What you're describing is simply another method of achieving the same aim by making stat growth diminish in percentage terms, the difference between levels also diminishes.Ĭompared to the former, the latter has the advantage of still giving the player regular level ups (which players tend to enjoy) whilst maintaining the difficulties of later stages of the game. You don't want to make the game too easy for those that complete all the side-quests and earn as much XP as possible, but you also don't want the end of the game to be impossibly hard for those that are rushing through.Ī common method is to make the XP between levels to grow, so for example 100 XP missed may matter a lot at lower levels, but at higher levels it makes no difference. Usually for RPGs there are two conflicting design goals: to give players freedom in how they play (and therefore how much grinding/side-quests to do, and hence their XP), and to make sure the difficulty of the game scales predictably for the length of the game. This is intentional, because making levels important is not the goal. How do they balance the game so that levels are still important later on the game? Pokemon's damage formula below is a bit more complex but absolute damage growth also decreases on each level.Īm I right to think in these games damage increases at a lower percentage on each level? Golden Sun damage calculation is a simple: Damage = Attack - Defense. Moreover I have played these titles and I never noticed this. So while I'm tempted to forgo this type of function for my game, I feel there's something I must be missing since many of my favorite games use them. This coupled with the fact that XP to level up goes up exponentially in these titles doesn't make sense to me. For example, when you go from Lvl 2 to Lvl 3 and damage increments 50%, however when you go from Lvl 50 to Lvl 51, an attack only does 0.5% more damage to the same enemy. My issue is that for linear functions, the % in which damage increases when leveling up goes down in every level.

I've checked many popular titles formulas for reference (Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, Golden Sun and Castlevania) and most seem to use linear functions. I'm developing a damage formula for an RPG.

Chrono trigger dmg formula list