STAT CUSTOMIZATION - HOW DO YOU THINK IT SHOULD BE DONE?

I'll use seeds as an example to explain my thoughts here: I believe there is freedom to have in both the kind of seeds you can get and in the amount you can use.

If players can get their hands on any kind of seed, they do have freedom over what stat they want to increase, which is more interesting than being limited to predetermined amounts of particular types of seeds.

Now it might be trickier regarding the quantity of seeds players can use at certain points... If these seeds are bought in normal shops, the players can get an infinite supply right away and some of them will definitely blow through the game. One solution would be to make special shops where only so much seeds can be bought before the store runs out of supplies.
Another solution would be to have the possibility of infinite supplies near the end of the game only, when most of the challenges have already been completed. That would allow players to beef up for the final boss or for some ultimate optional quest.

These are a few classic examples of how you could do it.

In addition to the runaway problem LockeZ mentions, it would be good to have a reason to boost everybody's stats instead of just one party member's. Boosting multiple stats (especially, say, agility plus anything else in 2k3) tends to compound, making it more effective to stack all the bonuses on one character rather than spreading them around.

The easiest way to make this sort of thing work is to make every character archetype need every stat to function - this gives a clear drawback to focusing on a single stat.

Consider, for example, a game where the stats are
-Strength, governing physical damage and making you less likely to take critical hits.
-Magic, governing magical damage and making ailments less likely to afflict you.
-Defense, governing all incoming damage, regardless of type, and
-Speed, governing critical hit, accuracy and evasion rates.

Simple enough example. Now, the most obvious thing would be to single out a stat to build in, right? After all, max Strength or Magic make you an engine of destruction; max Defense makes you immortal; and max Speed makes you untouchable. But what are the drawbacks?

-Strength focus creates vulnerability to ailments, lacks survivability, and has difficulty hitting.
-Magic focus invites critical hits, dies easily, and is an easy target.
-Defense focus has difficulty dealing damage, invites critical hits and ailments, and won't dodge anything.
-Speed focus can't hurt anything, invites critical hits and ailments, and crumbles when actually struck.

See what goes on here? Under a system like this, each time you place a point in a stat you're sacrificing the benefits of the other stats. Players of games like this will usually focus on about half the available stats; and will even then patch up their weak points with minimal investment instead of ignoring whole stats.

Stat with a defensive benefit of some sort will be invested in by most characters to some degree; stats with an offensive benefit are more likely to be a character's main focus.

Why don't you do it like Final Fantasy Endless Nova, to increase HP you would have to take lots of damage, to increase MP you have to use a lot of MP and so on...? I always thought that was cool!

You can make it so that there's a limited amount, maybe 20, of stat boosters in the entire game. You can make it so there's some sort of DOJO where you train and get a limited number of boosts in the stats of your choice. Possibly something that gives you +1 in one area and -1 in another area; or +1 in a stat like strength and -2 or so from your HP max.

I created a game demo where the main character had a 'Bonus Board' he visited in-game set out like a traditional boardgame. Each time he levelled he got the usual bonuses, but through sub-quests and exploration he could find 'move points' that allowed him to further explore the board, with each square having a particular bonus set to it. Some were a simple offence/defence choice with a +2 bonus whilst others allowed for the learning or levelling of skills.

Something fun that the user can feel like they're doing in-game to make themselves better and feel a sense of progression is always a boon.

As long as games have different things to offer, different people will play them for different reasons. Story, interactivity, milieu, social reasons (if it's an online game), etc. We can expect there to be a range of opinions about the gameplay mechanics of RPGs because RPGs tend to attract both the type who is mainly in it for the story/characters and the type who is mainly in it for the gameplay. To the former, complex gameplay can be a turn-off.

I suppose this is a function of where somebody lies on the casual-hardcore scale of enjoyment of an aspect of a game. The same kind of debate goes on in fighting game communities where the question is whether it's better for the timing of moves and combos to be strict or lenient. When timings are lenient, the hardcore player who masters them quickly soon grows bored of the game. When timings are strict, the casual player who for whatever reason isn't putting in the time to learn them grows frustrated and stops playing. (But to a developer, both hardcore players and casual players are an important audience)

There's a satisfaction that comes with mastering a skill, whether that skill is playing a sport, playing a musical instrument, or playing a video game. But just as not everyone plays a sport primarily for such a reason--some people play a sport for relaxation, social reasons, etc--not everyone plays a video game primarily for the challenge of mastering skill-based mechanics.

author=Ratty524
So I'll reveal a little secret of mine: For the Summer Games competition I am making a game that is centered on customizing your party's stats. The stat increasing items are not like those Seeds of Mana that are hard to obtain, but are a commodity, allowing the player to increase each stat (HP, MP, attack, defense, spirit, and agility) to multiple levels within a short period of time.

My question is whether this is a good idea? Do you think players should be allowed to easily customize their party member's stats or not? Do you think there should be a limit as to how much the player can do this? Take Pokemon, for instance. You gain an "effort point" for every enemy you defeat, which alters your pokemon's individual stats, but you can only have 255 of these points per stat, and 510 effort points total, meaning you can't just max out every stat and blow through the game. My aim is to give players more control and personalization of their party members, but would this be the way to do it?

Items do work for shorter games. But for longer games, you'll want a custom system. Trust me on this. Items will take you through a 5 to 10-hour game, at best (probably more like 5 hours). Problem is, characters will eventually get so powerful that no enemies can even damage them with physical attacks (even if their Attack is set to 999, a defense of 999 will usually nullify most or ALL of the damage), unless you make it prohibitively expensive to buy them, in which case, you're back to the grinding problem again (or unless you make all the special attacks do fixed damage ranges, which makes Defense useless, and almost pointless to upgrade). Arguably, this is the hardest thing to do in a balanced game. So I'd just as soon go itemless, either way.

There are two general ways to do itemless stat customization that I know of.

You could go the Final Fantasy: Endless Nova route (an old RM2K game, also known as the FFII 2K system), where you just make a system that bases it off of your actions in battle, with boss fights giving out bigger bonuses. In this, you create common events that govern variables associated with each character's stats, as well as things like how much damage they took in a battle (HP), or how many times they attacked (Attack). If you escape from battle, there'd be a chance your speed would go up. This system takes about 1 to 2 hours of full attention to complete per character.

Or, you could create a customization kind of STAT system, where you get points (we'll call them SP) after battle, in lieu of experience. For a system like this, it helps if the battles aren't random (there are tons of tutorials on how to make roaming dungeon monsters). You could use common, OR in-game events to govern these, though common events work better; aka, the variable 'SP' can be better controlled if you use different 'levels' of 'SP Gain' to simulate the experience each battle would normally be worth (aka, increase the variable 'SP' by x amount). Then just make events based on who's in the party (ALWAYS have a switch for each party member joining; i.e. 'Joe in Party', and 'Mary in Party' would be two separate switches. This takes about 5 to 6 hours for a party of 12 characters. Just make sure you create alot of common events for the 'SP Gain', so you can balance the party with how powerful you want the enemies to be at each interval. The nice thing about this is you can set a hard cap on the character stats (say 255 for the non-HP/MP stats), and you'll eliminate the 'invincible party' problem that befalls many a game designer. Also, if you run into a problem with stats being too high, you can just make more 'SP Gain' common events to balance it out (and they take mere minutes to crank out).

The nice thing about these is that with clever use of the foreign keys, you can pull these off without having to make your own pictures.