Importance of speed in RPG's

[danzibr]

How important do you feel speed should be in RPG's? Let me throw out some examples.

1) Traditional turn-based combat: speed is not super important. For this sort of game you input your commands and the good guys and bad guys go based on speed. Sometimes it's important to get that heal out at the right time, but since everyone goes 1:1, nbd.

As others pointed out... yeah, in some games it's important. I was thinking old RPG's where trash goes down easily and bosses are more of an endurance fight. In those games going first versus last doesn't matter much: I'd rather take 100 strength and 0 speed over 75 strength and 25 speed. But indeed, in other games it is incredibly important.
2) ATB: speed can be super important, depending on formulae. In some games having twice the speed allows you to go twice as often, thrice the speed thrice as often, etc. Look at FFVIII: when you can junction Triple to your speed, you become waaaaaaaaaaay stronger (in the sense of DPS).
3) CATB: speed is probably super important. The C is for conditional. Like FFX. The only way you can beat some of the super bosses is to rely on an absurdly high speed stat.
4) Systems with extra turns: speed is definitely super important. I'm thinking Breath of Fire III here. Anyone with an agility of at least twice the monsters gets an extra turn. The best strategies in that game involve abusing extra turns. It's... somewhere between traditional and CATB.
5) ARPG: varies greatly. In some games it affects auto-swing time, in some games how quickly you can use your abilities, in some games running speed.

So what's your take on the importance of speed? In many games it is the most important stat in the sense that low speed = you lose (I mean, speed by itself doesn't let you win, but like speed + strength). In some games it matters almost not at all.

[Comet]

Speed was super important in Final Fantasy IV on the DS. If you didn't both haste your party and slow the enemy, they would roll all over you with a rapid fire barrage of devastating attacks with no time to heal or protect yourself in between.

Definitely made the first few rounds of any boss battle intense.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

In ATB games, Speed often winds up being the offensive equivalent of WoD's "Dexterity is the almighty stat" issue. The faster you can attack, the more attacks you can make, which means more opportunities to deal damage.

[Psyren]

I disagree with your first bullet - in turn-based RPGs, very often the Dex or Speed stat is used to determine who goes first. This is crucial because of First Move Advantage. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRHdIScOMWQ) Even in games where the "go first" stat does absolutely nothing else (i.e. ones that aren't like D&D, where Dex ties to so many other secondary attributes) - even in games that aren't like that, Speed stats are vital.

We can even see this in D&D itself - the Improved Initiative feat, for instance, does absolutely nothing except help you go first. It doesn't make you inherently tougher or deal more damage. And yet, it almost always gets a blue color in handbooks because going first just plain gives you more options than going second - even in cases when the best option is to delay and go second anyway, you are still given the power to choose that option (or not). It's never a bad choice for any build, and if you ever have leftover feats it's always a viable choice.

[Knaight]

It depends on the game. Generally if there's supposed to be multiple niches and some level of balance, speed providing some bonus but not being the best stat is the general option. For instance, in fire emblem having higher speed can let you double attack and not get double attacked, and as such can be really useful. However, past a certain threshold that stops helping against a particular opponent, and the high speed characters are generally comparatively low strength, which lets them cut down some enemies beautifully, and just makes them do zero damage twice against others.

[Rodin]

Additionally, Speed can be super important in turn-based games by affecting things other than Initiative. If Speed translates to movement, it can be absolutely vital to have a unit that can move 7 squares instead of 2 or 3. In Fire Emblem, Speed is one of the most important stats because it determines how many attacks each unit makes. If one unit is sufficiently faster than the other, it gets to make two attacks.

In general, I'd say that Speed is exactly as important as the developers designed it to be. It isn't like Luck which is almost never considered a good stat to take.

[Winthur]

How important do you feel speed should be in RPG's? Let me throw out some examples.

1) Traditional turn-based combat: speed is not super important. For this sort of game you input your commands and the good guys and bad guys go based on speed. Sometimes it's important to get that heal out at the right time, but since everyone goes 1:1, nbd.

Any turn-based game I can think of off the top of my head gives a massive advantage to the guy who goes first. Heroes of Might & Magic will let you cast Mass Haste/Prayer or Mass Slow to stop the enemy dead in his tracks and/or clash with him, choose which units to bait retaliation out, etc. If you abuse the "A" button in Fallout to strike people first, you might avoid a crit that will kill you off or a Super Mutant's lucky minigun barrage at a worst possible moment. Right now, in Might & Magic 3, I've been stacking Speed on my Sorcerer to make sure I can get off an Implosion against any tricky enemy in my way that needs death first, or Time Distortion if said enemy pops out from a box and is capable of completely wrecking my party (Vulture Roc stashes, for instance).

[danzibr]

People have great points. I edited the OP to reflect that. I didn't consider enough options while writing the original.

But I feel I didn't pose my initial question well. How strong *should* speed be? Ideally every stat would be equally important (like in Pillars of Eternity, or so I hear). I personally quite dislike it when high speed = win or when speed is more or less irrelevant.

[Slayn82]

Elder scrolls has long balanced the advantages of a high speed and agility stat against a secondary stamina stat. You can run fast, chain melee attacks, dodge, but you better have some way to recover your breath on prolonged fights. Fortunately, recovering stamina in combat is pretty easy even to non casters, and by using potions of strength and vigor to be able to deal and take more damage, you temporarily increases your stamina until the fight ends. This means you can go ahead with just restoration magic, for the healing and buffs, with a small investment on illusion, schools that also have pretty cheap spells.

[Hytheter]

For instance, in fire emblem having higher speed can let you double attack and not get double attacked, and as such can be really useful. However, past a certain threshold that stops helping against a particular opponent, and the high speed characters are generally comparatively low strength, which lets them cut down some enemies beautifully, and just makes them do zero damage twice against others.

Fire Emblem speed also helps you avoid attacks though, so the additional speed isn't exactly wasted once you exceed the doubling threshold.

[Knaight]

Fire Emblem speed also helps you avoid attacks though, so the additional speed isn't exactly wasted once you exceed the doubling threshold.

No, but there's a vastly diminishing value. Plus, the point about doing zero damage twice still stands, and the speedsters tend to take hits hard when they do take them, other than a handful of characters that are just ludicrously powerful in general (Ike, Tibarn, Ephraim).

[Corlindale]

I don't mind the speed stat being good, but I find it annoying if the maths behind optimizing it is needlessly complicated. In some games you need to consult online guides before you can even think about making the optimal decisions - often there'll be hidden breakpoints and other factors that govern how effective speed is compared to other stats.

I like that most modern rpgs do the calculations for you, summed up as damage per second. Then you can at least experimenet with taking your Speed rings on and off again, see how it changes things.

Thematically, I really like the idea of being a speedster. I love games that let you manipulate time to move or attack impossibly fast, for example.

[NichG]

I have to go along with speed not being all that important in the 1:1 turn-based games. The advantage of going first diminishes with combat length, so it won't help so much in boss fights, and most modern RPGs don't have that much in the way of long-term resource management constraints where being able to suffer less damage during the rest of the dungeon crawl plays a big part in success or failure at the boss fight (even in such cases, its often possible to pay for a less efficient dungeon crawl segment by grinding for resources and buying consumable healing items to heal yourself back to full before the boss fight).

The other thing that makes speed less important in such games is that its very binary - either you go faster than the enemies you're dealing with, or you don't. If it would cost far too much to actually become faster than your enemies, its better to just dumpstat speed because being infinitely slower is the same as being just a bit slower. If you're already faster than your enemies, you gain nothing from increasing your speed. Speed is also in competition with other stats. If you can kill an enemy in one blow instead of two, that has a similar effect to going first and getting two blows as if it were one blow. Yet at the same time, an increased attack stat also helps in places where speed doesn't.

That said, this does suggest a number of ways it could become more important. Games with a very harsh resource-management component and dungeon fights which consume a lot of resources rapidly would increase the importance of speed. Systems in which a speed advantage maps onto a chance of evading attacks make speed potentially more important. Systems with positive feedback battlefield control mechanisms can make speed more important by putting more emphasis on being the one to take control during the first round.

That said, I think this is a hard design space to do well in. Speed becomes much more natural in systems where the nature of time is more fluid (like all the other systems mentioned in the OP), or even something simple like 1:1 systems with extended-time interruptible attacks (so during the turn order, you have a time at which you begin your action and a time at which it completes, and if you're attacked in the middle it can cause the action to become weaker, fizzle, etc; or maybe you're more vulnerable to damage during the action or whatever). So in such a system, having a higher speed means that you're vulnerable for shorter periods of time, which fixes part of the binary problem.

[Knaight]

I have to go along with speed not being all that important in the 1:1 turn-based games. The advantage of going first diminishes with combat length, so it won't help so much in boss fights, and most modern RPGs don't have that much in the way of long-term resource management constraints where being able to suffer less damage during the rest of the dungeon crawl plays a big part in success or failure at the boss fight (even in such cases, its often possible to pay for a less efficient dungeon crawl segment by grinding for resources and buying consumable healing items to heal yourself back to full before the boss fight).

On the other hand, if there is a 1:1 turn-based game where number of attacks varied, it starts being useful again. I'll use Battle for Wesnoth as an example here, though it is a strategy game (with a couple of pretty functional RPG mods). Every character effectively has 5 stats in RPG terms - attack, speed, defense, HP, and move. It's technically a bit more complex than that, where attack and speed are paired by attack, there are effectively two types of attacks that interface with each other, and defense and move are terrain based. In this case, more attacks and higher attack are both useful for different niches. Need to land one shot on a weakened target? Lots of attacks. Need to blast a high HP target before they retaliate at all? High damage.

[danzibr]

Reading these comments, I realized awholenother can of worms: multiple attacks.

Higher speed giving many attacks in a single attack (if that makes sense) can be as game-breaking as taking multiple turns per single turn of your enemy.

It's not quite the same level of OPness as straight up getting to go multiple times (the latter giving more utility and potentially more damage via magic or something), but still, 'das good.

[Knaight]

Reading these comments, I realized awholenother can of worms: multiple attacks.

Higher speed giving many attacks in a single attack (if that makes sense) can be as game-breaking as taking multiple turns per single turn of your enemy.

It's not quite the same level of OPness as straight up getting to go multiple times (the latter giving more utility and potentially more damage via magic or something), but still, 'das good.

It's usually not that gamebreaking. To use Wesnoth as an example again, a lot of people have 3 attacks. Having 4 instead isn't that much better, and there are actually disadvantages to having 1 or 2 in some circumstances. Part of that is that you get to retaliate when attacked on the opponent's turn, and the individual attacks are 1 to 1 until someone runs out and just gets hit repeatedly, but part of it is that doing 7 damage 3 times just isn't that different than doing 11 damage twice. Sure, against anyone with fewer than 7 HP there's a big edge, but in the 8-11 range the edge flips, then it flips again from 11-14, then for 15+ the 11 case is stronger.

[TaRix]

Well, how about Disgaea? Speed is only conditionally useful in pretty much any phase of the game. In the beginning and story levels, all the stats have their points for their characters. In the endgame, only attack (and intelligence for casters) matters, since everything else can one-shot anything you can build. Movement is independent of speed and it's a pure turn-based system. Counterattacks are also independent. Speed can help you dodge normal attacks, but skills/spells always hit. In later games, speed's ultimate use is for making fist-type weapons hurt more.

[erikun]

Speed, like every stat in a RPG, is fairly arbritrary and is only worth as much as the developers make it worth. It may not be a conscious decision or intended outcome, but it's how they code things up and decide on the mechanics that determine how relevant speed ends up. Much like how a game can make a standard attack worthless because they expect you to be using skills all the time, or make a magic stat worthless because magic attacks are terribly weak or deal a set amount of damage, they could make speed worthless by making its applications relatively pointless... or essentially critical.

Just a quick example, but in the original Final Fantasy (along with the more recent Bravely Default) the amount of damage dealt depended largely on both speed and strength. Each character dealt a number of "Hits" with each attack depending on the speed stat, with strength determining the amount of damage from each hit. As such, you could switch equipment to double your attack and end up dealing less damage, simply because your speed tanked to the point where you were only dealing 2-3 hits rather than 9-10.

Basically, speed is whatever you want to make it. If you want to apply it to the number of attacks, fine. If you want to apply it to dodge rate, fine. If you want to apply it to turn order, okay. How relevant it ends up depends on how important that application becomes.

[NichG]

Certainly you could call a stat 'Cauliflower' and have it control damage and the number of squares you can move per round, but that's not so useful to talk about I think. Rather, perhaps the right way to frame this topic is, the importance of the 'concept' of speed rather than literally 'a stat named Speed'.

For me, Disgaea's Speed stat only really overlaps with the concept of speed when it controls the evasion rate, not just the damage output of fists. You could make some small changes so that an increase in damage would feel like a natural consequence of the concept of speed (for example, the number of attacks you make per 'action'), but that doesn't stop me from recognizing the overlap with other stats that do the same thing and noting that in some sense, this can impact the importance (from a design point of view) of having that Speed stat there at all. If I have a design where two stats both contribute to damage output, I have to be very careful about how the stats can be influenced by the player to avoid there being some sort of trivial optimum growth pattern like 'pick one and focus on it' or 'make them exactly equal'.

[GloatingSwine]

Just a quick example, but in the original Final Fantasy (along with the more recent Bravely Default) the amount of damage dealt depended largely on both speed and strength. Each character dealt a number of "Hits" with each attack depending on the speed stat, with strength determining the amount of damage from each hit. As such, you could switch equipment to double your attack and end up dealing less damage, simply because your speed tanked to the point where you were only dealing 2-3 hits rather than 9-10.

The original Final Fantasy didn't have a Speed stat, the number of attacks was your chance to hit divided by 32 (doubled for black belt unarmed attacks and doubled again if you had Haste/FAST cast).

There was an Agility stat but it only affected dodging attacks and was pretty useless (not as useless as intelligence which was never used in any calculations)

FF1's determination of number of attacks works remarkably like the D20 system really, albeit with to hit bonuses on the weapon included in AB progression.

Speed was introduced as a stat in FF4 and affected how fast the ATB bar filled.

[Fri]

In Grandia games, there are not one but three speeds you need to consider!

First is initiative speed. A bit like ATB bar in Final Fantasy games, it decides when you could act (only it pauses when you can act, so you have the time to think on what to do next). And hits and skills can knock your place in the initiative bar! I think the stat is called ACT.

Then, moving speed! Before you can hit monsters, you have to walk toward them in a limited time. The higher your moving speed, the more distance you can walk in your turn to hit those pesky monsters! The stat is called MOV I think.

And finally of course, your casting speed. When it's your turn and you want to cast spell or skills, there's casting time for it. Which enemies can hit you with cancelling moves to cancel your casting. It just depends on how often you used your skills before, I think.

So there! Speeds!

[danzibr]

[snip]
Huh. I've never played Grandia, but now I want to.

[GloatingSwine]

Huh. I've never played Grandia, but now I want to.

Fortunately, you can! (http://www.gog.com/game/grandia_ii_anniversary_edition)


If you have a PS3 or PSP the original game is also on PSN for about a fiver.

To add to the move cancelling, you actually have two ways to attack in Grandia, Critical and Combo. The turn structure is represented by a single ATB style bar all things in the fight share, a Critical moves the enemy back along the bar whereas a Combo hits two or more times for a bit more damage. If you hit an enemy in the period between it initiating casting and reaching the end of the bar (that third type of speed) with a Critical then it cancels the move completely and resets the enemy to the bottom of the bar, effectively losing their turn.

Grandia combat is entertainingly crunchy and tactical for a quasi-realtime system.

[Fri]

Hey! I remember who you are.

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=19367479&postcount=14

It's been long overdue now :smallamused:

[danzibr]

Hey! I remember who you are.

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=19367479&postcount=14

It's been long overdue now :smallamused:
Yeah! I recall that too now.

Over 3 months and still no Grandia. It'll happen, it'll happen...