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?

This is something that has always made my head explode and back in the day when I made games that had a battle system I had to ask someone else to look at my game's project file and balance out the characters for me. I am hopeless at this.

I would suggest creating a general model of a character and then setting/fixing some parameters in a way that is verifiably "balanced enough" for whatever you're doing. In a single player game it probably doesn't matter. Final Fantasy 6, for example, didn't have balanced characters at all and it was really fun. What's more important in a game of that type is balancing the player characters against whoever you're fighting. Your ability to come up with characters that feel different and still have a sensible difficulty curve essentially depends on your ability to competently come up with role playing game mechanics in general. If you want to do this in an RPG Maker game or a Final Fantasy clone, you will have to pour over their mystical number formulas and try and figure out what they mean. It's probable that they don't mean shit, which means you're stuck making your game feel right by trial, error and creativity. You could maybe do some basic calculations on a spreadsheet like "number of hits to kill a thing, number of hits to win a battle, number of battles to level up, avg time per battle, battle time to level up" to make this faster for yourself. It might also help you come up with more boring variation balances equivalent to pokemon types.

If I was making a japan style fantasy RPG with ten classes, here are the classes I would choose:

Magician (the rabbits and tophat kind)
Ace Chef
Merchant (you always see these dudes but can never play as them)
Sailor (see above)
The King (serves no purpose other than increased difficulty setting. maybe tells joke.)
Unarmed Knight (wears armour, punches enemy in the mouth)
Girl (has the magic power to get kidnapped or suddenly have problems that are only resolvable by her male companions, cries, healing powers)
Time Mage (wears a cloak, takes self seriously, fights by striking people with pocketwatch)
Battering Ram Team (twice the people, half the personality)
Dog

Really, which fluffy descriptions you use for characters has very little influence on the way your game plays and quite a lot of influence on how your game feels. Consequentially, you should pick the most interesting sounding ones possible that are relevant to the theme of your game. Also if your game has a story with set characters, I guess that makes some of your decision for you. Using character classes is like using metaphor or simile or paragraphing, there's no set way to do it, and there's no best, ideal or global favourite way. How you use it depends on what you want to convey.

Given that you want to convey a sense of synergy between the characters in your party to emphasise the idea that they are bonding as they adventure, I suggest that you create synergy through individual deficiency. Start with blank slate, or neutral characters and then unbalance them such that each class has a flaw that another class can make up for. If players choose classes and you don't want any party to be better than any other party, you need to solve the problem of ensuring that any given party of n characters has as many flaws as any other possible party. The most trivial solution I can think of to this is that each class has a flaw made up for by each other class. This would make your game difficult unless the flaws were only minor, however. It also means a lot of work for you, because you need to invent 9 flaws and 9 advantages for each class.

The picture should have that relationship for each other class, but if I drew them in, I would have had a black circle instead. I have a gut feeling that you might be able to reduce down from this solution into a more manageable and elegant one with similar properties but I can't find a way to do it so for now, this can be treated as an idealisation of what kind of thing you might have to do. An approximate solution would be to pick a subset that sounds cool.