Castle Paradox

[Mr B]

A friend and I have been bouncing around a few ideas for a pen-and-paper RPG (which is rather...foolish, considering that neither of us have ever played one), and we started talking about what looks to be a rather large issue for RPGs.

The problem is this: is it possible to make support characters that provide great use in a game without them being so necessary that a player has no real choice whether or not to use them?

For the purposes of this discussion, I am dividing characters into two main roles; direct damage-dealers and supporters. Damage-dealers are any class that deals damage (Knight, Bubble-Mage, etc.), while a supporter is any class that provides indirect assistance to a damage-dealer (healing, stat-boosts, stat-drains, etc.).

In just about every game I can think of, it is far more efficient to simply attack an enemy. There are all sorts of interesting skills and spells, but, unless they deal damage, they don't see any real use.

I think that it could add a lot of interest to a game to have the support characters be just as used as the real characters; there is a lot of room for development of these things.

However, how to make them be useful without forcing the player's hand? If a battle can not be won without a support character, doesn't that just serve to reduce the player's options?

Maybe its a moot point. Nobody would seriously consider making a combat RPG that doesn't have direct damage-dealers -- that is not considered a restriction upon players. Why should designing the gameplay so that it requires a support character be considered a restriction? All the same, I dislike the idea of forcing players to choose at least one of such-and-such classes.

So, how to make them useful without making them indispensible?

Probably one way would be to make every situation surmountable by pure damage-dealing, but to have a healthy percentage of situations more quickly/satisfactoraly resolvable with support.

Maybe, instead of attaching the support role entirely on a character-by-character basis, each character could have half-damage/half-support skills. Perhaps almost to the point of each character having two classes, one from each.

Neither of these ideas really satisfy me. I feel frustrated that support classes can provide a lot of depth, but are constantly pushed out for being inefficient. Is there any real solution that allows support to be optional, or must it necessarily be either mandatory or non-existant?

[Moogle1]

One workaround is to make all classes supportive/complementary to an extent. That way, any two different classes will be able to combo together with synergistic results.

For example, we'll say you have two classes, a knight and a wizard. The knight has direct damage with his melee attacks and the wizard has direct damage with his spells. The knight also has support abilities like Cover and the wizard can use support spells to boost the knight's abilities. The player can choose who to use for direct damage and who to support, a choice that may be situational. He isn't forced to use the knight or the wizard, since the ranger could sub in for either one of them, but having at least two characters with different classes will more than double his battle effectiveness.
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Slime Salad :: Independent Game Design

[Iblis]

[msw188]

Yeah, I posted as a requested enhancement on Bugzilla the ability for attacks to target bitsets, which would be pretty key for this kind of thing. This is, to me, the chief fault of nearly every Final Fantasy game I've ever played (that support is rarely if ever needed).
Furthermore, I'd rather have characters lean more towards one or the other side, rather than being able to become powerful damage dealers as well as supporting characters all at once. Thus, for example, it is more sensible for the character to use their attack-up spell because, quite frankly, their damaging spells kind of suck (unless they are fighting fire monsters, say). These also help add to the feeling of a character's individuality (in terms of gameplay, rather than in terms of plot).

[Mr B]

Gah, machine ate my first response attempt.

Anyways, having abilities be able to modify bitsets sounds extremely useful. Having equipment with these bitsets already is nice, but I think it might end up that the end-game gear makes support characters redundant again.

So what if the gear bitsets would affect the response that having the bitsets set? For example, a sword with the 2xPierce bitset would do double pierce damage when it is enabled. A breastplate with +15 Invis. would maintain invisibility for 15 additional seconds over the default.

I know that a lot of times, even when a battle would be easier to finish if I had my support characters do their thing, I find it annoying to have them "waste turns" setting up for it.

What if, before each battle, the player was presented with a "special turn" phase of the battle that could only be used for support abilities? The player could set what each character did for support (if anything), and then the actual battle begins without the player's perception of turns being wasted.

The settings could be saved for the next battle, and there could even be setting slots that the player could set up and hotkey. For example, slot one could be used for settings that are good against numerous weak enemies. Slot two could be used for battles against enemies of superior HP and defense. Etc.

Heh, maybe sneak attacks by enemies would prevent the player from getting the setup turn, while sneak attacks by players would prevent the enemies from getting a setup turn.

[Camdog]

I don't really think the idea of items specialized for support abilities is any different than the "traditional" rpgs battle at it's core. Also, I don't think the support actions are useless as they are currently. It all boils down to math. If I deal damage equal to my strength every time I attack, and I have a spell that makes me do 125% of my strength every time I attack, I will need to spend 4 turns attacking for the turn I spent casting the spell to have paid for itself. Therefore, if an enemy takes 5 or more turns to defeat by attacking, it's smart to cast the spell, otherwise it isn't. All RPG battles are basically this in a more complicated form, just like your "specialized items" idea is. You just plug different numbers into the equation.

What I'd like to see is a complete overhaul of traditional RPG battles. I think there are a lot more interesting ways to simulate a small tactical battle. I know I'm showing my nerd colors here, but I think Magic is a great example of this. The tactics in that game are nearly endless, and in the right deck, a "support" card like Necropotence or Moat could make the difference in the match. In fact, the computer game version of Magic did this really well. You'd adventure around Dominia collecting not swords and helmets, but spells (cards). Wrap a system like that around an actually engrossing story and you'd have a great game.

That said, another important thing to remember is that you're designing a pen and paper rpg! The beauty in those is the fact they're run by a human, not a computer. You could use your support spells for anything you can think of. That strength spell becomes far more than +25% in battle. Your player could use it to get that extra omph and bend a metal bar in order to intimidate the surly dwarf, or bust down that fortified door. There's nothing you need to do to improve support style abilities in a pen and paper, they're already the meat and potatoes of the game!

[Me]

Perhaps give incentives for defeating an enemy in a different way. Since you're designing a P&P game, you can do anything, so this shouldn't be hard. Maybe a certain foe will give up after you, say, drop its strength sufficiently. Or, as was mentioned earlier, you could intimidate them through displays of power. Or you could humiliate an enemy not by beating them down, but by avoiding their attacks and crippling them with debuffs until they give up.
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[msw188]

Mr. B's idea about having equipment affect how bitsets are affected is pretty interesting, but I'm afraid it probably won't happen with the OHR. It seems an incredible undertaking, and I'm not certain how much there is to gain out of it (by which I mean, I'm not sure how useful this sort of equipment would be). But as for equipment activating bitsets, my idea had been that attacks override equipment (in terms of setting bitsets) while in battle. I'm not sure whether attacks should be able to target bitsets outside of battle (right now I'm inclined to believe that they should not be able to, and that bitsets are re-set after every battle, like status afflictions).

I know that I seem to be moving further away from the subject of support characters, but I had to ask: would it be possible to have harm-tile damage take elemental bitset effects into consideration? Heck, this actually leads to new suggestions:

Can we have plotscripting commands to check for (and maybe set) a hero's elemental bitsets? Something like the current 'check tag' and 'set tag' commands, with constants in the .hsi file for how you name your elemental bitsets, and constants to check against (weak, strong, or absorb):

if(check element (find hero(hero:Bob), element:ice)==element:strong), then
begin
#This hero can walk around in the ice cave without taking damage from the cold
end

Just an idea.

[msw188]

Okay, a double post, but this post is back onto the topic. I don't think I like the idea of having a special 'pre-battle' turn for support type skills. This seems like it would make the turns of your supporting characters even more useless in the actual battle. The main thing is, again, to make sure that the balance is such that using support skills is a really good idea, and the most logical way to do it (that I can think of) is to have characters that are good at supporting while NOT being good at attacking, or healing. This, combined with having battles that really need support (i.e., if you don't use a defense-increasing skill early in the battle, you will spend a lot of the battle healing, which will end up making the battle take longer AND costing more MP)

The idea about incentives for different killing methods is pretty interesting. I used to believe that in Dragon Warrior II, you got more EXP the faster you defeated the enemy group. I'm pretty sure that actually, there was just a small amount of randomness to the amount you got, but this could be a neat idea. Is it possible for enemies in the OHR to give negative EXP? If so, this could be easy to do with the battle engine as it is now.

[LeRoy_Leo]

[Mr B]

The problem was made evident to me while attempting to make a P&P, but I wanted to talk about it in more general terms for all games.

I'd love to see various ways of winning a battle, but they pretty much all involve making a much more technical game. If you have combat work on a social level you'll need to make an engine that also manages social relationships (The Sims RPG?). And once you get away from the "they dead = me win" formula, how do you even DEFINE what a victory is? How many points should you get for offending someone, and how do you decide when they're sufficiently offended?

DEFINITELY let's have attacks that can override bitsets! Very useful, that. And while we're at it, I'd love to see the heroes have access to the type bitsets. Er, assuming that this hasn't been implemented since Rusalka. I just got Tirgoviste and I am still unfamiliar with much of the changes...

[/lateral foray]

Yeah; a special pre-battle turn for support characters would serve only to further marginalize their role in battle. I think that it would only work if all characters have some level of both support and combat skills.

One of the problems that I see with having battles that require support is that it pretty much eliminates choice among support characters. The only way I see around this would be to have those previously-mentioned multiple ways of winning battles, such that different support characters can tilt the optimal method to different directions. A debuff victory would be pretty funny. Heh, I could imagine a boss battle that can be won only through debuffing.

Also, I'd love to see support skills that could modify the rewards that enemies give. How about a Merchant support character that could use the "Aquire" skill to raise the chance of getting drops? Or a Mentor that increases XP learnage?

Hmm...most RPGs don't have much in the way of teamwork. I mean, characters do have to work together, but it's not as if there is a lot of strategic interaction. Maybe support characters could do something to modify this..?

[Moogle1]

[msw188]

Personally, I think that the combo system of Chrono Trigger was a good step, but didn't go far enough. Too many of the abilities were quickly superseded by better single abilities. The main exceptions were abilities that NO single character could get (for a while), like whatever the thing was when Marle and Crono together could heal the whole group. I think that this is key for combo-style things - make sure that these attacks do things that single characters cannot do, at least for a while.

How important is it to have 'support' enemies? Would it make your own support characters more important if, say, there were enemies using skills that increased each other's attack, or were lowering yours? At what point does this simply become a tedious battle of negating supports? And how can, in the OHR, it be possible to have 'intelligent' enemy support? I think that it would be a BEAUTIFUL thing if attacks were given the option to be able to chain to two different attacks, possibly each with a different chain percentage. This would allow the maker to have enemies that trigger a partially random sequence of attacks, rather than picking attacks out of a list at random, or having a chain that always does things in the same order.

PS: The possibility of 'spliting chains' adds much more than just this, as well.

[Moogle1]

msw, I've been asking for that feature forever.

One of the features I always felt was most overlooked in Chrono Trigger (by players and designers alike) was the fact that a character's screen position could make a difference. Clusters of enemies were vulnerable to Cyclone and enemies in a line were easy prey for Slash.

Unfortunately, as with comb techs, this feature was also useless by the end of the game, where if it wasn't fullscreen, it wasn't worth casting (possibly excepting some single-target attacks).

Which brings me to what seems to be the prevailing problem in the genre: every game wants its characters to be heroes. Every character ends up being a standalone superpower, each capable of dealing thousands of damage to the entire screen. This is a horrible design decision.

One game that uses support spells effectively is Warcraft III. Thinking of that example and expanding on my idea from my last post, perhaps we could virtually eliminate the direct attack command by making it the default action (kind of like in KOTOR, et al.). Not only does this give the game a more live feel, but it also shifts the emphasis from "how do I deal more damage" to "how do I make sure my party has the upper hand." This is a more interesting question from a gameplay standpoint.
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Slime Salad :: Independent Game Design

[JSH357]

I think the problem lies in the amount of stats a game uses. Games with lots of different parameters (MP/MP/Str/Def/Mag/MDef/Acc/Evd/Spd/Lck) benefit less from support characters than games with just a few.

Say for instance, you make a game with just HP/MP/Str/Spd. One character has a strength spell. He will always win the battle. If his opponent can drain all of the Strength spell unit's MP, suddenly the match is more even. When you have TWO DIFFERENT attack stats, it can get nearly impossible to make status spells matter since you can just use the other types of attacks.

One good solution to making status spells more useful is making them do damage or heal AND change the desired stat. This kind of spell is more likely to be used since it accomplishes the goal of doing damage and changing parameteres.

MP is probably the biggest problem, though. Why waste your precious MP on status spells when you can save up for healing? The designer must provide a reason.

To sum all this up, I think games need to use fewer paramters in the first place. (One time I made a game with no defensive stats, but added spells to reduce damage. This worked very well. Makes a good alternative)