The Legend of Zelda: Forgotten Gates

One of the custom features I made in the battle system for Forgotten Gates is "power" for attack, defense, and intelligence associated with each weapon. Instead of just adding a set amount to stats, the currently equipped weapons actually determine what percentage of the stats go into certain calculations. For example, a particular sword might have 70% attack power, 13% defense power, and 100% intelligence power; attacking with that weapon would use 70% of the user's attack stat as the base damage, being on the receiving end of a physical attack would be mitigated by 13% of the user's defense stat, and magic spells would use 100% of the user's intelligence stat. The idea behind this feature is to allow finding a more powerful weapon to have a significant effect regardless of the current level of the heroes. Since I was expecting to have one-off random quest scenarios where the heroes could be at any level to start, this was an important consideration.

There are some downsides to this approach, though. The differences in stats between the heroes are magnified by the weapon powers, making balance trickier. Also, RM2K3's shop system is set up to show the simple stat boosts of different pieces of equipment. This means I would have to communicate the power levels of the weapons in the description text, leaving pretty much no room for anything else. Also, players wouldn't be able to easily compare the weapons in the shop to their current equipment.

Since deciding to go with temporary leveling which resets after every quest, I've started to wonder if the power system is necessary anymore. I'm thinking that the highest level achievable will be 5, and getting there will put a hero's stats at about double what they were at level 1. If so, maybe a simple additive boost to stats would be sufficient. The value of a particular weapon compared to the hero's inherent stat would be half as much at level 5 as it was at level 1, which isn't too bad.

I've already got the power system implemented in my battle plugin, so I'm going to go ahead with it for now, and see how the gameplay feels as a party tackles things with different weapons at different levels. It actually wouldn't be too hard to simulate the power system not being there; all I'd have to do is set the power for all weapons to be the same, and give them simple stat boosts using RM2K3's built-in system. As with most things in game design, there's only so much value to intelligent speculation; testing gives a surer understanding of what works and what doesn't.