DEFINE YOUR NUMBERS

author=Craze
You're making a game, and you can only have up to five attributes/stats - HP, MP, Attack, Magic, Evasion, whatever. What would you choose?...

I always use six because it's divisible by three and two. Strength, Endurance, Power, Resistance, Speed and Skill. Four stats is OK but a bit basic. Five stats completely messes me up when I'm trying to balance characters against each other because five is only evenly divisible by one and itself. You should, for balance reason, avoid having a prime number of attributes.

In addition to having six, you can map them onto a hexagon which looks cool. The hexagon should also illustrate how you can draw nice even arrows to show relations of stats. Four is also alright since it is not prime. Three is really bad because now your game lacks RPG number depth. Is there a game with a single stat? Yes, any game where you can levelgrind your way through anything without even paying attention to any RPG element the designer added is basically a game where Level is your only stat. Sigma Star Saga had two stats but that was kind of stupid.

There's more complicated effects in my six stats, however, you can't measure them by themselves. You must have both the user and the target in order to come up with numbers for damage, crits, etc. This way you can have the stats all in scale with one another (25 strength is as strong as 25 speed is fast) and change the interactions between targets to balance the effects out.

When coming up with a number of elements, three is a good basic number. Three, Six, Twelve.. It lets you balance the elements better if it's evenly divisible by three. Optimally a power of three, but that would make the next number from six eighteen. 18 elements gets a little crazy. You could get away with four but it takes more work to balance right.

It's good to have a number of status effects that is an even multiple of the number of elements, but past the first multiple you won't really run into problems with status effects. It's not so critical to have any specific number of status effects, really. Just have enough that you got options. For many many effects, you should link them to skills as a unique pair (like an MMO does often).

author=WolfCoder

author=Craze
You're making a game, and you can only have up to five attributes/stats - HP, MP, Attack, Magic, Evasion, whatever. What would you choose?...

I always use six because it's divisible by three and two. Strength, Endurance, Power, Resistance, Speed and Skill. Four stats is OK but a bit basic. Five stats completely messes me up when I'm trying to balance characters against each other because five is only evenly divisible by one and itself. You should, for balance reason, avoid having a prime number of attributes.

In addition to having six, you can map them onto a hexagon which looks cool. The hexagon should also illustrate how you can draw nice even arrows to show relations of stats. Four is also alright since it is not prime. Three is really bad because now your game lacks RPG number depth. Is there a game with a single stat? Yes, any game where you can levelgrind your way through anything without even paying attention to any RPG element the designer added is basically a game where Level is your only stat. Sigma Star Saga had two stats but that was kind of stupid.

There's more complicated effects in my six stats, however, you can't measure them by themselves. You must have both the user and the target in order to come up with numbers for damage, crits, etc. This way you can have the stats all in scale with one another (25 strength is as strong as 25 speed is fast) and change the interactions between targets to balance the effects out.

When coming up with a number of elements, three is a good basic number. Three, Six, Twelve.. It lets you balance the elements better if it's evenly divisible by three. Optimally a power of three, but that would make the next number from six eighteen. 18 elements gets a little crazy. You could get away with four but it takes more work to balance right.

It's good to have a number of status effects that is an even multiple of the number of elements, but past the first multiple you won't really run into problems with status effects. It's not so critical to have any specific number of status effects, really. Just have enough that you got options. For many many effects, you should link them to skills as a unique pair (like an MMO does often).

WolfCoder you always seem to know what you're talking about but you're pretty good at making what you know/say seem obtuse as possible when it comes to communicating what you know to someone else.

Layman version, please?

Mine has 8 elements.

It self-implodes often but that's Enterbrain's fault.

"Take Speed - it's only importance it's how your character stacks up relatively to the enemy in Turn Order (assuming SPD in your game doesn't mean crit/evade)."

So it doesn't let the character dodge things too? You should avoid making stats where you say the phrase "it's only importance". And don't forget that sometimes a really high speed means the character attacks 3, or 4 times to the slower character.


And you all should read a bit more carefully.

I always use six because it's divisible by three and two. Strength, Endurance, Power, Resistance, Speed and Skill. Four stats is OK but a bit basic. Five stats completely messes me up when I'm trying to balance characters against each other because five is only evenly divisible by one and itself. You should, for balance reason, avoid having a prime number of attributes.

I'm telling you to avoid 5 (or any prime) but there's no unifying theory of RPG stats.

WolfCoder a lot of my projects use five elements

I have not seen them self-implode yet

Which is why you say instead no more than 5 in contrast to me saying no primes and avoid a large number of anything.

author=slashphoenix
A ton of stats only have one purpose: Attack's only importance is almost always determining damage, for example. (Yes, not for every game, but for most.) They don't have to be multi-purpose; what if you want a guy who attacks quickly but can't dodge well?

And I get that you don't like primes, although I really don't know why >.>

He is a math guy, not an art guy.
He likes programming everything beautifully.
Primes... Such vile numbers.

Okay, seriously, primes can mess up math absurdely. Sometimes. Especially in high school. Ok, life drama, but it's true, depending on what do you do with the primes. and I assume he, for some reason, calculates 948793847598 of different... Things, while... Balancing teh game. Ok, I'm not being coherent. Damn the language barrier.

author=Fallen-Griever
Riot Grrrl:

Health: Pretty self-explainatory, if this reaches 0 then you're dead. Can only be replenished by items. Restored to max. after every battle.
Stamina: Required for every single action you perform. Can be replenished with items or by defending. Restored to max. after every battle.
Attack: Dictates the damage you deal. Static, but modified by weapon-skills and by buffs/debuffs.
Defence: Dictates your ability to defend against attacks. Static, but modified by buffs/debuffs.
Speed: Dictates how quickly the ATB meter fills. Static, but modified by the weight of the weapons you are carrying and by buffs/debuffs.

You might notice that I like static values and this is because it isn't possible to grind in Riot Grrrl. Keeping the values static also means that the attributes an enemy needs can be easily determined based on the type of enemy I want it to be (fast, strong, resilient, glass cannon, whatever). I guess that if the game focused more on combat then I probably wouldn't have as many static values, but since it doesn't I thought that this would be the best path to take.

... has the BEST rendition of the RM2k3 DBS I have ever seen. I salute you.

wolfcoder i don't think anyone needed your help figuring out that five stats is limiting but thank you all the same

also:

author=Craze
The purpose of this topic is to get you to think outside the box a little

nothing here

the nits
they are picked

And one of the hardest parts of game design is the cutting board... but this goes for film, writing, and a million other things as well.