Party Members and their Roles

[Androxine Vortex]

I'm trying to develop my party members for my game and I'm having a hard time. So far,I have six made and think there should be at least one or two more(possibly) but I'm trying to figure out their roles. Do I want lots of characters with limited customization so it'smore focused on the party members or should it be less party members with lots of customization? I think I want a little bit of both.

I don't want to seem like I just pulled the roles out from every other RPG (tank, healer, etc) I'm trying to come up with more unique characters. Perhaps this character can heal AND use physical attacks and prevent status ailments, and this character can also heal but can debuff enemies and use elemental spells. I think this kind of combination seems more fun because there's more options.

So far the only character I really have a "feel" for is Visalius, a knight who has generally weak attack stats but can use multi-hit abilities. He can also use a special that increases his dodge probability and increase critical hit chance.

I'm working on a mage who can cast debuffs and poision but can only attack with non-elemental attacks. Similarly, I'll have another mage who can cast (better) healing spells and cure disease, buffs for allies and also attacks with non-elemental attacks. And then maybe have a third mage who can use very powerful elemental spells and maybe have some minor ability.

Any advice? 

 

[Wavelength]

Look at some of the more gameplay-oriented multiplayer games out there and see what they do in terms of the gameplay mechanics behind the flavor.  League of Legends, Team Fortress 2, and the first Guild Wars are good examples of games in different genres that all do this well.

Using Guild Wars as an example, going beyond the classic tank/healer/mage roles, you have roles like single-target damage with strategic evasion abilities (Ranger, Assassin), disabling and counterplay (Mesmer), and melee-range spellcasters (Dervish).  Even inside the "standard" classes, like Mage, there are options to build them to burst down opponents (usually Fire), tank hits while putting out consistent damage (usually Earth), or disable and slow opponents while you let your teammates do the work (usually Water).  This kind of stuff keeps gameplay not only interesting, but also highly replayable.  Also, think about how different classes will work with each other to support each others' strengths and take enemies down.

Be careful not to give every character a way to do everything, though.  This actually makes the characters much less interesting because they don't have identifiable strengths or weaknesses.

 

[Kes]

Also remember to try and associate the skills a character has with their backstory; why does this particular character have these particular skills?  For example, in my last project one character was a bodyguard before joining the party, so she had a range of skills to defend/boost allies.  Of course, this presupposes that your characters have backstories.

 

[Androxine Vortex]

Also as a somewhat related topic, how do you feel about including "hidden or secret" party members? Say for instance there are four main characters that are given to you through natural storyline progress. But what if there are others like a mercenary you can hire for a high price or maybe one who will join you if you help him aid a difficult quest?

 

[omen613]

Rewarding the player for playing correctly is the route I take on designing classes.

Every character does good damage if they play their role correctly.

A Tank wants to be attacked but does 1/2 the normal damage.

• Needs to retaliate when attacked to do extra damage...now that 1/2 is doing double damage staying on par with everyone else.
• Needs to have serious armor rating compared to others to the point where if someone else is getting hit...they are gonna die real fast.
• When dealt damage, has a chance to gain an attack bonus next turn.

but if the tank isn't being attacked...their usefulness just plummeted 

again...rewarding the player for playing correctly

 

[whitesphere]

If you look at Final Fantasy IV:  The After Years, they had 20 (!) playable characters, of which 5 could be in your party.  How were they kept unique?  Well:

• You had fighters who had weak DEF, high speed and varied attack types (the Ninjas).  Some of these had limited Healing abilities which were very useful in a pinch
• Many fighter/magic-user characters had the weaker White Magic spells, but the more useful White Magic spells were distributed among the characters (i.e. Haste, Shell, Revive, etc) so no one character predominated
• You had, of course, the classic magic users, some were White Magic masters, some were Black Magic, some did both but not quite as effectively
• You had the fighter who was pretty good at most Black Magic (Golbez) but not at all with White Magic (justified in his backstory)
• You had Bards who could do useful party buffs/enemy debuffs but who weren't great at, well, surviving
• You had the odd Skills (i.e. an accountant who could use Gold to do serious damage) assigned to rather unique characters
• You also had powerful combination Skills that required 2 specific party members to execute

Basically, the more party members you have, the more you need to make sure to distribute abilities and attributes so no one character is pivotal.   And as others have noted, each character should be somewhat specialized so no one character is uber powerful.

But the more characters you have, the more difficult it is to distinguish them.  The characters really need their own backstories and qualities to stand out.  The game I mentioned had so many characters I felt they started to blend together after awhile.

Personally, I'd keep the number of characters down, also because game balance gets exponentially harder the more characters you have, because you need to test permutations of the characters.  If you have a Bard who can Buff strength by 50%, and a Barbarian who is slow but does ridiculous damage already, it could become a game breaker if they're combined.

Also, if your game is story centric, the more characters you have, the more dialogue permutations you need, unless the characters aren't that chatty.  That woman who fears Ninjas needs different text if no Ninjas are in the party, for example.

Now, if you want to add a Bonus Character or two, you can do that.  If it's especially hard to recruit them, they can indeed be nearly game breaker level strong, as a rich reward for following the difficult path to recruit them.

The fewer the characters, the easier it also is to make them distinctive with unique backstories, abilities, etc. 

 

[Androxine Vortex]

Thanks for the useful posts! I don't want to pressure my players into feeling they can only user a character one specific way. I want each character to have some things they excel at so there's more options rather than this one character is a healer and that's it.

 

[Kes]

I like having 'hidden' characters.  It gives a great sense of achievement if you find and recruit them.  It also adds to replay value if you missed them the first time round, and I think replay value is sometimes overlooked when we are deciding how to design our games.  We want to give our players the best possible experience first time round, because we know that many players will only play once; it then becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 

[Wavelength]

Also as a somewhat related topic, how do you feel about including "hidden or secret" party members? Say for instance there are four main characters that are given to you through natural storyline progress. But what if there are others like a mercenary you can hire for a high price or maybe one who will join you if you help him aid a difficult quest?

I love optional party members as long as they're given all the time, dialogue, and attention that the mandatory party members are.  That can be really time-consuming for you as the creator because you need to come up with reasonable rewrites of scenes based on which optional party members are with you, but it also adds tremendous flavor and replay value to your game.

 

[Androxine Vortex]

@Wavelength

Well what i was planning on doing was having inns in my game where you rest and heal on your journey and while inside you see all your party members walking around randomly and you can approach them and speak to them. At each different inn there will be new dialogue choices.

Also when there are cuteness i guess I'll have to just make it so that the main character is the one who makes the main flow of important dialogue while the others kind of comment and speculate. So my main character might say, "this looks like a trap."

Then one character would say "we must be cautious."

And another would say "have no fear, we are ready!"

And a final character would say, "Get ready..."

So since In my game you can only have three party members at a time, no matter who you have with you, their dialogue responses to cuteness accommodate with what the Main character says.

Granted I'm new to this so i actually don't know how i would do this yet lol

 

[Chaos Avian]

Well what i was planning on doing was having inns in my game where you rest and heal on your journey and while inside you see all your party members walking around randomly and you can approach them and speak to them. At each different inn there will be new dialogue choices.

Granted I'm new to this so i actually don't know how i would do this yet lol

In that case you could look at either the Ar Tonelico games for ways on how to do that. Over the course of the games you find or are given "Talk Topics" and at Inns, you can initiate these with your party members. It might be worth your time of you looked into the way how Tales of Xillia 2 handle their Skit System since they have multiple choice options in them.

Both games have an affinity system so it has in-game/ battle benefits, not just for fun~

 

[Harmill]

Personally, I'm taking a page from Final Fantasy X's book and creating distinct roles for each party member. Multiple build options per character can be cool (Wakfu, a strategy turn-based MMO, has three distinct builds per character class and that's really nice!), but it's also a lot more work. Depending on how in depth you go, one character could essentially be three separate characters merged into one.

I've created a variety of enemy "families" that each have unique traits that make them 'weak' against a certain party member. One family reduces all physical damage by 70%, forcing you to use magic to one-hit KO them, or take a couple turns to slowly beat them down with your weakened physical attacks. One family always starts the fight off by buffing themselves with a dangerous buff that has no turn limit. You must attack the enemy to remove it, and so I have a "combo character" who has more chances to remove that buff on a per-turn basis. Lastly, there's a family that counters physical attacks. You DON'T want your "combo character" targeting this family because they will counter EACH attack. For these enemies, using  magic, or the brute force physical nuker character should be used.

The only thing to be mindful of with my implementation, is that you must make a decision whether you want to FORCE the player into using each character against the family. Some players like to stick to their key favourites and don't want to have to change party members just because the enemies demand it. So for the enemy family that reduces physical damage by 70%... if I don't want to force you to use magic against him, I have to make sure his HP isn't too high. The goal would be to give him enough HP that he'd die to a single magic spell, but perhaps takes 4-5 physical hits to take down (depends on total party members, too). If you really want to encourage the player to use certain characters against certain enemies, it's a good idea to allow the player to switch party members during battle. In fact, many would say that's a requirement.

As for secret characters, I personally like them, but so long as they aren't "timed". I very much dislike playing a 40-hour RPG and finding that I've locked myself out from getting a secret character. I most likely won't replay the game, and so I'll feel a certain amount of resentment. If a game includes things like that, I feel more inclined to follow a guide as I play to ensure I don't miss out on the characters (Chrono Cross, I'm looking at you...).

 

[Wavelength]

Also when there are cutscenes i guess I'll have to just make it so that the main character is the one who makes the main flow of important dialogue while the others kind of comment and speculate. So my main character might say, "this looks like a trap."

Then one character would say "we must be cautious."

And another would say "have no fear, we are ready!"

And a final character would say, "Get ready..."

So since In my game you can only have three party members at a time, no matter who you have with you, their dialogue responses to cuteness accommodate with what the Main character says.

Granted I'm new to this so i actually don't know how i would do this yet lol

This is one of the easiest ways to do it as the designer, but most likely the player is going to see through it after a couple of scenes, and if they really like one of the optional characters, they're going to feel a little cheated that this character never gets to do anything important plot-wise.  That's why I always advocate either taking the time to build full, somewhat distinct versions for each possible scenario of which party setup you might have, or to not use this kind of "optional party members" setup at all.

I'm not sure how other people feel about this topic, though.  It's possible that some players would rather have these drawbacks than to not have any optional members at all.

Your idea about the inns is very good by the way - kind of reminds me of the "Private Actions" in the Star Ocean series, which was a popular feature.

 

[Androxine Vortex]

After thinking some more maybe i could do this:

During regular travel, you only move around as the main character. But if i make a cutscene, I'll just make it include all the characters in your collected party. And as for secret characters (because its hard to determine when exactly the player would recruit them) i would make a variable where its like " if character X is in Party, say blah blah blah." That way the characters that are given to you at pre determined times will be able to have fully fleshed out dialogue with the main character and the hidden characters will also have supportive dialogue but will obviously only speak or become visible if they are part of your team.

Does that sound better?

 

[SuperMasterSword]

@AndroxineVortex That's what I was going to do.

During regular travel, you only move around as the main character. But if i make a cutscene, I'll just make it include all the characters in your collected party.

I wanted to have this one optional character, not quite secret, as you see him and get an offer for him to join the team near the beginning. At the end I got too attached to the character and thought up so much dialogue that would be important I decided to make him mandatory.

 

[Kes]

That sounds much better, though I'd use a conditional rather than a variable. It can result in a lot more work in my experience but it is definitely worth it to have properly fleshed out conversations.