RPG Maker Forums

In the process of creating my game, I've run up against a couple of stumbling blocks, one of which is deciding on the types of armour to give my characters.

I am going with largely fixed parties - so for a good portion of the story, you have one specific crew of guys with you (occasionally swapping members as the plot demands, but mostly fixed so you don't spend too lon developing the guest characters).

What I initially thought was to base the armour on the character types - so you have skirmishers and archers in light armours like padded coats and mail vests, while the tank classes wear heavy armours, and mages tend to wear robes. Half of this is also based on how the characters are designed i.e. I'm not assigning heavy armour to the guy who runs about in a tatty coat with no shirt underneath.

I quickly realised a problem with this - I had far more light armour users than anything else. For example, one group of characters are pirates - so three of them wear light gear to complement their style of stealing / quick moves. The fourth is a healer, who is dead set against war so would refuse to using anything more than robes and a staff. Now arguably, I could change one of the light guys, but it makes close to no sense to do so - and I could just as easily balance the gameplay for characters with lighter armour in this section anyway.

(The other parties have similar issues)

The way I see it, I've got a bunch of options:

1) Keep the armour classes. While there's only a few characters wearing the heavy armours and robes, that just contributes to making them unique. It means when you have the third type of armour from the fourth dungeon's treasure chests, your heavy armoured guys have a few more points in defence than the others.

2) I rethink my concept of heavy and light armour into a "cloaks / robes" and a "medium to heavy" group, so half my light armour guys share an armour type with the heavier guys, and the rest go for a lighter approach. (The ones who are meant to be really tough get  some kind of passive / base stat boost). Or I make two light armour groups and divy up the light armour guys between the chainmail wearers and the wearers of the armour referred to ambiguously as "guard" or "protector".

3) Switch to one type of armour for everyone, since 80% of the cast are already wearing light armour. Compensate by making those wearing heavy armour have a +2% passive boost to their DEF stat and a higher base DEF to represent that they wear tougher stuff. Advantage here is simplifying things, though I'm not keen on the "lazy" approach of giving them all the same armour.

4) I keep the armour categories and rethink how the characters work. Not so keen on this idea, since it would mean reworking the character's fighting styles to match too.

Entirely possible I'm overthinking it, and "just do what feels right" is the right option.