Castle Paradox

[djfenix]

In most modern RPGs, the type of characters that people tend to use are usually just the "cool characters". A lot of people dont seem to care about the abilities of a character or how the type of character would benifit in the party. But if not chosing the "cool characters", people will lean towards the characters that will simply do the most damage.

An example. In FFX, the main team i used was Kimahri, Lulu, and Auron. Why? Because i liked them. You'd figure Yuna's white magic would be benificial in a party, but no. I still was able to get by without any problems with this team alone (parts where i needed to have other characters was tougher, heh).

A problem with FFX (along with a lot of other FFs) is that in the end, all characters are EXACTLY the same. After you move through most of the grid, everyone has the same abilities, and do roughly the same damage. In FFV through FFVIII, characters generally dont have a role, and can be built to be exactly the same as everyone else. In FFIX, there are assigned classes (or jobs) for each character, but essentially, it still came down to either who you liked the most or who does the most damage.

Not just FF. Other games pretty much have the same idea. Xenosaga, i prefered Shion, Kos-Mos, and Ziggy. Problem with xenosaga AND xenogears is that they have a combo system rendering anything other than healing spells useless. In Magna Carta (god, what a waste of time), i prefered Haren, Chris, and Eonis, but the game is also built on a combo system that's similar to Xeno. Chrono Trigger: Chrono, Ayla, Magus. Chrono Chross: Serge, Guy, Sprigg. Super Mario RPG: Mario, Bowser, Geno. So on, and so forth, et cetera, et cetera.

Where's the strategy? Where's the tactics? Why are we given other types of abilities, but ignore them only to turn a battle into a mad beat-down?

If you play pen and paper rpgs, or an MMO, you probably know what i'm talking about. Characters have roles should have roles in a party. I'm talking bout tanks, healers, buffers, debuffers, trappers, detectors, etc. etc. and having more that just a party of "damage dealers". And while some rpgs attempt at making these roles evident, for some reason, they always fail short.

I dont like p&p rpgs, nor do i really like MMOs, but they are effective in getting these roles out. A lot of p&p stuff we cant really do with a digital rpg, but most of the things an MMO does, we CAN do. But OHR games fail at that too. A lot of the battles in OHR games consists of holding the space bar, or again, choosing the favourites. And while, many OHR games succeed in making a fun battle system, it inevitably is just another question of who does the most damage.

So how does one succeed in making party role? Usually, it's just the DDs and the healers. Can anyone succeed in making the roles in a party?

[Mike Caron]

Well, let's say you want to create a character that is a healer, period. All you have to do is:

* Give them low attack, medium defense (they're not a fighter)
* Give them high int, high focus (they're likely a mage)
* Make the weapons available to them weak (for the stage in the game they're acquired)
* Learn exclusive healing abilities

Any character with these attributes will make a fine healer.

On the other hand, a tank looks like this:

* Medium attack, high defense (they have to soak in the damage)
* Low int, high focus (they don't cast magic, they survive it)
* High HP (yeah)
* Good armour, shields, etc.
* Exclusive abilities that raise defense, or heal their own HP

So on, so forth.

The reason many RPG charcters aren't as specific as this is to give players choice. However, that's not to say that they don't do this at all. In Chrono Trigger, for example, you have to admit that Marle is the best healer, especially since she's the only one who learns healing magic. (a couple others have healing abilities, but they're relatively minor). That you don't use her means that either everyone else is good at tanking, or that you have plenty of potions to replace her.

I suppose the best game to take a page from is Final Fantasy (I). Each class is very good at one thing, and not so hot at others. If you include a white mage, you don't get any form of fighter whatsoever, she's primarily for healing (and dealiing with nasty undead). Fighter is as Fighter does: Tank, through and through.

So, really, it is easy to force roles on to player, just many games choose not to, to give the (single) player choice.
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[Fenrir-Lunaris]

What Caron said is also how Welcome.RPG is set up as well, with some minor alterations.

You have fighters, who come in several flavors, though each focuses on a seperate concept. Do you want a warrior who is well balanced in offense and defense? Are you not so much worried about damaging the enemy as you are having someone who can take hits? Do you want to do as much damage in a shorter period of time without regard to defending yourself? Do you just want the assurance your attacks will succeed? They have one thing in common - lack of multitargeting spells. Indeed, they are made to fight - it's what they're meant for. That's why they're called fighters.

I've spent a lot of time trying to figure how rogues work in a party, and have come to two conclusions. Firstly is that they are weak fighters with lousy defenses, who compensate for this shortcoming with fast reflexes. Ultimately, fast reflexes determine victory in RPGs, especially those with an ATB system. A speed of 20 lets you hold the spacebar down in ANY battle. Victory's almost assured actually. The only way to prevent cheapness of this sort is to either (A) make the rogue in question do little damage to begin with or (B) give them other abilities which the player would rather use their turn on aside from spacebar mashing. Rogues steal. Some are more musically inclined and can provide buffs to other heroes. Others are able to affect other foes and allies' speed. Others still are like nimble tanks which are made to avoid hits, rather than take them. In short, so many types of characters can be built off of rogues, but again, their common element is speed.

Lastly are spell casters. These fall into two categories, healing, and damage dealing. For the most part, they may even have identical stats. A wizard who can do 100 damage is just as useful as a wizard who can heal 100 damage. At the end of the day, this is all spellcasters boil down to. How do you make it more interesting? Make them the only spellcasters, period. Nobody aside from the healer should be able to recover health, or raise dead allies.

The main premise behind all this is simply that these individual units by themselves work much, much better in a party. A lone fighter who's fairly balanced in all respects will probably make it all the way to the end of the game, provided of course he has plenty of healing potions and the best weapons and armor he can get. Of course this isn't always the case, especially when those potions run out, and also if he runs up against an enemy that's strong against his sword. A healer can't survive as many hits, and battles are hard when most of your time is spent healing yourself. A lone damage-mage trying to take on a dungeon is basically on a suicide run since they can't take hits, and can't heal. Same case with a berserker, except even moreso since he can't multitarget enemies. A tank could probably beat a dungeon alone, but it'll run into the same problems as the lone fighter - not being able to heal, and lack of strong weapons.

What about two healers? Two damage dealers? Two fighters? Same problem, only now the situation is compounded since you have to watch everyone like a hawk. If you can't heal at all, you have to switch your lineup around constantly to distribute who takes the brunt force of your enemies' attacks. Again, if you run into enemies who are only succeptible to magic, it'll be difficult if outright impossible to beat them with raw, brute force. Suppose you charge into battle with 4 identical berserkers? Against run of the mill encounters, this is a fine choice since they can overcome random encounters with raw force (and a rock on your spacebar). You can't do that with damage-mages though, and once your MP runs out, you're more or less screwed since you can't heal or recover spells without resting.

That is precicely the reason why a mixed party works. A mixed party will not have the player saying "oh snap a flan" when they run into damage resistant enemies, because they HAVE magic to hit them with. That's just one example, and there are many others of course.

[VirusTalent]

I always use one player I like and a healer, a mage, and another mage in FF.
Why? Its easy, and fun to play that way.

[Valigarmander]

I use the fighter/bmage/wmage/monk combo, but that's just me.

I think if you're making a game, you should mix things up a bit. Characters that are all the same just bore the hell out of the player. You need variety! Have different classes of heroes. Make use of every single stat (Attack, Defense, Counter, etc.) Give heroes different equips, not the same thing for everyone. I can't think of anything else right now. I'm working off of caffeine right now. Bah. Later.

[Moogle1]

Character differentiation is why I prefer FF9 over 7 and 8. I am still in love with the character select on Darkmoor Dungeon: you can probably beat the game with any party combination (I haven't tested this), but changing your party combination requires you to change your strategy.

Mainstream RPGs tend to take into account that you will have your favorite characters, so they generally design things so that the characters are statistically pretty much the same. This is boring, boring, boring! Characters should feel unique. Ideally, maybe, they could even have their own control schemes -- maybe to cast magic with your wizard, you have to enter in a button combo DDR-style (the better your timing, the more effective the spell), while your monk uses Street Fighter controls to execute his moves (Sabin, anyone?). It would give your characters more of a "feel," especially in the sense that you can now say "I'm better with Wizard" or "Check out my awesome Fighter skills!"
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[JSH357]

The best way to make characters stand out from one another is to make sure they have as little in common as possible. For example, I don't like the fact that healers are able to attack in most RPGs. In Thanksgiving Quest, I took away the healer's ability to attack, and my general response from players was that he is invaluable but not the only necessary member of the team.

In the Final Fantasy games, you can usually (If you really want to) solo the entire game with just the healer character since it can attack (however weak that attack may be) and heal.

If you strive to have unique characters, they really need to be unique. This can be difficult to accomplish since RPGs stress so heavily on damage-dealing. What if your score in the game was affected by the number of items you collected? What if there were no healers at all, but just healing items? Then a Thief would be a lot more valuable instead of mostly(MOSTLY, not always) useless like in the Final Fantasy series.

Try making a short RPG where only one character can attack, one can heal, and one can do other things. It actually turns out to be pretty balanced. Of course, you don't have to go that extreme, but the REAL reason that RPG characters tend to blur and cancel each other out is the fact that RPGs are so centered around doing damage. If you want more strategy in battles, find ways to make damage-dealing less important or different ways to deal damage.

[Machu]

Fire Emblem! It's like, super paper-rock-scissors hyper DX on steroids. There are very clear consequences on your character choices, and also countless subtle effects to consider, too.

Also, World of Warcraft has good (enough) class balance, too.
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[Iblis]

Because I was scrolling down and reading at the same time, when Machu said "class" I read "chess." So, an idea: if a battle takes place on a field where you can move around in a turn-based manner, as in Lunar or Inindo, different characters could have different patterns of movement, like chess pieces.

JSH is correct in saying that characters are too similar to eachother, and TQ is a good example of how to distinguish characters in a better way than the standard classes.

But, the problem is not just that healers can attack, but that it's their default action. Same for mages. Every character attacks by default even if they're not physical attackers. Personally, I think the entire idea of a "default attack" is bad. It makes sense that if a wizard has a staff (to focus their magic or whatever), they'd be able to bonk enemies with it in a time of crisis, if there was no better option. But most RPGs have it absolutely backwards: your wizard attacks physically all the time, except in a dangerous situation where they bring out their magic. I blame MP, the typical organization of battle menus, and laziness.

Also problematic, and in the same vein as the above, is that the average highly-trained fighter knows exactly as many types of physical combat as a feeble wizard. Just one: hit enemy with weapon. As wizards have an extra menu for magic, fighters should have an extra menu for techniques. And assuming magic is something trainable rather than inborn or something, they might know a simple healing spell to use for emergencies.

I've also thought about Moogle's idea, that different kinds of characters should be controlled in different ways. I really like this idea, in large part because it helps tie together player skill and character skill (a connection weak or nonexistant in the majority of RPGs, despite being a totally necessary part of gameplay).
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[JSH357]

Re: Machu

Fire Emblem is a good example, but note that the FE games in general are (at least from 4 onwards) pretty unbalanced. Axe fighters are essentially worthless with the rare exception of Berserkers because of their inability to hit things besides slow knights, which magicians are perfectly capable of handling.

(The magic triangle is also pretty worthless since Mages tend to have high RES)

I'm not dissing on Fire Emblem really (It's one of the best SRPG series), but I'm just saying it is only balanced theoretically.

[PlayerOne]

Why should characters be forced into boxes? They are supposed to be people, why can't they do as they please? Learn a bit of fighting and a bit of healing? If you have a flexible system, then it should be up to you to specialise if the game design makes it pay to be specialised.

[djfenix]

Well, i like using MMOs as a prime example of how classes can be used in a digital rpg. I've played lots of MMOs, but the 2 that i've played that makes excellent use of classes is WOW and FFXI. Although, i haven't played WOW as much, I can break down the roles in FFXI.

Melee Tanks (Warrior, Monk, Paladin, possibly Red Mage)
Tanks are pretty obvious, but a melee tank is the one who has the defence and hp. They can take the damage and sustain that position for a long time.

Dodge Tanks (Ninja, possibly Red Mage and Thief)
These guys dont have very good defense, but they have the evasion and/or abilities to prevent them from getting hit. They probably dont have very high hp either, but they shouldn't be getting hit anyways.

Melee Damage Dealers (Warrior, Dragoon, Monk, Dark Knight, Thief, Samurai, Ranger, posibly Red Mage)
These guys are the hard hitters. They have the strength and the techniques that allow them to do PHYSICAL damage.

Magic Damage Dealers (Black Mage, Red Mage, White Mage, Summoner, Dark Knight)
Also hard hitters, but using magic. This takes more thinking because one needs to take concideration of elemental weaknesses.

Healers (White Mage, Red Mage, Summoner, Paladin)
Using magic to heal. Pretty obvious. But they have low hp, and low defence, so they have to be wary in taking care of themselves and others.

Buffers (White Mage, Red Mage, Summoner, Paladin, Bard)
Uses magic to enhance your status. Regen, Shell, Protect, whatever. They make it so a battle is a little easiar.

Debuffers (White Mage, Red Mage, Black Mage, Summoner, Dark Knight, Ninja, Bard)
Similar to buffers, they make a battle easiar. But they curse the enemies with spells and abilities that lower the enemy stats.

Soloist (Red Mage, Beastmaster)
These guys can pretty much stand on their own. They have the abilities to survive without other party members and can pretty much do
everything alone.

And these roles can probably be extended further. FF games had the ranged idea, where heroes who use ranged weapons are the only ones who successfully hit airborne enemies (Wakka FFX) or enemies in the distance (FFII-IV). Or in FFVIII, magic couldn't be spread. So if you wanted to do group elemental damage, you'd need summons.

In traditional rpgs, you dont really see buffers, debuffers, and sometimes dodge tanks. You have spells to buff and debuff, but they're not really all that useful. Buffing is something that's a little more common, but debuffing seldom works at all. In most (if not all) games, bosses are immune to debuffs. Really, what's the point of having the spell then? And most buffs are practically useless in battle, for the effects are hardly worth noticing.

[JSH357]

Gaming isn't real life. Characters in games are not real people. I personally hate most of the games I've played that are extremely flexible. Once you figure out some skill that's better than everything else, you use that and nothing else, making all of the extra data in the game useless. Games are supposed to have rules to prevent things like that from happening.

I understand where you're coming from, but there are so many cases where having a flexible system in a RPG totally kills it that I have to disagree.

Edit: this was re:Playerone.

[Iblis]

[djfenix]

A flexible system is fine, but for all characters to be slowly stripped of their uniqueness to only be exactly the same as everyone else in the end isnt.

And while i agree that characters should be more like people, because ultimately, we're trying to make the characters as lifelike as possible. HOWEVER, most real people aren't masters of everything. Hell, nobody is master of everything. Why should it be so in an RPG? Sure, learn a bit of this, learn a bit of that. That's perfectly fine. But usually when a person learns multiple skills, they arent gonna master all of those skills.

That's just what a character in an RPG reflects. By then end of the game, they'll have mastered knowledge of martial arts, weapons skills, battle tactics, healing magic, black magic, etc etc. That doesn't seem realistic at all.

In a gaming standpoint, having everyone being exactly the same makes the game dull. By the end of FFX, i had Yuna tapping everyone with her staff, doing overkills with ever hit. She's a white mage. She shouldn't be doing that. Hell, by the end of the game, i didnt use any abilities at all. Straight hitting was the most effective tactic. Does that really seem entertaining? Would you want to play an OHR game where every battle requires you to just hold the space bar? I think not.