In the second part of my interview with Champions Online’s powers guru Brian Urbanek (first part here), I asked him about the question of balance and how simple DPS and defensive roles are being morphed into a more complex toolkit approach. Brian isn’t the sort of person who needs much prompting when he’s asked about role-playing game mechanics, powers balancing and gameplay. Here’s what he had to say…

“In many RPGs, wizards and spell casters and sorcerers tend to be the highest damage but least durable characters. But that kind of paradigm doesn’t work in a superhero game. That’s not the way superheroes are built. Dr. Fate or Dr. Strange aren’t dealing out the highest DPS in Marvel and DC. Those come from people who throw energy around or have claws or are Superman.

So instead of building particular power-sets that are balanced between powerful DPS and weak resistance, we have built a system that is very dynamic and toolkit-like.

We’re reshaping traditional roles - mage, pyro, tank - in unique ways. For example, the powers in the fire set make you a very high damage character. But throwing fire isn’t very defensive, so in a traditional RPG model that might make you very much like a mage. Except when a mage in an MMO specializes in fire and comes up against a fire based enemy, well, they often just can’t do anything. All they can do is resort to other spells, non-specialized skills, that do subpar damage and they just feel kind of useless at the fight.

We have a different paradigm. Let’s say you go deep into the fire trees and take all those tools that give you fire damage. It’s true that enemies that are resistant to fire will limit your effectiveness. But if they do mostly fire damage, you’ll be highly resistant to them and as a result you’ll be an optimal tank versus them. So the pure fire DPS blaster in our game is also an optimal tank for a pure fire villain. You can be the one who stands in the front lines and eats up all the damage. Your fire powers enable you to absorb, redirect, or just ignore all of this fire damage.

Because players have as much customization as we can give them, they have the freedom to pick and choose their powers from many different sets and to build whatever kind of character that they want. Everyone can have the healing power if they want it. Everyone can have the pure defense power if they want it. So it’s not possible to say that if you are a fire guy you are a DPS class, and not a tanker because, you are a tank in some cases if you want to be. So instead of assigning any kind of role or wanting to propagate the idea of different power sets that are locked to different roles, we use a system which we call roles and builds, and we allow and encourage players to self designate who and what they are.

There are a lot of good reasons to have a standard breakdown of the tanker, the DPSer, the support guy, right? And we do not reject that. What we are attempting to experiment with is letting players completely pick which one of those they want to be at what time and how they want to achieve it.

Our system layout is set up to encourage players to build up multiple specialties within their full tool set. You can have multiple powers that you can put in your bar at any one time. You build multiple builds. Well, okay, all your builds could be of the same purpose, DPSing, Tanking, or whatever, or they could be a little bit different. I think that we’ll get a much better multi-player environment when every player feels like ‘oh yeah, I really like tanking but if we need a DPSer for this run I can do that too’ or vice a versa, or healer, or melee character, or crowd control character, or whatever.

Roles are unlocked through achievement. Anyone can slot a healing power at any time but the more healing you do, you unlock higher and higher, revealing more and more specialized healing roles which have their own titles. So if you see someone with a high ranked, uniquely titled defender role you know that they’ve tanked many instances. Someone with a high ranked healer role, you know they’ve healed a lot of instances and because that’s an objectively determined, objectively assigned title by the game engine the players can’t fake it. So that’s a way that a player can advertise and hopefully gain some trust from the community.”

Final part of the interview runs next week.