How much equipment is too much for a group-RPG?

I think it's impossible to be sure without playtesting it, honestly. If you add more slots and it gets too cumbersome, then either it would have to be simplified again or some other element might need to be adjusted.

That's probably not a great answer, but it's the only one I can think of, since I'm not sure there's an objective benchmark lol

That is indeed a sensible answer, but yeah I was more asking about preferances and examples that could support either way of seeing it.

This greatly depends on how easy it is to equip an item.

In Avernum the player had 4 team members that could be equipped easily from the interface. Draggin a weapon from one team member to the next was easy. Equipping was also just drag and drop.

When compared to Dungeon Siege 2. That required selecting the party member, going into a inventory menu, dragging and dropping from in there; it was really a pain. I always had someone on the team with weak equipment, just because i didn't want to pause gameplay.

I would say 4 * (2 weapons, 3 armor, 2 accessories) is the standard. So 28 slots divided by team members?

In Final Fantasy games, I was often more willing to spend a long time in menus equipping characters. However this was because you only had to do it once at every town. In the FF tactic games you had to equip after almost every battle but that was OK, because each character had only a few items.

It looks like a lot of factors could be involved. Menu time, amount of times it has to be done in a play session, how smooth the interface is and just how many equip slots there is.

But also how items are aquired I guess. You now have to loot/buy even more items and suitable items as well for the classes you play with. With many slots i becomes more of a puzzle game to always have the right items to fill all slots for all heroes. Im ambivalent on this...

The biggest problem with Diablo/Torchlight games is too much vendor trash. If I find equipment that is not an improvement over what I am currently using, it doesn't feel like a reward, it feels like punishment. I want to spend my time fighting monsters, not picking through thousands of shitty items in order to find the one that has slightly better stats than what I am currently using.

Having a lot of equipment slots alleviates this problem by reducing the drop rate for any particular slot while keeping the overall drop rate constant. This is very much a good things. The more, the better. (Within reason, of course. A hundred slots may be OK, but a thousand is probably too much.)

A better solution is to only drop loot that is potentially of interest to the player. If your RNG rolls an item that isn't an obvious substantial upgrade to what the player is currently using, then don't drop it. Drop money or a consumable item if you still want to give the player some sort of reward. This better solution still benefits from lots of equipment slots, however.

@a light breeze

I wouldnt want to play a game with "even" a 100 equipment slots. Thats insane dude.

Also I dont see how adding more slots (e.i. introduce more item types) would decrease the amount of time a player has to spend going through all drops to determine if they are worth to keep or not. There is MORE details to keep track of then.

I agree that some games (im looking at you diablo 3) drops silly amounts of trash and that's just annoying. I will avoid this. Your final paragraph makes sense to me.

Since you are doing your own game "in the style of" with the gear looking only to be tailored to combat, think about exactly what damage and effects on combat that they will do.

What is the primary function of this equipment for each gear slot you might use?

What are the stats or modifiers that will show up at a high frequency (75%+) for each gear slot?

Will there only be bonuses or will there be penalties too (will a 2h weapon get a damage bonus but slow your attacks)?

Will you divide up physical damage to Pierce (spears), Slash (swords), and Crush (mace/club)?

Will there be elemental magic/bonus damage (fire/water/etc)?

Will you make specific tiers of gear (iron sword/steel sword/etc)?

Will you have items with specific bonuses, random unique gear with bonuses not normally found on that gear, random artifact gear, fixed/static artifact gear, or even gear that is necessary to drive the plot (defeat the critter while using the sponge of purity)?

Will there be any type of crafting, adding runes or gems to gear for extra bonuses?

By doing the above you will be able to feel out if you have too few or too many gear slots. You will see what the function of each is, what the expected stats and modifiers are, and if that gear would be worth being in your game.

Then you need to check the start to end values for the gear, keeping in mind the players party need their gear to be slightly ahead of the curve. Losing a few battles or having tough battles isn't a problem, but too weak of a party for a type of encounter too many times will frustrate players. Of course carving up all the critters in an instant would be pretty boring too.

In the beginning the party needs to be able to defeat early encounters easily to build up for later, but you need to consider what gear and stats/modifiers will be needed when you encounter TUTATEOTD (The ugly thing at the end of the dungeon) aka the final boss. As an example, if helmets reduce the chance of an incoming critical hit or reduce the amount of damage from a critical hit, it might not be too important at the start, but might be really necessary to survive late game or final battle.

If the players like the game and balance and the equipment handling is easy and effective the total number of slots doesn't really matter, only that each slot serves a function to better that character's power along the way so the player believes they have a chance at winning the the next battle.

If you can get all 6 characters gear sets on the same screen, and have the inventory and gear sort selections below, using drag and drop for all the items you were thinking of (helmet and armor included) would be quite easy. Just make sure you can drag and drop from one character to another.

Sorting problems are normally created by too much junk and limited sorting options. You might want to think of a gear rating for all gear types. If you do this and allow the selection of one character, the sort could show the items that have a better gear rating than currently equipped gear for the highlighted character to reduce the pile sorting time. If you are sorting by "strength" it could show the items that have more "strength" as highlighted (and maybe sort them to the top).

17 hours ago, suliman said:

@a light breeze

Also I dont see how adding more slots (e.i. introduce more item types) would decrease the amount of time a player has to spend going through all drops to determine if they are worth to keep or not. There is MORE details to keep track of then.

The longer I keep using an item, the more useful it feels to me. If I find an item for slot A and five minutes later find a better item for slot A, then there wasn't much point in picking up the first item. If I pick up an item for slot A and five minutes later find an item for slot B, then I can keep using the first item and it doesn't feel so pointless.

Having too many slots also dilutes the value of items, but to a lesser degree, in my entirely subjective experience.

Thanks for the input! Good stuff.

Im going for a middle of the road when it comes to complexity. My planned damage types are:

• Physical
• Arcane ("magic")
• Fire (both natural and magical)

And (not stricly damage types but) still possible for mobs to be immune/weak to:

• Poison
• Bleed
• Phychology

Im not sure if I will classify loot in tiers (common, rare etc). Maybe just give them some modifiers and let the player decide their value. Although I still need some way of calculating "sell value" for each item, with it's modifiers taken into account. Any good way to do this? I did find this: http://diablo3values.pixels.li/

Diluting the value of items because the same effects are spread over more items in more slots could be a good thing: item quality can have low variance and power level increases can be much more gradual than with few, possibly overpowered items.

For example, suppose the character party is stuck at a certain combat encounter that regularly ends in retreat because the enemies can kill our heroes faster than the party can kill the enemies.
They have low attack bonus, i.e. they collectively lack items that provide good attack bonuses, relative to their progress in the game; let's assume the traditional D&D scale in which +1 to hit means hitting x+1 times rather than x times out of 20.
At this point if they find their first enchanted sword and it is +4 (at least 25% more hits; the sword would be very valuable and possibly famous) the fighter equipped by it would be overpowered and the encounter would become easy, while if they find a +1 or +2 sword it would become winnable but remain challenging. And later they could find enchanted rings, bracers, underwear, etc. with small bonuses (usually +1, with +2 progressively less rare to provide an upgrade after saturating all slots with +1 items).

To my opinion, there's no point in doing many items just to have many items. Make them specifics: like some caracteristics or abilities exclusive to on type of item. Don't make it just according to ropleplay but gameplay. Do it as simple as you can, then when you have a way good idea you can match it to an item.

PS: square boxes of the same size would make your game looking great

Hi Suliman, I haven't read the other posts, but I'd like to answer your question from my point of view.

The first RPG I ever played is still one of my favorites of all times: Baldur's Gate. Your controlled a group of up to six characters an the rules were based on Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (version 2?). Each character had a race which affected some stats, modifiers, items you could equip and the classes you could have. In addition, all characters had one or more (!) classes that affected their abilities, skills and stuff they could use. Then, there was the inventory: head and body armor, weapons, belt, potions, staffs, etc. And the game was fun all the time.

We are living in an era where many people want to have everything as simple as possible. I would recommend to add as much stuff to your inventory as you want and add an additional optional Auto-Equip function. When activated, the character always uses the best stuff. This way, you can make players have who like micro-management (like me) and the spoiled kids. ?

Oooh the optional auto-equip feature is a good suggestion IMO

You're welcome ?

I think the notion of "best stuff" means there's no option.

Easy ≠ Simple

If you have a "auto-equip" system, to me that's synonym of failure. Failure to learn the player how to make a choice by himself.

If you can always choose the best without sacrifices, it's actually not a choice at all.

A good choice would be to sustain a characteristic rather than another one.

Then you have summit simple but not easy. That would be interesting and enhance the gameplay

I must partly agree with Doci here. If it can be automated it means it can also be skipped.

But i middle ground is to highlight all items at same or higher "objective value" (it may be level, rarity or sell value). So the player still needs to make a decision but it is somewhat aided. You have a certain spec or build im mind? The highest sell value item isnt always the best for example.

So you look through 2-3 items that are flagged as "possible upgrades" instead of ALL items in your inventory/trader inventory. Seems a good middle ground.

In a party-based game, the choice can be "who gets this obviously superior sword" as opposed to "which of these two swords, which are about equally good but different, do I keep". It's an interesting choice, but it's a choice based on scarcity (one good sword, multiple characters that want swords) as opposed to a choice based on surplus (multiple swords, one character that wants swords). Scarcity increases the perceived value of equipment, and surplus decreases it.

Taken to the extreme, scarcity means that you never "retire" old equipment. The total amount of equipment of type A you find during your adventure should never exceed the number of empty slots you have among your party for equipment of type A.

Not every player wants to spend time on a certain feature. A prime example is Dragon Age: Inquisition. It's not be best RPG I played, but I enjoyed the story. However, after playing countless RPGs in the past 20 years, I get easily bored by the standard combat systems. Dragon Age: Inquisition had a great feature that simplified combat system. All my characters choose their skills by themselves and I just had to press one or two buttons in combat while enjoying the game's most important features: atmosphere, storyline, character development, relationships, etc.

By making things optional, you do show that things don't need to be there in the first place, but you may attract different type of players.

47 minutes ago, GalacticCrew said:

Not every player wants to spend time on a certain feature. A prime example is Dragon Age: Inquisition. It's not be best RPG I played, but I enjoyed the story. However, after playing countless RPGs in the past 20 years, I get easily bored by the standard combat systems. Dragon Age: Inquisition had a great feature that simplified combat system. All my characters choose their skills by themselves and I just had to press one or two buttons in combat while enjoying the game's most important features: atmosphere, storyline, character development, relationships, etc.

By making things optional, you do show that things don't need to be there in the first place, but you may attract different type of players.

I also seem to recall Mass Effect having an auto-level up feature, but it was also optional and you could undo the allocations. Seems similar to an auto-equip option and it seemed to have worked out well.

¯\_(0.o)_/¯