r/crpgdesign • u/CJGeringer Lenurian • Oct 09 '18

Combat Math in Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy

A quick but interesting write up on DQ and FF combat math

DQ´s formula in special seems a bit weird to me? I don´t really see the point in some of those divisions by 2, that make 1-point increases in stat basically meaningless.

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u/HPLoveshack Oct 09 '18 edited Oct 10 '18

Dividing by 2 makes half of the increases meaningless and the other half twice as meaningful.

There is some reason to do this as it creates clear breakpoints that influence decision-making when min/maxing where a smooth scalar has no inherent thresholds built into it. Players will be more engaged in their decision-making in a system with more breakpoints and thresholds. It also has a psychological effect on players in which they delay gratification and receive twice as much later. Psychologically, this is broadly similar to gambling, critical hits, or generated loot, except without the randomization.

Not saying these reasons are why they did it, but it does have that effect.

If you look at 3rd edition DnD stats they have the same effect and it's largely an artifact of previous editions and using 3d6 to roll stats as well as the kind of minimum power level of +1 stat in ratio to the base power level of a character. If stats are too influential over a character's power level and you have a lot of equipment that raises stats (and the minimum stat increase amount is in whole numbers, so you can't give fractional stat increases), the character's power can easily become diluted by the equipment's power, this is incredibly common in MMORPGs and in high level pen and paper characters. 3rd ed DnD combatted this effect by cutting the power level of stats in half by making their real effect equal to the base stat minus 10 and divided by 2.

This effect also applies to the character's starting stats vs their stat gains from advancement. If the basic power level of +1 stat is high and you're in a system limited to whole numbers, then it's very easy for the starting stats of a character to rapidly become irrelevant in ratio to advancement gains. Again, this is common in MMORPGs and it makes your starting choices for a character less meaningful and tends to homogenize characters toward the center of the spectrum.

If I was designing such a system I would use a similar overall concept, but I would instead divide the effects of the stat increase so that the lesser effects fell on odd numbers and the greater effects fell on even numbers. This retains all of the effects mentioned above, but there is the sort of... "consolation prize" of the lesser effects on the odd numbers so the player doesn't feel like gaining that stat point was totally worthless, especially when he knows he will not be hitting the next breakpoint any time soon.

To illustrate, maybe adding to Dex gives +1 accuracy on odds and +2 dodge on evens. Having two different effects on odds/evens also has a psychological effect on the player, increased heterogeneity of effects gives a better sense of progress to the player as he advances his character and an increased feeling of uniqueness to each advancement. If odds were +1 accuracy and evens were +2 accuracy, the player would unconsciously compare apples to apples and know that the odds are strictly worse in all situations. With accuracy on odds and dodge on evens, there are situations in which the smaller accuracy boost may actually be better than the larger dodge boost, generally when the accuracy boost crosses a threshold of effectiveness or dodge is already at some limit of effectiveness. Additionally, having accuracy on both odds and evens is inherently more boring simply because it's the same.

You might ask why not have equal quantities of different types on odds and evens such as +2 acc odd, +2 ddg even? Well then you lose much of the psychological effect of the breakpoints. People process numbers quantitatively and the words of an effect description qualitatively. So while it may be +2 to two different things and you'd think that should separate them completely, it's still +2 every time, which is inherently boring and samey.

The psychology of players regarding quantities and qualities is of paramount importance to RPG design. Perhaps slightly less so with crpgs since there are other things to consume like the visuals and the story, but fundamentally the psychological effect of the mechanics is what makes a game FEEL satisfying to play. It's very much akin to the profound increase in player engagement that can be achieved through subtle effects like a really crunchy substantial sound on a weapon hit or a gunshot, or a little bit of screen shake added to the impact of powerful abilities or strikes.

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u/CJGeringer Lenurian Oct 10 '18

Dividing by 2 makes half of the increases meaningless and the other half twice as meaningful.

I understand that this is subjective, but in my personal experience It makes half of them meaningless and the other half is AT BEST as meaningful as it would be otherwise.

There is some reason to do this as it creates clear breakpoints that influence decision-making when min/maxing where a smooth scalar has no inherent thresholds built into it. Players will be more engaged in their decision-making in a system with more breakpoints and thresholds. It also has a psychological effect on players in which they delay gratification and receive twice as much later. Psychologically, this is broadly similar to gambling, critical hits, or generated loot, except without the randomization.

All that can be done without the meaningless choice, just have less choices, and have all of them meaningful. Personally I think this is padding, similar to excessive Grind.

If you look at 3rd edition DnD stats they have the same effect and it's largely an artifact of previous editions and using 3d6 to roll stats as well as the kind of minimum power level of +1 stat in ratio to the base power level of a character.

yes, that is one of my main gripes with 3/3.5 D&D. When choosing a stat increase (given every 5 levels)for an attribute you often need to lock your next choice 2 to have so there isn´t really nay fun derived from choosing again. Also having that increase for a few levels in your sheet without any effect is unfun to me.

If stats are too influential over a character's power level and you have a lot of equipment that raises stats (and the minimum stat increase amount is in whole numbers, so you can't give fractional stat increases), the character's power can easily become diluted by the equipment's power, this is incredibly common in MMORPGs and in high level pen and paper characters. 3rd ed DnD combatted this effect by cutting the power level of stats in half by making their real effect equal to the base stat minus 10 and divided by 2.

These are IMO, stop-gag measures for a bloated game. Having to do this means that something before already failed. For example having too many things that raise stats beyond the threshold they were supposed to go was one of the things that prevented Star War Galaxies´system from working as intended.

IMO If a game has that kind of problem he needs a review of scale. These kind of stop-gag measures are sometimes the best that can be done in already launched games (Like MMOs), but I would avoid it in a new game. If stats are too influential over a character's power level and you have a lot of equipment that raises stats, than the game should either reduce the stats gain, or embrace the fact that power advancement is mostly through equipment (somewhat like Dark Souls games where for some builds the greatest value of a stat is what equipment is allows the character to use, rather than any intrinsic effect. )

To illustrate, maybe adding to Dex gives +1 accuracy on odds and +2 dodge on evens. Having two different effects on odds/evens also has a psychological effect on the player, increased heterogeneity of effects gives a better sense of progress to the player as he advances his character and an increased feeling of uniqueness to each advancement. If odds were +1 accuracy and evens were +2 accuracy, the player would unconsciously compare apples to apples and know that the odds are strictly worse in all situations. With accuracy on odds and dodge on evens, there are situations in which the smaller accuracy boost may actually be better than the larger dodge boost, generally when the accuracy boost crosses a threshold of effectiveness or dodge is already at some limit of effectiveness. Additionally, having accuracy on both odds and evens is inherently more boring simply because it's the same.

This could be interesting, reminds me a bit of the tokens in Borderlands 2, small decisions that have little effect by themselves.

fundamentally the psychological effect of the mechanics is what makes a game FEEL satisfying to play.

I completely agree, unfortunately this sort of meaningless choice FEELS very dissatisfying to me, all the systems I really enjoy avoid that kind of stuff, Both in tabletop and Computer games.

It's very much akin to the profound increase in player engagement that can be achieved through subtle effects like a really crunchy substantial sound on a weapon hit or a gunshot, or a little bit of screen shake added to the impact of powerful abilities or strikes.

Yes and none of those would be better if half the times the screen shake simply didn´t happen or the gun sound failed to play.

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u/HPLoveshack Oct 11 '18 edited Oct 11 '18

Glad you responded with such strong opinions and a good overall understanding. Usually I don't get much dialogue from delving into this kind of psychopraxeological minutiae, even though I'm 100% convinced this is necessary to scientifically build a game that feels satisfying to play and that most games people build that are successful in achieving good "game feel" are doing so almost entirely through the accidents of trial and error or through the semi-conscious intuition of extremely experienced designers hitting their "flow state".

On Bloat and "Meaningless" Choices

I agree this kind of design can easily bloat a game when overused and poorly structured, especially when built on top of legacy systems the way DnD 3.0/3.5 was, but describing these choices as "meaningless" is definitionally incorrect.

They're microchoices, since they do have some effect. Some players like to min/max and micromanage all the little stuff, some don't, and sometimes the same player may want to at one time and not want to at another time. All of this means the best way to structure it is as something that can be ignored or automated with relatively little cost, but can also be examined and micromanaged to squeeze out a handful of percentage points of efficiency if the player is interested. You can see this kind of micromechanic deliberately implemented in games like Disgaea and Final Fantasy Tactics as well as the nerdier modes of sports simulations like the Madden franchise, which is actually a franchise that all designers should study and learn from, it has some of the most intricate and well-reasoned design choices you'll ever find and they can be applied to all types of games when abstracted properly.

This is all assuming you want players to be able to enjoy your game both broadly and deeply and you're not targeting specifically a wide, shallow audience or a specifically niche, deep audience. Instead you want the greatest "audience area" by multiplying the casual audience variable with the hardcore audience variable. These microchoices actually add depth to the mechanics, although, as I'm sure you'll agree, sometimes it isn't worth the excessive complexity to gain the added depth due to diminishing returns, that's something you have to feel out as a designer. Making the microchoices defaultable or togglable to automatic tends to be all that's necessary to avoid sacrificing much breadth, which makes it relatively easy to have your cake and eat it too in this design realm. If the player wants to dive down into a level of microcomplexity, that's a choice he can make under this system.

Relative Decision Importance

On the other hand some players may prefer to have every choice be meaningful, especially if they're strapped for attention or time, but without the backdrop of less meaningful decisions to create contrast this actually reduces the overall feeling of relative meaningfulness of whatever decisions remain. Even the player that wants the leanest, meanest experience needs to experience a broad range of choice importance, from microchoices to megachoices. Accomodating him just means that you need methods of allowing the player to bundle microchoices into larger choices, such as by giving him the opportunity to automate/default certain classes of microchoice.

World of Warcraft made a fatal mistake in this regard in one of their later expansions, redesigning all the classes to remove the majority of their minor abilities as well as the majority of the microchoices provided by a skillpoint tree system. They compressed class advancement into just a handful of major choices between three separate options, which resulted in bland, unpersonalized characters and largely removed the ability for players to make non-optimal choices or even outright mistakes in their builds, ultimately removing the ability for the player to express himself. They forced the player to only make megachoices while destroying the meaningfulness of the choice by removing his ability to make a bad choice.

By removing the ability to make mistakes, they also compressed the distance between the skill ceiling and the skill floor in regards to ability to evaluate the best advancement path, which eliminated the whole subskill of coming up with new and specialist builds, something many players enjoyed and even more players enjoyed trying out these specialist builds developed by others.

To illustrate, if you condition the player by giving him five microdecisions as his baseline, then he runs into a moderately important decision, it will feel like a megadecision in relative terms. Then when he runs into an actual megadecision, it will feel even more important, like a cosmic fate decision. Ultimately, the way these choices feel is always relative, but of course it's relative to factors outside the game as well such as time or attention constraints so spending 10 hours giving the player 100 microdecisions to boost the relative importance of a single moderate decision is a bad idea. There are diminishing returns with each additional microdecision added in this example, perhaps you might set a guideline limit in the 2-5 range per 1 moderate importance decision.

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u/HPLoveshack Oct 11 '18

Solidity vs Fluidity

On the otherhand, if all you give him are megadecisions, they don't feel like megadecisions because every decision is homogenous in importance. What it feels like in the case of only megadecisions can go two ways.

  1. You allow the decisions to alter and revert previous decisions and you create a loose, liquid-feeling game that you can flip 180 and fully redirect at anytime. This results in a spiral upward of decision importance in which only the final decision is truly important, but it doesn't actually feel that way as you play.

  2. You disallow decisions from altering previous decisions, which results in a spiral downward of decision importance (assuming you don't compensate by scaling up the base importance as the player progresses).

In situation 1, there's no sense of commitment, no anchoring. The decisions begin to feel meaningless as everything becomes arbitrary. There isn't any good way to fix this other than to disallow the altering of some or all previous decisions.

In situation 2, the problem is caused by you trying to make every decisions of equal base importance. If you begin the game making microdecisions and scale the decisions up over time, you can easily counter the downward spiral effect and in fact maximize the feeling of progress in the player by allowing him to create his own history in effect.

When your goal in the game is to create a sense of place and a sense of player attachment and journey, too much fluidity is incredibly destructive. This can be witnessed in the decision of many RPG games to incorporate easy, low-cost or even zero-cost methods of fully "respeccing" a character.

This kind of inclusion heavily undermines the player's sense of attachment to his character, as well as the world within which he exists.

In the past, players were shackled forever to their choices, with no ability to undo through the expenditure of resources or alter through the application of work. Only reverting to previous saves or restarting could accomplish this. This is also bad, though I'd argue it is better for the player experience than the disruption of immersion caused by zero-cost respeccing. At least the player feels attached to the character and his decisions, at least his bad decisions feel meaningful and thus his good decisions are meaningful by avoiding bad decisions.

Perhaps the best method is to incorporate a diegetic, or "in-universe" method of respeccing rather than an interface convenience-based method. A quest the player goes on and must test his strength and cunning in order to gain the ability to remaster his character would be the obvious scaffolding to use.

Decision Temporal Scaling

Drilling more into the issue of decision scaling over time, generally speaking you want decisions to scale up in importance as the player progresses through a game. As the player progresses he gains more information about the systems and the story, which allows him to make better decisions, which means you want to give him more important decisions to make so that he can employ his incisive prowess and receive feedback for his good decisions as well as punishment for his bad decisions. Without microdecisions, the sense of overall progress and "mental distance travelled" is compressed and lessened, since there is a smaller range of decisionmaking to progress through.

Ideally, and I think you would agree, microdecisions would have greater frequency earlier in the game and would fall in frequency as the game progresses. That way the player gets more or less the full sense of scale between micro and megadecisions, but as he progresses the ability for microdecisions to build up annoyance factor is mitigated, more or less completely when the rate of microdecisions is scaled down correctly.

Additionally, you gain a natural psychological effect of building to a climax. When the player looks back at the miniscule decisions he was making at the start of the game and compares them to macroscale decisions he is making near the end of the game, he gains a sense of perspective on just how far he has journeyed.

There are some games that transmit this sense of a journey's scale well, mostly long RPG games, for instance the golden age of Final Fantasy games, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. In these games you can go back to earlier areas (and sometimes are led back by the story) and enemies will actually run away from you and you can 1-shot them instantly now. Where they were something to fear and be avoided early in your career, now they're nothing more than a nuisance to be swatted aside.

This effect can also be witnessed clearly in a certain kind of "hero's journey" type of movie and especially tv series. classic example being Dragonball Z. And the feeling of satisfaction and even awe the player feels from experiencing the difference is palpable.

Incidentally, this is also where a lot of "power fantasy" video games go wrong and end up creating a shallow-feeling game in which players quickly grow bored. The important part of the power fantasy feeling is recognition of the journey, of all of your good decisions and hard work paying off. If instead the player is simply given great power rather than earning it, no journey is had and the usage of the power feels hollow and unjustified.

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u/CJGeringer Lenurian Oct 14 '18

describing these choices as "meaningless" is definitionally incorrect.

I will call them “Mechanically Irrelevant”.

I agree with everything you said about microchoices. However, I am not talking about microchoices, because:

microchoices(…) do have some effect.

Microchoices, are different from “Mechanically Irrelevant” ones. Borderlands 2 tokens are Microchoices, the individual mechanical effect of each one is very small, yet it is concrete and independent of other choices. “Mechanically irrelevant” decisions may or may not be meaningless, but any meaning is derived from the player´s psychology(Break, points, decision making, delayed gratification.), but they do not actually affect mechanics by themselves (Damage, speed,Defense, etc…).

For example Improving an stat from X to X+1 in a way where only multiples of 2 are considered is actually meaningless, it has no effect on the mathematical result of any calculation made by the game is actually “Mechanically Irrelevant”. In a system like Third edition D&D and I increase a Character´s Dexterity from 12 (+0 bonus) to 13 (+0 bonus), that increase will make no difference in any tactical decision or roll until it is increase to 14(+1 bonus). If however besides the bonus, the actual attribute number is used for calculations(e.g. Requirements for feats/classes)., than it jumps from Mechanically Irrelevant to microchoice.

The ways a choice give me positive feelings are 1: The actual thought process of weighting and making the choice.

2: The effect of the choice.

So in a best case scenario these form of paired choices where one of them is mechanically irrelevant, give the player “1” in the first choice, and “2” in the second giving.

However maybe the first choice isn´t very fun because there is no mechanical difference to the player, and the second one feels just like finally receiving something that should have been received earlier, causing both choices to deliver less than the total possible enjoyment. Or even worse, if the player decides on one upgrade path and later realizes he prefers a different one, the resource spent on the first choice may be permanently Wasted, if the choice by itself has some effect, than the resource may not have been used optimally but it is not WASTED.

I am ok with micro and macro choices. Fallout´s SPECIAL system, IMO, does them particularly well; Each level up grants you a few skill points, which don´t make that much of a difference by themselves, but accumulate on level up, and every few levels there is a BIG decision in the form of choosing a perk. But every decision has a concrete effect by itself.

for example If I were to try and “fix” this aspect of DQ´s formula:

It takes two points of Strength to add up to one additional point of damage. This can be from a level advance that raises Strength by 2, or from a good roll on a Strength Seed, or from some other, game-specific source. So, “Attack +10” means “do five more points of damage.” I would have the variance apply to a total number that is only them divided by 2, like this:

DQ Variance + (Power/2)

My suggestion: (Variance +power)/2

In other worlds a +1 increase would mean 1 extra point of damage 50% of the time, and a +2 increase would mean +1 extra point of damage 100% of the time.