Character Stat Creation

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Cyndi4U
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Character Stat Creation

Post by Cyndi4U »

Hello! I am new-ish to RPG creation (I've made paper and pencil before, but not a video game), and I can't seem to figure out a way to balance stats! I would rather them not be random numbers, it would be nice to be able to specialize each character, but I just can't seem to figure it out! Does anyone out there have any tips or tricks?? :???:

Thanks!
~Cyndi
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SwordPlay
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Post by SwordPlay »

Hi there!

There are lots of methods, but they all have problems, and there will almost always be exploits of some kind, or it will be too linear.

IMO you don't want to balance stats, but battle itself.
Stats alone do not contribute to easy/difficult gameplay, and is somewhat reductionist and might even end making your game more boring!


There are 3 important things to consider (off the top of my head) which can help you balance battle without going too much into stats.

Skip over it if you're not interested!

GIMMICK
A crap skill can make a worthless enemy terrifyingly dangerous.
Similarly, an underpowered hero can become the most valuable if they have important skills.
There's quite a lot of room in the engine for this kind of stuff, for example, multiplying or dividing damage/healing, and team-attacks for heroes and foes.
There is quite an important niche for life/magic draining attacks and things like that, which makes battles more difficult.

PARTY
Even weak enemies can become deadly when placed in formations.
Having a lot of enemies attacking at once ramps up the difficulty instantly.
Consider creating heroes and enemies designed to work in a party and consider the difference between skills/enemies when they are on their own, and when they are in a team.
An enemy or skill might be laughable by itself, but near impossible when combined with the right elements.

ROLE
This is the most important thing.
Try to decide the role of the entity.
Is it an attacker? Magic? Does party/stat things?
This is the easiest way to determine what your beginning and end points are, and gives you a good guide for measuring units against each other.
You should also decide the roles of equipment, items and skills.
Equipment: Does equipment slightly modify (give an edge) or drastically increase (grant abilities)?
Items: Are items intended to be disposable and numerous, or extremely important? What is the variation in-between like? Making items available (or not) can drastically decide the course of battles. Personally, I always finish my RPGs with, like, 99x Elixir and stuff like that. But if you have instant heals/cures made abundant, it will reduce difficulty a LOT.
Skills: How powerful are skills? Are they based on stats, or cause effects independent of the users power levels? Are they useful, and speed battle through use, or extremely powerful and capable of ending battle in a single use? Are they expensive or cheap? Do they use other than MP (items etc.,)? Same goes for items, as well as skills, and whether skills/items are interrelated or overlap.


SOME ACTUAL WAYS TO BALANCE YOUR STATS
If you want to actually balance the MATH, then you could use some of these ways:

SMALL STATS
This is a bit like a cheat way, or simplified method.
Making all stats, say, less than 10 or 20 makes it much easier to playtest, modify, compare etc.,
It doesn't sound like much variation, but it can be.
You'd need to know the effective ranges of each stat, and it can help if you need to calculate formulas on the fly.
This is also easier on players. Probably.
You can use this with fixed damage formulas to great effect.
The only downside is seeing small numbers all the time, it might create a retro effect
(if you don't know what I mean, compare old school rpgs where players have life points in the single digits to new rpgs where bosses have millions of points of life)

FORMULAS
Consider using fixed damage amounts if you don't want to balance damage math.
Get to know the formulas and take advantage of them.
Consider using percentage based formulas too.
This is the bottom line if you really want to balance stats. I don't recommend it because the other methods work as well, if not better, if you know what you are doing.
More math does not make better balancing. Comparing things accurately DOES.

CHAINS/HITS
Having chains and hits makes units more potent without tampering with stats.
2 units can have identical stats, but the first might only have 1 hit, and the other hits upto 3 times. It's a quick way to make enemies dangerous or heroes useful without messing too much with numbers.


BOTTOM LINE
So that was a lot to read, and no one probably learnt much about actually balancing stats mathematically like.

But levelling up should not just increase stats, but also grant abilities and things like that.
Similarly, progressing through the game opens up new possiblities for items and equipment, without involving any (or much) math!
Of course, this adds new math: Money, and cost! Which is also annoying to handle, but hey. What you gonna do? Eh?
And enemies can be easy in the beginning, and those same enemies can be difficult in the end, just by placing them in formations.
1 enemy might be easy. 8 enemies might not be. There are various battle settings, if you mess around with them, you might figure out some gimmicks for your battle system.

You really want to examine the ROLES of each thing and compare them.
You might not know what stats it should have, but you probably know you want it to be twice as strong, or half as effective as something else.

Similarly, you want to know what kind of RANKS or TIERS you should go through during gameplay.

You might decide on 10 tiers of increasing difficulty, for example.
Tier 1 enemies might be really weak, but can be supplemented with skills like poison.
That way, they can still be deadly when placed alongside higher tier enemies.
Don't create a lot of tiers, like, 1 to 100 or something like that, 1 for each Lvl.
That would be a lot of work to manage.

Otherwise, if you are hellbent on doing the math, I recommend using a spreadsheet to calculate and keep track of values, as well as outputting predicted and desired values.

As mentioned in the beginning, the battle system will likely have exploits of be fundamentally broken, the more diverse it is.
The less diverse it is, the more chances it will be highly linear.

It is difficult to find a balance, but you want to make your game more FUN not more complex.
Fun comes from novelty and new experiences.
No one wants repeated battles with new enemies, the only difference of which is slightly higher stats. Probably.
But regardless of actual stats, having weak enemies with instant death or status affliction can be thrilling, or seeing weird gimmicks like enemies that use transmogrification to change forms, or using team skills and attacks adds strategic elements to battle.

In summary, don't rely on number crunching to see balance in gameplay, but focus on feelings and experiences a player should feel throughout.
It is possible to make relatively stats reasonably complicated through various means, especially considering all of the above.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head, and others might have things to add.

Hope it was helpful and not too condescending.
Last edited by SwordPlay on Tue Aug 08, 2017 12:37 am, edited 1 time in total.
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