My Final Roadblock: Balance

In a game I have long since abandoned, I did go back and start the process of balancing. Here's my suggested approach, assuming some of the general tropes of RPGs are in place:

• How often do you want to level, and how many levels do you anticipate the party achieving (more or less) per broad section? Once you have that, break it down into specifics - I expect roughly two levels in this dungeon, one in this cave, none in this forest path, etc.

• Assuming you've got a party, figure out their roles now. Do you have a slow tank, a HP-weak mage, a fast physical rogue, etc? Determine what stats each member has emphasized and weakened (assuming they do at all - maybe everyone is a blank canvas).

• Set up your leveling curve appropriately. You now have some idea of growth pacing (how many levels you want by the end), and stat pacing (where each character should be relative to each other), so you should be able to go from there.

• Only then would I do what you proposed - seeding chests and shops, and using that a basis for what to do with the enemies. My rule of thumb for this is that each shop should be incrementally better than the last shop, but what you find in the field might eclipse the upcoming shop.

Balance is impossible with two moving targets, so something has to be set in stone first. For me, you set the party, and then balance the enemies against them.

Once you've got your party in place, remember that these are a sliding scale:

• Encounter rate vs. EXP. The higher the rate, the lower each enemy should give in EXP.

• Encounter rate vs. enemy difficulty. The higher the rate, the more trivial the fight should be.

• Encounter rate vs. time of battle. The higher the rate, the shorter the battle should be.

So my first suggestion would be to find the sweet spot of encounter rate, where you're comfortable with the number of random battles you're fighting. From there, you can tailor the difficulty of the individual enemies, as well as the EXP to get you to what level you wanted for that section.

Philosophy-wise (how long should a battle take?), difficulty-wise, how combat feels (fast paced, slow paced, high HP enemies), all of that is really up to you. It sounds like you have some thoughts as to how you want combat to go (multiple player attacks per enemy attack, a key weakness to discover, and high-HP enemies to make that weakness more of a necessity and less of an option).

If that's the case, then once you've got your party stats in, you'll probably aim for a slightly higher encounter rate.

• You'll take a look at your character's average damage in the cave (when you expect them to be level 12) plus weapons from the shop outside the cave (that is, not including found items), and determine that the average attack will deal 100 damage, or 400 with 4 party members per turn.

• If you want the battle to last 5 turns without finding the weakness, you'll give the monster 2,000 HP, and then you'll say "but he takes 4X damage from holy attacks."

• You can modify this a little bit, after the fact, by playing with defense. Give some monsters in the cave only 1,000 HP, but have them take 50% damage from physical attacks. It's the same numbers, but the battle feels different. Now we've got variety.

• Notice that all we're doing is balancing the party's damage vs. the monster's survivability. This balance can be independent from the monster's damage against the party's survivability, so do one, and then do the other.

TL;DR Start by setting the leveling curve of your party, with expectations of what level they'll be and where. Then create your items. Then balance the monsters in an area against the stats you expect the party to have.

Its best to have testers who know how to balance and where. That's why high quality games have at least 50 testers.

I'd be happy to donate spare time.

Balance actually isn't THAT important as long as you think about it in terms of philosophy.

Do you want your players to experience your story and features with minimal frustrations? Then make the game skew fairly easy. Never put the player against an enemy or boss they have to grind to beat. Test your party within a range of levels against any given encounter.

Do you want your players to work for it? Then skew it more difficult. Make enemies tough enough that the player has to grind or strategize. This is an excellent way to use status effects. Some players love a little pain. They thrive on challenge. If you want that audience, which isn't usually an RPG audience, don the gimpsuit and whip and go to town on 'em.

As long as the setting and story and other features (the maps, use of art and assets, etc) is "together", players will generally ignore the battles as long as they aren't too punishing or don't occur too often. If you really want to make battles a vital part of the experience, it's best to throw away the engine defaults altogether and do all the math from scratch. In the past, I've done that somewhat successfully by massively lowering all attendant numbers. For example, 10 HP for level 1 characters is MUCH EASIER to manage than 200 HP. The larger the numbers, the crazier the shit gets. If you adopt a more Western method of numbers and abstraction, it may be easier to control.

For the love of Cloud, someone answer this man (having that problem also)