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Bricks and Doilies: A Monster Tutorial
I played many created RPG's this past year. Through playing them, I discovered many different story lines, characters, heroes, and villains. However despite these various differences, I always seem to come across the same problem almost every time: the monsters.
Why Are Monsters Important In RPG's?
You clearly already know this, but monsters are the characters means of gaining experience point in order to level up. Without monsters, all those weapons your characters have equipped would be sitting there doing nothing, simply raising attributes for no good reason. Again, you already know this.
Balancing Your Monsters:
Not only are the monsters important, but their overall balance also requires much attention, and I MEAN attention. This means spending a lot of time in the Monsters Section of the Database (Enemies in RMVX). Here are a few steps that I use to create a balanced monster.
1)Parameters
One of the three important categories in monster development. I normally consider this as THE most important, as the monsters overall parameters will pretty much make or break your them.
What most people do wrong is that they make one particular stat really huge because its what the monster excels at (like magic). Then as you begin to test it, that slime you made suddenly one shots your entire party. You want to avoid things like that. And you can do that with these three easy steps.
Step 1)
Determine when at what level your party meets this monster.
Step 2)
Study your party's stats and center the monsters stats with the party's accordingly.
Step 3)
Test Play. Is the monster doing too much damage? To little damage? Is it dying too quick? Too slowly? Does it give enough experience? Adjust the stats depending.
What I personally like to do is make the monsters slightly (and I stress slightly) stronger than the party. That way, the monsters can give the party a run for their money and allow me to see the difference in party strength more clearly as they level up. It also makes so that gaining experience is more like overcoming a struggle and not like taking candy from a baby.
2)Monsters HP and MP
Yet another key factor in creating monsters. This is also another factor that determines the difficulty of your monsters overall. However, avoid going overboard. For the monster's HP, go to the test screen to determine how much damage your party does to it. Then adjust the damage so that the monster can survive about 3 physical attacks, roughly. For magic, determine what skills you monster has in his Attack Patterns list, then range the monsters total MP according to the skills it has. By doing this, monster battles can last more than the usual ten seconds and you can show off your super cool awesome special moves for your characters. This also makes its so that your monsters have plenty of MP for their magic and other skills.
3)Monster EXP and Drops
Monster EXP isn't really hard to balance. Instead of going for the easy level battles, try to bring the EXP to relatively small amount. That way, it would force whoever is playing your game to actually HAVE to battle in order to level up, instead of killing a bunch of easy monster with one move and gaining tons of experience. As for enemy monster drops, try to make it so that they don't Drop X-item every battle. Just play around with the probability rate. Make rare drops lower, too. Lower probability for higher reward items.
Try to keep all these things in mind when creating monsters. By adjusting these various statistics mentioned from the above, monster battles in your game will not only be challenging, but will also make their Drops and EXP that much rewarding after the battle. Making balanced monsters is a big step in creating a good RPG, so try to keep all of these in mind.
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Details
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Tutorial:
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Bricks and Doilies: A Monster Tutorial |
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Date Listed:
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Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:33:49 -0400 |
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Author:
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eien_tsubasa
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Total Hits:
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2146 |
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