of gold in varying amounts. Examining each pile tells you how much is there and offers a choice to take it or leave it alone. You have to take amounts of gold that add up to the amount you're allowed to take. Restraint will only take as much it needs, while greed will take everything.

Compassion - Could involve a particularly evil or reviled monster who has a nest with eggs or young monsters. This monster should be very tough to beat (or just very aggressive) and should have a weakness that you can easily exploit to keep him at bay (i.e. he lives in a dark cave and fears light; you can fend him off by waving your torch at him). Even if you have to defeat the monster, compassion will show mercy to the young monsters while a lack of compassion would just kill them off.

Edit: It might help if the player is not made aware of which challenge is being presented at any given time. Present the player with a situation to examine, and he needs to figure out which trait is being tested there.

Courage could be a corridor with a series of non-random battles, moderately tough, which you have the option to fight or not fight and heal (for less than the average health you lose in one of the battles). To pass you'd need to have fought more than a set number of the battles, let's say, more than half of them.

Patience could also be an extremely long boss fight which is not hard but requires repetitive use of a bland strategy. Which, honestly, is what 90% of RPG bosses are like anyway...

For Restraint I really like The Xix's idea. But any sane RPG player would take all the gold, no matter the circumstances – so you should tell the player, or at least hint, what's the maximum amount he can take. Banal example, let's say there's a monster who can only be defeated by a sword that costs $1000. You put the player in a room and see if he takes more than that.

If you want to really test the player, you can use The Xix's suggestion for Compassion above and imply that the young monsters are about to turn into the bigger, more powerful monster – unless you finish them off in a few turns.

I never really thought of any of those ideas. It seems I've been trying to make it harder then it really was.

I really like the gold one for restraint.

I'm thinking of using the baby one for compassion, but with a slight change. How does this sound? While working your way through the trial you come across a moster who is standing over her nest that is empty. She is looking sad. The player could have a choice to attack the monster. Which causes the player to fail the trial. If you look at the nest and determine that the babys must of gone missing. Then you would get an option to help the mother by collecting her babies for her.

I really like myoky's trial for paitence. But I'm not sure anyone would be able to figure that out without getting really frustrated or it being to easy.

This is the one I came up with for paitence. You are in a maze and must light a candle at the other end. There are two ways to go, the long way, or a shortcut. First you must find the lite candle at the other end. You can take either way to get there. But once you have the flame in hand you can go only one way and that would be the long way. There would be something in the shortcut to cause the flame to go out. Either you accidently splash water on it or a gust of wind blows it out.

The player is not going to have any idea what the trial stands for. They must look and acess the situation. If they choose the wrong path they would not be allowed to continue. If they choose the right path one of the head monks will come out and talk to them, letting know that they may continue in the trial.

Thanks for the help. You guys have gotten me on the right path again with my game.

Is it even possible to have invisible walls? If so I have an idea I will be using to go along with it.

I don't know what RM2 is capable of. I was just blindly tossing ideas out. Invisible walls would make for a great 2D maze or even a 3D one. You have to feel your way around. I already did inviso-wall mazes in "Labyrinths", a game I made on my Atari computer during the 80s.

You can. In the dungeon editor, go to custom, then details and select trans. You can select how transparant you want the blocks. To put them into your dungeon you need to enter transparancy mode by pressing [] + L2. Then press Triangle + down on the directional pad to turn transparency on. To turn it off just reenter transparency mode and press triangle + directional pad up. If you want multiple block transparencies you need to make them in the building mode first and then place them in the object placement. Hope it helps.

That's pretty cool. I guess they aren't kidding when they say RPGM2 is the most complete one.

Yup. You can even import graphics. ....If you have a P80 digital camera.

(Or some such P-numbered camera.)

for courage you could keep building up a monster to make it seem like he is really powerful, so much so the player would be a nut to fight him, (like text saying he is killing other things you have problems with still like they were flies?) but then turns out to be extremely weak

I dunno, I think the player may think the battle wasn't properly balanced if that was done. Unless you have somebody say after the courage test that the rumors were just lies that were a part of the test.

Courage is not simply defeating monsters. It is the ability to face ones fears. I vote that the courage trial be the one where you have to find the babies.

However, as for the compassion, I would set up a battle where you have a bunch of monsters like the above example. I big one and a bunch of smaller ones of similar type. The smaller ones all would have status ailments, (one would be blind, the next would be poisoned, etc)
The trick is that the "mother" would be pounding on you like nobody's business, your task (and thus the successful completion of the trial) would be to cure these smaller creatures of their sickness in a set number of turns, the test would involve not the babies so much (as that would be the obvious thing) but how you deal with the mother. If you kill her to make her stop attacking you then you fail because then the babies have no caregiver, but if you do nothing then the mothers attacks will kill you before you heal the babies. Running away would also fail you because in this instance you showed no empathy either.

honestly this whole thing could be all the tests in one.
Suppose you set it up so that the babies are all casting the status effects on each other as you try to cure them. This would show patience.
Not killing the mother would show restraint.

There you go. all the traits all bundled up in one neat package.
That is not to say you couldn't implement the other idea of an invisible maze. Like it could work like this:

You enter the temple or whatever it is, and a wise old monk greats you. He explains that to pass, you must prove your worth. As with all Kung fu tests, the task is deceptively simple. You will need to to go over to the back wall of this "room" where a mother monster sits. She has lost her babies, and they are each in a different location in this room. Collect the babies (you could simply have them warp to the nest when you touch them) and once they are safe, you may proceed. Simple, right? Yeah, the monk will conveniently forget to mention that the room is full of invisible walls and that both the mother and the babies are at the end of long convoluted paths. and once the babies are together, they will start to bicker and cast status ailments on each other. This will invalidate the condition that they "be safe to continue."

I would also set it up so that when you touch a wall it becomes visible again, but this could be tempered with a choice ("would you like an easy trial or a difficult trial) with an easy trial, you would get to see the walls, but if you found any chests, you would not be permitted to open them. If you did then you would be warped back to the start, and all the walls would be invisible always and the treasure chests would disappear (for real this time). If you chose "difficult" then you would not be able to see the walls or the chests, but you would be permitted to take what was in any you happened to trip over. This would not only server the purpose of patience, but would show honesty (not taking the chests when they are presented you/following orders) , and the ability to accept charity (accepting help from the unknown in the face of adversity).

Wow, Staffy! Those are very well thought out ideas. Very cool.

Yeah...I'm kind of awesome like that.