How many skills is enough?

[Xanirus]

It started with Final Fantasy. Secret of Mana, so many JRPG's what have you. Then came the PC generation. I like both. I don't know if it's because I've been spoiled by so many MMO's or PC RPG's, but I've become accustomed to having so many skills to use. Then again, in those kinds of RPG's you usually only control one character. In old school JRPG's, or the kind that RPGXP is good at making, you get to control several, so naturally each character would have far less skills than a game where you only control one. Add up each character's skill however, and then it's just like controlling one. I would think that having over 50 skills per character would be a bit daunting, but still, how much is enough? How much is too little? My game is similar to FF1. You have four characters that you will have for the entire game but you get to choose their classes. I have 8 classes in mine, 4 which are melee type, 4 magic type. The idea is to replay the game with different combinations of classes to make a different experience.

"Four white mages?! That will never work!" - Black Mage, 8-bit theathre

Currently I have about 12-15 skills per class, with the exception of the priest class because she needs so many different "Heal Status Effect," spells. So at the most, 15 skills + 4 characters, that's a total of 60 skills to play around with, including their upgraded versions. (So then we're looking at about 100 there.) The reason why I have stopped right now is because I've been tweaking my skill list to death to the point where I can't think of any more skills to make. (Without scripting, just using event commands.) I actually know a bunch more I could make, but then it would make choosing one class over another pointless because they could all do the same thing. Besides basic attacks, I have a few elemental attacks for the melee characters (to compete with if you decide to have no spell based characters at all), a few classes other than the priest have healing spells, and status inducing effect spells for all classes. I've tried to balance out every class so one can make up for another class with a few skills in a particular category should you decide not to bring one that excels in it. (For instance the guardian can heal if you have no priest, the rouge can damage heavily if you have no mage, and the druid can heal and have spell attacks to make up for the lack of a mage and priest.)

So there ya go. 12-15 sound like enough?

 

[Twin Matrix]

I'd go with each skill being unique in terms of element/function, and then being able to upgrade them or w/e. :P

 

[Dalton]

You can't really say, how much is enough. It depends on your battle system, length of your game, ect.
If you are using the standard battle system I wuld recomend 12-15 skils, since it gets boring pretty fast if I don't see a new skill every now and then. Also it always ends in just using your best skill on bosses, so having new ones for different bosses is a must.

Just to make an example in the battle system, tahat I am making for my game, every actor will have 9 skills, since it requires thinking and not just clicking on a specific skill. So 9 is enough for that.

Think about what you have and what you are going for. After that decide what you need.

Hope this helps

~Dalton~

 

[Xanirus]

Yes, I am using the DBS (tweaked a little with event commands though) unforunately, as I don't really have time to learn Ruby. Although most scripts for a CBS made by others look fantastic, I'm not too keen on using sprites. My game has level requirements to learn specific skills, and that you have to buy them, you don't just learn them automatically. But if 12-15 sounds good enough, sounds like I"m good to go. It just didn't look like enough on paper, but in practice I guess that's a different story.

Also I decided to add a few more skills that kind of goes towards what I was mentioning earlier, about making class choice pointless, but they will only come at the much later levels. I figured it wouldn't be so bad, maybe even better to make it seem worthwhile to get that high.

 

[RnLGG]

I agree with Dalton. But if you want more detail here ya go: At what level do you learn all the skills for one character? if you learn a new skill every 2-5 levels and If you learn them all before lvl 50-60 and they are fairly unique, I think you would be okay in my opinion. :scruff:

 

[Xanirus]

Yeah, I'd say it's around 2-5. I wouldn't really call them "unique," per se, if your talking about what the skills do. (Hurt the monster, lol) A few do event command like things like increasing your STR by X amount for X turns, but you can't control your character until it ends. If your talking about animations and the description of each skill, where yeah of course it's unique. (Let's just say I had a lot of inspiration from Diablo 2 and WoW, and then looked at a thesarus online to change up the names.)

 

[coyotecraft]

Do you count skills that are basically the same except for the damage? For example: Fire, Fire2, Fire3
It's a little ridiculous when you never touch the weaker skill later in the game unless it's something you can upgrade.
Then there's the skills that are the same only the scope is increased from one enemy to multiple enemies.

I guess you can narrow it down any combination of element, scope, stasis effect. And then split them between party members so everyone has something different.
And then you have skills that are only effective against certain types of enemies like flying types. But if you're going to have something like that then make sure there are plenty chances to use it.

 

[seven]

RM Discussion?
Anyway, if there's enough that I don't have to select one or two skills over and over for each party member (I guess that could apply to skill variety too, but idk. As long as it's not "strongest attack, heal, strongest attack, heal, etc.) and it's small enough that I can remember each specific skill and its function, then I think yer good to go.

 

[Xanirus]

@coyotecraft

As I mentioned above, the 12-15 skills per character was not including increased damage of the same said skills already in the 12-15. But I was asking the community about it because I thought simply making more of the same skill just do more damage might be considered a lame way of having "skill variety", (even though higher ranks of a skill is needed) compared to having skills that actually do different things. Then again this is a turn based RPG and maker for the most part, so real time character movement, distance, facing a target, etc, is not a factor, and therefore, that cut's off a lot of possibilites of what a skill can do. But I suck at Ruby atm, don't plan on trying to learn itm at least not for my first game, so basically the skills I have do one of the following:

*damage enemy(s) with element
*damage enemy(s) with element and cause some status effect
*cause some status effect (no damage)
*heal an ally(s) HP, or negative status effects
*boost a status effect on an ally(s)

Guess I'm thinking too hard, cause that's about what it boils down to to most RPG's. What I am trying make (I have a few made, via events) is those whacky "unique" skills that usually has it's own interface or input, akin to literally what every character had in Final Fantasy 3/6. Sabin's blitz, Setzer's slot machine, Edgar's tools (ok maybe not that one, what the hell did Edgar need weapons for? Chainsaw, drill, chainsaw, drill :haha: ) Cyan's swordtech, etc.

@KRoP
I would put this in RM Discussion, but it states "...this is not a place to talk about your project.....or ask support." This is essientally what I'm doing isn't it?

But thanks for all the input so far.

 

[Nearly Infinite]

Not sure if this is on topic or not, but if you wanted more utilitarian skills (as opposed to just different kinds of attacks), it's pretty easy if you attach Common Events to them.

For instance, in my game I use Day and Night lighting effects, and have dungeon interiors too dark to see in. I made torches that light up the dungeons, for a duration, and gave some of my caster classes a Spell that substitutes for the torch (with a longer duration, accessed only from the Menu instead of Battle, and tints the screen a little greenish).

Another example is that I made traps using Events, and some roguish classes can activate a skill that disarms them. I'm currently poking around with Stealth as another one.

You could put wandering animals in your game that just say "moo" or "bark" or whatever when you talk to them, but set an Event page to recognize whether or not you have a Druid and if he has Animal Speech. Animals could give hints, side quests, treasure like a chest, join the party, or whatever.

And, if you want to get wacky, you could make these things have different effects in a battle (a Priest's Light spell could damage undead or the Rogue's Dismantle skill could damage constructs or lower their defense). I haven't taken things that deep but it seems easy enough.

Basically, what I'm saying is, if you think outside the box, in this case Combat, you can make all sorts of Skills that define roles for different classes. It would take a little bit of extra work in Eventing on your Map, but stuff like that takes the bland taste of Combat-Only Skills and turns your party combination possibilities into a flavor explosion.

Sorry if this doesn't help (like, if you're only talking about combat).

 

[Xanirus]

Yes, I was actually just talking about combat really, I already had non-combative skills like you said, similar to D&D setups. But thanks for giving me more ideas.

I have Druids that can move trees or nature "stuff" around to reveal alternative routes, rouges can lockpick (if I make them steal (from people, other than monsters) I have to implement a karma system...thinking about it), fighters/rouges can intimidate/persuade in conversation, priests can pray at random altars to provide a temporary status boost to the party, etc.

My system for these skills like this:

For every fighter you have in your party, give 10 points to the party's Intimidate skill. So if you have 2 fighters, encounter a scenario that requires at least a roll of 15 to succeed, then roll a # between 1-20 (2 fighters, max of 20.) I plan to use this rolling system for all such scenarios, but what I don't know is how to level these skills up without scripting. (Basically I need to find where in the scripts affects what happens when your characters level, and somehow add a line that is like "Set variable X to relative 10" (give 10 skill points per level) If I could do that, however, I'd just have each character level those skills individually, (instead of just "having" it to begin with, and it never increases) and use skills points to level BOTH their misc skills AND combat skills. (Thus, making it it impossible to learn every skill in one playthrough.)