Bard as Battlebot

[Carduus]

One of my characters is going to be a utility/jack-of-all-trades/backup role, like a bard, but I had no interest in the whole singing-to-inspire thing. Instead, I decided she was a technologist/artificer who could alter a battlebot-like pet character to fit various situations. Need the bad guy pinned? Add the clamp. Need specific elemental damage? Add something that emits that. Forgot to equip your giant-slaying sword before the giant battle? Technologist loses her turn to have the 'bot bring it to you. As long as its overall abilities are below that of the PCs, I think its versatility would offset its lack of min-maxing.


The question is, though, how to create a system around this that is: balanced with other characters, interesting enough that someone of a certain playstyle would enjoy having her on the team, make specialization in a limited number of aspects make gameplay feel different (she has a 5 in propulsion but a 1 in sensors, so she can only (easily) make fast, near-blind bots), and generally cover the Batman/bard/utility character slot.


How would you build such a system that hits all the points above, and what rules could I impose to avoid abuse?

 

[Pine Towers]

Would a party of 5 techies be as efficient as a party with 1 fighter, 1 mage, 1 cleric, 1 thief and 1 techie?


The Bard must be the duck of the party: He can fly, swim, run and peck, but not as good as a bird, fish, cat and eagle, or he will overshadow the party member. If your techie can improve (his) damage in such a way to be on par with the fighter, why have a fighter at all? The same apply on the magic and skills department. If Gadget can grant Clank an elemental attack, have it so it won't rival with Breeze, the Wind Mage. Or in the end of the day, 5 techies could support each other to be better than the classes that were to represent the best in that role.

Spoiler

For a cRPG, this is no problem at all, since the player will control the whole party. In tabletop RPG (tRPG), play the duck is not so thrilling. That's why - for example, in D&D - the Bard fulfills a totally different role on the 4E and beyond, not being a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none character.

And even on the techie subject, a hacker can play a lot different than a gadgeteer (that builds one-use-only items that can have several effects) and a techie that focus on one robot (as would a ranger with his pet animal).

 

[Wavelength]

Well there's "The Mario" who is simply average-to-good at everything, but what I hear from your question is that you're interested in making a character who can be (but is not automatically) really good at everything.  And the way I'd probably handle that is to give some kind of direct cost to the versatility - whether that's a turn to "transform" the robot before it can do anything special, or a certain number of "parts" that must be spent to repurpose it for a single battle, or long (maybe even multi-battle) cooldowns on the Forms that the robot can take, or whatever you'd like, as long as the cost is something more severe than the normal amounts of MP/TP that people play around with but not so severe that it makes the character hard to use.


The aim would be to make this character better(!) then what they are trying to imitate, so they don't feel like a pale copy, but to make it less "natural" in the sense that the character who does something naturally (e.g. the Wind Mage, to use Pine's example above) doesn't need to go through any effort to unleash a wind-elemental spell, whereas the versatile Bard/Gadgeteer needs to do something special and therefore - while their wind spell might be even more powerful, allowing the player to experience that high of being clever and doing something really great - isn't as reliable as any other character in their one field of expertise.


That's probably how I would envision the multi-specialist character in a game where party members are supposed to feel balanced.  But there are lots of other correct answers, as well!

 

[Carduus]

I don't think I sufficiently explained myself. I'm trying to port the 'bard' feel (jack of all trades, master of none, utility/Batman/buff/debuff kind of role) to an internally-consistent robot. To prevent a battlebot that was better than the players, there would have to be limitations, but the limitations would have to expand over time so that it remained a few steps behind the PCs in what they did well.


I'd also like an additional layer of complexity/strategy in the robot controller/builder's skillset, ie: A 7th level Battlebot might have a systemic limitation (battery power?) of 7 damage, 7 speed, 7 agility, etc, but the player has to choose what to raise skill-wise, such that she might only be able to build a 4 damage, 7 speed, 3 agility battlebot. Someone else could prioritize raising different skills to make a 7 damage, 2 speed, 5 agility battlebot.


I'm trying to come up with a system that allows for the flexibility of a bard while making sure it can't be min-maxed into being better than the PCs at any one thing, and was wondering if y'all had any advice.

 

[Pine Towers]

@Carduus, your example reminded me of Star Trek. Why not go energy allocation? The bot have 2 parameters: [1] Battery and [2] System. The Techie have a "Energy Allocation" skill that, once activated, let him transfer energy to different systems:


A level 5 bot have a maximum energy of 5 and the attack, defense and reaction (speed) systems (and you can create more, like support). The skill allows the techie to distribute the 5 energy in any way he wants in this 3 systems. That systems are "equips" with base scores, like "Beta (or Alpha, or Gamma, or Delta) Attack" having a base 3 Attack. The techie can allocate 0 to 5 (in the example) to the attack system, increasing the base 3 to 3 to 8 (3 + 5). But if facing a hard foe the techie can "transfer all energy to the shields!" and reallocate energy to defense.


If you make the base equip systems low and the maximum energy allocation in a certain threshold, you can make it versatile without overshadowing other party members, because the exemplary level 5 bot with beta attack can have a maximum of 8 attack, while the fighter have a base 7 attack increasing to 9 or 10 when using his Rage skill.

 

[Dr. Delibird]

Well if you really want that "master of none" type feel, you could just make sure that anything that the bard can do that is simillar in anyway to the more specialised roles is inherently not as good. That is a good baseline. Spark on a mage doesn 20 damage? Eletric Shock from the "bard" does 10. That is a good place to start. After you make sure that the component of the skill the "bard" is doing is not as good as the other version/s, then you can start to add the elements that make it something the player actually wants to do despite the fact that it isn't up to scratch. Maybe the Electric Shock example I gave can have like a 75% chance to "charge" the target which damages them slightly whenever they make contact (as well as slightly damaging whatever they made contact with). Not a lot of damage though, maybe something like 4% of the thing being touched's max HP. This is just an example and it might not fit into your style or whatever but stuff like this that make the skill worth using without being straight up better is ultimately what the "bard" is about.