SBABY'S PROFILE

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.

Honestly, it's so dated that by now, I'd only use it in a comedy or parody RPG.