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I'm currently working on an RPG game project. I’m out of ideas on how to properly set race skills in the RPG. In the game, three different races exist:

  • Human – Balanced starting stats, active skills are focused on crowd control, debuffs, and average damage
  • Dwarf – starting stats has huge amount of HP but at the cost of damage and speed. Active skills are focused on defense.
  • Elf – starting stats has boost to damage and speed, but at the cost of low HP/MP. Active skills are focused on Damage

Currently I’m in the phase when I want to implement race skills. Race skills should be a passive skill which your character automatically earns after creation. This skill is another way of diversification, so if you compare a dwarf warrior with an elf warrior, there will be a difference in active skills, in starting stats, and also with a race skill.

I'm thinking about race skill for Dwarfs and Elves, but I'm out of ideas for a race skill for humans, which are characterized as a balanced race.

  • Dwarfs – 10% damage reduction on each hit by the enemy
  • Elfs – +5% critical hit chance
  • Humans – ???

Any suggestions are welcome.

streng
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  • Guys thank you for your answer. You move me to the different direction of thinking. For balancing I definitely run some calculations. But the original question was more theoretical than practical, meaning that: If Dwarves are good in defense, and Elves are good in attack, in what should be Humans good? – streng May 15 '19 at 07:30

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Sort of two part answer...

First, I'd make humans "normal" myself - nothing special. We are a kind of bland race. But that's totally a subjective thing.

Second, I would create a combat simulator that is driven off your rules and character classes. The simulator is not a visual, game-type environment. It's purely a program that spits out statistics of simulated combat. This is a classic Monte Carlo simulation setup.

With a system like this, you can let it fight thousands and thousands of random matchups and see what the results are overall. Ideally with 3 races, you want a nice 1/3 1/3 1/3 split showing that all in all the 3 races are statistically even when it comes to victory.

Once you have that simulator working, start tweaking and adjusting your race specs, and re-run the simulation. This will let you get a better idea of how well balanced (or not) your design is. It lets you for example answer the question, "What is the impact of changing the Elf critical chance from 5% to 4%?"

This also gives you full freedom to experiment with different skills for humans to see what the impact is. What happens if humans heal faster? Do a double attack every 10th round? You can test and find out with the simulator.

Tim Holt
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You can't properly balance races unless you have the combat system in place. How useful is 10% damage reduction? If combat is mostly focused on avoiding hits, this skill becomes less and less useful. Also for the 5% critical, what if combat is based on 1-2 hits to kill an enemy? That would require a different critical percentage than if an average enemy needs 50+ hits to kill.

Here's how I've done it in the past, it's not the best way, but it can help you go to the right path.

  • Create a formula like: "A level 1 hero needs 5 hits to kill a level 1 enemy, a level 1 enemy needs 10 hits to kill a hero" (example numbers)
  • Based on that formula, whenever you give a skill to a specific race, try to keep them inside that formula.
  • If the dwarf takes 10% less damage, that means the enemy needs to deal more hits to kill him, to keep the balance, the dwarf would also need to deal less damage.
  • If the elf has 5% chance to score a critical hit, that means it is more likely to kill an enemy with less hits (based on critical damage as well) so to keep the balance they'd need to be weaker to being damaged.

Experiment with different formulas depending on your game. How often a hero attacks is useful in some games but in others its not. When increasing levels, use the same formula but increase some numbers.

Tom Tsagkatos
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