Critique my Healer class

[Eschaton]

Hello, all.

For my project, the player can select from among a small selection of classes.  One class focuses on healing the party using their signature pray Pray.

On it's own, Pray recovers a paltry amount of HP for the party, but Pray gains additional effects based on:

The player's karma score (a variable)

The alignment of the deity the player has chosen to worship (another variable:  0 = evil, 1 = neutral, 2 = good).

Acting in accordance with your deity makes Pray more effective.  If you do evil acts while aligned with the good deity makes Pray perform poorly. 

But having a high karma (60-100) while worshiping a good deity will allow the Pray command to revive party members, remove poison, and increase health regen.

Having low karma (0-40) while worshiping an evil deity will do the same.

Having middling karma (41-59) while worshiping a neutral deity will do awesome stuff.  I'm not sure yet.  This is for the power gamers who work hard to keep a neutral character.

The healer class will also have skills that aren't affected by karma.  Karma really factors into the Pray skill.

Thoughts?

 

[NPC]

Sounds intriguing, but it also sounds like a "you have to play it and see" idea, since there's so much room for error with a system that takes your ingame story decisions to decide your power in battle. 

The two major problems that pop up in my head are that:

-the player might not be aware of the system unless you've accomodated that, but then you have to deal w/ tutorials.

-the desire to win battles easier might outweigh caring about the story, since you are in essence forcing a character's decision. It's one thing having alignments, it's another to make decisions you don't want to do well in the game.

But yeah, interesting idea.

 

[CrazyCrab]

Hmm, seems pretty neat, somewhat reminds me of the priests and paladins from Pillars of Eternity but there was no evil / good, they instead used traits such as ''cruel'', ''logical'', ''friendly'' and ''impulsive''. That said I'm quite surprised that evil and good priests have the same abilities, I'd give the dark ones some more ''evil'' skills, such as vampiric drains and sacrificial empowerment while keeping minor healing spells.

I'm also not so sure why the neutral character would be the strongest one... I usually find being neutral the easiest to play, you just pick every option that benefits you the most while minimizing the damage. It really depends on how easy it is to gain and lose allegiance though... in Fallout New Vegas essentially everyone was easily ''good'' where killing one ghoul would compensate for stealing like 20 items. So yeah, if you're working with allegiance just make sure you balanced it.

 

[Eschaton]

My other idea for Pray is that karma wouldn't factor into it at all, but Pray would become more effective with

a) your level and,

2) how many points you've put into your "passive" skill, which makes the player more overall effective in combat and in conversations.

 

[Chiakscare]

Worship of good and evil deities should have different effects than both doing recovers. Good should focus on healing; evil could focus on harming the enemies.

 

[Milennin]

-First of all, is this healer class the main protagonist? Because, if he's simply a follower, why do choices the player makes from the perspect of the main character cause the healer's karma to in/decrease?


-Second, why does it have the same effect for both good and evil? Those are two opposites, you'd expect them to do different things.


-Third, why only give neutral the awesome stuff when you could give all three sides awesome stuff? That choice to only give 1 side awesome stuff just doesn't make sense and punishes players for not picking the 1 side that'll give them awesome stuff.


-Fourth, it kind of forces the player to pick a side and stick to it for the rest of the game, effectively eliminating the point of making choices during the game after having chosen a deity, since the skill will otherwise perform less effective.

 

[fallenlorelei]

I wrote all of this because I misunderstood the class. You can still use some of these ideas if you want.

Spoiler

Worship of good and evil deities should have different effects than both doing recovers. Good should focus on healing; evil could focus on harming the enemies.

I second this. It was the first thing that popped into my head.

Keep the system with good acts increasing the performance of Pray, but I don't think the class with "evil acts" should be considered useless. Maybe you can have the Evil acts a Negative/Subtraction variable, and when the karma score variable reaches a low enough amount - let's say -10 - you can change Pray into "Doom" or "Curse" or something and have it to different things. If you still need this class to be the support, maybe it can heal members through HP draining or focus on debuffing enemies, or buffing allies with some kind of spike shield.

But actually! I get what you're trying to say now. "Middle" is the strong one, because Karma is a balance of goodness and evil. I get it, I get it. I like it!

To add on to what people above have said, make sure it is very clear to the player what is going on. Can you maybe add a mechanic in game that reveals the players karma score somewhere? I'm thinking a Scale on the HUD somewhere, but if that's too much, maybe talk to a Priest and he can assess where you're at. That way the player must strategize his next moves. "Do I want to be nice and help this old woman down the street, or do I want to 'accidentally' kick this puddle onto her dress? I need to stay balanced!" Idk haha. But make sure the player can see what's going down.

Also, come up with a cool name for the class that has to do with Karma. Healer/Priest/Medic sounds too saintly and will cause the player to want to only choose good options. Maybe "Monk"? Not sure here.

The term "Pray" also falls under that point. Maybe change it to something else. "Alignment Alleviate" or "Balance Beam!" or "Gray Matters!" lolol just kidding. I'm not sure here either.

Anywho - my two cents! Hope I helped a little bit!

 

[Eschaton]

Well, here's the thing. The class is explicitly called "White Mage," focusing on holy magic. The other Mage is indeed called a Black Mage, who casts offensive spells.

These are conscious, stylistic choices and I have no intention of changing them.

 

[C Frost]

Personally, I'm not a fan of this kind of mechanic, implemented in this way, i.e. your actions in the story linking to a kind of "good/evil" paradigm and determining how your abilities work. This was one of the things I really didn't like about Knights of the Old Republic; the choices there were, granted, incredibly simplistic and obvious ("do you kick the box of puppies over the railing, or halt your quest and find good homes for each and every one of them?"), but even so, you had to just "be light" or "be dark" or your powers would just be awful. Having a reward specifically for staying in the neutral path is a neat idea, and would help alleviate that problem in theory, but in practice the player would still be overly concerned about how their story choices are going to impact their abilities, and will end up making choices based ON that concern, rather than on what they feel the right choice is or what would fit with how they've been playing through the story thus far. Having the neutral option would just mean they have 3 paths to choose from, rather than 2, but they will still feel constrained into a path.

There is, as well, another issue I see with a system like this, one that could potentially present a big problem. Is this "pray" ability, with its karma and decision-based mechanic, the only healing source? Or are there others, but pray is the best healing source? Or is pray only one of several, perhaps slightly better than any of the others but not overwhelmingly so?

The problem I'm getting at exists no matter what the answer is to the above. If pray is the only healing source, then the player will be hamstrung in battle if they don't stay a strict course down the path of "good", "evil", or "neutral". If it is the best healing source, then essentially the same problem exists, with players feeling like they must choose between effective healing and choice freedom. And finally, if a powered-up pray is just sort of nice to have but isn't actually THAT much more effective than other sources of healing, then I would think a lot of players would just not bother worrying about it, considering the whole karma/story decision management aspect to be more trouble than it's worth if they can just as effectively use other skills or items to heal.

Well, here's the thing. The class is explicitly called "White Mage," focusing on holy magic. The other Mage is indeed called a Black Mage, who casts offensive spells.

These are conscious, stylistic choices and I have no intention of changing them.

That's... unexpected. Are you going to actually use those specific names for these classes? Because everyone will think of Final Fantasy. Yes, technically speaking, the terms "white magic" and "black magic" aren't actually copyright SquareEnix, but they might as well be. For many gamers and RPG fans, white and black mages are as tied to FF as Jedi is to Star Wars. Especially if you not only have the names, but they function in the same way as they do in FF (support and healer vs. fireball-tosser).

In addition, I'm having trouble seeing how a class called a "white mage" could use a skill called pray to heal people by either being super good with high karma OR really nasty with low karma and worshiping an evil deity. Feels off. As others have said, it seems like it shouldn't just be "your healing is better if you have either high or low karma". If you are going to have such a system in place, being high vs. being low should really give you entirely different abilities. Of course, this also brings back the question I noted above: just how important is pray to the player's success in battle? How well can someone fare while going through the game if they never have access to a fully powered-up pray?

When you look at the FF white mage, despite the presentation and access to a spell called "Holy", a person could possess the skillset of the class and just be evil. For that matter, the Holy spell itself is cast against your heroes by an evil disembodied machine head thing in the final dungeon of FF4. So there aren't any alignment locks on being this class or using these abilities, and the FF lore also (usually) doesn't go out of its way to say that a white mage is being rewarded with more powerful abilities based on how they conduct themselves. If your game IS going to say that, then there needs to be some kind of internal consistency with it, tying the lore and the gameplay together. Honestly, "You're super good? You can heal people really well. You're super evil instead? Same deal" just doesn't sit right. 

 

[RetroNutcase]

It's a neat idea on paper to be sure, but there's a lot of other things one would have to know to properly rate this kind of healer.

Pray's a kind of swiss army knife heal depending on variables, okay, I get that.

But what else does this healer have at their disposal? If you've somehow gone outside your proper karmic alignment, how screwed are you going to be with a non-functional Pray?

How easy is it to manipulate your karma? If you somehow wind up outside your ideal karma, will only story progression give you a chance to fix it? Or will you be able to do various repeatable things such as donate to the poor or go murder someone to get it back to where you like it?

How much more effective will Neutral alignment be over good/evil when it comes to Praying? Could it become too effective? As it stands, it almost sounds too good if it will cure negative conditions on top of healing as long as you stay in the right alignment. How would other healing spells work in comparison? 

 

[Eschaton]

Personally, I'm not a fan of this kind of mechanic, implemented in this way, i.e. your actions in the story linking to a kind of "good/evil" paradigm and determining how your abilities work. This was one of the things I really didn't like about Knights of the Old Republic; the choices there were, granted, incredibly simplistic and obvious ("do you kick the box of puppies over the railing, or halt your quest and find good homes for each and every one of them?"), but even so, you had to just "be light" or "be dark" or your powers would just be awful. Having a reward specifically for staying in the neutral path is a neat idea, and would help alleviate that problem in theory, but in practice the player would still be overly concerned about how their story choices are going to impact their abilities, and will end up making choices based ON that concern, rather than on what they feel the right choice is or what would fit with how they've been playing through the story thus far. Having the neutral option would just mean they have 3 paths to choose from, rather than 2, but they will still feel constrained into a path.

There is, as well, another issue I see with a system like this, one that could potentially present a big problem. Is this "pray" ability, with its karma and decision-based mechanic, the only healing source? Or are there others, but pray is the best healing source? Or is pray only one of several, perhaps slightly better than any of the others but not overwhelmingly so?

The problem I'm getting at exists no matter what the answer is to the above. If pray is the only healing source, then the player will be hamstrung in battle if they don't stay a strict course down the path of "good", "evil", or "neutral". If it is the best healing source, then essentially the same problem exists, with players feeling like they must choose between effective healing and choice freedom. And finally, if a powered-up pray is just sort of nice to have but isn't actually THAT much more effective than other sources of healing, then I would think a lot of players would just not bother worrying about it, considering the whole karma/story decision management aspect to be more trouble than it's worth if they can just as effectively use other skills or items to heal.

That's... unexpected. Are you going to actually use those specific names for these classes? Because everyone will think of Final Fantasy. Yes, technically speaking, the terms "white magic" and "black magic" aren't actually copyright SquareEnix, but they might as well be. For many gamers and RPG fans, white and black mages are as tied to FF as Jedi is to Star Wars. Especially if you not only have the names, but they function in the same way as they do in FF (support and healer vs. fireball-tosser).

In addition, I'm having trouble seeing how a class called a "white mage" could use a skill called pray to heal people by either being super good with high karma OR really nasty with low karma and worshiping an evil deity. Feels off. As others have said, it seems like it shouldn't just be "your healing is better if you have either high or low karma". If you are going to have such a system in place, being high vs. being low should really give you entirely different abilities. Of course, this also brings back the question I noted above: just how important is pray to the player's success in battle? How well can someone fare while going through the game if they never have access to a fully powered-up pray?

When you look at the FF white mage, despite the presentation and access to a spell called "Holy", a person could possess the skillset of the class and just be evil. For that matter, the Holy spell itself is cast against your heroes by an evil disembodied machine head thing in the final dungeon of FF4. So there aren't any alignment locks on being this class or using these abilities, and the FF lore also (usually) doesn't go out of its way to say that a white mage is being rewarded with more powerful abilities based on how they conduct themselves. If your game IS going to say that, then there needs to be some kind of internal consistency with it, tying the lore and the gameplay together. Honestly, "You're super good? You can heal people really well. You're super evil instead? Same deal" just doesn't sit right.

I've thought long and hard about what I wanted to do in terms of design and your words clinched it: karma shouldn't factor into it. I didn't design the other classes to factor in karma, either.As for other forms of healing...I'm still working on that.

As for the Final Fantasy references...I'm still working on that, too. I'm interested in homage, but I don't want to alienate cynical players or get a C&D, but I also stick to using things that aren't trademarked. "Black Mage," "White Mage," and even "Red Mage" certainly are not trademarked. Things like "Cid" and "Chocobo" are.

As for my design choices, I'm worried about making the WM's signature ability as interesting as the other classes.

It's a neat idea on paper to be sure, but there's a lot of other things one would have to know to properly rate this kind of healer.

Pray's a kind of swiss army knife heal depending on variables, okay, I get that.

But what else does this healer have at their disposal? If you've somehow gone outside your proper karmic alignment, how screwed are you going to be with a non-functional Pray?

How easy is it to manipulate your karma? If you somehow wind up outside your ideal karma, will only story progression give you a chance to fix it? Or will you be able to do various repeatable things such as donate to the poor or go murder someone to get it back to where you like it?

How much more effective will Neutral alignment be over good/evil when it comes to Praying? Could it become too effective? As it stands, it almost sounds too good if it will cure negative conditions on top of healing as long as you stay in the right alignment. How would other healing spells work in comparison?

The WM's skills are designed to debilitate, but not harm or kill the enemy with the exception of one purely-offensive skill. Here's the breakdown (names might be changed in the future)ispel: only power that does damage; weakens armor and destroys buffs created by black magic. Heavily damages undead.

Lift: lifts the oppnent into the air helplessly and makes them vulnerable to projectile attacks.

Gust: briefly stuns targets. Instantly removes floating and flying enemies from battle.

Pulse: stuns a group of enemies. Can be upgraded to eject floating enemies.

Pray: WM's signature move recover's party's HP.

 

[cockroach]

I suggest you not telling the player to choose an alignment for the entire game, but being able to change between them as they please. The current alignment can define which spells are you learning at a certain level... Then, if you're heading good path, you'll learn more good-aligned spells, as heal and such, and if you're heading evil, you'll learn stuff as drain life, sacrifice, and other stuff that fit more a dark priest. At the end, you'll have spells that match your "ethical history" in the game, i.e. a dark priest that long ago used to be good, so he masters early good spells.

That still can restrain the decision-making in order to get the most interesting skills, unless all skills are fairly interesting.

 

[TheHonorableRyu]

If Karma is a fairly committed pathway (it stays at the same score and only goes up and down a little bit at a time with storyline choices, as in the SMT series) then you may as well not have the Pray skill work with such a variable at all. If your deeds match your deity, then you use the skill as it works the same way. If your deeds are mismatched with your deity, you don't use it and may as well not even have it. 

If Karma can swing wildly up and down depending on recent choices that a player might reasonable make, then the Pray mechanic could be more interesting, but you'd need to put some thought to the details. Players might forgo the healing by making choices that will grant them a certain rare item, or grant more power to other skills that scale with Karma in the other direction.

 

[Wavelength]

I think the base idea was pretty good, although heavily dependent on implementation - you'd also want to have other in-game rewards for making "correct" (based on your alignment) decisions, and the class would still need to be somewhat useful even if you didn't.  Also, it would require a level of balance between "how hard is it it get very high/low karma" versus "how hard is it to keep your karma neutral".  I don't want to go into too much detail since it sounds like you're going to scrap the idea ("your words clinched it: karma shouldn't factor into it").

One other route you might want to consider going is to have all of your classes' signature moves (or even all moves!) factor karma in in some way, perhaps changing the nature of the spells more than the power.  Perhaps a White Mage's Pray, in addition to its basic heal, will remove status effects when at high karma, heal more at neutral karma, and create a "firewall" around the target ally that damages anyone trying to attack that ally when at low karma.  Perhaps the Black Mage's Freeze spell will, in addition to its basic damage, massive slow enemies or "stun" (freeze them in place) at high karma, deal more damage at neutral karma, and increase the amount of physical damage they take at low karma.  I think this could be a really cool system, although I don't know where your choice of deity would fit into it.

 

[Eschaton]

I'm not sure.  I think it's important to establish a sense that "the gods" might be jerks, so the use of the Pray command might yield different results based on...something.

Perhaps this god is the random number god, and it relies on the player's "faith" in it.  "Use Pray when you think you need to, and you will get the divine intervention you need.  Probably."

Like, the results might be random, but you're more likely to "get your prayers answered" if your health is lower or something.

 

[Wavelength]

Perhaps this god is the random number god, and it relies on the player's "faith" in it.  "Use Pray when you think you need to, and you will get the divine intervention you need.  Probably."

Sounds like The Heart of the Cards to me

 

[RetroNutcase]

To me it sounds kinda like Paula's Pray from Earthbound, but with the idea that RNG is more forgiving if you really need the help. Not a bad idea, necessarily.