Too many skill choices?

[Lord Vectra]

Is there a such thing as too many skill choices?

There are some things I love about databasing... and skills is one of them.

Currently I have roughly 454 skills. Now, you don't have all 454 skills but if a player had, like, 100, would that be ok?

Asking because I am redoing certain parts of my skill system, and there will most likely be an increase in the number of skills one actor has, and I'm wondering when there can be too many choices to choose from (this is assuming all the skills are unique and useful).

 

[TheoAllen]

It's too many when you have to scroll because the first few skills in first page are useless (or you thought so) that you have to spam skill that is on the next page. Extra step of selecting skill is what makes it too many.

If you have many skills that you could equip or favorite some skills that you could use it often, there wont be too many skills. As different player may have different style of playing.

 

[Kes]

[move]Game Mechanics Design[/move]
You might be interested in this thread which is asking a similar question, but for the whole party.

 

[Warpmind]

What you want to be careful with is multiple iterations of the same bleedin' thing; you don't need five single-target fireballs with different damage levels. For that, use a single skill with an incremental damage formula, or simply replace the skill when you pick up the next tier, IMO.
If you have five fireballs that have different effects - States, Buffs, Debuffs, etc. - then by all means, keep the five different fireballs, but make it clear which is which.

 

[TheoAllen]

@Warpmind the OP said assume the skills are unique and useful

 

[Canini]

If we assume that each skill is unique and balanced/useful you could theoretically have as many as you please as long as the player is aware of what they do and the situation to use them. In practice I would never ever make the player scroll past more than three screens of skills (assuming you use the default battle interface) and even two is a bit of a stretch.

 

[kovak]

I preffer to stick with 8 and divide them to use both MP and TP or nothing.
Then i add many common passives and class/ background related passives to give dept to customization.

I think i stick with 18 common passives on this case but i don't like the idea of having more than 8 active abilities at all.

 

[Titanhex]

The only way each skill can be unique and useful is if you've designed all the levels (maps), all the monsters, all your bosses, and graphed them on a curve of growth.
Alternatively, you have a game with a unique system that finds a non-traditional way to make these skills useful.

There's many other problems with there being that many skills and saying that each one is unique and useful. Honestly there's some subtractive design that needs to take place.
So with that, I'd say a lower number of skills is better than a high number of skills.

For one actor, 10 skills should be enough. But like everyone here has said, keeping it down to a single page is most ideal.

 

[Warpmind]

@Warpmind the OP said assume the skills are unique and useful

Ah, missed that parenthesis first time around.

 

[ShadowHawkDragon]

Generally its best to keep it at 12 or less. The reason for this is simple, that's how many skills the default skill selection windows display at any one time (6 rows of 2).

From my personal experience, once you have to start scrolling there's a risk of forgetting that certain skills even exist. Yes you could divide them up into multiple Skill Types each with 12, but there's still the matter of how many of them you can use at any one time.

So you have 100 skills, how many will you use in a 5 turn battle?

Its another matter if you use a skill equip system where you only have 8 out of 50 skills available at any one time. Or even if most of the new skills replaced old ones.

Overall the biggest factor is not quantity but quality, each skill should have its own distinct use and reason for taking a up a slot of the player's memory. Do remember you can always have items fill in the gaps for more generalist actions such as healing and cleansing and even elemental damage.

 

[Wavelength]

This question gets asked so much here. Might be worth doing a subforum search for "too many skills" or similar, but here's the gist of the advice I normally give:

• You have too many skills once they start to crowd out each other (making one feel useless if you have another) or feel similar to each other.
• If you have multiple actors, and their kits start to feel similar or all of them feel very "generalist", you also have too many skills.
• While it's fine for an actor to learn 50+ skills (as long as they all feel unique and useful), sifting through 50 skills in the middle of battle is a painful chore. 8-12 skills is usually a sweet spot for battle availability, so if you have significantly more than that, you should allow players to "equip" 8-12 skills on each character to actually to bring into battle.

 

[bgillisp]

I dunno. With some creativity you can make all those different tiers of Fire useful. For instance, if you went like this:

Fire 1 4 MP
Fire 2 24 MP
Fire 3 75 MP
Fire 4 250 MP

A few casts of Fire 4 and you're out of MP. So now maybe you want to conserve MP so you do Fire 2 to finish off an enemy, as it only needs a little more damage.

Or...you can also do this: Yanfly has a script (and maybe there's a similar plug-in version in MV) that lets you cap damage taken to a maximum. If a monster has that, then Fire 1 is still useful if Fire 2 - 4's extra damage is all above the damage cap. I actually did this in my game by making a few monsters take 1 damage from everything. Doesn't matter what you hit them with, it's going to be 1 damage. So now, those low level skills are best due to that, as using the extra MP for more damage is just a waste.

And before someone asks, I also gave those monsters really low HP. I think the hardest one in the game has 100 HP, and it's a special bonus encounter. All others are lower than that.

Or...you can also give the high level spells a cooldown or warmup. Maybe you can't cast Fire 4 until you've been in battle for 3 turns. So you'll use Fire 3 until then. And maybe Fire 4 has a 3 turn cooldown too.

With some thinking outside the box, you can make 50 skills on an actor useful. Now as to whether the player will like it, only way to know is to make it and test it.

 

[XIIIthHarbinger]

Personally I think there isn't a right answer for this question, because how it plays out depends upon a multitude of game mechanics, & this is very situationally dependent.

For example, in my own current project each of my party members has nearly four hundred skills that they can learn potentially. However, they can only learn one per level, so even if they take the character to the level cap, they still can't learn all of them. Additionally how many skills they can have as active, i.e. take into battle with them, is capped out at twelve.

So each party member can only learn about 25% of the total available skills, & can only use about 3% of the total available skills at any given time.

Simply put, the idea is for the player to decide what rolls each character will fulfill via which skills they unlock, & then specializing further by choosing which specific skills from their respective pool they will take with them into battle. This allows them to customize their characters & their loadouts in preparation for various battles.

For example, one battle you have your healer load up on their status effect resistance booster spells to combat an enemy who uses a great number of status effect attacks. Another battle you're fighting frost based enemies, so you have your magic user load up on fire weapon & frost shield spells.

Because of the level of personal choice I grant the player in how they develop their character, the more skills I provide for them to choose from, the more they can make that character their own, & the more they can apply strategy to each potential battle.

On the other hand if I was going the opposite route of my current project, & instead each character would have their own unique class, skill set, play style etcetera, all predetermined. & by extension the player's choice revolved around building parties based on who was best suited to a given mission. I would dramatically reduce the number of skills they learned in total, & ensure that there was little to no overlap from character to character. With each character probably having no more than a dozen skills in total.

Simply put, the question is not "What is the ideal number of skills in a game?", but rather "What is the ideal number of skills in MY game?".

 

[Lord Vectra]

Welp, a lot to reply to, so I'll try muh best.

The classes and specializations are pretty much predetermined. I currently have it like how bgillisp said. I have a cooldown/warmup system along with battle limits (can only use this "x" times per battle). I thought of scaling them as you level up, but the issue is sometimes the player doesn't want to sacrifice a lot of MP when all they need is a small one.

With that being said, you can't spam the same spell over and over. Some of the skills are singular v. AOE. Rule is AOE spells deal half damage from their singular counterparts that cost the same amount of MP.

I split my spells between physical and magical. Used to be divided by elements, but demo players said it was too many so I dropped it to two sections. Right now, at around lv.16, each actor has 12 skills in one of the two. 50 skills per section was an exaggeration - just wanted to see if people felt 10 was too much or 20, etc.

Items are already somewhat a big deal in my game. I don't do "equip" because I find it too limiting, especially since certain skills don't work well against some enemies and can sometime even empower the enemy in question (the latter is rare but I do know places it can happen), and not only am I not a fan, I feel the equipping spell thing doesn't fit my game.

I will try the "favorite" thing although with the cooldown/warmup and the very versatile range of enemies and their play styles, I don't think you'll be spamming anything except maybe attack (thats only if ur MP is low (or ur saving it), all MP restore effects are in cooldown/warmp, and you have no MP potions). Before any ask, you have a steady mana/stamina regeneration.

I think I answered everything

 

[VertigoAffliction]

I really think it has to do with the game, so it is to me a case by case basis.

However, I too have found myself doing the 'skip' even in AAA RPG games, after a certain point.

I won't name any specific games though, there's far too many in that list.

I chose 'none', though 'it depends' would be a more precise option.

I've played a few games made by friends of mine, and found that many of the skills were useless after an hour's playtime.

And the majority of these games had actors with 12 to 30 skills instead of 40, 50, or more.

I like Final Fantasy V's Job system because it limits the usable skills by any given character.

I think that the level of skill upgrading/degrading should be consistent with game progression; however many skills that equates to, is truly on the developer. But I would rather not see more than 30 skills in general.

 

[Kes]

If, as suggested in the OP, the player had 100, I would be extraordinarily surprised if even half of them were used. I am assuming, btw, that that is 100 for a single character, otherwise the reference to 454 skills makes no sense.

There is an extensive literature on the research carried out in a range of activities on the effects of choice overload. For example https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1057740814000916
Although there is no unanimity on the precise psychological factors causing choice overload, the consequences are well documented and undisputed.

 

[lianderson]

As someone with over 600 skills in their game, I've never once had anyone complain about there being too many. The reason for this, is because I've made obtaining all 600+ skills near impossible. (it would literally take about a thousand hours to learn everything on a single character)

The question is, how many skills do you plan a character will realistically have at the end of your game? And also, how long and complicated is this game? If it's short and simple, 5-10 is a good number. But if it's an in-depth epic with lots of strategy, about 15-25 is what you want to aim for.

 

[HumanNinjaToo]

I prefer to have less skills. I think it's easier to see the impact of skills when there are fewer available. Honestly, I'm a fan of characters only having 3-7 activation type skills. To me, this adds more tactical thinking on when the best time to use skills actually is.

That being said, I'm a fan of having lots of different passive skills to choose from. I think if the system is set up correctly, the passives can be used to not only add depth to the character, but to the active skills as well. Equipping passives that change the way an active skill works gets me excited way more than having 40 different active skills to choose from.