On Hyper Dimension class skills

[realmrpger]

I've made a few posts about class skills in Hyper Dimension. As you may know, Hyper Dimension implores a bit of an FFVII materia-like system where you can put abilities into slots on weapons and armors ("slot" being a rather generic term, as some enchanted items like maybe a keychain or a feather can be attached for an effect). But the thing about

Comments

[akaneko]

To what degree to you want the characters in Hyper Dimension to have preset combat characteristics, or be completely customizable? I'm not sure you necessarily need a class system if you're already going to have a materia-like system. You could still encourage role-specialization within a party by limiting how many accessories can go on any given piece of armor or weapon and/or what types are compatible with each other, and making some armor, weapon, and accessory types rarer than others. Not everyone in the party can go around in Uber Armor wielding the Mighty Sword of Combat Explosions and 23 Pendants of Awesome & Rings of Wonderous Magicky Doodads if the Uber Armor isn't compatible with Pendants of Awesome, or there's only one Ring of Wonderous Magicky Doodads in the game, or the Mighty Sword of Combat Explosions doesn't add as many accessory slots as most other weapons. It ought to be perfectly possible to make multiple distinct ideal combinations of equipment for each character in a party without artificially constraining which

[realmrpger]

In thinking about these combinations, I keep Final Fantasy IX in mind. There a few equipment "types" and certain characters can equip them. Certain characters can share equipment types, but those characters specifically have different skills they can equip. So, by using this system, Zidane can learn the counterattack from jerkin A but Vivi and Dagger cannot... And Steiner can't equip the jerkin, so he can't learn counterattack from it

[akaneko]

Hmm, what if the skills interact heavily with each character's stats? As in, any character might learn some given counter move, but it'll be so hideously inaccurate as to be almost worthless if a character doesn't have enough speed and aim, while it works awesomely for a character with awesome speed and aim? (Unless the former character ALSO equips something that boosts their speed and aim, uhuhuhu! ... but it'd eat up one of their slots to do so.)

[akaneko]

Alternately, you might limit how various learned techniques interact with what the character has equipped. A parrying skill, for example might work just fine with swords and long daggers, but would be worthless if a character only has ranged weapons at hand, or magical or technological devices not meant for direct impact with their targets that would break if used in such a manner.