Is 20 skills unique effects or is some Same But Scales Up? If latter, don’t do that if you want to save menu space.
How many skills can you display at once?
To first question: there is some of same basic spell at higher power level later on, sure. I endeavored to keep it to a minimum just because that is the most obvious place to trim the fat, but in a long campaign (which this is most definitely intended to be), I don't think ramping up the power level can be entirely avoided. I don't have any plans to have later versions of a certain type of spell erase the earlier version from a PC's list, because I am the kind of person that likes retaining the option of using a cheaper version to snipe down a weakened enemy while saving on MP (also, almost no type of spell gets more than two tiers of power).
VXA's battle window could show up to 8 skills at once, but MV looks to be built to display something like twice that (I don't have enough built into the engine yet for this project to confirm, but just eyeballing it, looks like plenty of space).
To try and trim out "It depends" responses in advance
Fission mailed. It depends! Not on the # of PCs, though.
"You could say that about anything, of course it depends."
Who is the audience? You tell me what the audience is for retro turn-based RPGs about parallel history lesbians, I'm damned if I know. I've just been assuming all along that we can drop this in a box labeled "DL" and if anybody else stumbles across anything I make, it'll only be after years of persistence and additional episodes. I think the real audience is just my own sense of personal accomplishment + guttering will to continue existing. But I can give you some of my ground rules and then outline how skills are broken up (simultaneously for gameplay, flavor and simple UI reasons that I believe reinforce each other).
-The player should be as informed as possible about every technique and piece of equipment available to their party. Text space left available after any (as succinct as possible) technical information is conveyed should be used for flavor purposes, because I will never pass up a chance to enhance setting clarity through incidental information.
-For narrative emphasis and scope, it is indeed accurate to look at Suikoden for a parallel to what I ultimately want to do. The world will never be at stake, but someone's little definition of it should be.
-Boss fights should be rude. The most dramatic plot conflicts should be represented by dramatic challenges. I want enough technical depth for them to be challenges that require a thorough exploration of all advantages available to the player--but also have more than one specific viable approach.
-No knights, no dragons!
None of that directly addresses skills, but it does address
tone and I endeavor for skillsets to be appropriate for that. I cut off power levels at what a 10th level D&D caster might be able to do (and even then there are other hard limits, like no one has teleportation ever, and other magic that might similarly break the logistics of a pre-modern society simply doesn't exist). Mention of BG is fairly apt, because I crib a lot from d20 mechanics, largely sticking to the same spread of elements and status effects. I try to think about what weapons might plausibly be able to physically accomplish on a mechanical level when selecting weapon skills or weapon traits, and magic equipment is an uncommon and expensive thing. I am not specifically aiming for "gritty realism," but I am erring on the side of caution. Magic is fun, and I enjoy having it in the setting to spice things up a little, but too much distracts from my real concern, which apparently is exploring the downsides of colonialism and imperialism and similar corners of history that most speculative fiction doesn't appear interested in for some reason.
If you can name what the audience is for that approach being paired with fairly chibi JRPG sprites, please divulge this information. If I had my free pick of art styles, I'd probably hew a lot closer to Suikoden again, but visual design is one area where I am wholly bereft of ability. RPGM's character portraits still land squarely within my comfort zone, though (I suspect I'll always prefer Japanese games for aesthetics and gameplay no matter how much I prefer Obsidian's writing).
The skill system I've been hammering out is broken up thusly:
-Weapon Arts, which are exactly what they sound like. A PC has to have the specified weapon type equipped in order to use these. These are projected to use HP to activate. In the project currently under discussion, physical fighters will typically have six WAs each from two separate weapon classes.
-Spell lists are broken up into Magic and Prayer. Magic is mostly about inconveniencing your adversaries; Prayer is predominantly about helping your friends. This is both a reflection of how spellcasting is organized socially in-world and a quick way for the player to infer what general purpose a new casting PC serves just by checking which school of casting they have. In the project currently under discussion, dedicated casters have spell lists capped at 16 for comprehensibility (and, again, this is about the breadth of a 10th-level d20 caster's spell selection). Spell lists per PC are heavily themed.
-Perform exists because music is key (more fundamentally,
language is key in-context to the functioning of anything magic). One song can be active on the party at a time; once activated, it will remain in effect until battle ends, the performer dies, or another song is started by the same or any other PC; characters who die and are rezzed mid-fight should resume benefiting from the effect of an already active song. I approach the mechanical effects of these by thinking of them as buffs that might plausibly derive from morale boosts; they should be about on the scale of impact, probably not as much as a spell, but also without a spell's expiration date. Unsure if used in project currently under discussion, probably not yet; due to only one ever being active at a time, it would make sense for any performer to have only a modest selection of options here. Huge opportunity for flavor dumps when used, though.
-Personal Skills are basically limits and run off of TP. Unsure if they'll break down squarely along 25/50/75/100 lines for everyone, but the idea is that everyone has four.
I try not to have any given PC draw from more than two of the Weapon Art/Magic/Prayer/Perform categories, because I figure that Too Many Menus is likely to ensue. For all of those, human enemies will also draw from many of the same skill pools. This is principally to convey that there are common schools and traditions of combat and casting that a broad cross section of people draws from in-context, but it's also easier for a player to grasp what a new PC or enemy is doing if their skillset looks like it's built out of something they're already at least somewhat familiar with.
In this project, when we're talking about 15-25 skills per PC, what we're practically looking at in a combat menu is that total split up: for physical fighters usually 12x WA + 4x PS (WAs likely 6-6 split between two weapon types, maybe 8-4 for some PCs); dedicated casters 16x spell usually under a single school (this is the part I worry about being visually unwieldy) + 4x PS, a few with a handful of WAs for backup (or if it just makes enough plot/character sense).
(Individual PCs will also have their own handful of flavorful passive traits, for sure--elemental or status weaknesses or resists, other esoteric stuff just for example--but I consider that separate from the skill system. Traits are things you look at in a menu, skills are things you actively use in battle. I haven't figured out where in the MV engine I can
display things like elemental and status resists, but I would like them to be easily visible. See same maxim: the player should be as completely informed as possible about the tools available to them.)
Tallying all that up, I can see it being a lot to memorize and keep track of. But to your question of "Is this likely intended for an audience of people comfortable with somewhat imposing mechanical breadth?" I'd always assumed that anyone would have to be goddamn weird to put up with me or anything I made in the first place.
