Weapon/Armor Types and Damage

News and suggestions during the development of The Quest's sequel. (Title is work in progress.)

Weapon/Armor Types and Damage

Postby pohdoh » Thu Sep 14, 2017 7:06 pm

Hello I am back after a long hiatus due to an exam. Anywho back to posting long ideas here until i get busy again lol.

One thing i notice is that most rpg's have a clearly best weapon/armor set in ALL situations. Runescape has the scimitar weapon types which has the highest damage per second and it invalidates almost all the other weapon types.
Skyrim avoids this by having all weapons do basically the same amount of damage. But that makes the weapons useless and unrewarding. They all have the same stats, so the type of weapon is more or less cosmetic.

I want to avoid both approaches and instead suggest a more complicated but much better solution especially to avoid power creep as expansions are added. I know the quest originally has something similar to this with the magic but i don't believe it did this with melee and ranged.

1. Armors have many different classes of protection
2. Weapons/Attacks deal many different types of damage
3. Mobs have differing amounts and types of armor

1. Armors

-instead of giving a flat AC bonus, different armors will give different armor values for different categories. Some categories off the top of my head (and in other games) are slash, stab, crush, heat, cold, arcane.
slash armor is protection against curved blades, pierce is for rapiers, crush is for hammers, heat is for fire/lava magic, cold is for ice magic, arcane is for uncategorized magic spells, and etc.

-so things like chainmail would be great protection against hammers but not so great against pierce weapons like arrows. full platemail would be the opposite.

-this will make it so there is no best armor but armor best for the situation. it will encourage players to get multiple types of armor sets and will make it MUCH easier to add new content without causing huge inflation and power creep. It will also make armors so much more unique and can give different armor materials different unique properties. for an example

-steel could have abnormally good physical armor like slash and stab but terrible magic and temperature defense since metal conducts the material. gold armor could be the opposite having magical properties and resisting magic but having terrible physical defenses. mithril would be somewhat in the middle. leather armor could have great heat and cold resistance but terrible pierce resistance. cloth robes can have incredible arcane resistance but terrible resistance to all else.

2. Weapons/attacks

-attacks will consequently be all the more complex. this goes for magic, melee, and ranged attacking styles. This especially makes attacking magic much more deep. Differing fire spells can give vastly different types of damage. Fireball is a spell sending a dense, heavy, and flaming mass so it would deal some fire damage, some arcane damage, but mostly crush damage and would be similar to throwing a flaming cannonball. Burning hand would be mostly fire damage and arcane damage.

-similarly melee attacks would have different types of damage depending on the weapon type. swords deal slashing damage, axes deal pierce+crush, enchanted spears deal pierce and arcane, etc. i think this is pretty self explanatory.

-ranged attacks also will do the same. Obviously most arrows will have to deal pierce damage but the type of arrow can also dictate additional damage. Heavy arrows could have less range but deal additional crush damage while enchanted arrows could deal varieties of different types of magical damage.

-this also allows for opportunities to change the rules with skills. for example, normally pierce weapons like a dagger would be awful against someone in plate mail with huge pierce armor. but a rogue would know how to attack the joints and weak points so the sneak skill could dictate how much pierce armor the player can ignore.

3. Mobs

-its equally as important to have mobs with significantly different types of armors and damage types. Wild animals like wolves would deal crush and slash damage so wearing plate mail would be fantastic against them. But the player will want to reconsider wearing full plate mail against a knight with a warhammer.

-this will also make mobs feel much more unique beyond just level, hp, attack, and loot. Mobs could have vastly differing types of attacks and armor types which would make dungeons feel more unique and make combat more intuitive and organic


And mostly importantly, these stats and ideas MUST be SIGNIFICANT.
The difference between wearing cloth and wearing plate mail against fighting a bear should be enormous. The player should be taking at least 30% additional damage if they wear the wrong armor type or do 40-50% less damage if they use the wrong attacking type.
If the damage difference is not this high, then players can just ignore this mechanic.

Also i would advise against making "balanced" gear. Those will invalidate the entire point of planning out your attack and gear setup since they will be "balanced" in all situations. These types of items should only be reserved for very end game items or quest items. Also only a few types of mobs such as bosses should be resistant to almost all types of attacks and most should clearly have 2-3 types of attacks they are weak to. Having them equally resistant to all types of attacks would make this mechanic useless and even being resistant to just 1 type would be rather restricting and artificial. Most mobs should be weak to at least 2-3 types of attacks to make different specs viable.
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Re: Weapon/Armor Types and Damage

Postby Sylon / Redshift » Mon Sep 18, 2017 9:09 pm

Great ideas, as usual! Thanks! I also had a similar idea for enemies/fighting but will definitely check out the armor types you mentioned too. I think we can build a great system from all these elements.
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