Secondary Point Currency Balance (JP)

[kirbwarrior]

I've been working on learning the in and outs of leveling in an rpg and I think I've wrapped my mind around how to balance exp; my current makes it so exp gain is based on a strict value of stats of the enemy (the average), and level ups are based the same on your stats. It ends up making it so fighting X enemies at your level is enough to level up regardless of level.

But I don't know how to do it with secondary points, such as AP or JP from games like Final Fantasy. Part of this is of course based around the fact that the secondary currency isn't as linear as exp, considering it's often used more like money to 'buy' things (but games like FF5 did make it a secondary exp). But even in linear forms, it's not given at any similar scale as exp.

And I think it's because it can cause wildly different results; If enemies give about the same amount of AP regardless of difficulty, then its best to farm weak enemies for it. If stronger enemies give out more, it's easy to catch extra jobs (or abilities, etc.) up very fast but it makes it very difficult to max them out or get stronger stuff without progressing through the game far enough. Which isn't exactly a problem, but I don't know what to shoot for when it comes to this.

Does anyone have experience (hah!) with this? Does anyone have ways to go about it? Or 'formulas' for coming up with ways that work?

Thank you ahead of time.

 

[bgillisp]

What I did in my game was I made it that you only gained JP on level up, and the JP you gained was 100 * the level you just gained. So if you just got level 11, then you gained 1100 JP as well. This seems to have worked out well with my JP system in my game, where the stronger stuff requires ~5000 - 10000 JP, which is really hard to get early game, but by level 25 - 30 can be earned with 2 - 4 level ups.

Outside of my game, I seem to recall FF5 (and I think FF12 too, with L{P instead?) did it where all fights except boss battles gave 1 AP per enemy, with a few exceptions. This meant that if the player wanted to grind AP they had to find the few enemies which gave more AP, and grind them. Also, the final dungeon of the game had all enemies give a really high amount of AP, so the player could finish out their jobs easily if they had not already.

 

[kirbwarrior]

JP gained on level up is actually a fantastic idea. After reading your post, I went and pulled out my Dragon Quest 8 strategy guide and looked up its mechanics online. It gives a 'flat' amount of JP (AP?) on level up, then that JP goes into certain 'classes' of weapons. Enough JP gets you an ability/passive.

1 AP per enemy isn't a bad idea. It does both what you said and also the opposite direction; there's no reason not to fight weak enemies when you are going through the area since you'll get a similar amount of AP.

Final Fantasy 6 actually made it pretty simple to master spells, since it would take at most 100 AP (usually far less) and enemies can give up to 10, which would go to all spells from your equipped magicite.

I do like the exact way you do it, since it scales well to a point, assuming that point is 'the end game'.