Can anyone point me toward a dumbed down method for a simple RPG progression design for turn-based combat?
I’m having trouble balancing level, attack damage, and hp between player/enemy. The logarithms are beyond me and I’d like to develop a simple solution I understand vs. buying an Asset. Thanks
Well, the trouble is that there is no simple solution to this particular issue. It’s like saying “Can someone give me a simple formula for quantum entanglement? It’s just too complicated for me.”, but there is none. The subject has an inherit level of complexity relative to the complexity of your stat system.
For instance if you only have Health and Armor then it may be straightforward to process damage, just do ‘damage -= Armor’, but then if you add elemental resistances you’ll need a multiplier, and have to decide whether to process it before or after Armor affects the damage coming through. So, it grows in complexity quite quickly.
That being said, there are discussions on the web regarding how to calculate these sorts of things and it boils down to just coding a formula to process the stats in some particular order. Most of the solutions you’ll find on the store are full-fledged RPG templates and probably more than you want, but you may be able to find a limited functionality single-purpose RPG stat calculator tool or some simple formula ideas online.
You also need to think about how you want the system to work.
Do you want enemies to level with the player? Many games do this because it allows for a fairly consistent difficulty across the game. However, it can be seen as “cheap” because it doesn’t really offer a sense of character progression (the character may get stronger, but so do enemies so there’s no fundamental difference).
Additionally, how you want the game to play will affect your formulas you make. Some games have very punishing combat that’s meant to make you slow down and approach things tactically. Some games have very straightforward “Press attack” combat that may be kind of enjoyable, but isn’t really meant to be difficult. Whichever you want will determine some aspects of the formulas you choose.
Yes that’s the problem is this quickly becomes complex.
I’m just trying to start simple, turn-based with very few modifiers and not linear. For now, I’m just using a spreadsheet and manually creating an artificial progression.
I imagine that in the future, I’ll make it more complex but for now my goal is to make it slightly more challenging to level up but keep it simple with strength/weapon/armor.
Do you want enemies to automatically get stronger or to stay the same level? Do you want the game to be hard or easy? Do you want enemies/players to be able to miss each other?
Just something quick and dirty…make enemy HP 100. Character’s standard attack at the beginning of the game is 33. Also add a “critical” or “weak” attack which increases or drops the attack by 25%. Each enemy gives you 10 XP. After getting 100 XP (150? 250?), you level up. When you level up, your attack goes up by 5.
I’m just making those numbers up. The key is not to follow them, but to look at them, maybe try it out, then say “no, the enemies are too squishy, they need more HP” or “the player levels too fast, change it to 500 XP” or something. Just a base you can work from.
I want the enemies to get tougher. I already have random misses for player and enemy. I’ve added a random percentage to the experience value for the enemies too.
The HP and damage is my trouble now I guess.
Do you want the same enemies to get tougher, or do you want to have different enemies appear? It’s another way to maintain the difficulty level without it seeming as unfair–you can include different enemies at different level ranges.
How many enemies are onscreen at once? How long do you want each battle to last, on average? Are they random battles, or is it every set number of steps or are the enemies on the screen before battle? The first two questions here might govern how long it takes to beat an individual enemy, which would govern (broadly) the ratio of HP to damage.
This is a real simple turn-based fight. 1v1 so far with a different random enemy appearing in succession. I guess 3-5 rounds of combat. I’m making sort of a clone of an RPG clicker but I plan to go beyond it to make it more interesting with the combat being a small portion of the game.
I’ll be adding in achievements, quests, and bosses but I’m trying to start small and simple.
3-5 within a single “battle?” Okay. Around 3 attacks to down a “normal” enemy might be normal for a turn-based RPG. Be warned, that might make battles feel kind of long if they have 5 of those sequences. So maybe 2 attacks per normal enemy. That might give you an idea of a ratio.
If you’re going to have different enemies, you probably want to look at ways of making them unique–not just in HP, but in the way they attack and what they’re “weak” to. But that’s making things a bit more advanced.
Talking it through is definitely helpful. I guess 2-3 rounds sounds fine with me.
So then around 3 attacks per normal enemy would probably be okay. Maybe a little more if you wanted, to better show a progression in ability.
Now you just need to choose actual numbers. And that’s kind of arbitrary. Psychology of number ranges - Industries - News & General Discussion - Unity Discussions
You should do exactly what Capcom did to make Street Fighter 2.
When Capcom Made SF2 they started by first making a Ryu prototype. They play tested the hell out of him and made him work well when fighting himself.
Next they made characters two at a time with a similar theme and balanced them off of one another then off of Ryu.
Chun Li and Guile were made to do air attacks.
E. Honda and Blanka were beefy charge characters with a rapid hit move.
Then Dhalsim and Zangief had their counterparts scrapped and just balanced off of one another.
Lastly they threw in Ken for American audiences.
But the point is, take a base idea. Then stretch it in different ways that remains balanced.
So you have Defensive stats and Offensive stats.
Boil them into their simplest form, Health and Damage.
What other elements do you need in there?
Armor Piercing and Armor.
Attack Speed and Dodge.
Stun and Movement.
Elements and Resistances.
Add them one at a time and make sure they have a value that is equal to the base Health and Damage, but also equal to it’s counterpart.
Lastly, since this IS a strategy game. Make sure to have a matrix of “this beats that”. So for example:
Armor Piercing beats Armor
Armor beats Attack Speed
Attack Speed Beats Health
Health beats Armor Piercing
I like this approach and it reminds me of something I once read about choosing one basic enemy as unit of measurement to relate everything else to. Like thinking in terms of “this badboy will be as tough as 10 of the standard minions”. This quickly falls apart though if the mechanics allow for the rock-paper-scissors kind of balancing.
If you want to minimize the chance of the system failling, I’d suggest to lift the skill-ceiling of the combat system up and make the late-game player strength something like 2x starting strength. I really liked about Dark Souls that nothing felt like just a gear-check and you really need to rely on your own skill more than on stats. Not sure though whether typical RPG players like or dislike that kind of gamedesign.
“Borrow” from proven systems. D&D is probably the king of balanced RPGs. I gather recent versions have changed things a lot, but the early basic rules (personally I’d look for 2nd edition) are available online in PDF format and are extremely easy to understand, and they work well even if you only use a subset. And yes, it’s legal. (You can’t call it D&D or use their artwork etc, but in the US, at least, it isn’t possible to copyright the actual rules of a game.)
Just using D&D’s basic HP, HD, AC, XP, and to-hit/damage rules would get you a long way…
There’re many ways how to make 1v1 TB fight entertaining actually:
Was it sarcasm? 
D&d was never about combat or balance. Even d&d fans themselves know and accept that. Unless you call pure randomness - balance.
Edit:
Forgot to mention about balance/numbers/etc.
As poster above said - just borrow it from someone and then adjust to your needs, it all depends on how many factors you want from players to consider for an outcome.
If you just want player to click enemy critter and roll a dice - then yeah - d&d (or any other random-based) will do. Since combat will be boring anyway and it doesn’t matter if it has balance or not - players will just suffer through those boring encounters and proceed with your storyline, like in Planescape Torment.
If you want your combats to be actually entertaining and still you want player to control only 1 character and be it TB - then you better eliminate randomness as much as possible. You may look at Age of Wonders 3 combat for example, if you want and borrow some numbers from there for start, it’s more-or-less balanced and randomness in damage isn’t that high (+/- 20%) and there’re no misses, but, unfortunately, criticals are present.
Randomness, yes, but highly constrained by modifiers, the way the tables created ranges based on stat ratios, concepts like Hit Dice which amounted to difficulty classifications, etc.
I think the best way to approach this is not to think about the stat numbers. You think about the game play numbers first.
“How many attacks need to be made to kill this dude”
“How many attacks should be misses”
etc.
Generally rpgs tend to use 3 hits to kill a dude for example. Games handle misses in all kinds of ways. But in general, those 3 hits to kill ‘feels’ good. A really strong guy might take 4.5 hits to kill him, a really weak guy might take 1.5 hits.
This gives you a basic framework to work with and reason about hitpoints, damage and hit chance, etc.
“How many fights does my game have?”
“How many different level ups do I have?”
Divide the two, now you have an idea of how many fights it takes to level up.
With items, you generally want to divide them into tiers.
Tier 1: mega crap
Tier 1a: super crap
Tier 1b: bad
Tier 2: kinda bad
Tier 2a: average
Tier 2b: kinda good…
Same kind of process, figure out how many tiers you have, divide by number of fights in game, etc.
Match all the numbers against some curve, pick a numeric scale that fits whatever you want. Stick x number of zeros in or whatever. The actual numbers really don’t matter, you want to think about the real gameplay stuff above, the actual xp/hp numbers are just whatever feels right.
This won’t give you perfect numbers or a finished product, but it will give you a surprisingly easy to use for setting stuff up and thinking about stuff. If the game is fairly simple, you really might not need anything more at all!
Dark Souls is a twitch game. It’s all based on player reflexes. You have some overlap between that and an action-RPG, but the OP here is talking about turn-based combat, which would be purely the character’s stats.
You could do a lot worse than just picking up any tabletop RPG that looks even vaguely like the game you’re making. Obviously you can’t just steal their system, but you can use similar numbers. And since there’s no computer handling the math, all of the numbers are right there for you to look at.