Hormalakh

Don't make me quote the entire last two pages of this thread. edit: rereading your text, I did not direct my posting at you rjshae. You used the word "muddle" which I took to mean that it wasn't the most tactically sound of decisions (and probably allows you to beat some(/many?) of the mobs in a normal or easy difficulty) and unlikely to be the most effective way. I was directing most of my disagreement toward other posters.

I am vehemently opposed to the idea of "lazy gameplay" where players expect to lazily pass through any and every combat scenario without tactics or strategy (i.e. just playing it for the story). This includes the comments being made regarding using only one weapon throughout the game (and only one armor) until you find the ubersword or the uberplate. Limiting tactics by disregarding two aspects of combat (weapon choice and armor choice) is NOT why I invested in this game. This game was not sold to the players that way and it should not cater to players who want that. That being said, an obnoxious or overly unintuitive combat mechanic, is -I am sure- not wanted by most players. At this point, since there is another Armor vs DT mechanic coming up, I'll wait to see what that is before arguing for or against any mechanic.

Hey. So I remember that Aumaua thread from a while back and I had been thinking about it for a while. My thoughts on it have slightly changed a little. I think that the aumaua can derive some physiological traits simiilar to some Samoans (big, built, etc), but I'm not too keen on all Aumaua being of the Samoan culture. I'm not Samoan/polynesian, but I doubt I'd be happy if I knew that a game has taken my culture/people and made them the orc-equivalent in a game. It can be seen in a good or a bad light, depending on the person. There really is no reason for a species to be based on a culture. However, if you want an island culture to be based on polynesian culture, I'm all for it. Just not a whole race. My 2 cents.

The DT changes with fancier chainmails, as long as they affect the DT system as a whole, will not terribly affect it. The equation would distribute evenly among all armors. I've tested it with the spreadsheet. The rules stay the same. Piercers do best in their piercing category. Crushers always do best in the higher end. Slashers do best at the beginning tiers. It's just that now, every weapon hits for less damage. Because ultimately a masterwork chainmail (or platemail or whatever) should be a better armor in general. It's always better to have a +1chainmail over a regular chainmail. It's just another multiplication that you add to the beginning of your equation (1-armor bonus) X everything else. Where armor bonus is a % between 0 - X% where X < 100. I also tested it in a scenario where if armor bonuses increase, the base DT of that armor slightly decreases (nothing more than 1-3 points). The numbers change and ever so slightly shift, but the rules stay the same. Anything more than that and you're starting to change your armor tier designations. If the shifts become 5 points or more, you're effectively shifting your armor to a different tier. Which would "make sense" in the real world. As you add more chain to your padded armor, it becomes less and less a padded armor, and more and more a chain mail. So you really shouldn't be calling your padded armor with 51% chain mail, a padded armor anymore. You should be calling it a chain mail with 49% padded armor.

I'm going to try explaining the mechanic one last time with a different perspective altogether. First of all, the system is set in a way where there is no "best weapon" that you use every time. That's kiddie stuff. In a real tactical situation, you want to use the right weapon for the right armor. With that out of the way, let's show the weapons you've got. I'm going to simplify this a little at first. We're going to start with 2handers to keep our speeds the same and so as to not worry about single/dual wielding. Generally, faster speed and dual-wielding = better. I've given some numbers in parentheses and I'll get to them later. I've used the spreadsheet Josh has on page 6 to come up with the first example. So if you're looking for numbers, you can follow that spreadsheet (but I promise you won't need it). Claymore: 45 damage No piercing (DT 0) Minimum Crushing Damage (MCD): 30% (13.5) Two-handed Dagger: 26 damage Leather piercing (DT 20) Minimum Crushing Damage: 30% (7.8 ) Troll's club: 34 damage No piercing (DT 0) Minimum Crushing Damage: 60% (18.36) Now, the way to figure out which weapon works best is to always start with how deep you can pierce an armor. Your two-handed dagger can pierce up through Leather armor (20 DT). Therefore, you will always get the best bang for your buck with the highest piercing weapon, even if your damage is low. Much lower than the troll's club(34>26) and the Claymore (45>26). Those are significant increases in damage (8 and 19 points), but when dealing with armored enemies, the best thing is to always by-pass/pierce their armor and get to the squishy center. Now, let's say your enemy starts deviating away from Leather armor. If the armor starts getting better and heavier (plate), then you'll want to start thinking more and more about moving towards the troll's club. Your other weapons have no piercing damage, so you can be sure that the further away they get from their piercing class, the more likely they are to hit for Minimum Crushing Damage (MCD). You can calculate this quickly: multiply the MCD with the damage. Now whether the devs want to show you this calculation instead of the "minimum crushing damage" as a percentage, that's fine with me. The calculation doesn't really help/hurt you. It just gives you more information. Hence, I put them in parentheses in the original weapon descriptions above. As you start moving away from your highest piercing damage, you're more and more likely to be doing the MCD for that weapon. Since you have those numbers, it becomes fairly easy to calculate which is the best weapon for the situation (not considering things like speed, although between the three weapons I've given above the speeds are the same). So, now you have a good starting paradigm for any situation: You are fighting an enemy with Leather armor, you go for your Leather armor piercer even if it does something close to 10-20% less damage (here, the dagger does up to 40% less damage than the claymore!). Armors much higher than leather armor, you go for the crushing weapon (troll's club). Less armor than leather? Go for the highest damage weapon you can (claymore). So that's our basic scenario. Now let's move on to something "weird." You have three new weapons. Now. Let me give you scenarios. 1- Plate wearing enemy (DT 45) 2- Mail wearing enemy (DT 30) 3- Padded wearing enemy (DT 10) Your answers are In fact, I don't even have to go through the numbers to know any armor much higher than your highest piercer needs to go for the highest MCD. That would be our first scenario. None of my weapons are plate-piercing, so I'll want to go for the flail since it has the highest MCD. In the second scenario, even a 50% reduction in damage between my samurai sword and my pike has no effect on the mail-piercing efficacy of the pike. That is to say that the pike still out-deals damage in this scenario! Since you've got a mail piercer and an enemy who wears mail armor, make his armor not matter at all. Finally, the samurai sword can pierce up to padded AND does the most damage, that this would be absolutely destructive on my padded wielder. Now here's one more example. Same weapons as given above. Which weapon would you use for a leather wielder (DT 20)? Answer at the bottom. ---- The Answer ---- My work (for any devs reading or to verify my answer with a spreadsheet)

It's actually only one single calculation. The actual equation doesn't really matter as long as the concept is understood and can be applied. But yeah, if all else is equal (which it wouldn't be) it comes down to what you said about "sword < dagger < mace" when considering DT. That was the point though, from the beginning. What mechanics equation do you propose? Val's?

Crushing doesn't negate armor. Only piercing does.

It's not a 0/1 binary for the slashing weapons. Even slashing weapons have a minimum threshold (10%). The crushing weapons just have a higher minimum threshold. So your slashing sword never does 0 damage. It does 15*10%=1.5. A mace (single-wield) would do at least 15*20%=3. Now if you mace or your sword have some "by-pass" power, this would help you tell which would be more effective. If you have a mace that has a by-pass power of 2, then you get 15-15+2=2. Since 3>2, since your mace cannot by-pass the armor, it does 3. Now let's say your sword has a by-pass power of 5. 15-15+5=5, Since 5>1.5, your sword with a by-pass will do 5 damage instead of 1.5. So it would seem that by-pass power (piercing) is the best right? Well, if mainly piercing weapons have the lowest damage output, there will be situations where you will want a slicier blade. It's never a simple 0/1 binary. The reason for this is that you never have a 0 minimum threshold. Also, your piercers never do the most damage. I don't know how to explain the magic stuff, because I don't know what their mechanics are. I think I explained your concern though. Let me know if it isn't clear.

I don't know to what exactly you are referring here. If you add what to DT? All I'm referring to is 2 factors: Damage and DT (basically negative damage). Negative damage and damage are always going to cancel out, lowering the final damage amount. So, changing the relationship between damage and DT seems overly complicated (Piercing essentially lessening the effects of DT, and crushing basically lowering it even further). I think maybe that's why the original system is unintuitive. You don't really have a side-by-side comparison of the damage types because the effectiveness works differently for each type. For example, the only bonus slashing gets is basically a higher base damage (because piercing and crushing weapons of comparable quality/level will always have lower base damage.) But you can't really see that in a side-by-side comparison. It's like saying "This sword does 10 damage, +7 damage. This dagger does 10 damage, plus 1 damage for every point of DT present, up to a maximum of 7. This mace does 10 damage, but can never do less than 5 damage." There is no single factor augmentation value that can be compared. In other words, it's not readily apparent, in looking at weapon stats, exactly WHAT the damage bonus is for a slashing weapon as compared to the damage bonus of a piercing weapon, because a piercing weapon has no damage bonus. It has a damage negation negation bonus, or a damage retention bonus. "Light, Medium, and Heavy" armors, and "Slashing, piercing, and crushing" weapons are really only tiers of potential damage values. If you add armor bonuses (like if a mail+1 adds 5 to DT) it doesn't work the same way across the board. The equation for damage is much more complicated than a simple subtraction. There are max() functions, some multiplications, and some subtractions. Piercing and crushing do not affect DT the same way. One by-passes it completely UP TO A POINT. This would be your piercer. Crushing weapon attacks but "may" by-pass armor. If you can hit harder by by-passing the DT, then you do. If you can't by-pass the armor with a crushing blow, then you can hit the minimum threshold amount. This is a MAX() function. Once again, they crushing and piercing do not work the same. Very very different. Also notice that crushing weapons always do more base damage than piercing weapons. Piercing weapons (like a knife) would always do less damage than one you can bash someone over the head with (a maul). You can't really compare them like you are. You have to look at the weapons in a different way. We are so used to looking at damage from a addition/subtraction view from PnP that it's sort of a little difficult to see it this way. ---- I'll try explaining again. You have to firstly move out of the DnD mindset for a second. "Young padawan, think outside the box." Weapons do not act in tiers. A hammer is not a screwdriver. Each weapon type has a certain area in which it's effective. Imagine that there are three qualities you can find in any weapon. How well it can pierce through a material, how well it can damage a person (with no armor), and if all else fails with bypassing an armor, it causes damage by knocking you around. These three qualities are piercing, slashing, and crushing respectively. Now depending on a variety of factors like the weapons that you have, the enemy you are facing, their armor, etc you will want to use different weapons in different situations. A crushing weapon works best against armors you can't by-pass. Piercing weapons work best if you can by-pass that material completely, and slashing weapons disembowel your opponents (they do the most damage outright). Using this idea, you pick your weapon that fits what you need done best. Now whether you have figured out the best "damage-output" depends on the factors mentioned above. It's quite complex, yes, but there are general rules that any padawan can follow to get a good idea. Only the best will master the secrets (i.e. you have a spreadsheet). But the tactical dabbler knows where to start and can be effective against his/her enemies.

Big brutes would have heavy armor. So what quality would you be looking for most in your weapon? (Crushing) Archers with low armor need to be cut down quickly. So what quality will you be looking for in your weapon? (Slashing) But you got archers with mail armor. Your sword does 10-15 damage, it has no armor piercing. Your mail-piercing dagger has 6-8 damage. Which one would you pick? (The mail-piercer).

If you add it to DT, it isn't an armor bonus across the board: it affects piercing weapons more than any other weapon type the equation works that way. Adding armor bonus as a DT removes armor bonus's distributive property. The older mechanic gives each weapon sort of like a "character" with its own stats. Look at SunBroSolaire's description. If you are fighting a heavy armored person, you want the most "crushing" character that you can get. Mid armor, get the most piercing you can get. Low armor, get the most slashing you can get. This general rule holds true. When several attributes start changing, for a new weapon, you can start asking yourself, do I want a weapon that's more slashy, crushy, or pointy? Each one plays well with certain armors, but obviously has drawbacks. No weapon is considered as a specific type. Like real-life every weapon has qualities that distinguish them and make them suitable for certain problems. You are told these qualities as a function of how "slashy/crushy/pointy" they are. The players should learn: slashing damage characteristics do the most damage. Piercing damage characteristics bypass up to a certain armor (weapons are slated as to up to what materials they can pierce (as I described a DT bypass of 25 wouldn't be called "piercing: 25" it'd be called "mail piercing." So the player knows that it can pierce up to mail armor)). Crushing damage increases your minimum value regardless of armor.

The way I explain Bonuses on armor is this: A better chain mail is a better chain mail regardless of what weapon attacks it. wrt scaling, he's talking about outrageous numbers that just become whacky when you start changing the numbers too much. This is true. If you go outside your range, the numbers become "OP." The game shouldn't very suddenly become easier/harder because you went out of the DT armor range.

Bingo! It's actually a very beautiful mechanic and I've never really played a game like this before. It would be amazing, it just has to be presented to the players well enough (which I'm sure GAME DESIGNERS know how to do ). Please Josh, don't drop this mechanic. It's really good.

Hi! It's a little difficult to explain, but ultimately SunBroSolaire did a good job explaining it. Basically think of a piercing weapon as something like a knife, a crushing weapon as something like a club, and a slashing weapon something like a scythe. If you get hit with a scythe, that thing has disembowel you so it it stands that it could do a lot of damage. A knife however is really more of a "stabbing" weapon. It's great for bypassing medium sized armors and low armors. Think about how you'd use a knife. You can stab through something like scale or leather, but at some point, you just can't stab through a material like steel or iron. The numbers just work out that way and intuitively that's how you think of a knife. A club however, doesn't disembowel you or stab you. It basically knocks you around. The damage done really doesn't care much about what armor you're wearing. If the armor is heavier, you still get knocked around. So MDTDT acts as a "floor" for damage. This is your crushing weapon. It doesn't matter what armor you're wearing, it'll always knock you around and yu'll have a minimum "threshold" for damage. DMG acts as your scythe. If you aren't wearing armor, you get disemboweled. If you wear a little armor, you get less disemboweled. If you wear plate, you don't get disemboweled at all. Finally DT- acts as your "stabby protection." If you wear a paper thin armor, you can stab through that with a knife. A scale armor is harder, and a piece of metal is practically impossible. I don't think the problem is too many variables. It's the the variables are being adjusted improperly when describing weapons. When you have a better knife, you can cut through thicker materials. A samurai blade (thin blade) compared to a scythe might increase its DMG slightly, but it increases "stabby potential" more significantly (i.e. you increase the DT-). Thus your samurai blade goes through heavier armors, but it wouldn't disembowel anyone but the unarmed. But it might not go through plate mail. So TL;DR: weapon characters must fit their variables. You don't have too many variables. You have just the right amount. You just have to be careful to change the right variable when you're trying to "improve" a weapons particular characteristic.

Hi Josh, So I've looked at the weapons/mechanics and I think that you don't need to change a thing. You just have to present it to your players differently, and you have to set some ground rules for your weapon designs. As a general rule, it seems that better slashing weapons should increase DMG*, better piercing weapons should increase DT-, and better crushing weapons should increase MDTDT. Individual weapons can have slight alterations in any of the other variables that you want, but the majority of the changes should be made in their respective "character," i.e. a "better" piercing weapon can have a 1-5% increase in damage output, but it's main improvements should be in DT-. Similarly with the other weapons. Then when you want to show this information to your players, make your weapons have "characters." Slashing character, crushing character, piercing character. If players want to have a weapon that fights better against mid-level armors, they'll want something with more "piercing character." Heavy armor? Add to the "crushing character." etc etc. The other suggestion that I have is to change the way you "add" to your armors. Don't add straight to the DT if you have a +1 mail or something like that. Make any efficiencies in your armors be straight across the board. A better chain mail is a better chain mail regardless of what weapon strikes it. So instead of doing a (dmg subtracted from ((DT+armor bonus) subtracted from DT-). Make the armor bonus a percentage across the board. armorbonus*(dmg - (dt - DT-)). A +1 would give something like a minimal amount up to whatever maximum you want (+5?). For example, a +1 through a +5 would give 5%, 9%, 13%, 16%, 20% damage reduction across the board, respectively.. Edit: Other ideas: When you describe weapons, specifically piercing weapons, instead of stating what DT- the piercing weapon has, make it an "attribute." For example, a "leather-piercing" dagger starts with a DT- of 20 (or whatever it is for leather armor). A mail piercer starts at the DT- of 30 (35? I can't remember.) Finally, if you want a player to make a "real" decision between a mail+1 and a regular mail, what you can do is get your mail+1 to have that 5% reduction but then drop the DT down a few points. It's still in the same range, so a scale armor would be +25 DT, but a scale+1 would be 5% armorbonus, +21-24 DT. Hope these ideas are things you haven't tried yet and I hope that these help the situation be a little more intuitive for your players. I'll keep playing with these numbers Good luck Everyone else, let me know what you think about this idea: do you like it, hate it, not understand it?

Wow! Thanks A. Backer. Congrats Obsidian! That's awesome! *crack* Now back to work!

Oh wow.. I completely missed the DT- column! Back to the drawing board.. eDIT: Ok got it working... Now let's see what we have here.

Along with color, use a different "shape" or pattern. Unlikely as it may be, players who are completely color-blind can still be albe to tell.

I sort of agree. It's not that there are too many inputs, it's that the inputs are unintuitive in how they change the system. I quickly knew what to do to get the right equation for your slashing and crushing weapons. But when it came to piercing, I got stuck. It wasn't intuitive.

I thought Piercing weapons were supposed to have the capability to ignore some DT. And crushing ignores more of that DT: hence why MDTDT is higher for crushing than for piercing. I could be seeing this whole thing wrong though...

So Josh, i've been playing with your excel sheet. Which of these are dependent and independent variables? Which one of these deals directly with the general type (piercing/slashing/crushing) of weapon you choose and which of these deals with the specific weapon you use? I realize min-max will be different for specific weapons (independent variable). Everything else is a dependent variable, right? -(Rate is dependent on whether it's Fast, one-handed, two-handed ONLY) -MDTDT is dependent on whether it's F/1H/2H AND whether crushing/non-crushing -DWF is dependent of whether it's 1H/2H. The reason I ask this, is will this change significantly between weapons of the same type/handling? Will there be Fast Slashing weapons with rates that aren't 0.9, DWF that isn't 1/2, and MDTDT that isn't 0.1? Are you changing weapons only based on DMG*? One issue I recognize immediately, is that the equations you're using for your crushing/slashing vs. piercing is different. I would try to find something that has the same equation all around, but where the dependent variables give you the nice gradients you're looking for. The first that came to my minds was Michaelis-Menton equations for me (but that's because I work with these everyday) Finally, it's really non-intuitive how your piercing weapons do the least damage and yet you have some sort of middle armor tier that it works out for. It would make more sense to have your crushing weapons do the least damage, with the highest MDTDT (it's weird that it goes all the way up to 0.6 - I tried 0.45-0.5 and it worked better. Sorry if I'm overstepping here All the best.

Most of them are highly experienced and have worked on previous games. These guys are professionals. I wouldn't worry about the art. Iit's also why I looked into it: I wanted to know that the art staff was awesome. I was not disappointed. Rooting for you guys.

They've already answered this a while back. Actually I think that information is in this very update. Actually I haven't read all through this, but I believe he only called out specific folks. I can't imagine there only being like 3-5 artists. Even the tiny mobile game studio I started marketing on had 2 artists, and quickly grew to like 4-5. I've done the calculations, but I can't find them right now.... It's something like 8-12 artists. Rob mentioned most of the people in this update, except 1 or 2 that will be coming on later. They weren't set in stone, but one is Brian Menze. Anyway, most of teh artists and their respective departments were mentioned. edit: found it Kien Tran Dimitri Berman Polina Hristova Rob Nesler Hector Espinoza James Chea Sean Dunny Mark Bremerkemp Antonio Govela

Thanks all for the thoughts. It's clear that this isn't favored by most people. Undoubtedly there will be a mod (as there was in BG2) that will work this in for those interested.

Ohhhh. this would be good. The sword never gets killed. You have to strike the cipher to make him break concentration so that the spell is broken. It would be a great way to have them in the background concentrating, while you've got him surrounded with your party members and not lettign anyone through. It's like football. You got your linemen and the cipher is the quarterback. American football that is. Not futbol/football/soccer.