Say your 1 STR 1 DEF princess waifu has a 35% Strength Growth. So every time she levels up, she gains 0.35 Strength. Stat calculation rounds down so her 1.35 STR is treated as 1 STR. After three level ups, that’s enough to go up by 1 whole STR point. And your waifu’s 150% DEF growth means this: Her first level up will grant 1.50 DEF, taking her from 1 DEF to 2.5 DEF aka 2 DEF rounded down. Her second level up adds another 1.50 DEF, taking her from 2.5 to 4.0 DEF. So it will seem as though she gained two stat points during that level up.
No RNG, just fixed growths without every character necessarily having to have exactly 100% or 200% or 0% in a growth.
It was a thing in FE9, and there’s a patch for it in the FEBuilder. I get the appeal, though it’s never been to my taste - it means your favourites never get screwed over, at least, but part of the fun of the game for me is having units grow (or get fucked over) in unusual ways.
RNG having a chance to mess up your strategy or characters sounds like something better suited to a second or third run of the game, like a Pokemon Randomizer run in a game you’ve already beaten normally. No risk of your deathless nuzlocke softlocking and dying early to a 210 attack 200 speed Snorlax Brock has before you have any hope of catching anything capable of beating it.
But it doesn’t mess anything up. Rosters are enormous. If I get through ten chapters of FE7 and Lowen has turned out terrible, I drop him in favour of new recruits. If I really, really like Lowen, I can pad him out with statboosters or, more bloody-minded favouritism. Or just drop him anyway, because I probably like more than twelve characters in FE7 anyway. If it comes down to a softlock, well, it’s down to my tactics, not to Lowen’s failure to proc 30% strength growths.
Still, it’s out there, but I think it’s telling that IS dropped it after 9.
Interesting idea. Certainty in FE is a fun space to explore. Though I prefer random growths since they kinda let you tell a story with your units.(Super blessed Lyn, absolutely cursed Alen, etc.) and that’s a part of the “Essential FE Experience” for me.
I don’t really have much more to say about the idea other than it’s an interesting idea and I’m curious to see how it plays out in practice. Certainly would allow for tighter design since there’s less RNG
RNG isn’t guaranteed to destroy a unit’s potential, but the potential for RNG to destroy a unit’s potential this run is there. It’s possible to play around bad luck, but how can designers create a tightly-designed punishing difficulty mode with no room for error if there is a chance of RNG creating error or removing the consequences of errors?
My personal idea is a mixed pseudorandom/fixed implementation, inspired a little by Heroes and TRS’s bracketed stats.
Units converge to (around*) the same final stats over time, but their rolls per level are “random”, with the growths/gains being adjusted behind the scenes as needed in order for the unit to converge correctly to the final stats, at least if the unit’s stats are below that final value. (So, for example, my Brom and someone else’s Brom could grow completely differently level to level, but they would even out at the end if both got to max level.)
I do love the cases where units grow crazily in stats that they normally “shouldn’t” though, so I dunno if I would want fully hard-locked stats at max level. Design philosophy is always evolving, I guess.