HOW DO YOU DIFFERENTIATE YOUR CHARACTERS?

Personally their characterisation plays into how I handle their battle abilities. If someone is timid outside of battle, they're going to be timid inside of battle (unless their shtick is being a berserker-type who goes wild).

Abilities are one way of doing this, yes, but don't underestimate passive abilities in battle to help differentiate IN ADDITION TO their skills. For a quick example, say the lower someone's HP gets, the higher their attack power. You're going to want to get their health down a bit, so perhaps a cover-type ability or attention-drawing one would help them lose that health. Give someone else a regen-type skill so that they can help keep HP-loser alive a bit longer - a small boost to their HP over time.

Consider combinations of skills and how they will work together. Like I mentioned above, give at least some skills to each person which will work together with other characters 'shticks' and skillsets to create strategies. If you have someone who can use low-tier elemental magics, then having someone who can boost their damage output is a great idea, but you can also have someone else who debuffs the magical protections of the enemy, and someone else who can combine their own spells with the spells of the elementalist to perhaps create a whole new spell. That's three different people who can prop up another person in battle, but also two people who can be affected by what the buffer-types can do.


I also like assigning different elements to different people and making their skills based on those elements. Someone might be fire/bow and thus use flaming arrow attacks or do explosive damage. Someone else might have earth/staff and use magical attacks and buffs.

I'm loving the examples in this thread. Especially the detailed ones by LockeZ and Craze. I'm greedy and demand more.

Here's a shot at some general guidelines:

Different resources
In terms of what characters spend to act, and how they obtain that resource. Looking at LockeZ's example, his ninjas spend shadows to act and gain them by evading, while a thief must actively steal to gain their spendable resource. They are more than just different names for MP.

Different forms a damage
And I don't mean fire vs ice damage. Think about damage styles that are different on a mechanical level. Direct single target damage, weaker damage to all foes, indirect damage through poison or by reducing enemy defense so allies do more.

Let me steal an example from my own game, Notes From Province. Two skills; the first attacks 4 times for 25% damage, while the second attacks once for 100% damage. In isolation, it's the same skill, but start adding some context and they behave very different. Picture an enemy who deals a retaliation attack every time they take damage or a defensive enemy who never takes more than 1 damage from an attack. If I stumble across a piece of equipment that grants a bonus on critical hits, I'm going to give it to the character with the 4x skill because he's much more likely to land a crit. Or what if you're up against LockeZ's ninja? Now the character with the 4x attack is a liability, because he's more likely to give the ninja evades + shadows.

Actually, writing that examples reminds of possibly the most important guideline,
Enemies that make the differences matter

Give them different roles or mechanics.

I tend to favor smaller parties myself (12 sounds very excessive), so it's easier for me, but...

It really depends on how complex your combat system is. Perhaps each DPS can specialise in different kinds of damage (slice, bash, stab), or they could have a variety of target ranges, or just plain different mechanics.

For example, in one game I have, everyone's roles are kinda mushed together. The hero is obviously a Support, but the "medic" is also a reliable Damage dealer who is good at debuffs and interfering with the enemy. The hunter deals in precision damage and some minor enemy lockdown, and either damages and softens up all enemies with an advanced skill, or buffs himself to "glass cannon" kinds of levels to do a guaranteed Crit. The assassin is more of a slower boil, manly focused on prepping enemies by reducing their evasion while damaging them, and can then attack all enemies with an advanced skill while doing bonus damage to enemies she marked with the no-evasion-status.

For another example, I have a game where each character has a different gameplay style. The heroine is a jill-of-all-trades who can passively support the party while doing high damage every other turn (her damage skills stun her as she "reloads"), and the main physical DPS works on a combo system, where attacking with one category of skills (say, punches) makes the enemy weak to another type (kicks), leading the player to decide whether they want higher damage by following the combo, or whether secondary effects of the skill are more important.

As for healers, there's a ton of ways you can play with them. Spike healers, healers who heal over time, healers who heal by cancelling buffs, healers to apply-healing-counterattack states, healers who heal passively just by being around, healers who are also tanks/DPS etc.

Other than skill, have them different elemental resistance, in-battle bonuses, for healer give them specific type of buffs, have character that need long charge of skill but high damage.

I could give you more list but basically OP before me already list them all, so I'm just adding a thing or two.

-Avi

I guess such a way of difficulty setting could work, but I imagine it being very possible to frustrate players too. Unless you really put a label on top of the characters saying "Hard" and "Easy".

Character balance isn't a must-have in all games. In SRPGs like Fire Emblem it actually adds a lot to strategy having 1-2 super strong characters in your group.

But in an RPG where you can just take 4 of 12 characters into combat, it seems counter-productive not to make them balanced.
(Balanced, but just easier and harder to master is a different thing.)