So I was just thinking about the classes/roles of my characters in Blackmoon Prophecy and how to balance them and it gave me the idea for this topic, which I feel could benefit anyone who is having trouble knowing where to go with their character classes and such if the replies go the way I hope.
Basically, what class types do you feel are mandatory? Fighters, healers, wizards... Those are generally among the three most widely accepted and most used classes, but they are pretty broad, or perhaps vague, names for classes. A fighter could be anything. Berserker, brawler, knight, swordsman, and so forth. Most games seem to have at least two fighters, but I feel that the majority of RPGs have character rosters that are made up of about 75% fighter-type characters, but less than half of that 75% are flat-out sword and shield warriors and are instead fighters with diverse magical abilities and so forth.
When faced with adding several different characters that belong to the same class family (such as fighter), how do you decide which ones deserve to make the cut, and which ones are too similar to the ones you already have to be included? For example, "berserker" and "warrior" can almost be treated the same in some cases, so in a game that only has about 10 characters, it's rare to see similar classes together. Games such as Chrono Cross or Suikoden can get away with having "clone classes" due to their excessively large rosters, but it is rare to see clone classes in games with much smaller rosters.
Then there are classes that compliment each other. For example, if a game has a black magic user, you could bet your next pay that you'll also see a white magic user, and that they will compliment each other wonderfully in battle - even if their abilities do not directly affect one other. Having a black and a white magic user in the same team creates a sort of synergy, but are these the only two class types where this happens? What about fighter classes? I suppose they work well with characters that exist primarily to buff others. What about thief-like characters? Who do they form a sort of synergy with?
Ideally, we want our character rosters to be very diverse. Having several characters who all behave the same and are mostly only different from in each other in appearance, is extremely bland. On the other hand, a roster with many different class roles is exciting, especially when hybrid classes (a strong warrior class who has potent magic) are thrown into the mix.
So, let's say that our own fictional games that we are all working on have rosters of ten characters. How would you fill this roster? What class roles would you choose? Would they compliment each other, or create that sort of synergy that the black/white magicians do?
