Designing Abilities for Specific Roles

In order to try and avoid the issue of having useless abilities, I'm trying to make sure that the abilities used are applicable to many generic situations as opposed to specific ones, but I also want to make them more than just a typical "this person attacks at a long range." For instance, my current ability for my Mid Range Defense role gives them the ability to switch places with another unit as it's being attacked and takes the damage for them, which allows them to perform their role from a short distance, and doesn't (to me) feel like the typical wall that a defensive unit tends to be.

I'm still throwing ideas around for other roles, but once I get 5 down I'm ready to start throwing them against each other and playtest. Ultimately I would like to see if I can get classes filling each role at each distance (so 9 units total) but I understand that I don't need to have that many, even if I do need a good selection for players to choose from.

Hmm. I just realized that I haven't discussed any of the stats needed for the game yet, or how to approach that. Next post I'll have to address that.

Roles and Abilities

In most tactical RPGs that I've played, it's the abilities of the classes that are the most interesting part of the game, but they often tend to have the issue of only being useful in a specific scenario. Inside of these situations, the abilities work great:

"This class has an attack that can hit up to 5 enemies in a row!"
"How often are enemies lined up in a straight line?"
"Two every now and again. More than that, almost never."

And that usually ends with the move being nearly useless. The system in this game will only allow for a few abilities, so I don't feel I have the luxury of designing throwaway abilities; every one of them must be designed to work in a multitude of situations, which in and of itself isn't that bad. The problem comes when you start considering the battle roles of any of the units. Their abilities would need to fit into their assigned roles, as well as be useful in multiple situations, most of these situations being triggered by an enemy unit. To make sure I can get all of this syncing together well, I am designing my units on two separate axes: both their role in battle, and the distance they perform best at.

Attack, Defend, Support
Close, Mid, Long

I have a few ideas of how these abilities will work, and will be talking more about that in my next post.

Issues to tackle

So, there are some major issues to tackle if this project is going to be successful.
How will taking turns work? Will one player move all of their units, then the next player move all of theirs, etc etc?
What stats will each unit have? How will they be managed for a board game?
Will there be equipment? How will that be managed?
Each class has different skills, and I want to allow players to change their units classes and equip previously learned skills. Again, managing is a major issue.
Also, how do they learn skills? How many will each class have? How will they work with each other?
Obviously, I have a lot of things to work on for this project, but I'm sure I can get it working together well. I just have to make sure to test my ideas and confirm they work as intended.

Initial post

A few things about this Blog, just for some perspective. One of my classes at DigiPen Institute of Technology allows us to do a project of our choosing that we have a passion to make, and this Blog is here to chronicle my progress. The project that I am doing is to take an idea that I've had in my game for a tactical RPG and create it; however, I know that the game as I initially designed it would never work. As such, I'm taking the original idea and refining it, changing it into a well designed board game as a real test of my designing skills.