08/16/2011 - Playtesting

It's been practically six months since the last news post on this website, but that doesn't mean we haven't been doing anything. In fact, we've been busy playtesting Cphera's core mechanics, making sure that everything is working the way we want it.

Of course, nothing works exactly as you want it to the first time around. One of the issues that we've found is that our balancing of Magic and Skill progression quickly gets out of hand. We've found that if you want to be really fantastic at something, within a few levels you will generally be so fantastic at those things that you will never, ever fail.

In general, the two blanket limiters we are going to place on the system will restrict the speed of overall progression. The first limiter will require a player to spend two Ability Upgrade points (instead of one) to increase his or her character's Ability scores past eight. The second limiter will be in reducing the number of Skill Upgrade Points down from double a character's Intellect to two plus the character's Intellect.

Once we've done this, we will see how various sample character's final skill and magic numbers are affected by this change. If we feel the numbers are still too high, we will likely "stretch" out the DCs for skill checks and magic, keeping the lower values where they are now, but making the highest values much higher. We are also likely to implement a level-based cap on Magic Ranks to limit a player's ability to pour all of his Upgrade Points into a single discipline to reach a game-breaking score.

As always, our goal is to always have something that a player wants to spend his Upgrade Points on every level. Unlike in other RPGs, where after a certain point you find yourself saying "darn, I have to fill up three more feats", in Cphera, we want players to struggle to choose which upgrades they are going to get every level. Customization means choices, and in Cphera we want to cripple players with choices.