Powers and Builds

I have this theory about “smooth” and “lumpy” build systems for RPGs.

It dates back to my teenage years playing the pen-an-paper RPG’s Villains & Vigilantes and Champions. V&V is gloriously “lumpy” – full of big tables and lists of data. Flame Powers could bundle up flight and throwing fireballs, and had different dice rolls from lightning bolts, and so on. It’s like a big toybox full of goodies to explore!

Champions and the HERO system is an incredibly elegant piece of engineering, in contrast. Both fire and lightning attack are just dice of ranged energy damage, possibly with modifiers attached. You’re guaranteed balance and fairness in that kind of system, and it appealed heavily to my programmer’s mind.

I’ve built a power system that allows me to assemble any power I want from blocks, just add damage, debuffs, mezzes etc and they’ll all work, and increase the cost of the power appropriately.

I could let the player’s loose on that, making it smooth like Champions. Or I could create some prebuilt powersets and make it more lumpy like V&V.

Then there’s character classes and roles in any RPG system. I wanted one of the pillars of Esperanto to be freedom of choice for your character, which means abandoning strict character classes. Ideally, if you really want Flight and Invulnerability and Heat Vision and Amazing Strength and Electrical Blasts, you can have them all. But you won’t be as good as someone who’s specialised in just one of these things.

Here’s what I’ve came up with:

Powers are arranged in thematic powersets, designed by me. I’m going lumpy. I was partly inspired to do this by playing City of Heroes, which has character classes with well defined powersets. I realised there’s a certain joy to picking through these pre-defined goodies with their idiosyncratic powers (I’m looking at you, Stone Armor!) and making what you can from them.

In Esperanto, players can choose any power from any powerset for their character, but…

Each character has:

• a Role that modifies the effectiveness of powers, eg Tanks get better values for self-defence powers, but lowered damage and mez values
• a Primary powerset, whose powers operate at +50% effectiveness
• a Secondary powerset, whose powers operate at +25% effectiveness
• two Tertiary powersets at base values
• any other powers operate at -50% value ie half strength

If you have an idea for a character who’s main thing is being invulnerable, you can choose Tank role and Invulnerability as your primary powerset, and you’ll be very tough out of the box. Your damage output won’t be stellar, at least not compared to a character with a primary damage set and the Artillery role.

Choosing your Role, and each of the four main powersets for a character is an investment in certain aspects at the expense of others.

Example

Let’s have a look at the popular and classic combination of Invulnerability and Super-strength.

The base values for Amazing Invulnerability and Amazing Punch are shown below: 20% resistance and 10 damage respectively.

We can see how these change if we select different roles.

Selecting the Tank role increases the resistance and decreases the damage exactly as advertised.

The values shown in the power selection screen reflect the Role you’ve currently selected. Notice that the cost of the powers has not changed.

The values in your character screen when you’ve selected may be different yet again, depending on whether you’ve selected the powerset as your Primary or Secondary.

If you chose Invulnerability as your primary, and Amazing Strength as your secondary they would look like this. The values for your Primary get multiplied by a further +50%.

20% (base value) * 1.5 (Tank Role) * 1.5 (Primary) = 45%

And the values for your secondary get multiplied by a further +25%

10 (base damage) * 0.8 (Tank Role) * 1.25 (Secondary) = 10

If we decide to make our character more offence based we could make Amazing Strength our Primary, and switch to the Brawler Role, intended for melee damage characters.

Our physical resistance is now

20 * 1 (Brawler Role) *1.25 (Secondary) = 25%

And our damage with Amazing Punch is

10 * 1.25 (Brawler) * 1.5 (Primary) = 18.75

Adding enhancements will also increase the strength of these powers, but unlike Role and Primary/Secondary choices, these will increase the points cost of the powers.

Basic enhancements will typically double the strength of the powers, but the crafting system will allow you to make even more powerful enhancements.

This allows the same base powers to scale depending on your character’s strengths, whether invulnerability is their main superhuman trait, right down to a street level hero wearing a bulletproof vest.

Project Progress Snapshot