Durability

Since we've all mostly come to a consensus on how the fatigue system should work, what are everyone's thoughts on using a similar system to represent item durability?

Some people have said they don't like the idea of weapon and armor durability scores, being a pain to keep up with, though I think they would be useful to express in some way. Perhaps we could do it in a similar manner to fatigue: tick marks that can be applied after battle depending on a roll. As you get more tick marks, the armor or weapon gets less effective and will need to be repaired. Better materials have a lower chance of getting damaged.

Thoughts?

EDIT: going by what Jiub said in the combat section, when an armor piece gets damage, it could subtract 1 from each of it's avoid/defend stats. Cheap crap-o armor has barely any and thus breaks pretty quickly, but good armor would have higher avoid/defend stats and thus be more able to take a few encounters. This also allows for Damage armor spells and weapons to be more useful in combat, for both sides of the fight.

Woot! I'm inspirational!

On a more pertinent note, I think it would be nice if like Fatigue, we include durability in a way that enriches the game and not just an inconvenient thing that you roll for every once in a while. The Diablo D20 mashup used Durability, but it was basically a money sink and that's all.

Saint Jiub wrote:Woot! I'm inspirational!

On a more pertinent note, I think it would be nice if like Fatigue, we include durability in a way that enriches the game and not just an inconvenient thing that you roll for every once in a while. The Diablo D20 mashup used Durability, but it was basically a money sink and that's all.

Define "enriches the game"?

I think in this context, "enriches" means "makes more immersive."

I think we need some sort of durability system for things like disintegrate spells, but maybe confine it to things like that?

I am totally okay with armor breaking down over time. It would make the Armorer skill very useful (as in the game). Rolling after each battle for every weapon you used and every piece of armor actually sounds like kind of a pain, though, now that I think of it.

Outlander wrote:I am totally okay with armor breaking down over time. It would make the Armorer skill very useful (as in the game). Rolling after each battle for every weapon you used and every piece of armor actually sounds like kind of a pain, though, now that I think of it.

Especially until we decide how armor is going to work. Is it going to be suites? or Pieces like in game. I'm more a fan of pieces, epecially because many artifacts in game are only sections of armor.

Enriches as in "doesn't exist solely to annoy the players." The reason durability is such a pain in some systems is it's arbitrary, and serves no purpose except to force you to TP and talk to Grizwold every couple hours. In TES, repairing is a way to practice skills, and the quality and status of someone's equipment can tell you an awful lot about that person. Brigands will be using worn-out leather and dented iron plate. If you see a motherfucker in full glass with an immaculate ebony halberd, you should probably run. On the other hand, it can be nice and ambiguous. For example, that chode in glass with an ebony halberd might just be a ceremonial guard who doesn't know which end is the sharp one, and that guy in the dented iron plate could be a weapon master who's just gotten back from doing something heroic and killing a thousand orcs single-handedly. Imperial legionnaires will be expected to have immaculate armor, whereas thieves might even be encouraged to have dingy worn-out crap, because it will make you stand out less.

and with regards to the suits vs. pieces, an idea I posted off-topic in one thread or another is this:
Use the torso armor for determining default, but called shots or critical hits might direct a hit at a different location. So a thrifty adventurer might get iron armor all over and then splurge on a really fancy headpiece to protect the squishy bits, or he might get steel for his chest and then wear iron or go unarmored on his head, legs, etc. and just hope nobody brains him with a mallet.

So if you were wearing no armor on your body, but full daedric everywhere besides the cuirass, you'd use your unarmored skill? Why you would do this, I dunno. This brings up another point, how will mix and matching of armor styles, not just pieces, be handled?

I think, for steamlining's sake, we might want to have armor be full sets, but list penalties (counting down maybe) for replacing pieces of the set. So if you're wearing bonemold and you replace the boots with cloth shoes of running or whatever, you take a slight ding to your armor value.

I like St. Jiub's method of handling this the best. Attacks default to chest, called shots can be... well... called, and crits are scored on random locations (unless it was a called shot crit, of course)

Rainbay wrote:So if you were wearing no armor on your body, but full daedric everywhere besides the cuirass, you'd use your unarmored skill? Why you would do this, I dunno. This brings up another point, how will mix and matching of armor styles, not just pieces, be handled?

Well, then you'd better scrounge something up quick, I guess.

Saint Jiub wrote:

Rainbay wrote:So if you were wearing no armor on your body, but full daedric everywhere besides the cuirass, you'd use your unarmored skill? Why you would do this, I dunno. This brings up another point, how will mix and matching of armor styles, not just pieces, be handled?

Well, then you'd better scrounge something up quick, I guess.

Unless you did it on purpose with maxed heavy armor and unarmored to be a huge troll and dodge nearly all attacks, and then when you do get hit with a critical and it goes somewhere random, it will probably hit a heavily armored body part.

(awesomeface)

At which point it's "Suddenly were-cliffracers...thousands of them."

Rainbay wrote:

Saint Jiub wrote:

Rainbay wrote:So if you were wearing no armor on your body, but full daedric everywhere besides the cuirass, you'd use your unarmored skill? Why you would do this, I dunno. This brings up another point, how will mix and matching of armor styles, not just pieces, be handled?

Well, then you'd better scrounge something up quick, I guess.

Unless you did it on purpose with maxed heavy armor and unarmored to be a huge troll and dodge nearly all attacks, and then when you do get hit with a critical and it goes somewhere random, it will probably hit a heavily armored body part.

(awesomeface)

Are we including encumbrance at all? Encumbrance could solve this neatly by having all of those pieces of heavy armor weigh you down and make it harder to dodge. Say every piece of armor has an ENC rating that you add up and then subtract from your dodge.

I support durability, if nothing else because there was talk about crafting skills and this will give some of them direct impact on character performance. Having a former apprentice to a blacksmith in your party won't be just a background note.

It was also discussed in the origional thread that armorer might also be used similar to enchant: to boost the effectiveness of weapons and armor. So if you have high armorer, you can spend some time and materials and make an item better than it's base stats. So with enough armorer, you could make some crummy iron sword better than normal silver sword: maybe make it lighter, faster, more accurate or stronger. The catch is of course that it is still an iron sword so you couldn't hit anything requiring magic or silver weapon.

Also, better quality materials for weapons not only start better, they can become better by allowing more upgrades just like they allow more enchantment. So an iron sword might just allow you to upgrade it one way, say choosing between boosted damage or speed or durability, but a silver sword could allow you to boost damage AND speed.

These upgrades would cost materials, similar to alchemy I thought.

Any opinions on this idea?

An interesting system. I like it, but it's complicated. Certainly doable, but it's a project for later if anything, I think.

I agree, the details of such a project will take some doing, but I like the idea of it. I don't mind Crafting being complex, because that's not the sort of thing you're prone to do in the heat of an adventure. But I definnitely like the idea of upgradeable weapons. Kinda like modding a custom weapon, it helps your character feel like that's YOUR sword, not just another "+1 sword" or "glass warhammer".

Exactly! You have your dwemer spear, affectionitly named Cliffrazor, which you have had enchanted to paralyze the enemy and absorb their health a little, and with your armorer have sharpened for increased damage damage, lightened it a little to make it lighter, balanced it for a bonus to accuracy and speed. You'd have to think about it before going for that fancy glass spear in the shop; sure you could upgrade it even more eventually, but you've poured so much time and effort into your current one and been through so much that you don't know if you'd rather wait, or maybe buy some armor or supplies instead. There are many ways you could do this, and the choice is yours.

Rainbay wrote:and the choice is yours.

With the amount of use you're getting out of that phrase I have to wonder if I shouldn't relinquish my avatar .

That being said, I favor the idea of armor damage simply reducing the "armor bonus" of the armor by integers. Let's say that your spiffy dwemer armor has a rating of 8, while your crappy iron armor has a rating of 2. Your dwemer armor can take a lot more blows than your iron before it becomes completely ineffective. Of course, we'll need to integrate this with the combat discussion, to determine how exactly armor works and how it might get hit in combat. With so many of these subsystems being reliant on the base combat system working first, I'm not really going to work on this until it is mostly finalized. 'Course, I'll have to read through the thread first because my attention has been elsewhere, but hopefully we'll be able to get that up and running before we start screwing around with armor damage. Well, that and skills; right now, those are my two top priorities.

True. We have to do some work on combat. We have how you actually hit someone pretty much down; now we just need to figure out what happens after that. Forget armor damage, what about PEOPLE damage? How damage is actually calculated has hardly been brought up, if at all.

Why not treat armor damage like we've done fatigue, only more-or-less permanent until repaired? You'd make a roll after each encounter where you took damage, and there'd be some sort of table to figure out how much damage. Disintegrate spells could add to that roll, or force a roll immediately during combat.

I am very interested in teh crafting system mentioned above, btw.

LessRudeScrib wrote:Why not treat armor damage like we've done fatigue, only more-or-less permanent until repaired? You'd make a roll after each encounter where you took damage, and there'd be some sort of table to figure out how much damage. Disintegrate spells could add to that roll, or force a roll immediately during combat.

That is exactly what I was supporting. I thought disintergrate spells would force a roll during combat as well, so they would be immediatly useful. Otherwise, no point in disintergrating the enemies weapons, because when the combat ends, they'll be dead before the effect takes place.