How many damage dealing buttons should a character have?

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Should he have just two max? A light sword swing and a heavy charged swing? Can those two buttons be comboed in different orders for more attacks? What about a third button for a sword thrust with longer reach or more penetrating power? A fourth button for a kick? A fifth to throw a fireball too? A sixth button for a longer reaching conal flamethrower? Where do you draw the lines on too many damage dealing buttons?

[Tadeusz]

If all these skills make sense within the game then I guess the upper limit is usually 12. More panels for buttons can be available if such range is really needed. My comfortable amount is half of that so I'd say 6 buttons should allow enough range for most of the player's needs.

[Brugmans]

Two: one for a heavy vertical swing, another for a heavy circular sweep, pressing both should execute a heavy reverse vertical swing. The first swing should also have two levels of charge, and different attacks should be freely chainable; lastly a button should be for parrying. A minor button can be reserved for kicking but that's negligible. This is the objectively perfect layout, that should never be deviated from. :weeb:

[asf]

this console garbage thinking is despicable

[J1M]

The moves a unit in an RPG should have are:

1. Move for targeting self
2. Move for targeting open tile
3. Move for targeting ally
4. Move for targeting enemy
5. Move for targeting terrain doodads (use door, switch)

[rusty_shackleford]

If I press a button, it should do something uniquely important.

You can have 17 damage dealing buttons if they're all unique enough to warrant it.

[WhiteShark]

In an action game, particularly one with detailed hitboxes and hitzones, and assuming the moves are meaningfully different in terms of reach, angle, speed, etc., I think the bare minimum is three. Example: lances in classic Monster Hunter have a horizontal stab, a 45° upward stab, and a move in which the character continuously charges forward dealing damage at the tip of his lance until cancelled. There's also a weak stab that can be done while blocking, a minor variation of the horizontal stab when doing an unsheathe attack, and the kick universal to all weapons, but those aren't essential. Three is sufficient for variety and handling different situations if they're well designed.

As for an upper maximum, I'm not sure there is one, at least in terms of game design; especially in a game with magic or other abilities not tied directly to weaopn attacks, the possibilities for meaningfully different moves are nigh endless. The real limiting factor is having feasible access to all of them. If using shift layers (i.e., holding one button to change the function of others), the number of accessible attack keybinds can be quite high―perhaps 15~20. Other moves can be made available, not by different keybinds, but by making them only appear in combos: first button press does move X, second button press does move Y, etc.

Turn-based games have different requirements. Since factors like movement, angle, speed, recovery time, etc. are heavily abstracted, moves that could be meaningfully differentiated by such in an action game are harder to make distinct in a turn-based game. To take the example of lance again, in a turn-based game, there really wouldn't be any point in making the horizontal stab and the angled stab different moves, for their minor differences are only relevant when making split-second decisions about targeting against a moving opponent. Likewise, because such granular factors are eliminated from the decision space, a turn-based game―at least one that focuses on a single or few combatants―needs to offer more moves to keep tactical considerations interesting. Hence, I think 4~5 is the minimum for a single character turn-based game, depending on the level of abstraction, but it goes down in proportion to the number of combatants under the player's control.

The upper limit is, again, hard to define in terms of pure game design. Though there are fewer differentiating factors in a turn-based game, there are still enough to create more moves than a player could feasibly remember or make optimal use of. The exception may be turn-based games with no positioning at all―think early Final Fantasy―for those eliminate another large swathe of the decision space. The other limitation is character identity: though one could design an arbitrarily large list of meaningfully different moves, one would quickly run into the problem of explaining narratively how one guy can do all them. Hence, for essentially the same reason that the minimum is higher for turn-based games, the maximum is also lower; I would peg it around 10 different moves, again falling in proportion to the number of combatants under the player's control.

[rusty_shackleford]

When I played WoW arena at a very competitive level(gladiator-level ratings for the seasons I played for), I probably had somewhere around 40-70 keybinds depending on the class(just off the top of my head from what I played, shadow priest probably had the most & warrior the least, but it has been well over a decade so…)
1-7, qertyfghzxcvbn, mouse buttons, scroll wheel, all with ctrl+shift+alt combos.
Worth noting that the massive majority of these buttons would not be for damage.

I'm not sure if there's any other game that requires you to have quite so many keys bound to play well. Can't think of any off the top of my head, anyways.

[MC_Sea]

Should he have just two max? A light sword swing and a heavy charged swing? Can those two buttons be comboed in different orders for more attacks? What about a third button for a sword thrust with longer reach or more penetrating power? A fourth button for a kick? A fifth to throw a fireball too? A sixth button for a longer reaching conal flamethrower? Where do you draw the lines on too many damage dealing buttons?

The maximum is hard decide since different games have different levels of combat but the bare minimum should always be 3. Even in turn-based RPGs, you will need one button for normal attacks, one for skills, and one for job-specific actions or ultimate specials. I would say 4-6 attack buttons should suffice for most games especially if you can chain them together, hold them for different attacks, rapidly mash them, and press multiple buttons/directions together for different variations.
I would be a bit hard-pressed to think of a game that would exhaust all those without covering all the necessary actions in a game (besides MMOs or simulation games, of course).

[WaterMage]

That depends a lot on game proposal, party size, encounter size, skills, etc

[J1M]

This David Sirlin's take. I would consider him one of the experts on this topic.

https://www.sirlin.net/articles/designing-yomi

[Norfleet]

Are you after how many damage dealing BUTTONS you should have, or how many OPTIONS you should have? Because these are not the same.

You can overload a game with too many different buttons, and yet have only one real option. Alternatively, you could have one or even no damage damage dealing buttons, and yet still have an entire wealth of actual options, because damage is not dealt just by pressing a button to attack. Maybe you attack by waving your sword with the mouse instead, so now you have a whole host of potential options, without the need for a horde of buttons. What if I have only one attack button, but I can stab by simply clicking or slash by clicking and dragging? This gives me an entire wealth of attack options that would be lacking if I had 6 buttons that could only perform a single canned animation each.

In an action game, particularly one with detailed hitboxes and hitzones, and assuming the moves are meaningfully different in terms of reach, angle, speed, etc., I think the bare minimum is three. Example: lances in classic Monster Hunter have a horizontal stab, a 45° upward stab, and a move in which the character continuously charges forward dealing damage at the tip of his lance until cancelled. There's also a weak stab that can be done while blocking, a minor variation of the horizontal stab when doing an unsheathe attack, and the kick universal to all weapons, but those aren't essential. Three is sufficient for variety and handling different situations if they're well designed.

This is an example of there both being too many and too few at the same time. If I want to stab at a 33 degree angle, it doesn't exist, and yet there's a bunch of buttons that are just simply "stab". Why not, instead, make it so I stab by aiming at what I want to stab with the mouse cursor, and then click to thrust, and increase the potency of the stab, perhaps, by leaning into it by moving forward at the same time? Now I have only ONE stab key, but I can stab at anything I wish, with varying degrees of commitment into the stab?

[WhiteShark]

Why not, instead, make it so I stab by aiming at what I want to stab with the mouse cursor, and then click to thrust, and increase the potency of the stab, perhaps, by leaning into it by moving forward at the same time? Now I have only ONE stab key, but I can stab at anything I wish, with varying degrees of commitment into the stab?

The limitation makes it require more skill to use properly. It's a good thing.

[TKVNC]

One.

Just an attack. Different weapons maybe, but one attack.

[Norfleet]

The limitation makes it require more skill to use properly. It's a good thing.

Skill at dealing with crappy controls isn't really great gameplay, unless your logical endpoint of this is to create Monster Hunter QWOP. It's merely jank we deal with, not a desirable feature. There are plenty of ways to make skilled gameplay with GOOD controls. Controljank for the sake of controljank is only amusing when you're making that the actual game.

Also, I can't help but note that as much as you claim to like it, you quit playing almost immediately.