Author: Conash

(Hey all, sorry for no blog post last week, it was Canada Day and I straight up took the day completely off. This week’s blog post is from Conash, please enjoy! -NM)

Hey everyone! So listen, I know that I still need to detail what all went into the Yamamaya revamp, but I recently got thinking about one of these little game design things that’s crossed my mind and I really wanted to get into it. This time, I want to talk about how easy it is to make Attack and Magic be the same stat, and how some games avoid that.

Now, obviously Attack and Magic aren’t the exact same stat, but when it comes to RPGs it can be very easy to make them to functionally be a universal ‘offense’ stat. Let’s take Harem Collector for example, if let’s say you were fighting an enemy that was designed specifically to reduce your primary attacking stat, it’d look at what character it was focusing on and either inflict ‘Attack down’ or ‘Magic down’ on them based on who it was. Compare this enemy to an enemy that instead of analyzing who it’s targetting instead just inflicts both, and consider what’s different? Well for mages they’ll have their attack stat reduced, for Felix this might pose some notice because you might have just switched to physical attacks instead of magic attacks, but for the other mages your attack stat is already so low that if your magic is reduced to the point that your attack is the better option, you’d rather just use an item to heal, buff your magic, or guard instead of attacking. Now what about your physical fighters? Well Raina and Bronwyn might laugh at this enemy as they have ways to convert their defense or agility into damage respectfully, but only Therese and Doll would really be able to turn to their magic stat for damage in the first case but both of these characters have the option to turn to either tanking or support so even then they’re not facing a huge impact. Functionally speaking, reducing attack and magic is no different than just reducing whichever is more important to any given character except in a few cases (such as after a certain love quest), and because of this a character only ever has ‘one’ offensive stat, even the rare skill that uses both magic and attack splits it’s usage of them to emulate it as if it only used one of the two rather than both.

Contrast this to say defense and resist, these are two different stats that the player will expect both of them to be useful at different times as you’ll be fighting enemies that have physical attacks and enemies that have magic attacks, but your mages only have magic based skills and your fighters only have attack based skills with a few exceptions. If you had the option to trade out any amount of Kyrie’s attack stat for a boost in her magic stat I bet each of you would trade that out whether it was 1:1 or even 50:1 to whatever extent you could. Whenever you’re thinking of designing an RPG though, it can be difficult to see ways to avoid this problem since this is just the nature of having stats that exist only to be ‘offense’, you could make skills that use both but you still have to reign them in to be about as effective as if the player only used one or else you’d break the balance of the game, but I’ve come across a few games that I think do a good job at helping make ‘magic’ and ‘attack’ serve roles to keep them both important to everyone, to one extent or another.

The first example that I want to bring up is Pokemon. After generation 1, the ‘Attack’ and ‘Special Attack’ stats would seem to fall into the problem as I described it, but when you really start getting into the grit and depth of the pokemon combat system it really doesn’t. Now, for those of you who haven’t gotten into it, pokemon actually has a rather complex and nuanced foundation to it’s combat, even if I may have quite a few complaints about it, but the reason that Attack and Special Attack are functionally different is that when you start getting into challenge runs of pokemon you’ll find that targetting the weaker defense of a pokemon can go a very long way, even if the move is resisted and only doing 1/2 damage, when you get to extreme disparities between defense and special defense like say Onix the ability to target the weaker defense is a huge game-changer, on top of that with the huge variety of moves that every pokemon can theoretically learn (which is made manageable by the limit of moves they can actually know) there’s almost never a pokemon who can never make use of either their attack or special attack, though there are some cases where one of these stats is so low it’s basically non-existent. The freedom to mobilize both of these stats with a variety of moves combined with how at times a pokemon’s defense may be 4x or more than their special defense creates opportunities where, at least in certain challenge runs, being able to make use of your weaker ‘offensive’ stat opens up entirely new strategies and considerations, and a skill that reduced or raised the attack and special attack stat of a pokemon by two stages would be pretty busted, even when there already exist stats which can raise one of those two by two stages or can raise both of them by one already.

Another example of a game that helps keep both the ‘Attack’ and ‘Magic Attack’ stats from effectively becoming a single ‘Offense’ stat would be the ‘Tales of’ series, though I’m going to be talking about ‘Tales of Symphonia’ specifically here. See, this is another example that at first glance would appear similar to Harem Collector, as your ‘Attack’ and ‘Intelligence’ are seperate stats, Lloyd for example doesn’t have any spells and if you plan to fight only Melee as Genis you’re in for a bad time, but both of these stats are still useful to both of them. See, something the game doesn’t explain is that your ‘Intelligence’ serves a double purpose as both your magic attack and your magic defense in this game (much like generation 1 pokemon, but this causes huge balance issues there which is why I didn’t want to focus on it), and while you can help make up for his lower magic defense both by getting equipment that resists the elements you’ll face or by buffing his sizable HP pool so that he can take a hit, you’re going to be hit by spells at all but the highest level of play, which is a big reason I really like the ‘Boorish General’ title for Lloyd as one of the only ways to boost his Intelligence even if it’s not by a lot (at least until I get the ‘Berserker’ Title that gives comparatively huge HP and Attack boosts), because even if he has no way to use his intelligence to inflict damage it still helps keep him alive. As for why attack is useful for Genis, this comes into play in two parts, firstly if you don’t rely heavily on your item bag you’re going to need to use physical attacks to regain TP to use for spells at time which means that you can reasonably expect to get some use out of your attack, but the bigger use it has plays into staying alive. See, one of the best ways to avoid staying alive when you do challenge runs in any ‘Tales of’ game is that you need to keep the enemy staggered, when they’re staggered you’re doing damage and they can’t attack back, and while there are a lot of nuances to this system there are at least some ‘Tales of’ games that make enemies immune to staggers from physical hits unless you do enough damage, meaning that if your attack stat is so low that you’re only doing 1 damage then you can never stagger an enemy, allowing them to attack you in the middle of a combo with impunity, when you combine these two facts together it means that if your attack stat is ‘1’ on a pure mage if you ever try to use physical attacks to regain TP you might as well be standing in front of them doing nothing because they can basically kill you with a combo or two before you can get enough TP for a spell. There are other things that also play into this balance too though, such as magic instantly cancelling the guard of the target stopping enemies from guarding infinitely until you’re vulnerable, you can get out many physical attacks in the time it takes to get off one spell allowing you to prevent your enemies from doing more damage with physical attacks, magic attacks can hit bigger areas to hit multiple enemies, while physical attacks have an easier time pushing enemies into the position you want them to be at. All of these things play together to create a situation where not only do all party members benefit from both ‘Attack’ and ‘Intelligence’ (though most characters benefit more from one than the other) but also a situation where you almost never want to only have physical attackers or only have mages as these stats feel like they fill distinct purposes.

So yeah, sorry if this got rather long, and I hope that it doesn’t come off as if I think that Harem Collector does a ‘bad’ job with core gameplay, take this as just some analysis of fun ‘quirks’ that I noticed with how the math, gameplay design, and player behavior all mix together to create situations where in some games inflicting an attack and magic attack debuff feels no different than if you only had one inflicted based off of some huge process where the game goes in and determines which is more important and only inflicts that one. One more thing to also point out I guess is that even when in say ‘Tales of Symphonia’ where you get characters like Kratos who can make good use out of both spells and physical skills, allowing such characters to have attack similar to Lloyd and Intelligence similar to Genis isn’t always a bad thing, because they can only ever invest any given second or point of TP into one or the other, effectively making the other stat ‘useless’ for that given resource analysis, the limitations then should be about how the value of being able to go from 2 melee units and 2 casters to 1 melee unit and 3 casters in the middle of the battle influences how likely you are to bring them over a character who can only fill one role, if when they do can only do half as much damage as Lloyd or Genis chances are the players will instead pass them up to take a character who is always at 100% instead of always at 50%.

Welcome back, Conash here to give another big talk about whatever game design thing has been on my mind lately! This one may seem a bit out of the blue to many of you, but I’m sure that both testers and time travels will probably have an idea about why this is on my mind recently. For the rest of you all I have to say is you might have something to look forward to in the 0.44 release in a couple of months!

So, I hope that most of you here are familiar enough with turn based RPGs like Pokemon, Final Fantasy, or this really obscure game called ‘Collect Harems’ or something to be able to understand the idea of having a certain number of things you can do in the time that enemies get their own limit of things they can do. Now I may only have personal experience to go off of, but I wanted to talk about the value of ‘actions’ as a whole, and what you have to be careful about when you ‘give’ an action and when you ‘take away’ an action as well as why not all actions are equal.

To start with, I think it’s important to mention that to me there seems to be 3 types of actions which a player can take while in ‘combat’ of some form, actions which influence ‘Damage Output’ like doing damage or buffing themselves to do more damage, ‘Damage Mitigation’ either by reducing total damage taken or making sure the damage/status effects are inflicted in a way that’s less detrimental to you, or ‘Recovery’ which is putting in effort to actively undo either damage or some other detrimental effect on you. While I can certainly see arguments that these might seem rather arbitrary, this distinction typically gets at the heart of the philosophy behind things as while choosing to have Therese use Martydom then guard is different than having Meline try to daze all your enemies both of these actions are done because you expect the damage that they’ll prevent to outweigh the damage you could have done instead if you brought Kyrie or Yamamaya instead, as you value the chance of wasting time and resources that have the fight be longer that is unneeded to prevent having to put in the resource investment that ‘Recovering’ from what might have happened would have been. Understanding this decision making process and what goes into it is fundamental when trying to give players options as if you make an easy to use ‘Recovery’ option that’s more potent than a ‘Mitigation’ option, then people will never use the ‘Mitigation’ option as it’s unsure if it’ll be useful but you do know that you can output more damage which is progress and if the bad thing happens anyways you can recovery for a similar price.

On a related note, I do believe that this decision making process applies to all games, as say a racing game would exchange the ‘Damage Output’ with instead getting farther in the race, maybe when you stay in last place until the end to have the computers rubber-band in your favor before you overtake them to ‘Mitigate’ the damage they’d do if you were in 1st the whole way through. Granted some game types don’t always have an in-built way to ‘recover’ but every game calls for the players to make decisions and take actions and the player will have to constantly assess their situation and come to a decision one way or another, regardless as to if the game waits for them or not. Though it is important to remember human limitations, even if players are entirely familiar with the situation the speed at which they have to understand their situation, remember their options, and come to a conclusion plays a big role in how much you can ‘expect’ from them, but turn-based games give players a lot of room to make decisions should they choose to make use of it, but enough of this little tangent!

Right, back to the original topic, the value of an action. The value of a single action is going to be relative to any given situation, for example if both the player and enemy has 2 actions per turn and you take away 1 of them you’ve removed 50% of the damage/healing/mitigation that either side can do, but when there’s 4 actions per turn and you take one away you remove 25% of what they can accomplish per turn. That bit is pretty simple (and deals a lot with why I’m not the biggest fan of how we have several accessories that give extra actions as those are numerically the strongest accessories in the game, giving 25-50% more damage/healing/mitigation), but it’s also important to remember that two actions even if similar aren’t always the same as I briefly touched on earlier. See if you have two identical characters except one has a 10% higher chance of getting a critical hit (which in Harem Collector means x3 damage), then that person’s attacks are on average 20% more valuable than the other character (because 10% of the time you will do 300% damage instead of 100%, meaning +200% damage every 1/10 attacks), anyone who’s overcome the third bonus boss should be familiar with this sort of concept as I went out of my way to make sure that you could not win if all your actions only had an ‘average’ output. Honestly a lot of this stuff just really gets down to math at the end of the day.

See, you may not realize it but just about everyone is crunching a lot of internal math when they play HC. I for example may go on a whole lot about how bringing Meline to inflict daze (a -60% hit chance on physical attacks that lasts for 3 turns, an average of -60% physical damage for up to 3 turns per use) helps a lot more than using Magic Missile at least early game (a 30% chance to deny the enemy 1 turn, an average of -30% damage every turn it’s used), and I came to realize this not just through theoretical number crunching but from experience when I noticed how often I didn’t get hit by an enemy that was dazed. That said, players who aren’t as interested in these numbers are usually more focused on how they only have 4 party members so bringing Meline would limit their options for the party as a whole. The players who spam attack to win? They’ve determined the time and effort to think of more complex tactics doesn’t have enough of a reward to it. This might not seem like quite as relevant, but it is actually very important when evaluating the worth of any given action, the perceived value a player’s options are.

Let’s have a little thought experiment here. Let’s say that you had a character with 2 spells that cost the same amount of MP, the first spell does twice as much damage as the second one in all cases except one fight near the end, where the second is 4x as effective. If you don’t go out of your way to hit your players over the head with this knowledge, they will expect that one fight to follow the unspoken ‘rule’ you had for the rest of the game where the first spell is stronger, and so most of them will have a harder time with the fight. See, players learn to associate a value with all their various options as they see how effective guarding is when they’re hit by a powerful attack, vs how effective it is when the attack targets someone else, or how much consistently enemies get deafened when you use sonic magic and so they decide how often to use it. You’ve gotta keep this in mind when you introduce new options to players because if you give them a new option that seems weaker, or the same but more expensive, if it doesn’t give them the same rewarding feeling as their existing set of skills then they won’t choose it even when it’s 10% better than their existing options because it’s not worth the brain power to access that memory, to make that connection, you’re exhausted from your jackass boss chewing you out for their mistake so who cares if you are only reaching 91% of your potential in this video game, you’re still stopping the evil overlord! Make sure to keep that in mind as you try to give players more ‘options’ so that they can make each action more distinct, if you give them too many choices or they aren’t as good as others they’ll probably forget them.

That’s about it… Sorry if things weren’t very clear, I’ve been having a hard time trying to string all the ideas in my head in a way that flows together for these more introspective blog posts. Hopefully there was enough meat to each of these ideas here that even if some of the connections about them are more vague or missing you can still make sense of this week’s bunch of nonsense!