Saturday Morning Adventure Dev Diaries #10: Character Progression

Hey guys! Dev diary #9 wasn't very juicy, so here's an extra one for today! In this dev diary, I want to go through the various means of character progression I am going to implement in SMA.

Progression

I'm planning for progression in SMA to follow a pretty free-form system, predictably inspired by the widespread point-buy progression systems in JRPGs. My current plan is for characters to gain a couple different types of points as they level up which can be spent on a different things to improve their strength:

1. Improving Attributes
2. Gaining new Skills
3. Improving existing Skills
4. Gaining new Abilities
5. Gaining new Feats

Improving Attributes

Just like so many other RPGs, you'll be able to impove some attributes of your atttributes as you progress through levels. This will just be a simple system, something like "whenver you reach a level that is a multiple of 5, gain an attribute point". Pretty standard stuff all in all.

Gaining New Skills & Improving Existing Skills

I'm currently planning for a lot of the skill system to rely on a character's Intelligence. At every level, characters will gain a number of skill points. Here's my initial plans for gaining and improving skills:

• Characters have a "skill cap" equal to 4 or 4 + Intelligence, whichever is lower.
• At every level, you get 6 + Intelligence skill points. These points can each be spent to improve a skill bonus you have by 1, or to gain a new skill.

I'm not 100% sold on this system yet, I kinda want something in place to limit the skill cap further at lower levels. As it currently stands, a character with a fairly high Intelligence could get up to +8 in a single skill right away at first level. Something like the Pathfinder system of not allowing skills to exceed a character's current level might be good, but I also want to preserve the influence Intelligence has on the skill cap.. The current barrier to this is finding a nice way of wording it to be honest. "skills cannot exceed your skill cap, and also cannot exceed your level" feels way too clunky. Maybe just having the skill cap equal 4 + half Intelligence would work better?

For more info on my plans for the skill system, refer to dev diary #5.

Abilities

As characters level, they'll gain "ability points" which can be spent on gaining new abilities for their character. Abilities will have a free-form style of construction. When creating a new ability, the player will choose various aspects like the attack roll used, some properties of the attack (like whether it's melee or ranged), how many creatures the ability targets, the damage roll, the damage type, and whether the ability has a secondary effect. Based on the aspects a player chooses, abilities will have a certain stamina cost to use.

Feats

I'm basing the majority of how feats work in SMA on how they're handled in Open Legend. Feats is the current term I'm using to describe specific features that cannot be accessed through the ability or skill system. They would encompass two main things: passive gameplay bonuses, and unique features that are too specific to fit into the ability system. To compare with D&D, this would cover a a lot of the unique class features granted to characters in D&D 5e, like a Barbarian's Rage, a Druid's Wild Shape, or a Ranger's animal companion. Feats will be gained by spending "feat points" which characters acquire as they level. My current progression plan is largely to mimick Open Legend, with character's getting 6 feat points at first level and 3 per level afterwards. Feat costs will mostly range from 1 feat point for minor traits to 3 feat points for larger, character-defining traits.

In Closing

Well that's character progression in a nutshell. I'm aiming for simplicty more than anything else here. I'm aware that this kind of free-form system may be overwhelming to some players, so I'm also planning to include some preset progression paths in the game - kind of like a traditional character class built using the system. These presets will hopefully allow some players to just pick an option and go with it without having to worry about making lots of choices during character progression, or they could of course just act as a starting point that can be modified to your liking later on.

The next dev diary is going to be about attack and damage rolls in SMA, particularly with regards to weapon proficiencies. It'll probably end up a little technical and dry, so I may end up releasing another slightly juicier dev diary alongside it.