RPG Battle Balancing - Character and Attack Definitions
A Feature by Mike Willis (msw188)

Contents:
I:THE GOAL
II:ATTACK DEFINITIONS AND KEEPING ALL ROLES MEANINGFUL
III:CHARACTER DEFINITIONS AND KEEPING THE PLAYER'S CHOICES MEANINGFUL
IV:A FULL-BLOODED EXAMPLE

There are lots of elements, both large and small, that go into making good battles for an RPG. This is the second of a multi-part series where I will be focusing on properly balancing non-boss battles, which I feel can be the hardest part of the whole mess. I will be assuming some familiarity with the OHR engine, but more importantly I will be assuming familiarity with menu-based RPGs (think Dragon Warrior/Final Fantasy, NOT Zelda or Secret of Mana). It may well be that some aspects discussed herein are applicable to other genres, but I shall bypass such considerations and write only concerning the menu-based gameplay system that the OHR was designed to sustain.

This article will focus on how to balance battles on a character-by-character and attack-by-attack basis. It will try to show examples incorporating many of the capabilities of the OHR's inherent battle system; nothing will be discussed that requires a customized battle system. Also, the examples will be looked at from a mathematical point of view; I may bring up the idea of using the "Sharp" damage algorithm in conjunction with elemental weaknesses, but I won't give this attack a name. That's the fun, creative part that is up to you. It doesn't really affect battle balance at all.

I:THE GOAL
First of all, making battles more or less difficult with only a few attacks is quite easy. Just adjust characters' stats. The tough part is maintaining difficulty while giving the player multiple options. This is where character roles come into play. We already discussed this a little in the first article, but here we are going to want to get into some serious details. First we outline the general goals.

All characters in battle should have roles. Enemies can often get away with only one role. In fact, giving enemies' only one role ensures that they will stick to it throughout the battle, something that cannot be easily enforced otherwise. However, we should be very careful when giving heroes only one role. Most players will not be thrilled to find certain heroes 100% useless in certain situations.

More often than not, it is most interesting if characters can fulfill several different roles well. To make these roles matter, it is very important that no single role (or small handful of roles) completely overshadows the others, or is necessary for victory. This is the balancing act of attack definitions. In addition, no one character should be able to fulfill ALL roles well enough to succeed, unless we are making a solitary hero. This leads to the balancing act of assigning roles. We will discuss these two concepts one at a time for convenience's sake, but when making a game it is often easiest to go back and forth between the two as you go, as we will see using a full example in the last section.

II:ATTACK DEFINITIONS AND KEEPING ALL ROLES MEANINGFUL
How many qualitatively different roles can we think of? From a certain point of view, there are only two: to maximize damage dealt to the opponent and to minimize damage taken from the opponent. A properly balanced system of roles will ensure that there are many ways to accomplish these two things, but not all are equally effective at all times.

Maximizing damage directly is easy to break up into several roles. The simplest is to use elemental and enemy-type modifiers. A further method involves the "Sharp>Normal>Blunt" setup in terms of reliance on base stats. If we use several different "Sharp" attacks that depend on different stats, all of which can be boosted or lowered by different attacks, we already have a lot of options. On the other hand, "Blunt" attacks remain fairly constant in damage output throughout a battle, regardless of stat boosting/lowering. But we must be careful; if we make direct damage too powerful and too cheap, it can quickly overshadow other roles. As a rule, there should never be any enemy that can be killed by free direct damage from any character in one turn.

Roles for maximizing damage indirectly are usually restricted to stat-boosting/lowering. Things like raising ATK or speed, or lowering DEF - these kinds of roles can be difficult to keep meaningful without being made over-powering and/or necessary. Making sure that there are no direct attacks of similar cost that could destroy the opposition helps make these important. The existence of "Blunt" attacks, and the ability to 'normalize' stats can help keep them from being overpowering. We will see some more balancing ideas in the next section about defining characters.

Minimizing damage directly is usually fairly one dimensional. Basically this comes down to restoring HP. Meaningful differences between methods include relative cost effectiveness (especially if we are emphasizing the cumulative effect of many battles) and the ability to heal multiple targets at once. Reviving dead heroes is another role. Keeping healing balanced can be tricky. One method might be the following: have the healing option of comparable cost to the damage dealing option, and have it heal an amount that would restore roughly 2-3 rounds worth of battle damage. This will ensure that healing is worthwhile when needed, but not as cost-effective as ending the battle as quickly as possible.

Minimizing damage indirectly can be the most fun. Aside from stat-boosting/lowering, we also have the "stun" and "mute" status conditions to set on characters. We can simulate some other things too, like a "blind" status condition through lowering the aiming stat. There are a couple things to note about balancing these. First, we should make sure that there are strong attacks that can be nullified in these kinds of ways (ie, strong magic attacks that can be muted, very strong "Sharp" attacks with high extra damage %'s that can be crippled by a lowered ATK stat). Secondly, these things should be curable. Simply put, if they are not crippling, status conditions are ultimately pointless. But to be crippling without guaranteeing defeat, they need to be curable.

All of the above becomes even more interesting when we start using chains to allow single attacks to perform multiple roles. Instead of having a very strong ATK-boosting attack, how about a direct damage attack that chains to a mediocre DEF-lowering attack? Or an attack that actually drains ATK? We can also chain attacks to undesirable effects to help balance them out. Suppose we have a very strong direct damage attack that always chains to raise the target's ATK (as if the attack made the target very angry). Another option would be to have attacks that hurt both the attacker and defender. How about certain attacks that often disable "stun" (like waking the target up), but there exist some weaker attacks of similar or lower cost that never disable it? Attacks like these also make our "stunning" attacks that much more interesting.

The possibilities are virtually endless. Balancing them all requires a lot of thought and playtesting. If we ever find ourselves using or ignoring the same actions all the time while playing our game, chances are that our attacks are not balanced and we have work to do. Lowering a cost, giving that powerful attack a very long wait-time, or a negative after-effect, or giving the weaker attack a more positive after-effect - these are all things we should keep under consideration.

III:CHARACTER DEFINITIONS AND KEEPING THE PLAYER'S CHOICES MEANINGFUL
Here is where the balancing becomes especially tricky. What should a character be able to do? Do well? Not do at all? These questions need to be approached slightly differently for heroes and enemies. Let us discuss heroes first. Notice that if a hero is only really good at one thing, then there is rarely any choice to be made by the player when this hero's turn arrives. So heroes should be able to fulfill multiple roles. The goal is that a player should never feel that any of their hero's turns are often a waste. And then there is the inverse question: Should multiple heroes be good at some of the same roles? In general, doing this makes a game much easier. On the other hand, if only one hero can fulfill a certain role, it makes keeping that hero healthy a much higher priority for the player.

More often than not, it is a good idea to spread roles out over multiple heroes in varying degrees. For example, the vast majority of RPGs have all heroes capable of mediocre healing via items, but there are usually a select few heroes who can actually heal well. To further variety, we can have one hero good at healing single characters, while another is good at healing groups. In both cases, it is important that the hero can also fulfill some other roles fairly well. Maybe one of the healers also is good at direct damage against enemy type 2, while the other has a "stunning" attack. This simple example illustrates the importance of having a large variety of attack definitions available to us.

Depending on our relative difficulty emphasis (single battles vs cumulative effects) there are other ways of balancing heroes besides simply assigning attacks. Meaningful differences in stats are the simplest ways. Contrast the high damage-dealing but low HP hero with the medium damage-dealing high HP hero. Neither is necessarily better, but they force slightly different choices from the player. The exact same scenario can be colored differently by changing the stat "HP" to "MP". A hero that can fulfill lots of powerful roles, but has only little MP to use them, forces some severe resource management on the part of the player.

When assigning roles to enemies however, we must remember that we cannot control what attacks the enemy will choose. This makes attack chains that fulfill several roles at once especially helpful for enemies. When we are assigning enemy roles however, we should still be thinking in terms of the player. First of all, it is important to construct enemies that complement our heroes' capabilities. For example, if we made that healer strong against enemy type 2, we had better have some type 2 enemies around. Similar thoughts should influence the giving of stats. "Sharp" attacks are useless if all the enemies have high defense. Even when assigning attacks, we should consider the player. The good thing about assigning different roles to different enemies is that in a battle against a variety of enemies, the player's choice of target is that much more meaningful. This will be explored more in the final section.

Just as in the case of attacks, all of these things should be constantly tweaked through playtesting as the game is made. If we ever find that one hero seems to be 'better' than another in the vast majority of circumstances, something is wrong. Maybe we need to lower some of his stats, or maybe there need to be more enemies that he is weaker against, or that can nullify his strong points. Maybe some of the other heroes need better equipment selection. Similarly, if there is an enemy that seems too difficult, we can try various things. Instead of lowering its HP, maybe we should lower its MP so that it can only use that powerful area attack a couple of times. Maybe add a weakness for the player to exploit.

There are so many different possibilities for character definitions that combine different roles in unique ways. Heroes that can stun but can't heal, enemies that resist all attacks but can be poisoned repeatedly (if we'd like to make poison more effective, we can give an enemy a high speed stat, and make sure that his attacks have long wait times), heroes that are only mediocre stat-wise but are immune to stat-lowering and status conditions, enemies that primarily damage stats other than HP; the list is practically endless. Balancing it all is not easy, so I would like to finish the article with a somewhat more detailed example.

IV:A FULL BLOODED EXAMPLE
We've seen several small, singular suggestions on adding various roles and trying to balance them out with others, but nothing can illustrate the actual balancing of battles like a full example. So let us consider a team of three heroes, against which we will pit a single enemy formation with four different kinds of enemies.

The first things to get straight are the basic roles of the heroes (often this is already done because the heroes do not usually change much throughout the game). For this example, suppose hero "H" (for healing) is already good at healing HP and okay at dealing normal direct damage. Hero "B" (for blunt) already specializes in good blunt damage, but has poor attack stats for normal or sharp damage. Hero "D" (for damage) has good attacking stats for both normal and sharp attacks, but has no access to blunt ones. All the heroes have access to mediocre healing via items.

Before we even begin thinking of enemies, how can we give some more options with these heroes? Since heroes "B" and "D" both seem to focus on damage, we can try to differentiate them a little more. It is important that none of the heroes are ever useless, but that they contribute differently in different scenarios. Let us give hero "B" attacks that are elemental, allowing him a clear advantage in certain situations. However, his cheap attacks are all single target. Now suppose hero "D" has no way to take advantage of elements, but has attacks that target all enemies for relatively low costs.

What more should we do for hero "H"? Well, notice how right now both "H" and "D" will have trouble contributing against enemies with very high defense. So what if we give "H" an attack that lowers defense, or raises attack? This should probably be a relatively cheap attack to use, as it will take a turn and only really benefits "H" and "D". If this attack is not seeming to be worth the use in battle, we can make it lower all enemies' defense to be more useful perhaps.

Now that we have some roles amongst our heroes, we can begin defining some enemies using the advice given above: We should still be thinking in terms of the player, and his heroes. We have two very different kinds of damage dealers in heroes "B" and "D", so we should have at least two different kinds of enemies that complement them. "B" would do well against enemies with high defense, and elemental weaknesses. Let us have one such enemy and call it "En1". "D" would do well against an enemy with poor defense, but so would "B" unless this enemy has high HP. So we make a low-defense, high-HP enemy called "En2". But we don't want all of the enemies to be easily dispatchable. Suppose "En3" has decent defense and high HP, guaranteeing that he will not be particularly easy for any of the heroes to kill quickly. We took the time to give "H" a defense-down attack, so we would also like an enemy who forces it to be useful. So let us give "En4" high defense AND elemental protections that nullify "B"s blunt attacks.

At this point we should start giving the enemies some roles. We know the player can dispatch "En1" and "En2" quickly once he learns how, but probably only one at a time. So we want to make his choice of which to kill first a meaningful one. Maybe "En1" has a very powerful attack that can damage the entire hero party. Maybe "En2" is not as strong, but has very high speed (as in, over twice as fast as most of the other characters) so that if it is left alive, its damage will surely add up quickly. Maybe "En1's" attack also has a chance of "stunning" that can really cripple the party. "En3" has pretty good staying power no matter what the player does, so we have to be very careful what roles we give it. Maybe a good sharp attack that will work well against any heroes that the player did not take the time to equip well. "En4" can be easy to kill once it's defense is lowered, so we give it some attacks that are a pain to deal with while it's alive. We already have good damage from the other enemies, so maybe this one can do things like "muting", or lowering stats.

Now we can return to the heroes. Going back and forth between enemies and heroes is a great way to make sure everything stays balanced. Right now "B" doesn't seem to have much to do against "En2" or "En4" (or to some extent "En3"), so he should probably have another option. When maximizing damage is not available, try some damage minimizing options. "B" can maybe have access to a "stunning" attack and a defense increasing attack. We might also note that if "En1" were to stun the right heroes early, a battle could become unwinnable for the player. Because there is no way to predict who the enemy will stun, maybe there should be an item available to the heroes that can cure stun. Or if we would like to keep the difficulty high, we could give an "un-stunning" attack to "D", who technically should never be NEEDED in case he is the one who is stunned ("B" is practically needed to kill "En1", while "H" is practically needed to kill "En4").

This kind of back and forth balancing could go on for a while, but with this example we can see some of the thinking involved. Of course, this is only one battle formation. This formation may be used multiple times in an area, but that discussion will have to wait until the third article, where we will try to put all of these balancing ideas together into creating a well-balanced dungeon.