On the subject of weapons

Rainbay wrote:

Outlander wrote:We could make either the weapon type or the material a straight + or -, to ease the calculatory load.

True. How do you recomend it be handled? How much for each tier?

dagger: /25
shortsword: /20
longsword: /15
Claymore: /10
1handed axe: /20
mace: /15
2h axe: /10
warhammer: /5
spear: /15

I hadn't thought that far ahead. The following is some brainstorming:

Chitin: -5
Iron: 0
Silver: +5
Steel: +10
Glass: +15
Dwemer: +25
Daedric: +40

So, at 50 Strength, a Daedric dagger would do 42, whereas a warhammer would do 50.
A Steel dagger would do 12, while a warhammer would do 20.

This begs the question: Which should be more important, Weapon type, or material?
Health is STR*2, right? Maybe we should crank up the multipliers a bit?



I do not wish to poop on your rainbow, Slotha, I just like the idea of non-random damage so very much and wish to explore the possibility more.

Outlander wrote:I do not wish to poop on your rainbow, Slotha, I just like the idea of non-random damage so very much and wish to explore the possibility more.

I don't really care about rainbows, only about getting to the end of it and having sweet, sweet sex with the pot of gold. Having static damage values would make the job of working out armor and special attacks easier (though, admittedly, it is very strange to be able to do exactly the same damage with each attack).

I though health would be endurance+strength, and fatigue would be endurance+willpower. Because our present damage system doesn't take skill into account and ability scores barely matter, 60-200 hit points would be sufficient to replicate what we had in Morrowind (provided that you played with the health fix instead of using the broken vanilla formula).

Also, I'll admit to never playing Oblivion, or Daggerfall. One came before I cared for RPGs, the other came when I couldn't afford a new computer. So. Since I know only about one-third of what's important, I'm not making definite statements about anything.

Slotha Sil wrote:

Outlander wrote:I do not wish to poop on your rainbow, Slotha, I just like the idea of non-random damage so very much and wish to explore the possibility more.

I don't really care about rainbows, only about getting to the end of it and having sweet, sweet sex with the pot of gold. Having static damage values would make the job of working out armor and special attacks easier (though, admittedly, it is very strange to be able to do exactly the same damage with each attack).

I though health would be endurance+strength, and fatigue would be endurance+willpower. Because our present damage system doesn't take skill into account and ability scores barely matter, 60-200 hit points would be sufficient to replicate what we had in Morrowind (provided that you played with the health fix instead of using the broken vanilla formula).

Also, I'll admit to never playing Oblivion, or Daggerfall. One came before I cared for RPGs, the other came when I couldn't afford a new computer. So. Since I know only about one-third of what's important, I'm not making definite statements about anything.

Having played only Morrowind, you know about 66% of what's important. Daggerfall is providing us mostly with ideas for skills, and Oblivion is providing us with nearly nothing.

The only use I could see getting out of Oblivion would be if we ever did a Realms of Oblivion supplement, since it provides a lot of details about Sheogorath's Madhouse.

well, we took Skill Perks from Oblivion.

Anyway, I don't really like static damage, but I DO like the idea of certain weapons (daedric axes and the like) doing fucklots of damage (like 10-80 per swing) because that's very reminiscent of the times when you go "HOLY FUCKSHITS FUCKITY THAT JUST TOOK A QUARTER OF MY FUCKING LIFE FUCK RUN AWAY"

I also prefer random damage.

Holy shit, Slotha. I have no idea how I missed the GIGANTIC COLUMNS OF AWESOME WEAPON STATS that you did, but they're fucking brilliant. Well the fuck done, sir.

After two days of intoxication I've come with a bit, well, old-fashioned solution for weapon accuracy, damage, armor, and weapon and armor skills.

Weapons do xy damage, whatever. But, weapons do bonus damage depending on how much they undershoot the defense value. So, the higher your skill and the better your base ability score is, you krump harder. Fists and daggers get a small bonus, one-handers get a mediocre and heavy bruisers get a good bonus. We will reduce weapon damage extremities to balance out possible overkills. Even better, we'll have weapons do damage solely depending on how well you hit, with no guaranteed damage dice.

Armor grants no typical DR, but instead just makes you harder to hit. Even if you get hit, good armor will reduce the undershot, making you take less bonus damage, or even negating it if the attack roll is close enough. Agility, armor value, block skill, the works, everything stacks on its side of the equation.

Now, as for the armor values. There is no pretty way to do this. My suggestion is to use percentile skills like in the game, and compile a key - a table - containing defense values for each type of armor depending on skill. This way there will be no need to actually calculate defense ratings.

We could use fixed damage values - no rolling for damage. An axe has a potential to do 1-20 damage, always. If we decide that, say, you get 1 damage for each two percent by which you beat defense value, if you beat it by 26 points your axe bites for 13 damage. Using the same approach to spells (your casting roll against opponent's resistances) would do the same for magic. One roll less in core mechanic.

And because all relevant ability scores are now factored in action AND effect, we could finally get rid of ability modifiers, which irk me so much that I feel my sperg tingling. (Except maybe for movement speed, that I can't argue against.) Seriously, think about it - a guy with 100 agility gets a 9% advantage over a cripple with 10 agility? That's... I don't know. Elbowing D&D into our game and nothing else. You don't need strength mod to damage, as strength already improves your chance to hit, thus increasing your damage. You don't need agility mod to defense at all - agility itself is already factored in.

Yes, I'm drunk again.

Better tier weapons get a getter a better underroll-to-damage conversion, in addition to improved damage potential. So underrolling by 17% with an iron longsword is a mild injury, while underrolling with a daedric longsword for the same value is a nasty stab wound. As attack and defense values are expected to grow at similar speed, hit ratios should remain the same, so this is the cleanest and the most obvious answer to hit points increase. Or maybe we should reserve this for inherently magic items, like daedric, ebony and artifact weapons.

Artifact gear would be better than their tier. An artifact light armor would have defensive properties of a medium armor, while an artifact longsword would have damage potential of an axe.

I'm liking it so far - it cuts down on the insanely complicated formulas we've been tossing back and forth for combat so far. Keep it up, maybe hash out a quick example scenario.

I'm still far from the point where i can offer a definitive example. Because, first, I need to sit down with a few sheets of paper and balance out weapon damage against hit points we're going to use ((WP+EN)/2, was it?), then fine tune different kinds of weapons and armor. Also there's this thing where I'm unsure how to make light, fast weapons a counter-intuitive choice against heavy armor, because their improved chance to hit effectively increases their damage compared to weapons that are objectively bigger but not likely to hit for full potential. I was thinking about removing hit bonuses altogether for weapons. While this might hurt balance because nobody would want to use small stuff anymore, I'd like to ask you - IRL, which successful army used daggers as primary weapons? Small weapons can be concealed, and their skill is tied to SPD. They shouldn't be a viable alternative to actual military stuff in a slugging match. Maybe they should get bonuses for backstabbing, or against disabled opponents (dagger of mercy!).

I can rig up a very simple exercise now, though. Let's say Hriskar Flat-Footed is drunk and wants to cleave Fargoth in two. Hriskar has his trusty 1-20 steel hand axe. Knowing that, Fargoth had traded in his 100 black dildos for a bonemold cuirass and enough training to have the same defense bonus as Hriskar's attack bonus. Now they meet at the small pond behind Arilles' and duke it out for the future of Vvardenfel. Because their bonuses are the same, Hriskar has to roll under 50 to hit the little bugger, and he does! He rolls 14 and slices Fargoth open like a ripe watermelon, spilling his green fetid goo on the ground. Had Fargoth invested in a steel tower shield and a cuirass, his defense value would have been 30 points higher, and Hriskar's attack would only have nicked him, connecting for 16 (8 damage). Had Fargoth bought light armor of the same tier as bonemold medium and steel heavy, his armor part of defensive value would have been 10 points lower than with medium, but because of all the agility he pumped up while training light armor skill, his actual defense value would have been almost as good as that of medium armor, or even better. But his hit points would have been lower, so he'd blarg ded anyway. Serves him right, whiny muck-wading creep

Daggers have a lot of uses - getting inside the reach of foes with bigger weapons, for example, or taking the place of shields. And Classical Greek and Roman armies usually used short blades after their spears were exhausted.

Saint Jiub wrote:Daggers have a lot of uses - getting inside the reach of foes with bigger weapons, for example, or taking the place of shields. And Classical Greek and Roman armies usually used short blades after their spears were exhausted.

Both situation only have in common that the fighting is done in confined space, which we don't have a system to simulate. Also, short weapons positively suck in combat precisely because you need to get inside the other guy's reach.

Maybe they need some sort of weird combination with hand-to-hand and grappling, where you prevent the enemy from effectively fighting back. Like one of those wrestling techniques developed to fight men wearing tempered steel plate.

But really, this is a consequence of a typical fantasy mishmash where obsolete weapons coexist with obviously better ones. I just want to avoid the stupid situation where everyone, on sight of an armored knight, pulls out their wee stabbins instead of axes and maces.

I'm going to dilute damage conversion for light weapons, so that they deal very little real damage to opponents with good defenses even if they do have a good chance to hit. And lo! and behold, short sword would actually be a good choice for a shield- and armor- oriented warrior who intends to win through attrition, so the Romans are appeased.

That, or the armor in itself will do the dilution indiscriminately, depending on type. I'll need to see some playtesting done before I decide on this, as it would drastically reduce damage taken while making going unarmored Diablo 2 on Double Hell difficulty.

Now, I'm partial to sitting down and solidifying this idea to see if it works. I'm going to use [Str+End/2] for hit points, and smash my old formula a bit so that it runs with new numbers.

[edit]
We will need a way for characters to improve their chance of success at attacking; as it stands now, someone with one rank in armor skill ahead of your weapon skill and a good shield is almost out of your reach. I was thinking about sacrificing one action to prepare an accurate attack on your next action, or some kind of combo chain that require different kinds of successive attacks (setting up the opponent to be off balance for a moment and such). But as the concept of having martial guards, techniques and special attacks was met with silence, I doubt this will be popular.

OK, here's the preliminary thing.

[edited attack formula, 22.july2010. Ignore the rest of the post, we now run on single attack/round, armor bonus+skill/2 paradigm.]

The formula used for attacking is as follows: good stuff - bad stuff = number to roll under

Good stuff (you):
AGI
STR
SPD
Weapon skill
Weapon attribute

Bad stuff (enemy):
AGI
STR
SPD
Armor skill/2
Armor bonus
Weapon skill/4, weapon attribute/4, block skill/2*
or
Weapon skill/4, weapon attribute/4, off-hand weapon skill/4, off-hand weapon attribute/4,
or
Double-handed weapon skill/2, double-handed weapon attribute/2,

*against ranged attacks, you only get the shield block bonus, not the weapon parry bonuses. Here's something for the people in Perks thread to play with.

Let's pay attention to Armor bonus:
Armor bonus = armor skill x armor multiplier
Armor multiplier tells you how many skill points you need to get a defense percent. They're ugly, so I'll make a table for every kind of armor, skill levels 5-100; I'm going to list only max armor bonuses now.
Unarmored
Unarmored bonus, 30
Light armor
Leather, fur, 13
Hard leather, 16
Chitin, 24
Studded leather, 30
Glass, 50
Medium armor
Mail, 45
Bonemold, 48
Dragonscale, 53
Orsimer, 57
Dreugh, indoril, 62
Adamantium, 80
Heavy armor
Iron plate, 50
Steel plate, 60
Trollbone, 60
Dwemer, 72
Ebony mail, 80
Daedric plate, 100

While it might seem that armor ranges wildly vary, take into account that Unarmored is not a combat style, and that light armor implies higher agility while heavy armor implies severe penalty to agility. I don't know how exactly all this will work out, but so far it looks like the things will be balanced, and slightly in favor of heavy armor, as it should be. It certainly looks odd that a master of light armor wearing, say, boiled netch leather gets less armor bonus than a master of unarmored walking around naked, but that, again, is intentional, as mastery of light armor carries with it high Agility and hence overall greater defense ability. It takes some tweaking, which I'll do much later, but this is, technically, my suggestion for beta.

Now that we know what kind of armor we're dealing with, it is time to work on weapon damage. Hopefully, I'll have something usable in a few days.

Add in Encumbrance as a Bad Thing. that will boost chance to hit based on how much crap a person is carrying. If we're using the same units of weight as Morrowind, having -1 defense per 25 Units will add a respectable chance to hit, and will automatically provide the Heavy Armor Makes It Hard To Dodge effect without applying a specific penalty on the armor itself. That way, if it's Feathered armor, it won't encumber as much (it shouldn't!), know what I mean?

See that daedric armor with a 100 bonus? That would force an opponent of equal skill to roll -1 on their d% to hit you, even if you don't use a shield. I am counting in encumbrance to keep heavy armor in check. In fact, the high defense values of heavy armor are there precisely to counterbalance the agility penalties, and other hardships, of wearing a heavy armor. Obviously, it needs more work. I haven't even started yet.

It do plan to go over the board a bit, compared to the video game. In Morrowind, heavy armor was strictly worse than light, almost as much as medium. Or so I felt most of the time. Heavy armor is a choice of dedicated front line warriors, and has to be srs bzns, not just a fashion statement.

...and we'll also have to have a table for encumbrance vs strength values, because with what we have now one point of encumbrance penalizes a 20 strength character as much as an 80 strength character.

For every 20% of your max encumbrance, you take a -5 penalty to defense. That should be an amount of weight equal to your strength score (if we're using Morrowind/Oblivion units of weight).

How do you calculate percentages without a calculator at hand? Slowly, and slow is a game killer. Also, that means that someone at 19% encumbrance picks up a rock and suddenly suffers a defense penalty. And that defense penalty will peak at 25, which is far below anything acceptable.

No, I was thinking of having your carrying capacity be the same as your strength score. Divide weights of game items by 5, and now we can use basic addition and subtraction instead of division and percentages. STR - encumbrance = your max AGI, something like that. It might seem brutal, but it makes sense - somebody loaded up until they can barely move is not going to dodge arrows, no matter how agile. I'm going to have to rework armor values when I see how much your average adventurer's on-person gear weighs.

We should institute a similar system for speed as well, albeit less brutal. Maybe halve the penalty...

[edit]
Actually, I just had an idea. Max encumbrance stays at STRx5, but in 5-step increments. If you carry your STR in encumbrance, you suffer no penalties. Between your STR and twice your STR, you suffer mild penaltes, then moderate, then severe, and then no AGI bonus at all. I like this for the pseudo-curved graph it would produce. But that means 5x number-crunching... hm. Maybe next week.

Under the Morrowind weight system, 20% of your capacity is equal to your Strength score. So you're on the same wavelength I was with the 20% of STR, but you're probably right - a penalty of five is kinda insignificant in the long run.

Saint Jiub wrote:Under the Morrowind weight system, 20% of your capacity is equal to your Strength score. So you're on the same wavelength I was with the 20% of STR, but you're probably right - a penalty of five is kinda insignificant in the long run.

I know that, it's rather obvious. I was talking about using that 20% as severity thresholds for encumbrance, as 20% is equal to your STR and there's no need to calculate it.

I've got a solution for our armor rules, and it's stupidly simple.

You know how armor gives you some protection even if it's the first time you've ever worn it? Well, we'll have armor give you a fixed defense bonus, plus your armor skill halved.

Unarmored - no armor, so you only rely on your skill.

Light - say, boiled netch, gives you 5 + skill/2.

Medium - iron chain, gives 20 + skill/2.

Heavy - steel plate, 40 + skill/2.

Because encumbrance will have more than one way of f****** you in the arse during adventures, wearing armor should give significant advantage in combat. Also, if we're going to use the new combat system, I'd suggest dropping extra actions granted by speed, and instead placing speed on both sides of the combat equation. That would put heavy armor, heavy weapon users at a disadvantage compared to mobile striker characters that pump their agility and speed regularly, so I'd amp medium and heavy armor a bit. It will also be counterbalanced by magic bonuses and armor-fighting techniques to an extent, but we'll be able to talk about this ONCE THE MAGIC CROWD COMES BACK FROM THEIR VACATION. In the mean time, I, uh, forgot about the third thing. Never mind, I'm sure I'll remember.

I like the idea. I'd like to find some way of ensuring that Unarmored doesn't become worse than the others - the joy of TES is that, ideally, any style of combat or play can be just as rewarding as any other. Perhaps limit the benefits of speed granted to characters with armor?

There's always situational stuff. It's hard to convince a target you're not a threat when you're in full plate. Evan harder to sneak around in the stuff. Meanwhile, a guy who's completely unarmored is still a threat because his opponents think he's clearly unarmed, right?

Not to mention you can't just wear armor all the time in real life like you could in the games. You have to sleep, to urinate, to run, etc. If you're mostly just putting skill into armor and so are used to it taking hits instead of having to dodge them yourself, when someone ambushes you in camp you're pretty fucked.