How should the length of battles in an RPG scale with an actor's power (i.e. character growth). Right now I'm assuming that an actor will defeat an equally powerful actor in about five hits. A weak character will take a longer amount of time to defeat a strong character, and a strong character will take a shorter amount of time to defeat a weak character. This would be to the point of the strong character being invincible to the weak character: a sewer rat has no right to pose a threat to an experienced warmaster with a full set of glittering magical armour. ;) I'm wondering if this "five hit" rule should apply to all power levels though. I can see a fight between two unskilled actors ending quickly, while a fight between two highly skilled actors would drag on for a while. However, I'm worried that scaling battle length to character power would result in situations where two actors are so powerful that a fight between them never ends. I could introduce a rule like all attacks doing a minimum of one damage, but then the sewer rat would be able to slowly nibble away at the warmaster. What rules of thumb are good for figuring out damage ranges and battle lengths for different characters and character powers?

You should maybe take the partial damage with dodge idea and apply it here. Also, you can add critical hits.

Critical hit 40% damage
Normal hit 20% damage
Partial hit <20% damage
Total Dodge/Miss 0% damage

You can also create a stamina point system so that the player will get tired over time. When people are exhausted, they can only do impulsive strong attacks, but only once ever few seconds. Have a stamina bar where the player can take action as long as their stamina is above a certain minimum level. Each action will use a different quantity of stamina depending on how powerful the technique is.

Edit:

Example

Stamina regenerate at 1 per second (higher as you level up)

Simple ability
1 stamina to block
2 stamina to dodge
3 stamina to attack
4 stamina to parry
5 stamina to counter (high chance of critical if it comes after parry)

techniques will require vary amount of stamina depending on how you want the balance to be.

requires minimum stamina 5 to take action. It this way, players cannot take action when their stamina is less than 5 even if they can do certain action for less than 5 points. This also make some player do the impulsive (high stamina cost) attacks when their character is exhausted similar to real life.

Edit again:

What you want to have is to have as few miss as possible. The character that dodge will still have a high chance of taking partial damage, but there is a small opportunity for them to take no damage. The 5 hit kill is an effective way to keep the game from lasting too long. Partial damage will help at the higher levels of playing. The stamina system can be added to stop the playing from lasting too long.

[Edited by - Platinum_Dragon on November 20, 2009 12:01:37 PM]

The ideal length should be about 10-15 seconds for normal monsters of same level.

Basically i think you should introduce different monster difficulty like wow :
Easy monsters (with same level as you) : die in 1 hit or 5-10 aoe hits.
Normal monsters (with same level as you) : die in 5 hits.
Elite monsters (with same level as you) : die in 20 - 30 hits.
Bosses ...

Easy monsters will swarm the player e.g fighting a legion of 20-30 rats, they will do low damage, but when they surround you, you are pretty much dead. It will fun, having them as you make the player feel powerfull.

Normal monsters are the casual monsters, they could also buff others, and will require planing in order to win.

Elite monsters will be able to kill you in 5 hits, so you will have to kite them, crowd control them or spam heal yourself to survive.

For characters of different levels, the power gap depends on you, in wow for example it would be almost imposible to kill someone 5 levels higher than you (except if he is a clothie or if he is afk).

Also wow lowers the chances of a lower level character to win a higher level monster based on their level. E.g a lv 20 monster has 30-60% chance to do a crushing blow on a lv 10 player. A lv 10 player has much lower chance to hit him like 60% and even if he hits him will do only 5-10 damage instead of 60-100. If wow didnt use this extreme power gap then lv 60 characters could easily win lv 70 mobs since the damage done by a lv60 is almost the same as the damage of a lv 70 (a level 70 does like 30% damage more). So these extreme hardcoded power differences guarantee balance. These rules dont work on pvp, so a low level character could actually win a higher level player (if he is afk).

Also a neverending battle is not bad. E.g enemies would be forced to become frends, find new tactics or quit fighting. Thus they will find alternative playstyles, or strategies to win.

[Edited by - titanfantasy on November 20, 2009 12:09:40 PM]

I think you're thinking about this way too hard. Battle length is not the issue. If battles are too long or too short, that's a symptom of an underlying balance issue. Just make sure things make sense and are balanced, and battle length will take care of itself.

It depends on what kind of combat system you want your RPG to have.

An RPG that is completely gear and build dependent(ex: most korean MMORPGs) should have short battles because the winner is decided before the first hit lands.

One that is dependent on skill usage and counters(ex: Guild Wars) should have longer battles because the winner is decided by a series of action and counter-actions. If battles are over too quickly, then the strategic level never gets deeper than initial moves.