Lephys

Hear, hear! *passes out the torches and pitchforks... and ale*

It may not be that obvious. Taking one path versus another can have different balance drivers. Giving equal XP for both options might actually be inappropriate. Hence we can't really know if equal XP makes sense unless we see it in a wider context. I don't think Moridin means "in each particular instance of choice, both options should be equal." I think he means "If I choose to play through the entire game choosing consistently bad/selfish/destructive-for-my-own-gain options, I shouldn't end up with 40% less loot/XP/character progression/party members/quest opportunities than the person who went through the entire game choosing consistently good/selfless/compassionate/considerate/constructive-for-as-many-involved-parties-as-possible options." EDIT: He beat me to it... haha.

I'm talkign about PERSONAL power. Take LOTR movies as an example. Think Aragorn. Norman human being with normal human physical limiations. No lifting 10 tons or swinging super-sized swords. No punching dragons. For other types of power - like political power - that's something that would be interesting to see. RPG's and fantasy games are often so fixated on personal power and bigger NUMBERS instead of depth. I'm honestly not even sure how I was talking about anything besides personal power... (except maybe party power, which is just a grouping of the respective powers of multiple persons.) LOTR is an excellent example. Not of the progression of power, but of the exaggeration of human skill (much like many Japanese themes in legends and stories and anime). You can say Aragorn was no more powerful than any other person, yet he possessed greater stamina and pain-ignorance than pretty much every single soldier around him. Sure, his sword strokes were things anyone could perform, with enough skill, but he had the power to dodge more attacks and execute more precision kills than anyone else on the battlefield (who wasn't also a main character with a slightly exaggerated power) for 17-times longer than anyone else. Also, look at Gandalf. He was quite powerful, but still completely mortal and vulnerable as a withered old man. He COULD burst forth a shockwave that knocks down 100 foes, but he was then extremely weakened. He could heal, to an extent, but that also had its limitations and its taxation upon his magical "stamina," for lack of a better word, and he couldn't reattach 13 chopped-up pieces of a person and bring them back to life, or regenerate the other half of a smashed-in brain. Which is exactly what I mean by, no matter what manner of power and factors you're dealing with (magic, soul-powers, etc.), it doesn't have to get ridiculous. The best fantasy fiction is the stuff that makes you say "Hmm... even though this completely made-up power and force exists, I feel as though I could relate to those who are wielding it, and the world still feels as balanced as reality." You can subtly implement fictional amounts of power. It's not a binary switch between perfect reality emulation and DragonBall Z. I wouldn't say you're wrong when you say some RPGs are too fixated on bigger numbers of personal power and not enough on depth, but that doesn't make fictional individual power and depth mutually exclusive things. I mean, is magic an automatic no-no for you? (I'm sincerely wondering.)

Well... He IS the ver-y mod-el of a sci-en-tist Sal-ar-i-an. ^_^

I suspect all the hard work they've put into this should... "Aumauant" to a high quality race.

^ It's easily doable, as Ferraris are, themselves, a mode of transportation. It would simply be expensive. 8P I'm not sure the Kickstarter funding covered the cost of Ferarris.

... Or at second... or at third... . I'm not trying to simply antagonize here, but I'd say that "at first" is kind of integral to intuitiveness. If you don't comprehend how something works until further study and/or explanation, then it isn't intuitive. It doesn't become intuitive once you understand it, or even the most complex things in the world would all eventually be intuitive. They're simply comprehendable, intuitive designating almost immediate or inherent comprehension. It wouldn't be the end of the world if they had stuck with the old mechanic. I don't LOATHE it or anything. I just think it's unnecessarily restrictive in terms of weapon effectiveness (again, mace is ONLY good against heavy armor, because it's ALWAYS farrrrr worse than the sword versus Light/no armor), and the minimum amount of weapon effectiveness calculation is much higher than it should be (because it depends directly upon multiple factors even in the most basic of estimates.) That's all. The new mechanic, so long as it is balanced correctly, can serve the same functions as the old, PLUS more. So, it's less restrictive (it's much easier to produce scenarios in which weapon choice is less significant and scenarios in which it is more significant), it's intuitive (not to mention probably makes it easier to balance all other factors of combat encounters), AND it can potentially do even more than the old mechanic. I don't think the new mechanic has any inherent flaws, in other words. It's implementation could always have flaws, though.

Yeah. I was immediately thinking that when we learned about Wounds for the Monk class, because that's a concept often used with the Barbarian/berzerker concept. The more damage you take, the more reckless abandon you gain, sort of... Kind of like a fighting style that relishes survival instinct and its biological effects on physical capabilities. So, I was thinking that a possible mechanic for the Barbarian could stem from his OFFENSE building his adrenaline/aggression, rather than his opponents' offense. That would still provide a mechanic/effect in tune with the aggression-dependent fighting style of Barbarians, while still setting them apart from the Monk class in terms of how the mechanics function. A Monk still doesn't want to wade into the most enemies possible because you have a very limited amount of Wounds, which emphasizes control rather than pure aggression. But the Barbarian could have skills/abilities built around the direct confrontation of more enemies than any "normal" melee fighter would, supporting boosts to his combat effectiveness through aggression. The limitation could still be a combination of a cap on the aggression bonus AND a duration after which fatigue starts to set in. Maybe if you go too long, he has to take a knee for like 6 seconds in combat. Almost like a self-stun, mechanically. But it would be avoidable by simply not over-doing his aggression-building abilities. It wouldn't be "Just stop attacking things for a short duration, to avoid getting fatigued for a short duration." That would be self-defeating, heh. It's kind of like how Stamina will work. If you have 50 stamina, you can take 48 damage, then "heal" up a bit back up to 25, then take 20 more damage. So you can take more than 50 damage, you just can't let your Stamina reach 0, or you lost consciousness. As long as the Barbarian's aggression/adrenaline didn't "max out," so to speak, he wouldn't ever suffer a hard stun-like effect. Maybe if it's beyond 70% or something (or maybe for too long?), he suffers minor fatigue penalties to things like movement speed and/or attack damage? (while still attacking probably faster and more effectively striking multiple targets than a typical Fighter would.) *shrug* Just my .5 cents.

It didn't exist "in Dune," but it existed in the particular film he's referencing. He's not claiming it existed outside of the film, but if it didn't exist, none of us could even be referring to it right now. Whether or not it was in the original Dune canon/lore, TRX was remound of it, nonetheless, and believes something similar to that concept would be cool for Ciphers. I don't see a flaw here. *shrug* ZOMG! Quest objective option (if you have a telekinetic Cipher): Convince the corrupt lord that his manor is ferociously haunted by restless souls who want his blood (Help the community by dealing with the corrupt lord.)

"For balance reasons" being the key words. Meaning that we're fine with breaking from a perfectly logical system for the sake of balance. Which is why I say it's perfectly fine to say "I'd really like XP for each kill," but it's both unnecessary and incorrect to say "It's DEFINITELY an inherent, logical problem with the death of any living thing that could harm you NOT resulting in immediate XP, u_u." It's completely contradictory to suggest that tons of things that should grant XP don't need to, and that's perfectly fine; meanwhile, kills are a thing that should grant XP, and therefore MUST. In a system that doesn't award XP for the literal experiences of your characters, we typically set kills as XP "checkpoints" because we like it and it's convenient, not because logic dictates that we must. The possibility that more than one kill will be necessary to reach an XP "checkpoint" is a potential balancing issue, at worst. It is a concern, but whether or not it is a problem depends upon other factors.

Good point is good. Although, for what it's worth, I believe Josh already stated that swapping weapons would take time (as opposed to not-swapping weapons taking "no time" as far as your as-often-as-possible attacks are concerned). So that should already be a thing, and it makes perfect sense. But, yeah, that is, I think, the main problem with the original system. It doesn't really support ANY weapon-type favoring for lower-complexity encounters. Slashing is balanced by ALWAYS having higher base damage, so, if you run into a group of 0 DT enemies and your party is using maces and mauls, you're doing like half damage against all of them (suggesting that a giant hammer INHERENTLY does half the damage, when swung at something's skull, than a sword.). You don't HAVE to swap weapons, but there's always a REALLLLLY good reason to. When all 3 damage types are handled in the same manner (relative to armor types), you can still have complexity, but it's a lot easier to balance the degree of difference between "good" and "bad" weapons against any armor type in any given scenario. Basically, you can have your cake and eat it, too. Of course, Josh's proposed new system DOES handle things this way, it would seem (as opposed to the original system's way), so now it's just a matter of ironing out details and balancing. Or, to clarify, I don't think that particular rigidity flaw from the original system exists in the newly proposed system, so, at the very least, it is better in that respect. We won't really know exactly how it well it deals with all other factors/problems until we know all the details. On the contrary... this forum simply suffers from an immense shortage of underanalysis. ^_^ Seriously, though, it's perfectly constructive to analyze and discuss the potentiality of the system. Discussing such things is like mining for precious metals. We're just seeing what we can find that might be useful. Discussion is not restricted merely to arguing for or against the officially-proposed systems. If we have to wait patiently for Obsidian to provide more details that they've worked out for the system, we might as well produce the possibility of some useful tidbit in these forum pages that they can use along the way, rather than refraining from discussing anything and eliminating the possibility all together.

Hey man, thanks for replying. This ^^ thing here about reputation. I mean if your character accepts a quest, completes the quest, then returns to the quest-giver for a reward, then slaughters the quest-giver (and his people) it should negatively affect your reputation with future factions. That example is pretty much how they've described degenerate gaming. A kind of double-dipping on xp, with no consequences. But if a player knew that his/her reputation would take a dive from this sort of behaviour, and potentially mean lost future quests (and xp) then they might think twice about doing it. Degenerate behaviour is really a chaotic evil play style, because you're betraying your employer in effect, or just killing innocent people. If they acknowledged that behaviour as evil, they could let the reputation system handle it, instead of designing ways to prevent it. If you want to play a psycho nutter killing machine, you should be able to, but you also accept the consequences. I.e. don't let moral high ground affect the design of the game, let your moral choices affect your reputation. Easy peasy. PS. I'm an atheist too. Not that I don't think there should be times when you should be able to deceive people and kill people you just "helped," but I want it to make sense. There should be plenty of times when you simply can't do so, because your party would either abandon you for being a psycho ("But... we just totally saved those people's lives, and you chose to specifically avoid combat at all costs, and you weren't bluffing! What the EFF, man?!") or try to kill you or something, unless all the NPC companions are just cool with you being a psycho. What I'm saying is, it should be clear whether or not you're choosing "My character decides to prevent a conflict BECAUSE IT IS IN HIS NATURE TO STRIVE FOR PEACE" or "My character decides simply to avoid conflict in this one instance, but only because he'll probably gain something more valuable by not-killing them." Example: Situation A) You promise someone you'll help get them to safety when escaping from some dungeon, but only (secretly) because they're useful in your escape (even though your character doesn't really care about their well-being, there's no reason to kill them yet). You find out they know where some valuable outpost or treasure, etc, is. When you get to the exit, after promising you'll help them find it, you kill them and take some map fragment or clue and all their belongings, because you're actually a greedy bastard. Situation B) You actually let them go, and help them escape, and you're friends, and they tell you where the treasure is, and someone's threatening their family, so they need to deal with that first, and you go out of your way to help them with that (has absolutely no gain for you except kindness as its own reward, because the person and their family have pretty much no belongings except the person's immediate, decent equipment). THEN, once they thank you and wish you well, you simply turn around and slaughter them. It has nothing to do with any dialogue choice, or anything you did to indicate you wished to kill them, and now you just do. Situation B doesn't make much sense. In Situation A, you're bluffing to use someone as a tool for your own gain. In Situation B, you did things PURELY for others' gain, then immediately did things that contradicted your previous actions. Again, I'm pretty sure all your companions would say "Dear GODS, man! That wasn't even a double-cross! You're just a psycho-murderer! You even HELP people, first, THEN kill them!", and probably just try to kill you on the spot (most of them. Certain ones might just shrug it off.) It's basically the same premise as "You can simply kill everyone in the whole city, for no reason, at any time." If you can do that, either the entire city has no bearing on the main story, or you just essentially ended the game early. Even "evil" people don't want everyone dead for no reason. They just want to control everything and gain stuff from everyone. Only psychos irrationally kill everyone for no reason. I wouldn't call it a problem, as much as a completely unnecessary factor. And I have yet to see anyone suggest the removal of combat XP altogether. Merely a different method of awarding it. Your advocation of per-kill XP is perfectly valid already without exaggerating the opposite stance beyond the realm of accuracy to make it seem more ridiculous. Also, just something I thought of (in general, not in direct response to the quotes in this post), if it only makes perfect sense that you don't get XP until something dies (you remove a "threat"), no matter how long that takes, then I suppose you can't have any soldiers in city barracks or town guards training against dummies, or practicing with bows against targets, since they'll never gain any experience until they actually kill something. Training is impossible when only threat-reduction = XP. Yet another way in which the logic doesn't match up.

But, strangely, the more we're okay with it. "7-hour, multi-stage boss fight? Totally cool. Group of enemies in a cave amounting to a 10-minute fight? CAN'T WAIT 10 WHOLE MINUTES FOR XP! >_<" (I'm not trying to attack anyone. Just humorously exaggerating for the sake of the point, is all.)

Well... it kinda makes sense, because it happens in reality, too. People can do some amazing things in desperate times/on adrenaline. But then, when that wears off, it turns out you've been beyond your physical limits for longer than you usually are ever even AT them before getting tired. It's like... when you have the flu... your body's doing WAY more stuff to fight off the flu virus, in addition to still processing all your thoughts and senses and allowing you to move around and do things. Until it stops (and usually for a little while after), you're quite tired and fatigued. Also, "arrogant" might be a bit much on the personality restriction. If every single Barbarian, ever, was an arrogant ****, that would be a strangely boring group of people.

This. I would much rather your errand/assignment choices have some bearing on the events/possibilities in the main game than simply produce stuff. (I'm not saying that anyone said "THEY SHOULD JUST GIVE YOU STUFF AFTER A CERTAIN DURATION, LIKE IN ASSASSIN'S CREED!" or anything.) It's just how it translates in the gameplay (player-software interaction). Sure, in the lore, you chose "Go talk to people in the tavern," and for several hours your companion went and spoke to lots of people, in a raucous room with a lot of interesting folks, and they talked, and there was a brawl, and there was some outcome to the brawl, and it turns out your person gained 30 XP and was rewarded by the barkeep with 50 gold pieces. But, as far as the player's game is concerned, you picked someone from the list of people you weren't currently using in your party anyway to go be unavailable for a while (during a time when you don't need them anyway) and come back with stuff, and there just happens to be a nice little write-up of HOW they acquired said stuff. But, the only way in which the player was effected is that, A) You couldn't put them into your party for a duration because they were "busy," and B) you gained stuff. Don't get me wrong... I love lore. But I'd rather stick to "this person brought word of some matter that needs addressing that you didn't know about before" and "this person discovered POTENTIAL stuff that you can now choose to actively go and find" for the effects of these little assignments and happenings with your peoples throughout cities and towns in downtime.

Exactly. 20 orcs is a greater threat than 1 orc, in the exact same way that 1 dragon is a greater threat than 1 orc. But it was suggested by the Advocacy of Combat Kill XP Foundation that if there are 20 orcs, it is inherently wrong to award XP at the end of the whole group "threat," whereas if you replace those 20 orcs with a single dragon (all other factors remaining equal), it's totally fine to wait until after the player has spent the time, effort, and resources necessary to eliminate the "threat." So, I ask, what's the problem with considering multiple enemies (that are all engaging in the same, single combat encounter... not 20 enemies scattered across the wilderness or anything) a single "threat"? What is the player losing when he has to kill all 20 orcs for a reward that he ISN'T losing when he has to kill a whole dragon for a reward? Or, better yet, what is the difference between killing 1 orc and killing 20 orcs, besides time, effort, and resources? And if there isn't any other difference, then why is it okay, in the case of the dragon, to simply make 1 enemy take as long and as many resources to fight as 20 of another? "Because he might want to not fight all 20 before getting a reward" doesn't work, unless it also works for the dragon: "Because he might not want to fight all of the dragon before getting a reward." If the dragon's fine with him, then he's willing to spend the 30 minutes and health and resources necessary to kill the entire dragon, so, if in the orc example he's not okay with spending the same amount of time in combat and using the same amount of resources before getting a reward, then we're comparing apples to oranges. The factors have to be the same for a reasonable problem to be found. Let me ask you this: If all our lives we had been getting XP only for combat encounters instead of each enemy, would anyone still feel that it's somehow cheating the player not to award XP upon each kill? Also, as I said before, if the player knows that killing less than 20 orcs will get him nothing, what incentive is there to ever not look at it like it's a dragon fight, and either engage them or don't? In other words, if its perfectly valid that the player should get 16-orcs worth of XP when he leaves 4 alive and NEVER comes back to kill them, ever, then it logically follows that the player should be able to kill 80% of the dragon, get XP for that, and never ever come back to finish off the dragon (the dragon would probably remain at 20% health forever, to copy the fact that the orcs don't replenish their numbers when you leave.) So, I just want to know, if the kill XP necessity isn't just precedent, then what is it? Why does it matter if you've eliminated a threat or not if the threat can always be infinitely variable? Also, I may be mistaken, but I believe there are some RPG systems that award XP per kill, but they don't award the XP until combat is over. Just thought that was an interesting tidbit, and I wish I could remember what game(s) I'm thinking of...

Here's what I've got so far regarding the problem with the original damage/armor system (SORRY FOR THE LENGTH!): Look at the basics of the original system's formulas: Crushing: base damage - DT > MDTDT Piercing: base damage - (DT - DTN) > MDTDT Slashing: base damage - DT > MDTDT See, Piercing is always going to have lower base damage than slashing, but that's not in the formula. Base damage is variable, so the formula doesn't account for variable balancing of the damage values. It is completely unclear what the specific relationship is between Slashing, Crushing, and Piercing. In the same way, how do you know what the difference is between the various MDTDTs? You see, the SYSTEM knows, because the developers designed it, but the player doesn't know until you let him do the math. He cannot tell, based on how the system functions, HOW different the values are in relation to one another as the quality of weapons and armor scales throughout the game. In NOT-the-original system, damage and DT still do the exact same thing (as they were already intuitive, by themselves). But now, you simply have a binary switch on whether or not there will be a bonus and whether or not there will be a detriment. Is it Light armor? Slashing weapons will get a bonus. They still have variable damage, and Light armor still has variable DT that makes perfect sense no matter the values, but you know whether or not to just subtract DT, or do something else. And that something else is always the same across the board, even though the end values can vary greatly (depending on the already-variable damage and DT values). Here're the formulas for this type of system (a DT augment, I found, works better, so I'll go with that: Slashing: base damage - DT(1.5) against Light Armor base damage - DT against Medium armor base damage - DT(.5) against Heavy Armor Piercing: base damage - DT(1.5) against Medium armor base damage - DT against Heavy armor base damage - DT(.5) against Light Armor Crushing: base damage - DT(1.5) against Heavy Armor base damage - DT against Light armor base damage - DT(.5) against Medium Armor This is purely an example of the effects of a different system that treats all types with the same formula, respectively. Notice how, no matter what the damage or DT values, I know that Crushing gets SOME amount of bonus against Heavy armor and SOME amount of detriment against Medium armor, and Slashing gets SOME kind of bonus against Light armor and SOME amount of detriment against Heavy armor. How much of a bonus? Well, that depends on DT. The closer DT is to 0, the lesser the difference, across the board. The farther DT is from 0, the greater the significance, across the board. BUT, Slashing isn't always better against Light armor than Crushing, even, because you don't know the damage of the Crushing weapon or the Slashing weapon. They can still be whatever you want, without the need for Crushing's damage to be deftly balanced at some certain amount lower than Slashing damage. Want some enemies to not warrant quite so much "which weapon do I have equipped" worry? Easy. Drop their DT. If it's 0, it doesn't matter what kind of armor they have, or what kind of weapon you have. In the original system, this wasn't even possible, because two weapon types were almost ALWAYS worse than one of the weapon types (one weapon type was always significantly better than the other two, at least. There was never a neutral.) Want some enemies to really require some weapon choice? Easy, raise their DT. Want weapon variety? Awesome! Make a maul with 50 damage and a sword with 40. As long as the DT is higher, the maul will still have the advantage over the sword against heavy armor, and the sword will still have the advantage over the maul against Light armor. Look at allllll the glorious dynamics you can play with, simply by changing the DT. 3 different enmies with the exact same DT, and 3 different weapons with the exact same damage value, and there's strategy to be had. Pick your targets, swap your weapons. That's just with a basic DT adjustment, for a simplistic example. You can always get more interesting with it with the various effects and bonuses I mentioned in a previous example. The ones like bleed damage over time, extra critical damage, temporary DT reduction per hit (which would actually lower the enemy's DT value against all incoming damage), etc. That's just a handful. You could have a different slashing weapon with each extra bonus (or you could have those bonuses IN PLACE of the DT 1.5/.5 adjustment bonus.), and any combination of them, and any other interesting bonuses that can be thought up. It can be as complexly far from the simple "Always use slashing vs light/piercing vs medium/crushing vs heavy" scenario as you want, and yet STILL, damage and DT and health always have the exact same relationship and significance. Is that not easier to balance for whatever you want than the original system? I'm well aware Josh has already said there will be a different system, but I felt it prudent to explore WHY the old system was unintuitive, in the interest of making sure any different one IS intuitive. Plus, there was still a lot of "I don't see what was wrong with the old system" going around after the announcement of the change. And if this forum's purpose isn't collaborative understanding, then what is it?

Here's my question. What's the reasoning behind 1 enemy only providing XP after 30 minutes of combat being perfectly fine, but 2 enemies only providing you XP after 30 minutes being inherently problematic? "Because precedent" is not a reason. It's a choice. A choice is made for a reason. How does reason support that decision? What changes for the player when something's dead as opposed to something being not-dead after the same expenditure of time, resources, and effort? Here's a supporting question: Why don't we say "I should receive loot upon each enemy death, rather than having to wait until combat is over to be able to loot all the bodies because the remaining enemies are still attacking me and preventing me from looting."?

Exactly. So, a big scary dragon that you got down to 20% health, who didn't regenerate at all, would be a direct comparison to a group of 20 enemies, of which you killed 16, who didn't come back. OR, you could have the dragon regenerate AND the 16 enemies replenish. If one is fine and the other is not, then you're using different reasoning for each situation (the dragon and the group).

I already proposed one. Although, it was more just thinking about a simpler-yet-equally-effective manner of creating a difference in effectiveness between weapon/armor types than my claiming to be proposing a unique system that no one had proposed before. It's not necessarily COMPLETELY different from either Val's proposed system OR the newly proposed system from Josh (or what we know of it so far.) I'm merely stressing the importance of the separation of DT (as a value that already determines base-damage reduction) and the calculations for armor-type/damage-type effectiveness. This is something I believe Josh pointed out in his new proposal. The same mathematical change across all weapon types (against the appropriate type of armor for each) was purely for simplicity's sake. Like I said, you could always give different types of bonuses for each (like my bleed damage for slashing/extra crit for piercing/temporary DT reduction for crushing example). But see, in that, you have 3 different effects (damage over time, critical augmentation, and DT reduction) to be paired up with 3 weapon types. In the original system, you have 2 factors (more or less base damage, and more or less DT negation), split between 3 weapon types.

I'm probably just coming across as extremely difficult at this point, heh. I'm realllllly sorry if I am. Seriously. Maybe I just need to give up for the night. But, I realize what you're saying. I do. I think I do. I'm pretty sure. Here's the most simply I can state my concern of over-complication: The thing that makes crushing different from slashing is the difference in MDTDT PLUS the difference in base damage PLUS the difference in the DT value of heavy armor. But, the only real difference you're accomplishing is that a level 10 masterwork steel mace is going to do more damage against 20 DT armor than a level 10 masterwork steel sword. And a level 10 masterwork steel dagger is going to do more damage against higher DT armor than a sword will, but only against LOWER DT armor than a mace would. In other words, "DT too high? Use a dagger. DT still too high? Use a mace." Whether or not you give weapons minimum damage is a separate issue, as that only deals with the basic relationship between damage and DT. Am I making sense? A range can already be achieve with appropriate damage/DT values/differences between weapon types, but instead, 3 or 4 different variables/calculations are being used, and still only achieving a range of effectiveness. Oh but it does. Just in a different relationship. If an enemy has 50 DT, and a crushing mace has a minimum of 5 damage, then it negates 45 DT. If the enemy had only 10 DT, it would be negating only 5 DT. Whereas, a dagger actually negates a set amount, which might be higher than the difference between crushing's MDTDT and the foe's armor. Which is part of my point. I get that if the sword did 15, the dagger did 25, and the mace did 35, the mace would ALWAYS be the best weapon. My only point is that that staggered base damage approach accomplishes the same weapon range effectiveness. That's why I'm not advocating that slashing always do less damage than piercing which does less than crushing. Like I said, they got the math right. I just think the system made it more complex than it needed to be.

Ahhh, I get what you're saying. When I said "When you factor in DT," I was talking about my example (as it was using 0DT across the board). Not the original system. I realize that things are working differently, but I'm saying it still seems like a convoluted way of just using damage and DT for the exact same effectiveness ranges. Having a sword do 15 damage vs 15 DT armor (resulting in 0 damage) and a mace dealing only 10 damage vs 15 DT armor, but always dealing a MINIMUM of 5 damage is achieved just as easily by making the mace do 20 damage instead of 15. Sure, if things have 100 armor, the minimum damage works when the 20 damage doesn't. But, who decides whether or not things ever have 100 armor? You do, in designing the system. I'm not saying "You can't use DT negation and minimum damage thresholds for damage types because they're not simply addition and subtraction." I'm saying that it doesn't seem to accomplish anything that a much simpler system (slashing < piercing < crushing in damage, and Light/no armor < medium armor < heavy armor in DT). Imagine if you did the same thing with elemental magic. Fire just does base damage. Lightning penetrates up to 10 magic resistance, and Frost always does a minimum of 10 damage. The only "appropriate" resistance for Fire to be effective is no/hardly-any resistance. If stuff has high magic resistance, Fire is pretty much useless. The system, itself, is highly restrictive. They just got the math balanced out really well, but it's still WAY more math than is needed. (For the record, I'm ONLY talking about the damage-type part of the system. The dual-wielding and speeds and all that is not faulty.) Yes, but... they're all still based on DT, but then they're all different on top of that. It would be one thing to have different effectiveness bonuses for each, like: Slashing inflicts bleed damage-over-time versus the correct type of armor, Piercing deals 300% (instead of 150%) critical damage versus the correct type of armor, Crushing temporarily reduces DT by 1 per hit versus the correct type of armor. That's 3 different things that are fine. What wouldn't make much sense is if I said: Slashing inflicts bleed damage as long as DT is under 10, Piercing deals 300% critical damage as long as DT is between 10 and 20, Crushing temporarily reduces DT by 1 per hit as long as DT is between 20 and 30. In the first example, you can have 3 different types of weapons all have the same base damage, and you're STILL going to wind up with different final damage (based on 3 completely different bonus effect calculations). In the 2nd example, DT does TWO things, so you have to adjust base damage relative to DT values of armor for a comparable level, AND adjust DT for each range of armor to make sure that your damage-type effectiveness is balanced right in the end. In other words, in the original system, you have DT versus damage PLUS 3 different relationships with DT (slashing doing nothing, piercing negating it, and crushing negating it in a different way) to account for, JUST to achieve the balance you're looking for (you can't make slashing do 50 damage to make up for the fact that it can't get around DT, and you can't make DT too high on heavy armor because it would too quickly make both slashing and piercing useless.) You're doing MULTIPLE calculations just to make slashing better against one armor type, because that armor type is really just a grouping of a bunch of calculations.

Precisely. The argument was "But, even though I didn't complete that quest, I still did SOMEthing. I expended effort and resources, and therefore should've gotten XP for what I DID do." That's why I made the big, scary dragon comparison again. Dragon takes 30 minutes to kill, and you only fight it for 20 minutes, then have to leave and never return (not the system's fault, and not any different with per-kill-XP), it's totally fine. There's no problem. But, if 20 trolls take 30 minutes to kill, and you only fight them for 20 minutes, then have to flee and never return (again, nothing's stopping you from returning, and the trolls don't even replenish their numbers like the dragon does its HP, typically), NOW there's a problem. That was what didn't make any sense.

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.

Yeah, it's just something that could easily cause a problem if not taken heavily into consideration.