Re: [crossfire] Redo wc/ac/armor (+dodge)
On Fri, Aug 03, 2007 at 11:51:13PM +0300, Juha Jäykkä wrote: So we'd have AC, armour (resist_physical) and dodge? Three things? Not good, imo. This just reflects the fact that a heavy armour will reduce your mobility. But as Mark said, keeping legacy values will cause problems. A new value called dodge or whatever will work better. Maybe we should do a body part table and think about protection values. After the Wallace rule of nines, we have (for humans): head 1 x 9% arm2 x 9% leg2 x 18% torso 1 x 36% For our body protection armour system we may use: body_head 1 x 9% body_arm2 x 6% (12%) body_wrist 2 x 2% ( 4%) body_hand 2 x 1% ( 2%) body_leg2 x 15% (30%) body_foot 2 x 3% ( 6%) body_torso 1 x 36% The body_shoulder part is special. A cloak covers body, legs, arms and also the head with a hood. So I would say a cloak is able to increase the armour value by 11 (arms 2%, legs 4%, torso 4% and head 1%). But no armour should increase the maximum percentage for the body part. This leads into some calculations with the overlapping cloak. For example a helmet is unable to increase your armour by more than 9%. The same for other resistances. Having a helmet which protects me by 100% against fire wouldn't burn my torso? No, just the head is protected against fire, which means 9% of the body. The armour parts shouldn't offer more protection than the body cover percentage. This also makes the armour system more clear for the players. Now combining for example a +20% leg armour with a +30% torso armour will result into +50%. Maybe we could allow a cloak for other resistances than armour to offer up to 87% protection (head 9%, arms 12%, legs 30% and torso 36%). For example a cloak of fire protection with 87% resist_fire combined with fire protection bracers, gauntlets and boots will allow an overall maximum resist_fire of 99%. But combining a 87% resist_fire cloak with a 36% resist_fire torso armour won't increase the overall resist_fire protection, because the torso is already fully protected by the torso armour, the cloak can't add anything else. Having a 30% resist_fire torso armour with 87% resist_fire cloak adds the missing 6% resist_fire for the torso part. Because there are only 99% in the body table above, you can't ever reach a protection of 100%. This can be reached by magic for a period of time or rings / amulets, but not permanent with armour. Enchanting armour will work up to the maximum value out of the table above. So you won't be able to enchant boots over 6% (2 x 3%). Adding an option to add other resistances than physical, either by scrolls or by smithery, will have the same limit. What about rings adding resistances? Well, they could either fill up the missing points of armours. Or there is an extra slot for magic which always adds the resistance, no matter of the armour resistances. The extra magic slot will allow resistances up to 100%, filling up armour points just up to 99%. I prefer the extra magic slot with the chance of 100% resistances. And this will be new, but easier to understand. Adding resistances will work linear. Combining two rings of fire +30% will sum up to +60%. Let us discuss a little bit more about a dodge skill. Perhaps we need that 10% XP pool, after all, I still don't like this xp pool idea. CF is not a pen paper RPG. but make it allocatable ONLY to those skills which cannot advance in any other way, perhaps? Or even make the 10% player-selectable? Make skills in a way that it's possible to gain xp in. Or simply let dodge gain XP from missing attacks? That's better. Like 1 XP per missed damage? Uh, how do you reach level 100? Did you tried to level up hiding? This 1 xp steps are a pain. One more thing: would dodge help evade things like magic missile? No, just those you won't be able to run away from with normal movement. You see arrows, bolts, magic missiles, ... coming and you're able to run away from them. No need to dodge them. It's just for the melee combat. On Fri, Aug 03, 2007 at 06:47:40PM -0700, Mark Wedel wrote: Dodge skill: I thought about the idea of dodge skill getting exp each time you dodge. Same do I. Several problems - exp has to go up as character advances, otherwise dodge skill effectively maxes out at pretty low level. Correct. Same problem as with lockpicking, find / disarm traps, ... I think such a simple is open to easily exploited abuses - I park myself by a monster I know can't damage me (say high regen + high resistance to its attack type). I let it sit overnight, and next morning, I've got bunch of dodge exp. Than we have to make it not exploitable. If a monster can't hurt you, you can't gain xp from it. Again, we need a system which decreases the xp gained from lower level monsters. What about something like that. You're unable
Re: [crossfire] Redo wc/ac/armor (+dodge)
On Thu, Aug 02, 2007 at 10:41:18PM -0700, Mark Wedel wrote: rename ac to dodge, and make it start at ten. If working with d20 this sound reasonable. Remove this bonus from pretty much all armor currently in the game, and/or perhaps add penalty for most of the armors. Keep ac of armour. But this value will reduce dodge. So a plate mail with ac 5 will reduce the dodge value by 5. We still need to check all the armour to verify the ac value. I mulled over the idea of making dodge a skill, but handling exp on that is tricky Let us discuss a little bit more about a dodge skill. It would have some advantages having dodge as a skill. This way you're able to keep up with wc and also mages will be able to dodge without the need to train physical combat... I think base dodge should be based on dexterity, But wc will increase with a skill which may reach level 100, dexterity will stay around 30. You won't be able to dodge anything on higher levels. certianly races/classes may get a dodge bonus, This will make it easier on lower levels. But at high level the problem will still exists. and certain skills may give increasing dodge bonus for higher levels (like karate - high level person in karate should have an excellent dodge) That forces mages to learn physical combat to avoid being killed on higher levels. The one change I would make is that enchanting armor would increase the resist_physical value, and not the armor. Right now, boots +1 give you 1 ac point and perhaps 3 resist physical - under the revised system, those boots would still not give you an AC, but 4 resist physical instead. Sounds reasonable. But than we need to increase the enchanting level. A maximum armour enchanting up to +4 won't have such a big impact than ac +4. One ac point is worth a 5% chance (due to the d20). And will it take effect on all resistances or just physical? The tricky part on this is balancing it out - since the to hit rolls is d20 based, it doesn't take too much a difference for something to be deadly or not deadly enough. Do we want to stay with the d20 based system? It allows us just 5% steps. We don't need to implement pen paper systems. We should develop something more suitable; d20 is good for pen paper based systems, but we don't need to care about an easy dice system. The computer will do the calculation part. Now one thought I have here might be to sort of say what are reasonable/expected values of those different attributes, eg: level wc dodge resist value 1 1 10 20 10 5 15 30 20 13 22 45 ... 10090 10695 Such a table is neat and will help making better maps. the point is they may not really be linear - at certain points, characters may get different items that give them certain boosts, etc. That heavily depends on map making. A linear progress is favoured. J??rgen ___ crossfire mailing list crossfire@metalforge.org http://mailman.metalforge.org/mailman/listinfo/crossfire
Re: [crossfire] Redo wc/ac/armor (+dodge)
Remove this bonus from pretty much all armor currently in the game, and/or perhaps add penalty for most of the armors. Keep ac of armour. But this value will reduce dodge. So a plate mail with ac 5 will reduce the dodge value by 5. So we'd have AC, armour (resist_physical) and dodge? Three things? Not good, imo. Let us discuss a little bit more about a dodge skill. It would have some advantages having dodge as a skill. This way you're able to keep up with wc and also mages will be able to dodge without the need to train physical combat... Agreed. Some incarnation of DD has a skill tumbling which in essence is the same as dodge here. It can be improved by the skill point system. Perhaps we need that 10% XP pool, after all, but make it allocatable ONLY to those skills which cannot advance in any other way, perhaps? Or even make the 10% player-selectable? Or simply let dodge gain XP from missing attacks? Like 1 XP per missed damage? This needs a major change in the server: currently (I think) the player will not even know whether the monster has tried to hit and missed or not tried at all. And I think damage is computed only after hit is scored, that would need to change as well. One more thing: would dodge help evade things like magic missile? I think not, since they are spells and supposedly guided (missile). It might be ok to help evade comets, asteroids and other non-guided stuff (firebolt comes to mind), though (not lightnings, they are supposed to be too fast). But wc will increase with a skill which may reach level 100, dexterity will stay around 30. You won't be able to dodge anything on higher levels. True, unless we ramp up the maximum stats to 100 - not likely (I'd up them to at least 40-50 range, because fireborns, for example, can easily get Pow 30 with very little equipment - their maximum Pow with all equip should be more than that of other races.). Dodge needs to rise with levels. certianly races/classes may get a dodge bonus, This will make it easier on lower levels. But at high level the problem will still exists. This is the old problem with racial/class bonuses all again! We should decide here and now that all racial/class bonuses need to either a) not exist or b) improve with level, as fireborn ac and dragon resist_physical do at the moment. (This does no apply to such things as fireborns' resist_fire +100 or undeads' disease immunity or even fireborns' extra fingers - just numerical bonuses (except those that are already maximal).) That forces mages to learn physical combat to avoid being killed on higher levels. Or avoid melee and missiles - like in many penpaper rpgs. Though it is sometimes pretty difficult in CF. Sounds reasonable. But than we need to increase the enchanting level. A maximum armour enchanting up to +4 won't have such a big impact than ac +4. One ac point is worth a 5% chance (due to the d20). True. And will it take effect on all resistances or just physical? Why would it? Just AC is being altered and it never affected any other resistances anyway. BUT I'd alter the alchemy/jewellery/etc as per one of my earlier posts and that would enable you to alter the other resistances of items as well. Perhaps it might also be nice to limit the total sum of bonuses an item can give by something else than jeweller/etc level as well: iron rings might be able to give less bonuses than mithril rings? Do we want to stay with the d20 based system? It allows us just 5% steps. We don't need to implement pen paper systems. I can only see one problem with 5% steps: it means 5% of the attacks hit no matter what. This might be considered unrealisticly high. But since beings with AC 100 are pretty tough anyway, they'd probably have so good resist_physical as well that those who should not realistically be able to hit them will not do any damage even when they hit. -Juha -- --- | Juha Jäykkä, [EMAIL PROTECTED]| | home: http://www.utu.fi/~juolja/ | --- signature.asc Description: PGP signature ___ crossfire mailing list crossfire@metalforge.org http://mailman.metalforge.org/mailman/listinfo/crossfire
Re: [crossfire] Redo wc/ac/armor (+dodge)
Quick followups: AC: if this change is adopted, one really can't just say 'make what is currently AC a dodge penalty' - that will result in lots of broken items (certain items that currently give high AC and shouldn't give that as dodge penalty). Plus, it becomes confusing - if I've learned one thing, having these legacy values is a bad idea. Instead, a dodge (or dodge_adj) field should be added. It may be that AC is a good starting point for that, and anything that has AC set is converted into -dodge_adjustment. Another reason a new field is good is that it then makes it very easy to see if the item has been updated - if you see that the item has a dodge_adj set, you know it is up to date/current. If you don't change the field name, impossible to know if you have some legacy object that needs to be updated, or if it has been rebalanced. Dodge skill: I thought about the idea of dodge skill getting exp each time you dodge. Several problems - exp has to go up as character advances, otherwise dodge skill effectively maxes out at pretty low level. I think such a simple is open to easily exploited abuses - I park myself by a monster I know can't damage me (say high regen + high resistance to its attack type). I let it sit overnight, and next morning, I've got bunch of dodge exp. Now with the experience pool idea, dodge may be a bit more usable, but I'm still not sure if one would be able to funnel enough exp into it to be useful - if the creatures WC is 50, having a dodge of 30 vs 20 makes no difference - the creature is going to hit you all the time. For spellcasters, may be reasonable to have various spells (of different power) that give dodge bonuses. So you have a 40th level spell that gives you a 30 dodge bonus - good enough to avoid being damaged most of the time. An advantage of this is that this is also quite easy to tune - if a character is a pure spell caster, his spellcasting skill is effectively his overall level in some sense, so what level spell he casts really determines what creatures he can kill, and thus, what level of protection he can get from those spells is of direct relevance. Enchanting armor: Exactly how much improvement each scroll gives is an implementation detail. However, one has to be careful - if one is able to enchant all pieces of armor to resist_armor 50, that character will have an overall resist_armor 99. So you need some mechanism to say something like 'max enchantment on boots is 10, max on gloves is 5, max on armor (suits) is 60', just to keep things in balance. I would say enchant armor would only improve resist_physical. That said, adding other spells to increase other resistances is I think reasonable (enchant armor - protection from fire, etc). But still in this case, the max total enchantments of all the different types of attacks can not exceed the max enchantment values. And those max enchantment values are really only for player controlled enchantments. Artifact/special armor may go above that, but those max values should be used as baselines. d20 vs dother: That could be changed - has to be thought on how to do it. Percentage system would be fairly consistent with rest of game (percentages for resist values, etc). A problem however is steps of increase - if you increase say dodge and wc 1% per level, then actual level doesn't make a huge different - wc + d100 dodge + 50 makes the dodge and wc skills not especially important - that d100 is what will primarily make a difference - in that above example, suppose creature has dodge 30, so wc + d100 80 to hit. If character has wc of 0, hits 20% of time. Wc if 20 means 40% of time - twice as much. This system may be reasonable, but really does de-emphasize wc and dodge. Other issue is that currently a weapons bonus (sword +1) affects wc. If switched to a percentage system, that +1 sword means diddly squat. One could change it so that each plus of a weapon is 5%, but now you're looking more like a d20 system again, just everything multiplied by 5. Dodge for spells: It should perhaps for certain spells. One could follow that ADDv3 systems of 3 saving throughs - reflex, fortitude, and willpower, and dodge will really equate to reflex - sort of goes beyond original start of this discussiong, but discussing saving throws perhaps makes sense. ___ crossfire mailing list crossfire@metalforge.org http://mailman.metalforge.org/mailman/listinfo/crossfire
