How to balance an RPG? There is no perfect answer, and instead I think it can be described as “What you do is what you get.”
You are building a system, and from the functioning of that system, you will get the results that system produced. It seems redundant to type it out, but it is very much a cause and effect of how the system is designed, rewards and penalties will be assigned, and players will want to maximize rewards and minimalize penalties.
If other aspects of the game are also very good, maybe they will tolerate less than perfect maximum rewards and perfect minimum penalties, to see a more interesting story, or make more personal choices, but the balance of statistics and skills should support all these things as a foundation, because the incentive structure will in large part dictate how many players play, because of how they are rewarded, thus defining what type of game this is. What you do, is what you get.
So with that rambling preamble done, I will turn towards my methods of mixing perfect balancing versus asymmetric balancing to create a system that has a solidly balanced foundation, with a number of asymmetries that map to the theme and gameplay of the game.
Getting coverage on things you can do, and how well you can do them
Stats, skill Groups and Jobs
Stats and are skills are core to RPGs, you perform skills, such as casting Magic Missile, and your stats help determine the success and strength of the skill usage.
In All Hail Temos, I divide up skills into skill groups:
- Combat (CBT)
- Influence (INF)
- Craft (CFT)
- Experiment (EXP)
- Seduce (SDC)
These skill groups are then balanced with stats, but I have an intermediary step to create both a perfect balance foundation, and an asymmetrical balance, for how stats are distributed inside.
Stats
To explain this, I need to introduce the stats for the game, which have 5 base stats, and 10 derived stats, which are all the combinations of the 5 base stats, in unique pairings with each other. The base stats should seem familiar, but are tuned a bit to get better thematic coverage:
- Strength (STR)
- Agility (AGL)
- Wit (WIT)
- Awareness (AWR)
- Charm (CHM)
These 5 base stats are then combined to all their permutations with 10 derived stats:
- Precision (PRC) = STR+AWR
- Beauty (BTY) = STR+CHM
- Grace (GRC) = STR+WIT
- Endurance (END) = STR+AGL
- Accuracy (ACR) = AGL+AWR
- Social (SOC) = AGL+CHM
- Flexibility (FLX) = AGL+WIT
- Deduction (DED) = WIT+AWR
- Convincing (CNV) = WIT+CHM
- Personality (PER) = CHM+AWR
Together these are 15 combined stats. And there is a perfect balance between the number of derived stats, and the base stats. Thematically, I also tried to get a very wide coverage of potential elements of a character’s abilities, which we are reducing to stats, to inform how I should create the game to allow all these stats to be expressed. After all there is no point having a stat that is a dump stat, because it is never used in the game. Better to cut it, or expand the game in at least some way so that the stat is incorporated in a way that thematically and gameplay wise makes sense.
Skill Groups
Next I assign 3 of these stats to the skill groups, without ever repeating or leaving any out, so there is perfect balance of the 15 stats into the 5 skill groups, with 3 each.
- Combat: Strength, Awareness, Agility
- Influence: Social, Personality, Convincing
- Craft: Accuracy, Wit, Endurance
- Experiment: Deduction, Flexibility, Precision
- Seduce: Beauty, Grace, Charm
To convert this assignment, I give each stat 2 points, so each skill group gets 6 points. The player selects a job that contains 2 skill groups, so the player is selecting a total of 12 points of stats when they pick their job, which is distributed in this perfectly balanced above way.
But, here is where I add in asymmetry to the design to give things a more thematic shape, based on how all these terms connect together and can be interacted with in the world.
- Combat: Strength + 2, Awareness + 2, Agility + 2
- Influence: Charm + 3, Agility + 1, Awareness + 1, Wit + 1
- Craft: Agility + 2, Wit + 2, Awareness + 1, Strength + 1
- Experiment: Awareness + 2, Wit + 2, Agility + 1, Strength + 1
- Seduce: Charm +4, Strength +2, Wit +1
This creates a situation where there is an asymmetric balance, so not all the numbers relate evenly with each other evenly, on top of a lot of symmetrical balance, where all possible options are present, and no duplicates exist. Which I’m calling perfect balance, for the purpose of this article, to underline both of those qualities are true: all unique combinations exist, no duplicates.
Jobs
As I mentioned above, the player selects a job, which is what selects all of these stats and skill group assignment. Every job has 2 skill groups, which I can asymmetrically balance as a major and a minor skill group for that job. The jobs are:
- Explorer = Combat, Influence
- Saboteur = Combat, Craft
- Tactician = Combat, Experiment
- Assassin = Combat, Seduce
- Merchant = Influence, Craft
- Detective = Influence, Experiment
- Spy = Influence, Seduce
- Engineer / Inventor = Craft, Experiment
- Artisan = Craft, Seduce
- Bureaucrat = Experiment, Seduce
The assignments of all skill groups are such that in all the jobs, there are all combinations present, and no duplicates. So perfectly balanced. But, the distribution of which job is major (first listed), and which is minor (second listed), is asymmetrical and was tuned to be in the theme of the world and gameplay, and not for perfect balancing, unlike the 10 derived stats which are perfectly balanced from the 5 base stats.
The player will select one of the above jobs, which give them a major and minor skill group, which give them 12 points of stats total, divided among the stats that comprise the skill group, with 3 stats per skill group, at 2 points each.
After selecting their job, the player is given 12 points to assign how they want, so they get 50% nature (all given by a single choice) and 50% nurture (selected individually). This creates another perfect balance, 50-50.
How will this affect gameplay?
Until I get a lot of player feedback, I won't know how things will initially be received, but there is actually a lot more missing from this balancing article, which is the skills themselves. When you swing a sword, cast a spell, try to pick a pocket, etc, how is all of this information balanced there?
It’s balanced individually, for that skill. So this is where the real balancing of the game occurs. All the balancing I did above is to provide the framework to balance individual skills you will use in the game. How far you can dash, or shoot an arrow, will be determined by the way that specific skill uses the underlying system of stats, skill groups and jobs.
By the way, you can change jobs. Any time you want, but it doesn’t take effect until the next time you go up a level in a related skill group to that specified new job. Your selected job gives you a type of cap on a type of progression you can do with skills from other job’s skill groups, and when you change jobs, you lose access to high level skills in all your non-selected jobs, but keep access to low and mid level skills. So, you can level and play across the range of jobs and skills, but not all at the same time, but you can keep adding more low and mid level skills to your usable skill set. I will write a post about this in the future.
Conclusion
So, that is how I created the stats, skill groups and jobs used in All Hail Temos, so that you can get a mix of perfectly and asymmetrical balanced relationships that describe how your character exists in the world, and what gameplay is possible.
If you would like to see how all these stats and jobs can be viable gameplay, wish list All Hail Temos on Steam.
