RP Skills balancing guide.

Hello everyone,

In recent times in the RP I've noticed that people are having trouble making balanced skills for SF2. They either are underpowered, overpowered or just unusable. So hereby I'm going to give you a few key points on how to balance your skills using the skill sheet for SF2.

SF2 Skillsheet:

I'll just break it down here
Name: speaks for itself, no balancing purposes here.
Cost: How much your skills cost or what conditions needs to be fulfilled, mainly used to balanced skills
Range: How far your skill can reach, minimal usage for balancing.
Duration: How long does the skill linger, minimal usage for balancing
Cool-Down: Number of posts after the skill can be used again. Decent balancing tool
Description: Big ability balancing right here and to make your ability more versitile.

While most of you guys will "balance" your skills with their cost or with their Cool-Down time. Although this is a very good way to balance your skill at the same time it'll severely hinder how often you can use said skill. So what I suggest is using the description to balance your skills instead. Let's use one of you guy's skills as an example.

Skill: Tatsuya
Name: Phoenix Feather
Cooldown: n/a
Range: close
Description: This skill is a passive for Tatsuya, for every attack he makes he slowly causes his body to generate heat. When he generates enough heat certain parts of his body will ignite in flames.

Very basic skill huh, just keep kicking and become hotter and hotter until you finally ignite your body and start doing some real damage. Well here is my version of it let's see what you guys think about this one.

My version of Tatsuya's skill
Name: Phoenix Feather
Cost: N/A/1
Cooldown: n/a
Range: close/long
Description: As Tatsuya keeps attacking his limbs get hotter until they finally can ignite, if tatsuya stops attacking and doesn't attack for 2 more posts then his limbs will have cooled down after 10 posts of attacking his limbs can ignite. Once his limbs have ignited he can chose to use 1 point of energy to fire the flames from his body into a dome around him causing people around him to be forced away unless they can stand the heat or are fire proof OR fire the Fire from that limb for a long ranged attack.

With this skill you cover a weakness this character has, long range fighting and getting ganged up by multiple enemies at the same time while not changing the core skill itself by adding a cost to a otherwise fine but "bland" ability.

Unbalanced version of the skill
Name: Phoenix Feather
Cost: 1
Cooldown: n/a
Range: close
Description: as long as Tatsuya attacking he's able to draw upon the power of the mythic being known as the Phoenix to cloak himself in all-scorching fire . All defenses will be burned to ashes if touched by this fire and if he were to die while using this skill his body will burn to ashes from which he will be revived after 3 posts.
This skill CLEARLY does too much for it's cost and goes over the top with the power. It prevents the opponent from blocking and forces them into dodging, attacking him back is useless since he'll just res anyway. So all you can really do is run.

Useless version of the skill
Name: Phoenix Feather
Cost: N/A
Cooldown: n/a
Range: close
Description: So long as Tatsuya is attacking his body will start heating up allowing him to become more flexable.
This skill does absolutely nothing that a good warming-up wouldn't do for Tatsuya as well except he can now skip the warming up. It's almost literally a waste of a skill.

I know my examples are very over the top but that's one of the best ways to get the message across. Only if you see an exaggerated example then you will copy about 20% from it, while it does not seem much it'll be an incredibly huge improvement once you start throwing in your own style as well.

I hope this was useful for you guys and that it'll help you in the future with the new skills you'll be making.

Can you provide an example for a skill that is straight up overpowered and/or unusable?

Added useless and Overpowered versions of the skills as well, thank you for the suggestion Dazo.

It's also worth pointing out relative and skill set balance. Often times, a stand-alone skill can be broken. There are instances where a skill set as a whole is broken, though, or certain skills are weak enough to compensate for stronger skills. For example, a character of mine named Echo, who is currently being used in Spirit Force 2, has a skill called "The Sight". This is an extremely powerful skill that allows her to see things like a person's personality and skills at a glance. Despite this, she's going to be a balanced character mid-RP due to the rest of her mid-RP skills being mediocre at best, thereby compensating for the Sight's power. Similarly, a centralizing concept like the Sight can sometimes just be too strong in nature, and will therefore be practically unbalanceable without a lot of unwanted nerfs.

tl;dr Weaker skills in a move set and centralizing themes may or may not justify a stronger skill.