[POLL] LOOKING FOR FEEDBACK ABOUT MY MAGIC SYSTEM

Poll

Which system is better (from a design perspective), and which would you rather play with? - Results

The two-Relic system is better, and I would rather play with it.
5
62%
The two-Relic system is better, but I would rather play with the multi-Relic system.
0
0%
The multi-Relic system is better, and I would rather play with it.
1
12%
The multi-Relic system is better, but I would rather play with the two-Relic system.
0
0%
I do not care for either system.
2
25%

Posts

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Greetings, fellow developers.

I'm at a bit of an impasse in designing the magic/ability system for my project. I have two different but related systems in mind, and I'm looking for some opinions about A) Which system is better from a design perspective; B) Which system you'd personally rather play with; C) Anything regarding either system, really. Any constructive thoughts will help.

In this post is a TL;DR version that just gives you the essentials and will allow you to make a decision. But, if you want to really delve into the systems and read my full analysis of the pros and cons of each and how the lore of the game is involved, here is a link to a Google Doc with all of that. It's not terribly long, but is far more detailed than what is presented below.

The Short Version:

In either of the two systems, magic/abilities will be granted to characters who equip a kind of item called Relic. Relics gain experience and level up, unlocking new and more powerful abilities as they do.

System 1
  • Characters can equip up to 2 Relics.

  • Each Relic will offer a very large library of spells once fully levelled, all based around a certain theme.

  • Relics will be few and far between, each one being particularly meaningful.

  • Characters will also have access to other accessory items that fill smaller, more mundane roles, such as status protections.

  • Some Relics may be too good, others not good enough (otherwise extreme grinders could unlock superpowered abilities at the beginning of the game).

  • End-game Relics may require grinding to unlock their best abilities.


System 2
  • Characters can equip a large number of Relics, perhaps 10-12 (up to 20 based on the limits of the code).

  • Relic spell libraries will be much more limited.

  • Relics will be much more common and obtained at more regular intervals.

  • Characters will not have access to additional accessory slots; Relics will fill these more mundane roles as well.

  • This might feel like a watered-down Materia system, with all the breadth but none of the depth.

  • The lore behind the Relics may need to be completely rewritten, and each Relic won't really feel like a special acquisition.


Thank you for any input you provide!
Corfaisus
"It's frustrating because - as much as Corf is otherwise an irredeemable person - his 2k/3 mapping is on point." ~ psy_wombats
7874
Slow that brain train down, bud.

Why would having so many skills per relic be necessary? Aside from just "more damage", what makes these individual skills worthwhile? More is not always better.

Going by your own math, you'll have 20 to 30 relics with up to a dozen abilities each that are gained through leveling them up, which would require setting experience values that are met at varying intervals and a way to store each individual relic the party happens across (I'd assume there's going to be multiples of each relic type). That's roughly 360 different abilities you'll have to create. I wouldn't even want to have to think about how much busywork it would be just to implement this system, little less actually micromanage and level up every relic I happen across to maximize my party's magical proficiency.

Even in RPG Maker where half the work is done for you, this is still an unreasonably herculean task to undertake and one that I can almost guarantee your playerbase won't be able to appreciate in its entirety.

Relics are accessory-type items (rings, earrings, tiaras, bracelets, etc.) that embody the power of a particular ancient deity.
In the lore of the world, these deities are no longer recognised or even widely known.

Okay, but why? Why are the deities unknown in this world, and yet...

The items shall be identified by the name of their respective deities.
The Relics may not be exceedingly rare (one might find one in an antique shop from time to time, for example), but their powers are hardly known. This is an important point.

Why is there this dissonance between what the player knows and what the characters know? Clearly the very wearing of these "relics" - which could be as simple as a ring on a finger - grants the wearer unspeakable and mysterious magical powers, but the common person can't tell the difference between this or that seeing as the deities have fallen out of the public lexicon. What purpose does having powers "hidden in plain sight" serve?

And please don't hide behind convenient write-offs like "only the chosen can use these everyday abilities".
Let me know when you've reached the finality of your reply, and I will evaluate it fully.
Corfaisus
"It's frustrating because - as much as Corf is otherwise an irredeemable person - his 2k/3 mapping is on point." ~ psy_wombats
7874
author=StandardFiend
The Relics are the primary source of abilities for the characters. What fun would an RPG be without a meaningful array of abilities for the player to choose from?


Meaningful? Good. Excessive? Bad. You're mistaking the two.

author=StandardFiend
How would players create unique strategies and experiences if, by the end of the game, they just had a small handful of abilities to use? The entire point is that the individual skills WILL be worthwhile.


Having skills that build upon each other (synergy) is where strategy comes from, not from sheer numbers.
Really taking the mick out of me, eh? Well, I'm appreciative nonetheless.

Believe me, you bring up many important points which are always on my mind. This project is still in its early stages and a lot of material is still being moulded. Numbers are certainly not finalised--it's concepts that I'm meaning to talk about here, not specifics.

For example, the number of relics and number of abilities. You're absolutely right that something like 360 different abilities would be daft. I wouldn't want to play that game, either! Necessarily there will be overlap between the abilities offered by certain relics. The point of the first system is that there is a small number of relics that offer a more complex series of abilities with an identifiable theme, as opposed to the second system, wherein a relic may just offer one kind of ability. I apologise if my explanation engendered a misinterpretation of my intent, that the specific numbers are not final and not important.

Creating meaningful and synergistic abilities is one of the grand challenges of RPG design, and one that I'm not sure why you're so confident I am ignorant of. I understand that an excessive number of abilities does not a good game make. I also, as a consumer of games in this genre for nearly my entire life, understand that having choices is important. Sometimes, merely aesthetic choices, if not functional ones, can make a difference to some people, and qualify as meaningful ones to them. Players who do not appreciate such things are always welcome to ignore them, and players who do appreciate them have them available. Isn't that a better game for everyone, in the end?

The "why" of the thing is less important. Why are the relics only usable by certain people? Because that's what the story is about. I'm actually just a little bit offended that you would call that hiding behind a "convenient write-off". Why was Frodo the only one who could manage the power of the One Ring right up until the end of his journey? Because that's what the story was about. Why was Luke able to master the ways of the Force while it took Han the entire trilogy to merely believe in the Force's existence? Because that's what the story was about.

Many of the most classic stories in our collective literary repertoire revolve, at some level, around the classic Hero's Journey, wherein an individual is given a task to conquer and, along the way, obtains some kind of special power or item with which to accomplish that task. Necessarily the hero must be raised above the common man.

Maybe finding relics at the local pawn shop isn't an idea that will make it into the final game, but the point is that the characters will come to understand the meaning and value of these objects, while the common man will not, thus opening the possibility of obtaining the relics in unusual places, rather than just "Generic Ancient Ruin #7".

And as I wrote before, there will be no dissonance between player knowledge and character knowledge. Players will obtain knowledge of the relics as the characters do. It is a journey of discovery on both sides of the screen. The reason the relics are identified by name in the inventory is so that the player can differentiate between them without having to examine their internal abilities. Inventories are by their very nature abstract and ignorant of the fourth wall, so I don't think this design choice is unreasonable.

Again, thanks for taking the time to read and comment. All of the issues you brought up are definitely on my mind as I work through this.
Corfaisus
"It's frustrating because - as much as Corf is otherwise an irredeemable person - his 2k/3 mapping is on point." ~ psy_wombats
7874
Well, to discuss the matter at hand, I'd prefer system 1 if only because having more to my equipment than just a grocery list of relics is something I've come to expect in games. The only games where strange magical relic items seemed to work really well in their own right are ones like Path of Exile in that they're augmented to your weapons and armor and can be replaced at any time without repercussions. In these games, they play a more secondary role which negates the stress that comes with having to maintain the more critical parts of equipment on your character. You level up these relics to boost the effect of a single active or passive ability instead of having your entire build be based on how far a relic has been leveled.

I also assume that you'll be making this in some sort of RPG Maker so having a concise equipment screen would be preferable.
The equipment screen is a huge challenge for me, simply because I have very little coding knowledge. I purchased Luna Engine for VX Ace for that purpose, so I'm hoping something similar will find its way into the MV plugin library. Making it easy to understand and operate is my first goal.

Unfortunately, the default screen for Galv's script (the second system, and the screenshot in the doc) is far from perfect in that regard and would need heavy modification to reach what I'd consider an acceptable level.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
More generally this is a question about letting players choose a class vs. letting players choose each ability they learn.

I feel like the player needs some limitations to complicate their decisions. It's very difficult to make a hundred individual spells that are all balanced against each-other, but much easier to make a dozen groups of spells that are all balanced against each-other. Each choice is so complex that it becomes much harder for the player to immediately see the "right" answer, and the variety of uses for each relic means that you can make everything useful in every dungeon if you want to.

You don't want to give the player too few choices though. How many customization slots you want to give the player probably depends on how many party members the player has, and also how many other ways the player can customize their party. Do they have meaningful equipment options or just upgrades? Can they choose which characters to use in their party? Can they control their stat growth as they level up? There's a sweet spot for the total amount of choices to give them. That sweet spot isn't always in the same place either - it depends on how directed vs. freeform of an experience you're trying to make, and how much you want your game's difficulty to be about long-term strategy vs. short-term tactics vs. immediate execution.
author=LockeZ
More generally this is a question about letting players choose a class vs. letting players choose each ability they learn.


That pretty much hits the nail on the head, there. In the first system, each Relic would provide the character with a discernible battle role--or, at least, enough of one that equipping two Relics would complete the picture.

Your final paragraph contains a lot of useful insights, all things that are rolling around in the ol' noggin. I'm not sure if you meant all of the questions to be rhetorical, but I have thoughts about them.

As for number of party members, I'm leaning towards four. Originally I wanted three, but two early story segments leave the player with four characters, and it would just be awkward design to have a three-member party for those segments. Plus, being that there are 8 mandatory characters, split-party segments work nicely.

Each character will have his own innate abilities, small ways to distinguish him from the others. My goal will be to balance these abilities so that the player can truly pick a party based on preference, not on utility. And later in the game, the intent is for the player to be able to pick from any of the characters.

Equipment is something I'm just not sure about. I recently read an article about the concept of acceleration flow in the experience of an RPG, and it opened the floodgates, so to speak, in terms of how I'm thinking about the player's progress in my game. I'm just not sure where I want to be on the "incremental upgrades" vs "meaningful options" spectrum. I've played both styles of game and games in between and it all comes down to what best serves the overall product.

There's no control of stat growth. Characters are meant to be somewhat tabula rasa so that, when the player is constructing a party, his relic choices are what truly defines that party, and the relics themselves will differentiate the stats of the characters in various ways. The result of this design is that, as the player progresses through the game's initial acts with mostly pre-determined parties based on the story progression, his pool of relics will be likewise limited; this eventually evolves into the latter acts where the player can obtain more relics, and powerful ones through optional content, and distribute them amongst his own choice of party members. The complexity of choices, battle roles, classes, however you define it, evolves with the game's progress.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
Can you link to that article about acceleration flow in the experience of an RPG? That sounds like exactly my jam.
Here ya go, broseidon.

Acceleration Flow can be found at the bottom of the page. Everything on that page is pure gold for folks of our ilk.
My suggestion is a hybrid. Have your cake and eat it too.

Make it so that common "Relics" (I'll just call them Artifacts for the sake of differentiation) have one spell/ability/stat boost, and that's it. You can equip it like Materia, but with no leveling. It fills a slot. To keep up with lore you could say these modern Artifact creations are meant to mimic the powers of Relics but are far inferior.

Then you have Relics as you designed, with lots of thematic movesets based on grinding and gods and such. These are rare. These are powerful.

You have a full array of slots to fill (10-12). You make it so that Artifacts can fill any slot but Relics can only fill specific slots: the northern-most slot in the circle, or the North and South spots if you still want two Relics.

Example

Slot 01: Fire God Relic
Slot 02: HP +10
Slot 03: Wind Spell
Slot 04: --
Slot 05: --
Slot 06: Water God Relic
Slot 07: --
Slot 08: --
Slot 09: Mug (Command)
Slot 10: Luck +02
Corfaisus
"It's frustrating because - as much as Corf is otherwise an irredeemable person - his 2k/3 mapping is on point." ~ psy_wombats
7874
I like this. Listen to the language of the Merlanders.
The two relic system sounds better. Letting the player too freely choose rarely works well. For example, any character who is a black mage will also be a white mage and vice versa. A common result is that such games, while in theory having a nearly unlimited number of builds, in practice they only have two builds, the fighter and the mage. That is, if I make one fighter build, I can either copy that for the second fighter with a minor variation at best or I can gimp myself. Ditto for mages.
author=Crystalgate
The two relic system sounds better. Letting the player too freely choose rarely works well. For example, any character who is a black mage will also be a white mage and vice versa. A common result is that such games, while in theory having a nearly unlimited number of builds, in practice they only have two builds, the fighter and the mage. That is, if I make one fighter build, I can either copy that for the second fighter with a minor variation at best or I can gimp myself. Ditto for mages.

Kind of like the end result of mastering a bunch of job classes and using Mimes and Freelancers in FFV: your final party is two identical mages with XMagic and two identical fighters with XFight, making the diverse job system meaningless.

As LockeZ would put it, the "correct" choice becomes more apparent in that situation.

Merlandese, I like where you're going with that. The lore is always changing in small ways. Rather than completely design a system to fit it, and rather than fashion the lore after a system, I want the two aspects of the game to evolve together such that they just mesh perfectly from the player's perspective.

In other words, it would not be burden to establish a story wherein a hybrid system works very well and makes sense. I will think on that at length.
One danger I can see with Merlandese's suggestion is that single spells can become ridiculously useful for a low price. Say you make a black mage type of character. Just toss in a single healing spell and the black mage will for the price of one artifact become a healer not that far off from a dedicated one. In the same vein, a support oriented mage just needs one good offensive spell to gain a massive offensive gain. Further, some skills tend to not care about the user's stat, like buff spells, and they may also massively boost a character for a single artifact slot. A thief type character for example, is usually very fast and you can give them a defensive buff spell that they can cast before any enemy gets to move. Since buff spells rarely cares about caster stat, that defensive spell will be just as effective as if a dedicated support mage had used it.

On the other hand, that may not be a problem at all. Maybe the player is expected to pull tricks like that? You may also be able to design around the problem if it indeed is a problem.
Those could all be problems if the system is balanced like a "default" RPG, but with a custom system comes custom balancing. Definitely something to keep an eye on.

The Materia System, the GF/Junction System, and the Sphere Grid System all found ways to re-balance the variety of spells and battle commands that worked even though you could hypothetically have a Fighter that heals or a Healer that... Black Mages. XD


Some suggestions to balance a system like this off the top of my head:


01. MP Cost for "Artifact" spells are high, while Relic spells have low cost (or costs that can decrease as the Relic levels up).

If your Relic has a Minor Heal spell that costs 10MP, then naturally you'll give that Minor Heal Artifact to someone else. But the Artifact version costs 40MP, or makes you feel Dizzy 50% of the time.


02. Slots have devaluing/valuing effects based on position or proximity to the Relic slot.

For example, Minor Healing grants +30% HP in Slot 02, +25% in Slot 03, +20% in Slot 04, etc.

This would be somewhat similar to the position of spells in the Elements System from Chrono Cross.


03. Limited supply of all "Artifacts" and Relics. Relics are already unique items, but just because the other type are more common doesn't mean you have to be able to buy them wholesale. If a Minor Heal messes up the system too much and you don't want to debuff it, make it so only one exists.
Exactly, the game would be balanced around the abilities the player obtains. And, of course, I don't think it's unreasonable to give a larger, perhaps unbalanced level of power to players who are willing to put in the time and effort to uncover powerful combinations. Using the example of FFX, without more than a few hours of grinding using the right techniques a player can construct a party of characters who can each output nearly 100,000 damage as either a physical attack or a magic spell and be able to buff the whole party and heal nearly 100,000 HP. At that point even the optional super bosses are trivial, but it's possible within an otherwise balanced system.

Or in the FF7 example, obtaining the four secret Materia basically breaks the game in half.

In FF8, the player could avoid leveling up and obtain extremely powerful spells from trading cards early on, utterly breaking the game balance.

There are definitely ways to build the system such that it is "mostly balanced" but with the possibility of being abused by people willing to make the effort to abuse it (usually in ways that weren't foreseen anyway). I think that's a good sweet spot to aim for.

Personally I have a lot of fun, in subsequent playthroughs of my favorite games, ripping the systems to shreds and seeing just how trivial I can make the content. And some people, I understand, have no qualms about doing that the first time through because they'd rather enjoy the story and characters than put effort into conquering trials of skill and strategy. And that's great too.

Thinking about a hybrid system opens up more possibilities for equipment systems, too. Perhaps slots for Artifacts can be based on certain equipment, making choices about stats vs slots relevant.

It's also definitely possible to set up a synergy system where the effectiveness of the Artifacts is dependent on the Relics they accompany. I'm not sold on the idea of keeping the circle-slots or using distance from the Relic to determine Artifact effectiveness, but a system where a "black magic" Relic would demand more MP of a "white magic" Artifact, or reduce its capacity to heal, etc, could offer a lot of depth for customization that rewards specialised characters but allows a Jack of All Trades to still be effective.

Could even do something like a points-based system, where Relics offer a certain number of points for equipping Artifacts, and give "discounts" to Artifacts that are in line with the Relic's theme.

My experience of Final Fantasy VII and VIII was that those games were broken in half by default. The enemies were, with only a handful of exceptions, ridiculously weak. The attack command combined with cure + all respective cure only would let you bulldoze more than 95% of all enemies. The systems didn't break the games because there was very little in the first place that wasn't already broken.

For example, all of my characters in both games were either great fighters and great healers or they were great mages and great healers. Every single one of them had high durability as well. The triple healer aspect didn't break the game because there was almost nothing that warranted this amount of healing anyway. I also gave one of my FF VII characters barrier + all which would have been awesome in a harder game, but was pointless in Final Fantasy VII.

Final Fantasy VII and VIII are actually my horror examples of how to not balance a game. Though if you liked those games, then I guess Merlandese's Hybrid system would be a good thing.
I totally agree with you. FF7 is pitifully easy and has about as much balance as a one legged man on a boat with seven gallons of rum filtering through his liver. I've killed the final boss with a level 30ish party. 8 isn't much better, though I find that playing the game as intended can actually offer a reasonable challenge from a novice perspective.

Final Fantasy games in general offer a multitude of lessons on what not to do in system design.
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