Building Character (mechanics)

[blacksmithy]

Hello, RPG Maker community!

This is my first post on this forum. I played a lot of RPG Maker 95 on the PS1, and finally got Steam and pre-ordered RPGMMV a week ago. It is VERY exciting to be making games on such a powerful storytelling engine!

So, one of the big challenges for me, with all these options available in RPGMMV, is deciding how complex to make my characters. I'm not talking here about their personalities, motivations, etc. (I write for a living so that's, like, whatever) but instead about their mechanical complexity. How many skills should they have? How much is enough? How much is too much?

My current job class paradigm is to give each class at least 5 and at most 10 unique skills, plus a few basic "Tactics" that every character shares. I plan for the game to include about 9-12 characters: enough to have lots of party combinations to try, but not so many that you start forgetting who's who. Most classes, as well, are unique to a single character.

The train of thought there is that narrowing down the skill sets will help me make the characters feel unique, instead of everyone having similar skills because there's so dang many skills flying around. For example, one mage class operates by going into a deep, chanting trance to activate big, terrifying spells; another crafts and uses items mid-combat (still trying to figure out the programming on that one). The situation I want to avoid is where Chant-mage's 20+ skills overlap a bunch with Item-mage's 20+ skills, and as a result they feel similar in combat even though their casting method is completely different.

But of course, I worry that my guideline of 5-10 skills won't be enough to keep my characters interesting through the course of a (probably) long game. I mean, good writing covers a multitude of sins, but I don't want to be committing design sins in the first place. My damage formulae are set up to scale so that I don't need "Fire, Fira, Firaga" skill progressions, so that's not a concern, but a lack of tactical depth is quite concerning indeed.

But enough talk! What are your thoughts on the "sweet spot" for mechanical complexity? How do you achieve it in your games? Let's dish!

 

[NichG]

'Skills' can be used for a lot of different things, design-wise. Some are more effective for different players than others. The thing to keep in mind is that each skill represents some effort that the player must undergo to figure out if it's a good idea to use it, and when. That has to occur during productive play - that is, the player will test out the skill while navigating the game, not in a vacuum. This is multiplied by the number of characters, not to mention whatever exploration and experimentation would be needed to work out good combos. So if it would take too long for the player to really figure out the differences, there will be a point where they'll just pick something that looks like it works well and exclusively use that.

On the other hand, skills represent a much more granular reward to the player for advancement than just seeing the numbers go up. If the player knows in advance what skills there are to be gained, they can represent concrete goal-posts that the player looks forward to in order to mark their progress. That can, in turn, keep the player engaged. The Fire/Fira/Firaga chains are effective in this sense because once you have Fira, you don't really have to experiment to know to use it instead of Fire (so it doesn't increase the player's cognitive load), but it also marks advancement pretty clearly - the player knows they want to get Firaga, because it will be strictly better than what they had before.

However, that kind of system has been done to death, and players are used to it now to the point where they aren't as easily engaged by the illusion that Fira->Firaga is somehow different than just getting a bonus to their damage statistics. Also, it's a limited use of the design space of skills. So that's a point against it. Lets proceed assuming that we don't want to do this style of skills at all, and see what's left.

In gameplay, each skill represents a choice that can be made on the spot (rather than needing to build for it ahead of time with level-up points or job points or gear choices or whatnot). So for any skill presented to the player, there should be a tactical situation or immediate strategy where it would be the best choice to make in that situation. Furthermore, ideally, those situations should be relatively balanced in their rate of occurrence, otherwise you have the situation of gimmick skills that look useless and get ignored (even if they would be useful for this one trick fight). The best case, IMO, is when the use of skills can chain together with each-other synergistically, because that moves you from evaluating the tactical situation to actually formulating strategy. But again, if there's 'one best strategy', the player will just learn that particular pattern and repeat it, and ignore other options (this is part of the reason for cooldown mechanics, I suppose).

In any event, I would suggest starting from figuring out what kinds of battle situations would actually feel different from each-other. Things like 'the party is severely fragile', 'the party can't get a chance to act', 'the party needs to kill the boss as soon as possible before he gets a big finisher move off', 'the boss keeps throwing up these barriers/allies that come back, and get in the way', etc, etc. Then come up with skills that interact with those situations in interesting ways - maybe one way to deal with fragility is to have a skill that lets the party ignore one attack, whereas another way would be to heal them up, etc. Those different ways are what will let you construct interesting synergies. Then apportion them to the characters, such that any one class of skill is held by no more than say 3 characters. 

If you end up having trouble with there being too many skills, you can always use a system where the player has to purchase/allocate skills (maybe in a retrainable way). That makes skills act more like build choices or inventory items, and allows the player to sort of specialize their team towards their style without getting overwhelmed.

Edit: Another option is to have skills which have conditions for their use, so that they're not even displayed to the player as a choice until 'the right time'. That way, the character can have a lot of stylistic diversity without having option paralysis in a given moment. There are various designs for this - card game style things with a 'hand' of moves are one choice, but you can also do something more direct where each character might have three types of skill, and which of each of the types they will use in a given moment is determined by circumstances.

 

[Kes]

I am going to move this thread to Game Mechanics Design, as I think it is a better fit there.

 

[RetroNutcase]

Honestly, this can be a tough spot. On one of my projects, I want every class to have some unique skills, but I don't want to pad them with skills either.

That said, some are probably going to have more variety than others if you follow certain conventions. Mages, if they rely on the classic gimmick of elements on their spells, will have a much bigger list than any other class since they'll likely have several spells that are the same 'tier' so to speak, but have different elemental attributes.

By the same token, there's only so much you can give to a physical powerhouse who is meant to hit things hard, assuming you don't want to overlap and have more than one class capable of doing the same kind of thing. I'm actually trying to work through a similar dilemma on my own project's class system, as it's kind of layered in a way. My classes are set up on a system of both having class specific skills, but also weapon based skills similar to the later Dragon Quest games like 9. So a Soldier with a Sword will play differently from one with a Spear, as an example. Same class, but different weapon that completely changes up their playstyle. With swords, they can inflict other damage types beyond Slashing by using stab or bash attacks that won't hit as hard as a normal attack, but change the weapon's attribute  for that attack so they can work on virtually any enemy. A Spear on the other hand gives a Soldier a defensive weapon that doesn't hit as hard, but can pierce through defenses, and also allow them to attack and guard in the same action (Although they won't hit as hard).

That said, variety can be quite good! It gives a player options in finding something that fits their style, versus trying to adapt to what the game gives you at any given time. I'm a huge fan of the player choice approach when it comes to party makeup. Moreso if you can customize your own classes.

 

[Milennin]

For my main project I currently have 8 main skills for my main characters, the first half of those are all fairly similar but with different effects or conditions. Then the second half of the skills is much more unique so the characters differentiate from each other. This makes the start of the game somewhat easy for the player, as they don't have to memorise a whole bunch of skills that all do completely different things right from the start, but then gradually becomes more interesting after the first few dungeons.

In addition to that, there will be a bunch of equipable skills that can be found in the game, which allows for a small degree of customisation. Though a character can only equip one extra skill at a time, they can be swapped out any time outside combat.

A smaller project I'm currently working on has 9 different classes with all kinds of different skills, but are still somewhat similar at the same time. Each class has 4 skills, and all their skills have the same costs. The first skill is a free cast skill for every class and they all restore 3MP to the user, but their side effects are all different. The second skill on the list is a permanent buff, but also unlocks a secondary skill that can be used to restore the user's HP (which after using cycles back to the primary skill). Again, their side effects are all unique and different.

The third skill in the list is a utility skill, used for things like stunning, slowing down, mitigating damage etc. The fourth skill is for dealing damage, but all in their own unique ways.

I like characters that have unique skill lists, and also skill lists that don't grow too big or else it becomes overwhelming (or tedious scrolling through if there's a bunch of useless skills in there). At the same time I also like to have a set of skills that share similarities with other characters to make it easier to memorise what they all do.

 

[blacksmithy]

A large part of my early quandary about how many skills to use was answered yesterday when I figured out how much more you can do with States and Common Events than I originally thought possible. With the clever (for me, you guys are probably used to all this stuff) use of these two variables, I've been able to pull off some really fun stuff, like:

-Knights being to toggle a "Substitute" state on and off to make knights good tanks or good bruisers if the player prefers;

-Alchemists being able to craft items mid-combat (or out of combat) and providing a visual cue via State to show the player their increased Pharmacology. Did you know you can use a character's Pharmacology in a skill/item damage formula? Crazy!

I'm starting to figure out more about the engine (MV is the first RPGM that I've played since the PS1 version, so please forgive my noob awe), and my characters are starting to feel more streamlined, like a LoL or DotA champion as opposed to a Dragon Warrior unit. My dream of creating a JRPG battle system that uses the familiar old framework to create skill-testing, puzzle-esque combat encounters may actually become a reality. Y'know, in five years when I actually finish this stupid game.

On topic: I strongly urge people to try scaling damage formulas in your attack skills. What I mean is formulae that increase damage multiplicatively with the character's stat growth. It's saving me a lot of time and brainpower, as I can make one skill that stays good throughout the game instead of a series of "strictly better" skills that the character needs to learn to keep up with enemy HP bars. I'm trying to offset the perceived "sameness" of having a smaller skill set in various ways.

For example, my knight class gets precious few attack skills, but I think if I ever get tired of shouting "Oliver answers the call to arms! Hammer of Fealty! BOOM!" during battle testing I should just quit playing RPGs altogether. (If my wife gets tired of it though, I can't really blame her.)