Classes? How do you choose them?

Haro everyone,

Just out of curiosity in your projects how does everyone design their characters' classes (is it through the character's personality, backstory, etc.). More so how do you balance them?

Curiously,

Seraph

If you're game features fixed classes for specific characters instead of a job-switching system like Bravely Default or FFV, you definitely have to make the character's class fit in with their personality and history.

For instance, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense (sorry, majority of RPG heroes) for a simple farmboy to be an expert swordsman. It just doesn't.

Now, this doesn't mean that all healers have to be kind, compassionate folk. They could be rude, tough and disdainful of their fellow man, but they were born with healing magic, and they've got a job to do, glibglobbit! Cutty! Test for Lupus! (Sorry, lapsed into House there.)

As for balancing the classes, this partly has to do with how many PCs you have. In a party of four (rpg standard) you usually have a physical powerhouse, a speed/stealth class, an attack mage, and a recovery/support character. If you have more characters, you have more options.

In my current game, there are 8 pcs. Duran is a Sage, raised by a holy order of librarians, is physically weak and uses a mixture of different magics. Cordelia inherited her mother's holy Paladin powers; good defense, good attack, some healing, some holy spells. Tiko is a ranger raised by forest spirits who taught him archery and plant magic. Olvanka is a knight who honed her swordsmanship in the military; no magic, great attack and defense, but slow. Xen is a secret agent with martial arts expertise; hits hard and fast, with low defense and a few "chi" stat buffs. Siobhan is a witch; physically weak with high magical attack and some nasty state curses. Jean-Luc is an orphaned street kid who steals to get by; fast, lucky, and can swipe goodies from enemies. Mira is a desert priestess who calls healing and cleansing rains, but can also blast baddies with water spells.

Also, in games like Golden Sun, all the PCs have magic, but only of one element. So, if you're in a dungeon full of fire monsters, Mia (a water healer) can cast her water spells on monsters, Garret (fire warrior) sticks to phys attacks, and Isaac (earth fighter) switches to recovery. Ivan's air magic remains neutral here, so he can do whatever.

However you sort your classes, whatever you call them, just make sure they each have some kind of flaw which can be covered by one of the other classes. Its not just the strengths, but also their weakness which keeps things interesting and makes the player think about strategy.

I fixed my classes specifically around the characters' backstories.  The types of skills they have reflect that.  Like captainproton I find a lot of stock classes and the way they are distributed among the type of characters rather ridiculous.  My classes in my current game are

Farmer; vagabond, sorceress (wants to be a Consulting Sorceress - think Sherlock Holmes being a Consulting Detective), an artistic dwarf (don't ask), a spymaster, a bodyguard (female, actually), a knight and a rock beaver (hews stone instead of wood - it makes sense in-game).  Thus my farmer has healing skills because a farmer is someone who feeds others; my bodyguard has all sorts of protective skills and so on.

I've never been a fan of the idea that your healer must be physically weak or that only one character can do buffs/debuffs, so the skills are spread around more than in some games.  This makes team choice more interesting, particularly as I have 5 in the active party.  This makes balancing a bit more tricky because there are now more variables to take into account.  It is also affected enormously by whether you have battle items which deal damage and can be used by anyone, or not, and if you do, how easy/difficult they are to come by.  I think well judged offensive items can make things much more interesting.  Done badly they break the balance.

I tend to define the classes by backstory.  My current game has 4 party members.  One is a combination healer/offensive magic user.  The other is the designated tank.  Another is a Shaman --- who learns her most significant elemental attack magic Blue Mage style (the party needs to be hit with it).  And the last one is a high speed, raw damage dealing Martial Artist.

I dole out secondary abilities which seem logical for the class and character.  The Tank has defensive magic and some basic healing magic such as Veil to reduce the targeting of a party member.  The Martial Artist has a variety of combat tactics (Stances which impact attack and defense strength and so forth).

How do I balance them?  In my mind, each class has a different specialty.  So, I rank the classes in terms of magic attack strength, physical attack strength, defensive strength, speed, etc.  So for my first pass, I make sure the obvious ATK/DEF/etc stats match those rankings.  I also check the Skills to check their damage output, elemental type, etc.

Once I've done that, I do a lot of Test battles, with the equipment I expect the characters to have at that point in the game.  I watch the damage output and damage received, and make sure those are reasonable for the opponent type.  For random encounters, I tend to have them chew at the party, but not brutally so.  They can be challenging.  For example:  I have some nasty Thunder Faeries late in the game.  These are fragile, but very quick and love to cast Lightning Storm, which hits the entire party and can cause Paralysis.  And they call their friends if the battle goes on too long (ouch!).  But, most random encounters are not usually super challenging.

Also, I've tried to make most random encounters I set to not take more than 3 rounds.  Boss battles tend to do more damage and have more interesting strategy, such as "Counter magical attacks with Silence"

In my case, most of the tweaking is in opponent stats and equipment stats.    But I have taken Skills and made them more "brittle" (i.e. powerful defensive states either are short duration or often fall when the player is hit) and changed their damage output, There's no real simple trick to balancing.   I just tweak all of these and re-run the battles to make sure they're fair but challenging (the latter much more as you get near the end of the game)

Really, it's all about testing and re-testing as you tweak damage output, any positive or negative States inflicted, Skills and so forth.

^This 

Most of the char in my current project have very developed background stories(some of which are upto 25 years in the making, wow boy does time fly), so it makes sense to just fix each char with their own unique class. I've did other things to allow customization, but the classes, that's not one of them. 

I have a char who trained to be a Priestess(I'm paraphrasing here by calling her a Priestess, she's much more, but to keep this post straight to the point), so naturally she's gonna be a Priestess type char whom has many healing, and support spells.

I have a Dragonian char, who has the ability to turn into various dragon forms, so such abilities are tied to him as well(his class will be called a Dragonian Guardian, there's a huge story to explain all about the Dragonian Guardians, and such).

another example

I have a special char(newest, highly developed char I perceived of, not even 9 years old, and has been on hold, but her story is coming around). In short actual dragons get a power/ability upgrade so to say, when they hit the 10 thousand year mark. Now because Dragonians take the form, and properties of a dragon when they transform into one, in theory if a Dragonian were able to survive long enough to hit 10,000 years old, such would apply to them as well, and just like their pure Dragon counterparts, they would earn the title of Ancient(placed in front of their general title/class name). Due to the fact Dragonians are used as a last line of DEF to prevent the "strongest" demons in the demon worlds from attemting to overrun a protected world, as you can imagine, Dragonians never live to be that old(the oldest dragonians are more like 5k, and even that is only due to special cases).

Well due to a bunch of circumstances(which she's definitely not happy about. You'll have to play the game to find out her full story, I haven't even written anything about her yet, I've been meaning to put it down on paper for years now, as well as upload some of it to DA, but haven't done so yet), she has made it to over 10k years old. To make matters even more unique, she's a rare type of Dragonian, who has the "natural" ability to change into a Holy Dragon, so her class is gonna be called Ancient Holy Dragonian.

Most of my char classes are based on their personality and jobs.

My classes are tied to my characters, and the majority of them are well established and is somewhat tied to their profession.

IE, Lockeh Cross is the Knight of the Sun, the Celestial Knight, chosen by the Sun God.  It's a class that specializes in powerful holy elemental sword techniques and buffing allies.  He can heal but it's effects become negligible once Apollo joins the party.

IE;2:  Apollo is an Acolyte, the son of the Church of the Five's High Priest who was recently initiated into the order.  A "standard" healer class, with a twist. Apollo uses a warhammer instead of a flimsy stick.  His physical attack, while lower than physically inclined characters, is moderate, and can deliver slow, crushing blows that allow him to deal extra damage to Medallia's hardshelled and faster creatures but smashing their shells/leg bones.

IE;3:  My main character, Kain, is a Wyvern Rider/the eponymous Dragon Knight.  He's used to being in the air, and as such uses a lance and the wind to deal extreme damage at great risk.  Falcon's Wing is an airborne strike that has a chance to decrease Kain's defense.  His magic is inclined to giving buffs that can allow for slight counter attacks and magic reflection.  He becomes increasingly versatile as the game goes on, but he really excels at nothing, although his speed is on the higher end of the spectrum.  If anything he has elementally inclined weapons to reflect the storyline changes to his established life.

Like others have said, mine are mostly based on their backstories, and their overall build. It always looked silly to me when these frail looking JRPG heroes wielded massive two-handed weapons, so I try to stay away from that generally (even if I could make it lore-friendly). For magic-classes though I tend to be a little more lenient, so my farmboy or knight might know a little or have an aptitude for a certain type of magic. Honestly though, as long as I can make a convincing argument for a particular class, I tend not to worry too much. So I may switch my character from a sword to an axe somewhere down the line, and just make some slight adjustments to their backstory so it all fits together.

Yeah, I agree with you on the whole, "skinny bishie-boy wielding a massive sword" thing. Most of those characters have arms the size of my wrists and barely look strong enough to carry all the hair gel they use.

I also agree when it comes to the body type of the character matching the class. After all, someone who has to devote a big chunk of time to memorizing spells probably wouldn't be super athletic,right? Though I suppose it would be funny if a total meathead were to discover an inherent magical skill. "Gonna get hexed, bro!"