Thoughts on locking the main character?

[S.Court]

One of the games I have seen this is Radiant Historia and this one showed me a inconvenient in one aspect: Balance

This character will be all the time in the party, which will mean he'll take all Experience Points, which in development process it means

a) You make sure the experience curve is designed in a way the main character arrives to the important points with the desired level, but that implies the other characters might doesn't get the enough experience/level for those places, or.

b) You make sure the experience curve is designed in a way all other characters can arrive to important points with a desired level (asumming player rotates their use of course) but that'd imply main character would arrive to really high levels, probably becoming it in a gamebreaker

I'm saying that not to discourage you to lock it, I'm saying that because that'd imply a careful way to character experience growth. RPG Maker is quite malleable in this subject and you could, for example, create a different experience curve for main character and that can help to avoid main character gets a experience snowballing.

Regardless that, if you say he's the main story device and istory and world can't exist without him, the most logic approaching would be to lock the character, so you'd need to check properly the experience curve to avoid a lack of balance in your project.

 

[kirbwarrior]

This character will be all the time in the party, which will mean he'll take all Experience Points

It's already been stated that letting the entire party get experience regardless of battle solves this, but Suikoden 2 goes another approach. Its experience system makes it so low level characters can catch up to the party's level easily (basically four fights and they are close enough), while you really slow down getting experience once you are the correct level for the area. After playing through it, I was changing my party constantly and I don't think the main character ever stayed even two levels ahead of the rest for too long.

 

[Kes]

Another option to prevent the locked character getting too OP in comparison with the others is to reduce the rate at which that person earns exp. You can do this by adjusting EXR in the Features panel of the actors tab.

 

[kirbwarrior]

Another option to prevent the locked character getting too OP in comparison with the others is to reduce the rate at which that person earns exp.

One idea I really liked that a DM told me she did in D&D was that, to help weaker players catch up, the stronger players could give the exp they gain to other players. The DM never made it a rule to reward them for doing so, but would tie something in to show appreciation; "I'll let you learn a new language since that's something you wanted." "I'll let you reroll that charisma check with the princess, we all know you should have succeeded."
My point is, I like the idea that experience is totaled up, but then only given to the lowest level party members; If you fight two bats who give 50 exp, each actor would normally get 100 exp, so instead the lowest level character gets 400 exp.