Looking for beta testers
 

As I have mentioned, I am in the process of developing a turn-based battle system. Currently it looks like it can be easily abused but I need to find out exactly how. I could use some people who are interested in RPG & Tabletop games to do some testing for me. It shouldn't be hard; The best way for you to help me test this game is simply to build a party.

There are two parts to this game. The first part is the creation of Character classes & Characters based on that class. The second part is putting those four against another four characters in a turn based battle.


EDIT: I've decided to display the character building manual here now. It's... long.

/********************************************/
The Game
In this game, you will create a party of 4 characters to battle in turn-based style with another player's party of 4. This is a fairly involved process, so the following is a series of instructions on how to build each individual character. Below is a character sheet you can copy & paste into another document. Once you understand the basics of character building, you can fill out four different character sheets to form your own party!

*/-------------------------------------------------------------------------------/*
Character Sheet
Name: - Class: -
Type: - Weapon: - Armour: -
Elemental Atk: None

HP: -/- MP: -/-
STR: VIT: INT: WIS: SPD:
Fire DEF: 0 Water DEF: 0 Earth DEF: 0 Wind DEF: 0

Abilities:
Attack
(Class Ability)
(Character Ability)
(Skill Set)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
Item
*/-------------------------------------------------------------------------------/*



Starting with Class
Before building your party's characters, you should build the Classes to base the characters off of. The benefit to doing this is that you have a basic set of stats to assign to any number of characters, so that when and if you want to create new characters, you won't have to start from the ground up. Below is a 'Class Sheet'. You will notice that it has only some of the fields that the character sheet does, so it will define only certain aspects of your character. Like the character sheet, you may want to copy this into a seperate document

*/-------------------------------------------------------------------------------/*
Class Sheet
Class Name: -
Type: -

HP: -/- MP: -/-
STR: VIT: INT: WIS: SPD:

Abilities:
(Class Ability)
(Skill Set)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
*/-------------------------------------------------------------------------------/*

Below are the instructions on how to build a character's class.


Hit Me
Like most RPGs, your characters will have a set of 'Hit' Points (HP) & 'Ability' Points (Traditionally 'Mana' or 'Magic' Points, thus 'MP' ). You have 15 points to assign between these two stats. At this point, you'll want to be thinking about whether you want your character to have a lot of stamina (able to take a lot of damage to their HP) or be able to use powerful attacks (paid for with MP). Also note that once the HP is assigned, you will multiply that figure by 10 to get your classes starting HP. MP will remain the same.


Statistical Data
Your other stats play a more subtle, but very important role in the game. There are five stats, besides HP&MP, which you have 25 points to divide between. To help you determine the best configuration, here is a definition of every stat including your Hit Points & Ability Points;

HP: Health Points (Subtracted from current total when attacked)
MP: Energy Attack Points (Subtracted from current total when using powerful abilities)
STR: Physical Attack Power
VIT: Physical Defense
INT: Energy Attack/ Heal
WIS: Energy Defense/ Receptiveness
SPD: Enables movement, defines turn order, and can be used to attack/defend.

Your stats will have a huge effect on your abilities. Later on, we will define customizable abilities for your Class, and later your character. For now, simply keep the following in mind;

STR & INT are considered 'Offensive' stats, meaning that these are the only stats you may base damage dealing attacks on. Likewise, VIT & WIS are considered 'Defensive' stats, and you may not utilize them to deal damage.
SPD is a verstile stat. It is both offensive & defensive, and determines how often and how soon you get to take action during battle.
INT is the only stat that can be used to heal (With the exception of HP/MP, more on this later). When restoring HP or MP to a target with this stat, their WIS stat will determine how effective your heal is on them, with each 'point' assigned to WIS equaling 20% of the effect of your heal.


Typecasting
Once your stats are determined, your character is identified as one of three 'Types'. Your class type places certain limits and rules on your abilities which we will address later.
Physical Type: If STR+VIT > INT+WIS by 2 more
Energy Type: If INT+WIS > STR+VIT by 2 or more
Neutral Type: STR+VIT = INT+WIS (allow a difference of 1)


Oh, oh, It's Magic...
Now that we know how to set our stats and, roughly, how they work, lets build an example class to see them in action;

*/-------------------------------------------------------------------------------/*
Class Sheet (EXAMPLE)
Class Name: Magician
Type: Energy

HP: 50/50 MP: 10/10
STR: 1 VIT: 5 INT: 10 WIS: 2 SPD:7

Abilities:
(Class Ability)
(Skill Set)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot) <-----------(We'll work on abilities next!)
*/-------------------------------------------------------------------------------/*


Willing & Able
There are 5 different Options to select during battle. Two of these are default options that every character has access to; Attack, and Item. One other option is called "Character Ability", & is specific to your character (We will discuss this later). However, the two options which pertain to your class are the "Class Ability' and the "Skill Set". Eventually you will name these abilities, define them, and determine how much they cost to execute, but let's take a moment to understand what they can do first.

The 'Class Ability' should provide a reasonable alternative to the 'Attack' option. Maybe you want a heal, or a second method to attack, or to temporarily enhance your stats. This ability can do anything (within reason!) that you want it to.

The Skill Set is not an individual ability, but rather a group of special abilities specific to your class. Like the Class Ability, these skills can do basically anything you want. How many abilities you may have in your skills set depends on what type of class you have created;

Physical Type: Up to 4 skill set slots
Neutral Type: Up to 6 skill set slots
Energy Type: Up to 8 skill set slots

Defining Abilities

Now let's create some abilities and determine how much they will cost to execute.

Below is the ability builder. Before examining it, first determine the kind of ability you are trying to create. It is a heal? Does it deal damage? Try to figure, in terms that relate to the game, what exactly your ability will do. A lot will depend on how you have built your class up to this point, so try to make it an ability that will be well-suited to that class's strengths.

Now, if you have some idea of what you'd like the ability to do, we can start building it. There is a cost associated with each feature you use, effect, and how you deliver the action, so start adding up the points you see in each box. Starting with the column on the left, first determine what you are using to take action, then move on from there.

View the ability Builder here.

"** An 'effect' on any stat is considered ½ of the total stat. To double or eliminate a stat would cost 2 instead of 1, for instance. This principle applies to elemental functions as well but does not apply to current HP/MP.
-Actions that affect a characters status for 1 or more turns take effect after the action has been executed.
-The only way to affect abilities is to disable or re enable them."

*** These refer to an element used in a specific attack (when it is not the element equipped to the character) for the 'USE' and to the elemental defenses in the 'effected' items

So after determining what an ability does, you can easily calculate the cost. The cost associated with each ability can be paid for in 1 (and only one) of 3 ways;

MP (1:1 - Use up your ability points)
Special Items (1:4 - Use a Specific Item to execute. Only 4 of these available p/ ability, p/ battle)
Turns (1:1 - Counting from the next turn, the action will be executed on the turn number corresponding to the cost of the ability.)

This system may seem daunting, so let's create an example ability step-by-step. This is going to be a Class Ability, and we'll call it 'Mystify'. We can add this ability to our example class.

1. Action: This is a Class Ability, so add -1 to our cost. I am not using any of my own stats to execute this ability, so I can move on to the 'Effect Self' Column.
2. Even though adding a negative status effect to our own character enables a more powerful ability, I don't want to be hindered by this skill, so we'll just move on to the 'Effected' column and determine what status we want to effect.
3. I want this skill to slow down its target, so I will have it effect SPD. This adds a cost of 2. I don't want to effect more than 1 stat, so let's determine how long the effect will last.
4. Under the 'Duration' column, let's slow our target until they receive damage, this adds another cost of 2. Since we are not dealing damage, the next two columns don't apply, so we can move to the 'Method' options.
5. So far our cost for this ability is 3. It looks like we can make it a little more powerful, so let's have it effect all enemy targets. Since we are already paying to effect one target, it will only cost 3 more to attack all (There is only 4 total in any party).
6. Our cost is now 6, and we have to decide how to pay for it. Our example character has a high MP total, so let's just pay for it with MP.

So we can see that, to figure exactly what an ability does and how much it cost, we merely go through each column on the table left to right and add our cost up as we go. The exact same method is used to determine our skill set as well.

So now our Class Ability looks something like this on our Class Sheet;

*/-------------------------------------------------------------------------------/*
Class Sheet (EXAMPLE)
Class Name: Magician
Type: Energy

HP: 50/50 MP: 10/10
STR: 1 VIT: 5 INT: 10 WIS: 2 SPD: 7

Abilities:
Mystify: 6MP, SPDx1/2 for 1 hit on all enemy targets.
(Skill Set)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
*/-------------------------------------------------------------------------------/*

If you check the cost of the skills against the ability builder, you will see more examples of how to build these abilities. It is important to be accuarte when calculating cost, so double check your math!




A Game With Character
Now that your class has been defined, we can use it as a base to create an induvidual character from. To define our character, let's go back to our character sheet, and add in it's class information:

*/-------------------------------------------------------------------------------/*
Character Sheet
Name: Merlin Class: Magician
Type: Energy Weapon: - Armour: - Elemental Atk: None

HP: 50/50 MP: 10/10
STR: 1 VIT: 5 INT: 10 WIS: 2 SPD:7
Fire DEF: 0 Water DEF: 0 Earth DEF: 0 Wind DEF: 0

Abilities:
Attack
Mystify: 6MP, SPDx1/2 for 1 hit on all enemy targets.
(Character Ability)
(Skill Set)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
-(Skill Slot)
Item
*/-------------------------------------------------------------------------------/*

Looks like we have some work to do before our character is complete.

Choose Your Weapon
Weapons can modify the stat you attack with (STR, INT, SPD). Your weapon can give a 10% increase to any offensive stat, a 20% increase to offensive stat(s) with a -10% decrease in any other stat, 30% increase with a 20% decrease in another stat(s), etc, etc. There is a minimum 1 point increase for every 10% bonus you assign to a stat.

Armour works the same way but for defensive stats only (VIT & WIS). You may also substitute a 10% increase to any stat (offensive or defensive) with a +2 to any elemental. (This elemental enhancement will not negatively affect your setting with the opposing element)."

Elemental My Dear...
Certain ancient cultures believed in a concept known as humorism in which 4 basic elements making up the body would shift depending on activity. This theory was closely related to the theory of the four elements: Earth, Fire, Water and Air, which finds certain parallels in modern science with the forms of matter.

In our game, you can equip elemental attacks and resistance to your character. To attack with an element, you must choose an elemental weapon enchantment (See 'Weapons' above), or else you have to include the element specifically in an ability (See the Ability Builder). To set elemental resistance, you can give each element a certain value on your character sheet. Initially, you can have any two non-opposing elemental enchantments up to a +2 value. (You can raise this even higher by enchanting armors.) However, any value will give the opposing elements an inverse value. (Armour enchantment does not change the value of the opposing element.)

Elemental Defense works as follows;

Elem +4 50% of damage from Elem absorbed to recover HP
Elem +3 Damage reduced by 100%
Elem +2 Damage reduced by 50%
Elem +1 Damage reduced by 25%
Elem 0 No Effect
Elem -1 25% additional damage
Elem -2 50% additional damage
Elem -3 75% additional damage
Elem -4 100% additional damage


Finally!
So lets use everything we've covered to complete our example class. Since we've already covered Class Ability and we know that Character Ability is built the same way, we'll go ahead and add in a unique attack for 'Merlin' here;

*/-------------------------------------------------------------------------------/*
Character Sheet
Name: Merlin Class: Magician Type: Energy
Weapon: Wand (+1 MP) Armour: Tuxedo(+1WIS, +2 Fire DEF, -1STR) Elemental Atk: None

HP: 50/50 MP: 11/10(+1)
STR: 1 (-1) VIT: 5 INT: 10 WIS: 2(+1) SPD: 7
Fire DEF: +2 Water DEF: 0 Earth DEF: 0 Wind DEF: 0

Abilities:
Attack
Mystify: 6MP, SPDx1/2 for 1 hit on all enemy targets.
Assistant: Use Special Item (INTx5)x(WIS/5)=HP Restored
Illusions (Note: These have not been completed)
-Rabbit
-Grow
-Shrink
-Float
-Saw
-Teleport
-Flash
-Coin Trick
Item: Use one standard item from your party's inventory
*/-------------------------------------------------------------------------------/*



Rocky-Music and Martial Arts
After creating four characters, you'll want to know how to fight!

Turn Order

Every character goes in order of SPD stat from highest to lowest, with characters taking extra turns ahead of and once for every character whose SPD stat is 1/2 or less of their own until every character has gone at least once. It would look like this.;

SPD>15----13---11----9----7-----6-----4-----3
R1-----x------x----x------x|
R2-----x-------------------------x|
R3-----x--------------------------------x|
R4-----x-----x-----x-----x--------------------x|
R5-----x-----x-----x-----x-----x-----x-------------x|
*--------------------------------------------------------------*

Characters take turns until all of the opposing party is KO'd or permanently unable to take action.


Items
These are the items available during battle. One party of 4 characters shares this inventory:
3 Mana Potions (Restores 50% target's total MP)
3 Potions (Heal 20% target's total HP)
2 Revive (Restores from KO + 1/10 target's total HP)
2 Remedy (Cures status ailment)
2 Elixirs (Restores full HP/MP)
Special items: Up to 4 per ability that utilizes an item per character.


Status
A status effect is any temporary alternation to any of your seven stats, disabling any abilities, or altering any of your elemental functions."
/************************************************** *****/

And that, in way more than a nutshell, is it.


Like before, If you decide to help I will be looking for the following types of feedback;

1. Look for ways to over-power abilities or just 'break' the system in general
2. Look for inconsistencies in the building system
3. Recommend ways to make game more simple
4. Recommend ways to make game more customizable
5. Any other suggestions or complaints

Have at it!

I'll gladly help, but we'd need to see all the classes first before I can start poking holes in it and maybe suggesting ways to balance classes and/or abilities against each other.

That's just it: The Samurai is purely an example of a potential class you could create with this system. You will specifically define the class stats, abilities, enhancements, everything according to the building system. What I want you guys to poke holes in is the ability creation and character building.

So, wait, you create your own class, and then a character in that class? Why not just make the class an element of the character, at that point?

My original thought was so that you could create other characters of that class. It's superficial at this point but that was the idea, in anycase.

I think it would be pretty diffiicult to make this system truly customizable without having some classes be great while others being mediocre and some worthless. For example if you have a Fighter class that has a maxed out STR/VIT build you'd have a classic example of a Fighter, however if you had picked out a Black Mage and then tried optimizing that for STR and VIT including equipment it would seem to be a sub-optimal choice unless you are going for a specific character in mind. The same could be true for the Fighter type (lots of HP and high STR/weapon damage) who tries maxing out INT. It seems like there will always be some choices that may either be overpowered compared to the rest or they will be poorly made and won't be as much of a challenge to fight against.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you allow full customization of the characters there will be people who will min/max their abilities and then there will be those who won't, which will make the difference between the two more noticeable depending on the amount of customization that is allowed. The more customization = the bigger the gap can be between min/maxers and those who don't. A perfect example of this is between D&D 3.0/3.5 (huge gaps depending on how the character is built due to lots of customization) and 4th edition (less customization, less gaps).

The same holds true for making up the abilities. Some people could create either class abilities and/or skill sets that are too powerful or pretty weak and when you have a total of 8 players playing against each other there will be noticeable differences in those who min/maxed and those who didn't even bother thinking their character choices out.

Of course you could always step in as the game moderator and not allow things that are too powerful or maybe suggest to those who present subpar abilities and skill sets to increase their usefulness but that will still limit their creativity.

I guess what I'm trying to say is I would find it hard to create a fully flexible game system without any major ways to break and abuse the rules due to having a lot of customization options available. Either way I'll still help you if I can, but if it's a pure flexible system then we can just start making builds that have high speed and can one shot other enemy characters and go from there.

Nique has had me and a friend of ours duke it out Martial-Arts-and-Rocky-Music style to test his system and I totally took him to church with my way overpowered characters. :cool: But then Nique nerfed all my awesome abilities... :(

For the most part, I think the character building system works really well. The way to decide HP/MP, stat points, and weapon/armor bonuses is simple, makes sense, and is easy to figure out IMO. The part that really needs work is the system for assigning costs to abilities.

We definitely need testers who will try to exploit the system.

I'd love to help test it and offer suggestions on how to fix any flaws that appear, but as far as coming up with things from scratch for an entire game system I'm hardly any good at it :(

I see where you're coming from. Rest assured I've considering that. I think when you see how that stats effect battle you'll understand what I'm trying to do a bit more. The biggest problems I see is that there is a large learning curve for people not used to Character building, and, as you say, it isn't really geared towards conservative builds, and I would probably need some kind of guide on how to not make a sucky character.

However, there is always a cost associated with abilities that are more than just standard, and I'm attempting to define that very rigidly so as to accommodate for all types of characters and to make it balenced. So I'm creating a system that you can use to determine 1)what your ability does and 2)the cost. The constraints that I'm placing are going to be geared more strongly towards the game itself - obviously, certain things are going to be impossible. Or at least, this testing will ensure that I can eliminate the possibility of unfair abilities. If that means I need to adjust the system, then I'll do that. If it means I need to make an exception rule, then I'll do that.

And, of course, for more practical gameplay, I want to know how to build some good standard classes.

EDIT: Ninja'd by my own wife. :(

Yeah I think that coming up with a "Create your own abilities and class sets" and then assigning a "cost" to whatever you end up picking could become very blurry when one character has a certain set versus another who with the right combination of ability scores and abilities/skill sets can dominate the competition.

One suggestion I can think of off the top of my head after playing the first RPG Battle game was how I thought Speed was a somewhat gimp stat. Granted the higher your SPD stat was meant how early on in the round you went but beyond that you still ended up getting your turn at the same rate as everyone else (i.e. 8 turns later it's you again) and so you really only need a SPD stat one higher than someone on the other team or one lower depending on your strategy.

My suggestion to change it is based off of a lower stat instead of a higher stat and have that number be the number of rounds that will pass before you get another turn.

Example: Character 1 has SPD = 10; Character 2 has SPD = 8; Character 3 has SPD = 6

Then you count out how many Rounds there are and see if anyone is supposed to go on that particular round...

..................Character 1............Character 2.............Character 3
Round 1.......
Round 2.......
Round 3.......
Round 4.......
Round 5.......
Round 6................................................. ...................X
Round 7.......
Round 8.........................................X
Round 9.......
Round 10.............X
Round 11.....
Round 12................................................ ..................X
Round 13.....
Round 14.....
Round 15.....
Round 16.......................................X
Round 17.....
Round 18................................................ ..................X
Round 19.....
Round 20.............X
Round 21.....

And so on and so on. If nobody goes on a particular round than you just skip ahead to the next round until it's someone's turn (Rounds 1-5 nobody would go and Character 3 would go on Round 6 which is effectively the first Round of real combat). This fits the flavor pretty well too of how Speed went in the Final Fantasy games with the ATB bar filling up faster and you being able to take 5 turns before the enemy takes their 3rd if your SPD was fast (or moreso if you focused on SPD obviously).

With this system you could even make the abilities and/or skill sets have a delay time with them when used (like casting some powerful magic might give you a +5 SPD until your next turn comes up which effectively makes your next turn come up later because you used a powerful ability). Granted this would need to be balanced out so people don't come up with characters with a SPD rating of 1 and end up getting in 8+ turns in before anyone else gets their first turn but using this system would also add a lot of strategy to the game about whether to use a normal attack vs powerful-delaying attack versus the other system where it's basically spam your most powerful ability over and over again.