SLOP2096: Every Battle Is a Spreadsheet

A semester spent reading the arithmetic under Japanese RPG combat: turn order, initiative counters, damage formulas and the rolls around them. You measure real fights, rebuild their systems in a spreadsheet, and design one of your own.

Systems Design in Japanese RPGs

Every JRPG battle is a small deterministic system wearing a costume, and once you can read the numbers you can read the design.

• game design
• systems
• JRPG

What you will be able to do

1. Week 1After this week you can diagram who acts, in what order, in a round-based battle, and name what the game had to decide to make that happen.
2. Week 2After this week you can predict the next five turns from a speed table and say exactly where the prediction breaks.
3. Week 3After this week you can reverse-engineer a damage formula from ten logged hits.
4. Week 4After this week you can say which random elements a fight needs, which it should remove, and defend it with expected values.
5. Week 5After this week you can classify any status effect by what it rewrites — rate, cost, order or outcome.
6. Week 6After this week you can model a fight as a budget and find where it's solved by spending.
7. Week 7After this week you can write the rules of an action-economy system in one page and show its degenerate strategy.
8. Week 8After this week you can tune a stagger threshold so a fight has a second phase, and show the tuning in numbers.
9. Week 9After this week you can define a party role by the constraint it removes from another role.
10. Week 10After this week you can plot an experience curve against an encounter table and find where the grind starts.
11. Week 11After this week you can write a boss's script as a decision tree and identify the intended solution and the unintended one.
12. Week 12After this week you can specify a combat system in numbers a stranger could implement without asking you a question.

Who this is for

You've finished at least one JRPG and you can open a spreadsheet. No programming until week 12, and not much then. You don't need to have finished the games we measure — recorded fights are provided — and you don't need to like them.

What the semester builds toward

Every week you measure something real and rebuild it in a spreadsheet, so that by the end you have a folder of working models rather than a set of opinions. The semester ends with a design brief: one battle system of your own, specified tightly enough that somebody else could build it, with the numbers worked out and defended.

Where to go next