Xinxspuz

I'm also experiencing this issue. I got in a fight with some Ogres, and one of the Ogre Druids cast a spell on my entire party. I used Suppress Affliction to keep my squishies from dropping due to the AoE damage, and after the fight, 2 characters had the "blinded" status stuck on them. I fought another group of ogres much later, after resting several times, and a THIRD character now has the "blinded" status stuck. Same set of events - Ogre Druid cast spell, used Suppress Affliction, status stuck at end of battle. It's worth noting that my two front line characters a) have enough Endurance to survive the spell the Ogre Druid was casting, and b) were far enough away from the squishy characters that I couldn't hit everyone with the Suppress Affliction spell radius. So, both times, the two front line characters suffered the hostile spell effects, but didn't receive Suppress Affliction, and neither one has gotten stuck with "blindness". It's not showing up on the Character Sheet under "Active Effects", and Aloth is still finding traps before I waltz through them, so it doesn't SEEM to be actually affecting the gameplay, but still.

Do me a favor. Go put on some ankle weights and wrist weights, and try to do a sprint down the sidewalk. See how fast you move. Even the best-designed modern armor still slows down its wearer. Any soldier will tell you this. They don't SEEM slowed down because soldiers throughout history have always been trained to peak physical performance, but I guarantee that however fast and agile a soldier is while wearing armor, they are faster and more agile without it. It's just that a 50% reduction in speed for someone who can run a 6-minute mile makes them, guess what? About the same speed as an unencumbered AVERAGE human being.

Too many posts to quote all at once... Everyone that keeps talking about having armor only apply Damage Reduction and/or Damage Resistance: You're basing your arguments primarily on FPS games (Fallout 1/2), which by their very nature incorporate a miss chance. You may not SEE the miss chance, because it's not a number in your character's profile, but you can be damn sure that some players are better at dodging and weaving than others, and are therefore harder for enemies to hit. By the same token, some players are just better shots, and hit their target more often. Having DR (either type) does not mean that you're automatically being hit every time an enemy takes a shot at you. That makes these games a "mix of the first two systems" (Vote Option #3 in the poll). Anyone who is voting for #2 and using Fallout or any other FPS as their argument doesn't understand what they're voting for (Which NEVER happens in America, right? ) The point of an RPG, on the other hand, is that your character's in-game performance is NOT heavily dependent on your ability to make headshots from across the map. You're given some skills and abilities which you, the player, get to choose, and those skills and abilities determine whether your character has the marksmanship abilities of Legolas, or an Imperial Stormtrooper. Enter the miss chance. Your character's accuracy at <insert attack form here> attacks is determined by a number, which you, the player, can modify by your skill choices, ability choices, equipment choices, and tactical choices in combat. Conversely, an enemy's ability to hit you is ALSO determined by a number, albeit a different one than yours most of the time, and by the choices that the programmers and AI make for that enemy. What goes into calculating that miss chance is mainly up to the programmers. Want to represent every hit that deals damage by having your character make an "Ow!" sound, and every hit that fails to do damage (whether due to dodge, blocking, or damage reduction) represented by your character visually stepping out of the way of the hit? Ok, but visually, that's a very unrealistic combat. Even older games differentiated between "Hit" (Ow sound), "Blocked by armor/shield" (Clang/thunk/whap, no damage taken), and "Clear miss" (dodge graphic for character under attack). Newer games add in graphics for "Parried", "Glancing Blow", and several other categories, depending on what game you're referring to. Upside: More realistic and entertaining combat. Downside: More programming to do, more sound files to record. My two cents? I think that some armors should protect their wearer by making them harder to hit - shields, breastplates, full plate, and so forth actually do provide a durable physical barrier to incoming attacks. Enemy's miss chance goes up. The enemy can negate (partially or fully) this miss chance IF they have an attack of sufficient power to penetrate your armor - a shield isn't going to do jack against a ballista bolt, and a suit of full plate isn't going to provide any protection at all against being smashed by a falling tree. Weaker attacks can still do damage via the critical hit method - even the best armors have weak spots where weapons can penetrate. Joints, breathing slits, etc. Conversely, some armors should offer more in the way of damage reduction/damage resistance. A suit of cloth armor provides very little in the way of a physical barrier to most attacks, but it does still absorb some of the kinetic energy of those incoming attacks. Here's where "-1 to all incoming damage" or "-5% to incoming damage" becomes a relevant feature. Can you have armor that does both? Absolutely. That's one of the reasons plate mail was historically such an effective armor - it both blocked attacks, and mitigated the damage of the attacks it couldn't block. Hit someone with an 8-kilo sledgehammer, and you transfer the same amount of kinetic energy to them whether they're armored or not. Bones shatter and organs rupture if your target is unarmored, but if she's wearing plate mail, the metal of the armor redirects the majority of the force, and distributes it over a much greater surface area, resulting in far less permanent damage to the armor's occupant. Will she still get knocked down? Probably. But she can get back up, suffering only a large dent in her armor, rather than a fatal injury. All these armors must be balanced by other stats, as well. Plate mail makes you an easier target because you can't move as fast, and your range of motion is impeded. But, as mentioned before, there's a difference between an attack that's a "wide miss" (doesn't even come close to hitting you, armor or no), and an attack that's technically a hit, but just fails to penetrate your armor. Maybe plate mail makes you 30% easier to hit with attacks. But guess what? Attacks that do hit you are going to bounce off with no effect 90% of the time. This still makes plate mail very good armor - your base chance to be damaged by an attack is now 1/8th of what it was before you put your armor on. Problematic if you're fighting a giant who uses a tree as club - then your plate mail doesn't do so well against massive crushing damage, completely negating the armor protection. Suddenly your chance to be hit is 130% of base, and your armor is useless. Time to hide behind a rock, take it off, and impersonate the party Rogue trying to tumble around between the giant's feet. What it boils down to, basically, is that a hybrid system is pretty much a given. The actual details of the system, as far as which armor provides which bonuses, are a matter of game balance, and how much work the programmers feel like doing. The math remains the same - an armor that makes you 80% less likely to take damage from an attack is the same as having a skill that makes you 80% likely to dodge an incoming attack. Over a long combat, you take 80% less damage either way. The way the modifiers and calculations are set up in the software determines whether Dodge becomes more useful than Armor in a specific situation, or vice versa. That's where having A) A balanced game system, and B) A clear explanation of said game system will make the difference. When you have both of those things, regardless of how many variables are included, you can sit down and compare options for yourself, and get what you want out of your character and the gameplay experience (Translation: Munchkin your heart out).

Seconded. Being the Party Leader needs to count for something (a LOT of something) in combat, but it's the bickering around the campfire that makes the game more enjoyable and intriguing.

I definitely liked the realism of having ammo in the BG series of games, although it made me shy away from using throwing knives and darts most of the time. It was just too much of a hassle to refill quiver slots in the middle of a fight. Finding the Infinite Ammo Quivers in ToB eliminated some headaches (ever run out of primary arrows and have Imoen switch to Arrows of Explosion in the middle of a fight?), but also made the game just a tad less enjoyable. Archers became mobile turrets that required little or no management. Maybe have a tiered series of quivers? Instead of just "20 arrows" and then "Never runs out of ammo", you could find/upgrade your quiver as the game progresses - at middle levels, maybe it holds 40 arrows, or 60, but still runs out eventually? That would somewhat alleviate the problem of filling up inventory space with ammo, while still making you pay attention to how many arrows you have. Thoughts?

Haha, finally, an environment where wasps get their comeuppance. It never gets even CLOSE to that cold down here, and I swear I find a new nest of yellow jackets or wasps every time I start to trim the lawn. On the subject of how to handle armor... Old-school D&D used Armor Class, which reduced the probability of being hit, but not the actual damage. (For the purposes of this discussion, I will use "Armor Class" to refer to any system that scales the probability of being hit without modifying the damage received.) At low amounts of HP, this usually resulted in a single unlucky hit reducing your character to meaty chunks (Khalid vs. Ogre with the Girdle of Gender Changing, anyone?). As your AC gets better, you end up with situations where mediocre enemies literally can't even touch you, and you can wade through them with impunity. Even a match against a comparably-skilled opponent would often result in the two foes just flailing ineffectually at each other for many seconds, until someone landed a critical hit. Then it was back to flailing for several seconds until the next crit. A flat Armor Class was adopted because it was easy to calculate, easy to remember, and easy to use in the midst of chaotic tabletop gaming. Additional sets of modifiers (flanking, bonuses/penalties vs. damage types, etc.) make it more realistic and flexible, at the cost of ease of use - which, it should be noted, is almost a non-issue for a computer game, since it will be doing all the calculating and modifying for you. Many newer games make use the "Armor reduces damage" approach - it's more intuitive, and your character gets to say "Owie" more times before dying at low levels, and gets to say "Owie" more consistently at high levels. A pure DR approach, however, feels obtrusive during gameplay. No one likes to get hit EVERY SINGLE TIME, even if it only results in minimal damage. Pure DR systems remind me of very old video games, like Warcraft 2, where combat involved virtually no luck - if your numbers were better, you were almost guaranteed to win. Also, I just made myself feel old. In reality, most RPG-type games released within the last few years blend the two approaches. Some armor reduces your chance to be hit, either by deflecting blows, or providing actual cover (a shield, for instance). Some is more effective at reducing incoming damage, like plate mail - you're a bigger, slower-moving target, but most attacks are literally going to just bounce off, leaving you unscathed. Combining the two systems allows for much greater flexibility, and a much more interesting combat experience - sometimes your character will dodge and somersault around, evading incoming attacks with grace and skill. Sometimes, he'll just stand there and sound like a Honda in a hailstorm. The downside is that programming a dual system, and making sure all the available armors and character abilities (Dodge and Evasion, to name a few d20 standbys as examples) are balanced with each other, takes considerably longer than either a pure AC or pure DR system. There are plenty of established examples to use as starting points, though. I WOULD like to chip in with one new comment on the DR vs. AC debate, though: I thoroughly enjoyed the ranged combat experience in Mass Effect 1. The system used in that game did an excellent job of combining the two different approaches. Armor, on a purely stat-line basis, only offered DR, but the game itself integrated NPC miss chances and player targeting/shooting skill nearly seamlessly. The trick here would be adapting that approach to include melee combat, rather than just ranged weapons. Forced misses become a lot more obvious and glaring at knife-fight ranges. Once a system, or a blend of the two, is decided on, we can all start arguing about metal armor being electrically conductive, and whether chainmail undergarments cause morale penalties due to chafing during long marches.