As most of you know, I've long regarded stat calibration as the most difficult task in game design. It has singlehandedly brought down several of my unfinished projects and sapped an unhealthy amount of motivation from the ones I did finish.
I used to spend countless hours writing and rewriting stat tables that never quite worked out when put to the test, and after almost three years of formulating these tedious number patterns I was no nearer to achieving a balanced stat table than I was when I began. If anything I was getting worse! Then, with a sudden spark of inspiration last February while working on the Roguesoft RPG Engine, I concocted the Percentile Based Table system.
Put simply, I love the PBT system. It's beautiful. It's the V6 of stat calibration. Not only does it deliver the balanced rates I've long sought after, it's also extremely versatile. Indeed, versatility is the driving force behind PBT in the form of distinctive entity characteristics. Whereas up until now most GM/SC RPGs (certainly mine) boast varying degrees of enemy strength, there's virtually no depth whatsoever applied to enemy characteristics. An enemy is either strong or weak, nothing else, and with such flat levels of versatility RPGs like Quest of Magic boasting vast amounts of combat fail to engage the player in any degree of skilfulness, as gameplay revolves solely around level grinding.
With PBT it's a piece of cake to define enemy strengths and weaknesses, and using the base value chart as a reference you can easily work out the overall strength of an enemy in accordance with its level. Furthermore it's incredibly easy to adjust the rates of battle damage, accuracy and duration to whatever you like without ever having to modify the system.
In short, the PBT system is one of the most beneficial game resources ever. If you haven't already tried it out, you're bound to fall in love with it like me.
