Are there any tricks/tips or advice for designing special powers and abilities for characters in an rpg?

Or is it, essentially, a hard slog of trial and error and playtesting? This, I'm guessing.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;638600Are there any tricks/tips or advice for designing special powers and abilities for characters in an rpg?

Or is it, essentially, a hard slog of trial and error and playtesting? This, I'm guessing.

Playtesting is very important to get the mechanic the way you like.

Also, never underestimate the power of names.

Using dnd spells as an example,

Magic Missile is somewhat dull as names go.

Searing Ray sounds better.

Fourfold Invocation of Doom is a cool name.

Your Delicious Sacrifice is amazing as names go.


Unless the setting clashes, I favor cool names for powers.

Seems a very general question? You mean coming up with them in the first place, naming them, balancing them?

WOTC apparently has/had an approach where all their design got split up between the idea guys (who came up with the cool idea) and then the developers whose job it was to fit mechanics to things and make them work (balanced or whatever). The basic idea here being that you start out with all your ideas no matter how crazy, then later figure out how to make them work.

As far as coming up with ideas for specific abilities go, you could steal them from other games, or be inspired by other media like films or whatever. I think you'd also find some abilities will appear if you look for gaps in the system - like if Power A is too strong, that could mean you need Power B to counter it. Or you might find that some other hole prompts an ability, like DCs for a task being too high unless there's another ability that helps, or needing extra ways to recharge power points or whatever.

Coming up with them: Pick broad categories you want covered, like movement/attack/defense/stealth/buff/debuff/etc. Then just see how many ways you can do those things that feel different.

Naming them: I'd go with descriptive names. Makes building a character easier if I can tell by looking at the name what the mechanics might be.

Balancing them: Just go for rough parity at the same level and all will be well. Maybe try to predict abuse or potential boring tactics (like spamming the same thing forever) and see what you can do about those in advance. After that just test the hell out of it.

Are you or any of your friends a CCG player? If so, they are the ones you want testing your powerz. They live to tear shit like this apart.

Otherwise, playtest everything. Tell your players to break the system as much as they can, and join in yourself - combine powers in the most brutal and effective way that you can, decide if you're happy with the results, and if not - change it. Don't assume that potential purchases will be gentlemanly about this, just because you didn't want to put the hard work in.

Not gonna lie : this is going to be a huge amount of work, to do it properly.

Quote from: Ladybird;639264Are you or any of your friends a CCG player? If so, they are the ones you want testing your powerz. They live to tear shit like this apart.

Otherwise, playtest everything. Tell your players to break the system as much as they can, and join in yourself - combine powers in the most brutal and effective way that you can, decide if you're happy with the results, and if not - change it. Don't assume that potential purchases will be gentlemanly about this, just because you didn't want to put the hard work in.

Not gonna lie : this is going to be a huge amount of work, to do it properly.

Seconded. CCGers could care less about rhyme or reason, outside the only game that matters: power and winning.

But before power design you're almost better off using the scientific method to asks yourself 'why?' Addressing the problem and dreaming up relavent hypotheses on why it functions as a problem in the first place are crucial beginning steps. Without the experiments to know what's problematic and why, any powers created might end up being irrelevant solutions.

Few things are sadder than cool powers you can't, or won't, use.

Quote from: Ladybird;639264Are you or any of your friends a CCG player? If so, they are the ones you want testing your powerz. They live to tear shit like this apart.

Otherwise, playtest everything. Tell your players to break the system as much as they can, and join in yourself - combine powers in the most brutal and effective way that you can, decide if you're happy with the results, and if not - change it. Don't assume that potential purchases will be gentlemanly about this, just because you didn't want to put the hard work in.

Not gonna lie : this is going to be a huge amount of work, to do it properly.

I am a CCG player and have long thought that rpg designers could learn a lot from the presentation of CCG rules and card design as it has to be consistent, clear and brief. I've known some champion level players as well (not me, of course), unfortunately that was a a few years ago and they were social mutants. The people I rpg with aren't ccg players, despite my best intentions over the years (i thought they might be most interested when the CoC ccg was first released - not the chaosium one). They just aren't strategy/deckbuilding types.

The issue for isn't naming powers, that's easy. I've never had issues naming things really. The largest problem is that each of the power 'sets' is very different, so I can't rely on, for example, a singular power source, like Chi, or Mana. Some can work that way, others just can't.

Quote from: Opaopajr;639284Few things are sadder than cool powers you can't, or won't, use.

I agree entirely.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;639289The largest problem is that each of the power 'sets' is very different, so I can't rely on, for example, a singular power source, like Chi, or Mana. Some can work that way, others just can't.

Sorry don't quite get what you mean? Do you mean, there's extra work building several sets of powers, with each having different limitations that make them hard to compare/balance?

This is why I like HeroQuest - it doesn't matter what the actual powers are, just how they are used. This makes balancing redundant and makes chargen really easy.

As for other systems, I tend to base powers on similar things. So, how are they fuelled? How often can they be used? What effects do they have? Look for something similar and change the words. So, for Legend/BRP, is something else with a similar power level fuelled by MP/Mana or POW? If something is fuelled by POW then your similar power should also be fuelled by POW, other wise it would be really cheap.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;639569Sorry don't quite get what you mean? Do you mean, there's extra work building several sets of powers, with each having different limitations that make them hard to compare/balance?

i mean the special abilities of each character type operate on very different principles.

The first thing I would do is write a computer program to run a new power/ability in a slugfest against generic opponents.  This is largely to see whether the new power/ability is doing what you wanted it to do.

I use FASERIP,  so powers in my games are basically : Describe a cool power. Give it a name and a rating. Go do awesome stuff. If you want to use it in a new and special way, its a Power Stunt.

Thats basically the entirety of the power creation rules.

Quote from: ggroy;639689The first thing I would do is write a computer program to run a new power/ability in a slugfest against generic opponents.  This is largely to see whether the new power/ability is doing what you wanted it to do.

I wouldn't know how.

Even without a computer, the manual way of doing the same thing would be rolling dice and tracking the hit points until one side is dead.

The difference with a computer program doing the same thing, is that it can run through hundreds (or thousands) of slugfests in a few hours.  Though the more complicated the powers/abilities, the slower the computer program will run.

Hundreds or thousands of iterations of a slugfest should produce enough statistics to see whether a new power/ability is doing what one intended.

But with that being said, the computer won't tell you anything about unanticipated uses of a new power/ability.