Hero Design
A Feature by Adam Perry (Mogri)
Many of the first decisions you need to make when designing an RPG concern the heroes that the player will control. Who are they? What can they do? The game experience can be completely different based on the character the player controls, a fact to which anyone who's played Symphony of the Night can attest. How do you design your heroes effectively?
Before you even start designing your characters, there are several things to consider. The most obvious is the story: unless your characters are generic mercenaries (as in Final Fantasy Tactics or the Ogre Battle series), they are integral to your game's story. But even then, there are gameplay implications. For example, how many heroes will the player ever have at once? Will the player be able to choose his party or will the story dictate who he controls? Is the main character locked into the party or can the player swap him out, too?
The answer to these questions often changes within a game. For example, the beginning of Final Fantasy VI forces you into certain parties; later, you can customize your party as long as you include a key hero; later still, you gain full control over your party. Many games, such as Final Fantasy VII and Super Mario RPG, let you customize your party as soon as you get enough heroes, but you need to keep the main character in the party at all times. Heroes that are always in the party are usually given a slight edge over other heroes. More on this later.
The total number of characters in your game changes your options as a designer. If Final Fantasy VI only had six heroes, chances are we wouldn't have seen the Phoenix Cave or Kefka's Tower. If Chrono Trigger had more heroes, it would have been impossible to include as many combined techs as it did. (This partially explains Chrono Cross.)
One last important consideration before designing your heroes: if the player gets to choose the party, when can he change the formation? In general, the more you restrict party changing, the more self-reliant the heroes need to be. An extreme counterexample is Final Fantasy X, where you can change party members during battle! This kind of flexibility lets the heroes be extremely specialized: Wakka is the only character with enough Accuracy to consistently hit fast enemies, Lulu is the only character with attack magic, and so on. (The distinction blurs as the game goes on.) If you play through the game without ever switching party members during battle, the game is much more difficult.
Bringing it back to the original point, the less the player is allowed to change party members, the stronger each one needs to be, generally. If you can switch between battles, then you're not limited to four heroes' MP pools; once one of them is exhausted, you can swap out for a fresh character. If you can only switch party members in towns, then when your heroes run out of MP, they're out for good. Remember this when fine-tuning your challenge.
Okay, so you've planned out all of the above. Now what? Assuming your characters aren't infinitely customizable (as in Final Fantasy VII, where all abilities are determined by materia), you should figure out what each character's role in combat is. Archetypal roles like knight, healer, thief, and so on are good starting blocks. You don't need to restrict yourself to these traditional hero types, but try to ensure your characters are distinct from one another.
More leeway can be given to a hero who is permanently in the party: generally, he'll have higher stat totals and more general ability sets. There are two good reasons for this: first, it allows the player more freedom in customizing the rest of the party, and second, the player will resent being stuck with a weak main character that he can't remove from the party. Just about any game with a forced main character will give him a significant boost over everyone else, though usually not enough to make him categorically superior to everyone else.
Remember, a hero is defined not only by his abilities but also his stats. There is sort of a traditional tie between the two -- magic users have low health, healers have low attack, fighters have low magic defense -- but remember that this tie is artificial and might not be what's best for your game. Consider also that equipment can be used to change a character's role in combat. Suppose you have a really heavy armor in your game -- that might change a fast, hard-hitting hero into a slow tank who soaks up damage for the rest of your team. You could even take this one step further and define your heroes entirely by their equipment.
Speaking of abilities, how often can they be used? Does your hero have MP coming out the wazoo or can he only use his powerful abilities once or twice before running out? You can create interesting choices for the player by tweaking this. Maybe it leans both ways for a character -- your wizard's Zap spell costs 2 MP, an efficient attack to use on a regular basis, but his Ultima spell costs a whopping 100 MP. What options does your character have when he runs out of MP? Is he completely useless? Does he have a good backup attack?
Role assignments will have an impact on later elements of your game. Does the story call for Rosa and Rydia to leave the party? Better remember that when designing your dungeon. You'll have players cursing you if you put physical-resistant monsters in a dungeon where they can't bring their magic users. In a broader sense, your hero roles will play a large part in how the player designs his party. Did you ever willingly put Garnet and Eiko in the same party in Final Fantasy IX? I didn't -- they're more or less the same character. In general, try to make all party combinations valid. This means differentiating all of your heroes.
Here's a useful exercise: make a big list of every unique kind of ability you want your player to have access to at any point in the game. Be specific: water damage is different from lightning damage, single-target is different from multi-target, and so on. For the purposes of this list, ignore your characters. This might seem counterintuitive, but it'll get you better results. Go ahead, do it. Don't forget status effects. Your list should be as thorough as you can make it.
Now part two: for each ability, pick one or two heroes who can use it. Resist the temptation to go above that; giving the same ability to three or more heroes will dilute your character differentiation. Pay attention to how many abilities each player has. You may or may not want to distribute them evenly, but keeping tabs on their number of abilities will help you balance your characters the way you want.
Here's the cool part: if you did this right, you've just finished designing all of the hero abilities in the entire game. This may seem like a surprising thing to have planned out so far in advance, but you'll definitely want your heroes' abilities decided before you start designing the enemies they'll fight.
Closely intertwined with a hero's abilities are his stats. An impressive selection of destructive magic is useless if your hero's magic attack is mediocre, and a character with low-cost mid-range abilities can be useless or broken depending on his speed stat. You can just as easily specify your heroes' stats before designing their abilities (and there are advantages to that, as well), but doing the abilities first will give you a better idea of who that character is than the other way around, and you can use that mental picture to define your heroes numerically here.
I strongly recommend DukeOfDellot's OHRStat spreadsheet for tuning your heroes' stats. It's pretty easy to give a hero stats that are balanced at level 1, but it's harder to estimate how strong he'll be at level 20. Remember, your player isn't going to make it to level 99. OHRStat gives you a much better idea of how the heroes will grow throughout the game.
Of course, intimately tied with stats is the equipment that boosts them. I would venture to say that most commercial RPGs put a greater emphasis on equipment than on character level, though the degree to which this is true varies from game to game. What about your game? Will characters get most of their stat boosts by leveling up or by finding newer and better equipment? Which stats won't ever be affected by equipment? Traditionally, equipment is a strong factor in attack and defense, but doesn't really affect HP and MP. Stats that are unaffected by most equipment tend to have much higher growth rates.
Note that all of this is especially tied to the rest of your game. Your heroes' stats are necessarily related to your enemies' stats; your equipment needs to go somewhere in the game, be it a treasure chest or a weapons shop; the player's heroes' experience levels are related both to how much experience the enemies give and how difficult the enemies are. These are all fuzzy areas if you're just starting your game and are the most likely to need tweaking later on. This is another excellent reason to design your attacks first.
Okay, so you've designed your heroes. Now how do they fit into the framework of your game?
With a few exceptions, RPGs will start you off in control of one or two characters. You almost certainly won't give your player all twelve of your game's heroes right off the bat. As a final element of your hero design, consider how and when your player is going to recruit additions to his team.
Traditionally, the player will gain new heroes as the story progresses. This is sensible for a story-driven, character-based game. Characters join and leave as the plot dictates. If all of your heroes join the party this way, that's great -- you only need to determine when they'll join.
As far as that goes, it's generally preferable to let the player control all of the heroes by the middle of the game, even if it's not all at the same time. Acquiring a new hero involves a learning curve as the player becomes acquainted with the hero's capabilities. Moreover, introducing characters late into the game gives more opportunity for disparity among the heroes' power: if the new hero is too weak, the player won't want to use him; on the other hand, you don't want to make him too strong. One game that gracefully sidesteps this issue is Chrono Trigger: Magus is certainly not your strongest party member when he (optionally) joins you late into the game, but most players like the character well enough to use him anyway.
In games with larger selections of heroes, remember that the player will tend to want to stick to his core party, whatever he's decided that is. SaGa Frontier allows you to recruit up to 15 heroes at once (out of the surprisingly large cast), but you'll rarely switch to anyone outside of your core party of five. That party will usually end up being the first five heroes that the player isn't dissatisfied with.
You can avoid this by forcing the player to switch around often. This is best accomplished by allowing the player to change party members at any time then designing the game so that battles wear out the heroes, as mentioned in the first section above. If the player is forced to use his entire arsenal, then each additional hero becomes an asset rather than a piece of luggage. (As an aside, I've never seen a game with more than twenty playable characters give you any incentive to use more than a handful of them by the end of the game. Valkyrie Profile does as good a job of this as any, since the characters you get in the optional post-game dungeon are too good to pass up, but many of the characters you get on a regular basis throughout the game end up permanently postmarked "Valhalla.")
If you're including characters that are peripheral to the story, consider making them join the party in more interesting ways than a simple plot sequence. Perhaps they're mercenaries who require a payment before they'll join. Maybe a sidequest is required to find them or convince them to join. Will the character join the party as soon as he's found or is he going to need a good reason to help you out? Will the character stay indefinitely or will he leave as soon as he feels like it? Perhaps the player needs to keep his characters' morale in check to keep them from deserting.
Hero design is an integral part of your game flow. While awesome hero design alone won't make your game great, neglecting it is a surefire way to give yourself a weak game. Keeping in mind the considerations and strategies in this article will help you achieve an effective design for your game's heroes.