This is a recent issue we had with Chaingame, so I figured I’d bring it up here. In an RPG battle system, spells are generally a pretty big part of it. Turn based games in particular use them a lot. All you need to do is look at the big spells lists in games such as Final Fantasy to see that. I guess some people enjoy putting in their feature lists “999 spells!!!!” or something like that. But it’s not so much the quantity of spells as it is how useful each of them are.
Now, I bring it up because of Chaingame. We had end game spells which pretty much either did everything, or became obsolete. An example would be the Full Boost, which would make Power Boost, Guard Boost, and every other buff obsolete. At the end game, there is no decision whether you should take the round and see which buff you should cast, you can just pick that one and you’re set. Then Power/Guard/Life Boost just take up space in the menu because no one will be using them anymore.
There are some games I’ve played where the main character starts with just an attack and a sword skill. The sword skill does about the same damage or maybe slightly more damage but costs MP. However, it doesn’t scale in damage in the same way. So your attack could do 40 damage, the skill could do 60 damage, but later in the game the attack could do 132 damage and the skill would do about 70 this time. Now, in what case would you prefer to take the 70 damage skill that costs MP over an attack which is free and more easily accessible in the menu?
So when designing skills, you should think about how useful they are compared to each other, how useful it will be in the future, for how long it will be useful, how useful the player will believe it is, and things like that.
One of the hardest skills for the player to use are the status effect spells. Final Fantasy X had a great idea for them, simply have them as Attack + Status effect so you don’t lose the turn if the status effect doesn’t connect. You don’t have to do that though, but if they are in the game, they should be useful to the player. What use is it if only the weak enemies that you can easily kill are the only ones affected by status effects? Alternatively, if you’re not careful, they can break the game and make it boring for the player. I read a review on a game that had high HP bosses but that all were easily put to sleep, and sleep lasted a long while and wasn’t easily interrupted. The difficulty went down to 0 like that.
You want to have the player think about what they’ll do, and “Attack, Spam Ultima, Spam Cure4, Attack” every turn doesn’t involve players brains very much. Games should have meaningful choices.
OK, that is it from me for now, I am tired. Thanks for reading and feel free to offer suggestions, feedback and comments on this!