how to handle not-so-powerful PC?

hi! I'm new to community. there is something I wish to discuss with you all.

I do love how lv99 Harold can have 9999 Hp and 999 Atk, but what if I choose to limit the power of human potential to that of real world?

think about low level wizard of D&D, heck he has only 4 hp at lv1. even a slight scratch with a sword can kill him.

for many years Lord of the rings is in my mind, like how "that human warrior" whose name starts with B died. a single arrow can kill the mighty man.

so, what if every enemy attack is very dangerous? will you rely on dodge or block for 90% of attack to not get hit? what could be the ideal solution?

Borderline case, but I think the way the discussion is likely to go, this is probably better in 'Game Mechanics Design'.

[mod]Moving this.[/mod]

And here I thought PC as 'Personal Computer', turns out it's a 'Player Character'.

In mount and blade, while it isn't one hit kill, even after you maxed all the stats, getting out of trouble from 5 - 10 men ganging up you together is still troublesome. Means, you make the enemy statistically equal with your character. Even if you have your own level quite high, you would still think twice if you want to engage a larger band than yours.

@TheoAllen I respectfully disagree with your association.
I have played countless hours of warband on highest possible difficulty. It's ridiculous how easy it is to play with a maxed out character.
It's rather impossible for it to be difficult to deal with groups of enemies. You have higher walking speed than them, meaning foot soldiers will never catch you as long as you have some maneuvering space. You also have speed of attack advantage. Weapon master 10 and 420 two handed weapon skill will grant you two attacks for their one, meaning even multiple enemies attacking you are no issue, since you always have space to strike. And if you can't, simply go back to create some distance.
And if you have a horse and great lance, then it's even easier, because you can easily cover the distance between you and enemy archers and quickly walk away afterwards. I have beaten 30 khergit lancer deserters alone. With a group of 20 I defeated a lord carrying 150 soldiers. Sturdy horse, good armor, lance and two shields worked wonders.
Of course viking conquest and fire and sword are another matter, because f&s has firearms and viking conquest has a ton of spears - a stabbing attack with a polearm stops a horse in its tracks.

But back to the thread.
If you want to make the player not too sturdy, I still have ways to deal with the damage - separating my group of four to two healers and two heavy hitters has never disappointed me and in fact made some games pretty easy for me (for example Doom & destiny on hard). If you want to make it one shot - one kill, then 90% dodge would suck completely, because it's RNG. In this case it wouldn't be a bad idea to introduce some custom mechanics to dodge attacks, where it would then depend on the player's skill to dodge it or not.

oops sorry!

@TheoAllen
ah right, I always gangbanged when playing it. it could be ok material for start!

@Poryg
I dont know why but I was obsessed with rng, even after horrible defeat at Darkest Dungeon. it is good to hear other's opinions to open my eyes ;)

RNG with one shot attacks always sucks.
I've played a game where the last boss battle was completely ridiculous. The boss had a ridiculous HP pool and had a normal sort of attack, a stronger attack that targeted two, a two shot kill AOE attack and a heal that healed 50% of its HP.
Of course since it was entirely RNG, it was also only based on luck whether I could defeat the boss or not. Because for example when it threw 2 AOE attacks in succession, it wiped out my entire party without me being able to do anything about it, because it caused me 75% HP damage and I could not outheal that. When I got him to 10% HP and he then casted 2x heal, he was back at 100% health, absolutely nullifying these 20 minutes of attacks and heals I did (except for the lost items of course). Not a pleasant experience.
This is no different. When a human is at a disadvantage, he needs something to offset the disadvantage. RNG will not offset this disadvantage, because it works for him once, but against him next time. Thus he needs either some weakness or mechanic he can exploit or be able to avoid it with his skill.

RNG kills can go burn in hell.

@Poryg I've heard it from my big bro years ago who was also avid player of MnB. Me? I got bored after few hours playing. Take it with a grain of salt.

@hsw2201 the starting point is, you need another party member to back your PC up. Or, create a mechanic that rely on player's skill, could be reaction or deduction. Reaction would be playing a lot of QTE, to dodge or parry attack, one or two hits could kill you. Reaction is like, a most of bullet hell where if you touch a single bullet, you die. Deduction is like, tactic game where tactical position matter where you ambush the enemy.

As such I think it's better to come up with other mechanic other than standard turn battle where most of the part are based on rng like evasion, hit rate, or even damage variations.

I dislike instant death moves with low success rates, I feel while there is a random luck factor to it, you can end up defeating the boss in a single turn or just by spamming that move until it works. I don't see much fun in that and feel it would take away a lot of the experience if all the bosses and enemies are effected by that same skill.

I would rather you have to use different moves and have bonuses with certain skills and items then have a single attack, no matter the RNG rate, that can take out that boss or enemy.

Saying that, most RNG when it applies any other state or reasonably fair damage output, I do like and think can make battle systems more interesting and fun, on both the party members and the enemies sides.

As long as they're neither too high or too low when balancing out. I don't want them to break the entire game either.

I'd say avoid RNG like the plague for this. I was just playing Persona 3 The Answer (the extra dungeon that is with the FES version of Persona 3) and their idea of more strategic battles was to make it as follows:

1: Near impossible to hit the enemy to get player advantage
2: Many enemies are only weak to Light or Dark, which doesn't work so well at start of game when the spell only has a (supposedly) 25% chance to hit in the first place. And I say supposedly as I hit like 2 times out of 30 in my 2 hours playing it. But if you try anything else, they drain it or reflect it, so spam Light or Dark it is.
3: First boss was only weak to one element...and they gave it the skill to Dodge that. So it's all RNG if you really hit or not.
4: All guides I consulted even says things like this: "Well, hope it doesn't use that skill, else it is game over" or "Hope you find that item, as the next boss is impossible without it"

Basically, there is no strategy whatsoever. It's all whether or not the RNGGoodess blesses you. I gave up 2 hours in right after beating the first boss then losing a random battle due to bad RNG.

And speaking of early edition DND, I grew up on them too, and early battles are just awful. It's miss, miss, miss, miss, just hit the stupid goblin already. It's anything but fun, and I think we honestly only played them as there were no other options out there at the time.

As it is, there is a reason most battles don't mimic real world fights, and that is it would honestly not be fun. In a real world battle, one hit usually ends the battle, as it either kills you or injures you so badly you can't continue. While that might be realistic, few would find fighting in a game that way fun at all, and would probably give up early on.

@bgillisp

Well, if the characters aren't that powerful, giving them a few RNG damage skills and state skills may actually balance it out better.

RNG doesn't have to be set to 3%, for example if you suddenly make it 50% it's likely to hit in 1-3 turns. It's all about balancing that for what works for the game.

@hsw2201

If they are all weak playable characters, and if they are major and going to be in the party for a large part of the game, giving them some advantages so they can be powerful in some instances would be a good idea. If the character is setup with a formula where every single encounter becomes very dangerous/a huge challenge for the entire party as a whole, just because one or all the characters in the party are weak, I think that would be overwhelming in a standard RPG. You could instead make a different game where there are fewer encounters, if this is extreme then not many, but each encounter is a challenge and a like a boss fight. Otherwise, I don't see it working.

Even in instances where, let's say you have 4 party members in battle and only 1 is super weak compared to the other three, it'd still be best to give that character some advantages against some enemies so there is a deeper purpose for them to be in the party gameplay-wise, otherwise it's going to feel annoying if they get KO'd every turn and it isn't easy to restore there health.

See with the wizard example, they may be taken out in a single hit but I'd imagine they also have powerful magic skills that deal more damage than other characters can do. With RPG's today, if you were going to balance that out, you'd normally have a setup where you can revive them easily or block the damage for them to keep them from being underpowered.

Another method would be making the enemy troops in a way that the stronger characters can deal with them and the weaker characters are just in the party but doesn't effect the output of the battles. So the battles don't become harder with the super weak character, but are beatable at the right type of pace for your RPG because the stronger characters can handle them.

That can be used if for comedy purposes if you want a really weak character there for a few laughs or if that character is generally meant to be weak for the party for story purposes, again though, if they're going to be in the party for a major party of the game without being able to swap them out, I'd recommend giving them some advantages in some fights or making them get stronger and give some sort of plot device reason with the story if there weakness it's solely based on that. Saying that, make it fit in the story, I said reason not excuse.

What youre aiming to do puts you in rough territory but that doesnt make it impossible.

Turn based rpgs are usually very forgiving and strategically easy.. less hp and faster combat means less room for error so youre aiming at making a harder game. If combat involves any RNG you have potential for hopeless situations outside of the players control. But combat does not have to need rng. I would avoid chance as much as possible and focus on damage reduction for defence rather than dodge or block.

Personally, I wouldn't go that route at all. While I plan on having most of my mid-endgame enemies be pretty heavy hitters, the player will have sufficient tools to deal with this, such as tanking abilities to draw attacks while mitigating damage to the user, abilities to buff their own stats, abilities to reduce enemy stats, party-wide elemental resistance abilities, etc. Both players and enemies have access to very-high-chance-of-success status ailments, but there are also plenty of accessories (and 4 slots for them!) to negate these ailments, various abilities to remove different effects, and of course different enemies have different immunities.

I guess the point I wanted to make is that, if every attack is meant to be an arrow or bullet that can end a character's life in one hit, and its gated behind RNG, then players are going to have a bad time. However, if they have sufficient tools to defend against these kinds of things, success is going to feel a lot more rewarding and failure is going to feel more like, "ugh, I should've used ___ instead" rather than "@%#^ing RNG ^%%# again! *throws controller*"

thank you guys/gals, you all are really helpful! good to be a member of community :) well since this will be just a hobby project, I have plenty of time to think about what you all said. thanks!