Josh Sawyer on Miss and Hit

[Sensuki]

Well also Baldur's Gate has a certain amount of attack animations per round even though only one is real (at the start of the game), I think that's because the other ones are then used when the player gains more attacks per round. They're not filler, they're there for a reason. I think Icewind Dale changed this so the player only had an attack animation when they attacked, afterwards they returned to the 'ready' pose.

[Adhin]

That and if you played a fighter in original BG you 'had' no abilities. in 2E, Fighters had nothing but there base attack (BG auto-attack). Far as im concerned, removing the base auto-attack from combat for only use-special moves is going to be a boring game. They're needs to be action going on, and ability use only means force-pausing for each character every second. With auto-attack you get to at least let your front liners flail away at enemies and use abilities when you need them.

 

Simply put they can't do this with out a base auto-attack feature.

[TRX850]

What would be really awesome is seeing a variation of combat animations that all string together fluidly as your character gains extra attacks.

 

Combat variations are pretty standard. But when you have 2 or 3 or 4 attacks per round, there could be "historically accurate" combinations of cleaves and counter-cleaves calculated on-the-fly, but each determined by the position of the preceding attack (apart from the first one). It'd be different for different weapon types, but the really spectacular combos could unlock as your attacks per round increase.

Edited January 8, 2013 by TRX850

[Adhin]

Yeah though I'd like to see some variation and, preferably, meld on the fly instead of a specific set. NWN had a few it would cycle through. The main reason I bring it up is because of DA2 had 'attack sets' animation, and it gets extremely repetitive to look at when they do the exact same 5 moves over and over in long chains. An Action game, like a DMC, does that but often has 2 versions based off if you step out the button presses or rapidly tap... that and you can often break the chain up with other stuff or flow into another chain using another weapon.

 

Point is, it gets less boring in those action games because your in controle of this 1 guy and you get to play around with various animation chains. DA2 in isometric will be the same thing over and over. BG+ had a few animations it would randomly pick between which kept it at least a bit random.

 

So yeah, but they need to have a few variations of the 3-4 attack chain animations to randomly cycle through.

[TRX850]

So yeah, but they need to have a few variations of the 3-4 attack chain animations to randomly cycle through.

 

Exactly. There should still be a random factor in each permutation so you don't get the same patterns recurring too often. I just mean there should also be some logic applied to where each successive blow lands, based on the previous blow, but not necessarily sticking to any predefined combat chain. I guess maybe it's a combination of both historical and random in that case.

Edited January 8, 2013 by TRX850

[Sabotin]

I'd rather that attack speed remain fairly constant, more so than in the IE games.

[TRX850]

Attack speed was used in conjunction with initiative rolls to determine the order of combat each round, i.e. light/fast weapons usually attack first.

 

I don't think it sped up the attack animations at all.

 

But it begs the question though, if P:E uses combat rounds similarly to BG/D&D rules, there may be an awful lot of non-action each round, especially at lower levels.

 

Maybe in those dead spots, melee characters could adopt an En Guarde stance with variable footwork and baulking? I don't really want to see anything too radical here though, at the risk of losing too much of that old school charm. But just enough so it doesn't look ordinary.

[Sabotin]

No, no, I didn't mean weapon speed. When I said attack speed I meant the attacks/round statistic. I believe someone said that PE won't have rounds, so I tried to use a more neutral expression.

 

What bothers me about it is the same thing as you. That you start at 1/round and can end up at 5+, with combat at the start seeming frustrating (with the fill-in animation looking like misses) and at the end looking just silly with the overly sped up animations.

[Sensuki]

I'm going to assume attacks/etc will be handled more like an RTS or a MOBA, except with RPG 'to hit' mechanics

Edited January 8, 2013 by Sensuki

[Osvir]

^Honestly? I wouldn't mind.

 

A choreographed MOBA which brings me to a thought I had earlier today: Anyone want to help me with a project in LoL? I want to record some general brawling and then edit it into Baldur's Gate-esqueness. Unfortunately you can't control 5 champions at once.

 

I play on EUW, Osvir as username.

[HansKrSG]

As mentioned by many here. I would not hate an avoidance system instead of a miss system. As long as total avoidance does no damage.

 

The best would be using both though. In combat the attackers skill should matter, as well as the defenders skill. Opposed rolls (as sneak vs. perception) takes too much time in PnP, but in a computer game, this would be ideal.

 

I also like the ideas of degrees of the success of the hit. A better hit should also add to damage, even if not a "crit".

 

Total miss - no damgage of any sort

glancing hit - little damage

normal hit - normal damage

good hit - extra damage (+50% for example)

Critical - Much more damage (+100% or more for example)

 

Of course, you could make it more dynamic and have every "point" over a normal hit be a little better, and vica versa when lower, doesn't matter that much.

Many are talking about critical misses, I think that it might be a good idea, but in no way important (IMO).

[TMTVL]

We already have a way of having characters and enemies dealing more or less damage: the damage roll, which differs from the to-hit roll. I mean, how would you deal with stuff like fire shields and the like? "Oh, he struck you, but it was only a light blow, so suffers little damage." "But the spell description says that anyone who strikes me in melee is engulfed in flames..."

[Fearabbit]

We already have a way of having characters and enemies dealing more or less damage: the damage roll, which differs from the to-hit roll. I mean, how would you deal with stuff like fire shields and the like? "Oh, he struck you, but it was only a light blow, so suffers little damage." "But the spell description says that anyone who strikes me in melee is engulfed in flames..."

But the damage roll isn't dependent on your skill, it's an attribute of your weapon. And actually it's more realistic to have the % of damage depend on your skill and not on your weapon type, so I could imagine that they take out the randomness in the weapon base damage and put it somewhere else (e.g. that hammers have a higher chance of glancing than swords).

Concerning the fire shield enchantment, that's actually a good point. At least if such enchantments exist in the world of P:E.

[Lephys]

So yeah, but they need to have a few variations of the 3-4 attack chain animations to randomly cycle through.

 

Exactly. There should still be a random factor in each permutation so you don't get the same patterns recurring too often. I just mean there should also be some logic applied to where each successive blow lands, based on the previous blow, but not necessarily sticking to any predefined combat chain. I guess maybe it's a combination of both historical and random in that case.

 

I've often thought about this, in almost any RPG. Why does my Level 1 character take up a goofy "I'm gonna swing my sword like a baseball bat at yer head!" stance and swing once every... oh.. 3 seconds, in combat, and deal 12 damage, when he COULD swing every second (in a flowing sequence of little animations that rely on a handful of resting-point poses for all animations) and just do like 4 damage per swing? Hell, even dodges and parries could be worked in, because, as has already been said, a modern computer can process these rolls STUPIDLY quickly.

 

I would say that, instead of gaining attacks-per-round (or basically attack speed, in a non-round-based game) as you leveled up, you could increase your auto-attack reportoire of moves. There'd be 4-5 different little weapon-swing (and enemy weapon swing) animation permutations to start out with (so it would actually look like you're both fighting each other at the same time, rather than just focusing on swinging a weapon on a cooldown and see who dies first), not including dodges and blocks and parries and whatnot, and then you could gain different essentially passive abilities as you went. For simplicity's sake (and example's), you could just throw in typical RPG things like stuns, knockback, trips, etc.

 

Your "auto-attack skill" could be Swordplay, or Axe Mastery, or whatever (also already in a billion other progression systems in the universe), or there could even be a General tree that would provide a lesser degree of bonuses at the ceiling, but would apply to any weapon you were using. The only difference from typical systems is that auto-attack combat, in between active skill usages and movement active commands, would flow awesomely nicely, and you'd actually see an improvement to this as your character supposedly became the supreme master of all things blade, rather than him just standing around Rock'em'Sock'em Robotting away like a doofus until you click "Axe Hurricane of Impending Disintegration" and select a target.

 

I just think this would do well in support of the whole "player skill and character skill are separate things that are both at play" idea. You could take any existent combat system (that's not turn/round-based) and work this in, simply reducing the amount of damage dealt by weapons proportionate to the increase in attack speed, and the combat pacing stays exactly the same. Combat just rocks a lot more is all.

 

By the way, the little passive bonuses and effects I was talking about in your general auto-attackery would be quite minor compared to other things. No "50% chance to stun on each hit!" or anything. Pretty much any effect that's usually passive, in combat, could be applied in this situation. Because your auto-attack damage is pretty much passive. I think that's the problem. That's what it feels like in most games... That you might as well just have a damage aura that only hits your selected target every (insert weapon speed here) seconds, and there happen to be "Oh look, I'm supposed to be attacking him" animations attached.

 

Guild Wars 2 actually does this, slightly. Your slot-1 skill (1-9 keys on the keyboard) is pretty much your auto-attack, no matter what class and weapon you're using, and on most of the melee weapons, it actually cycles through various slightly-different attacks (they actually have different tooltips and everything, and some of them apply effects, so you can halt your auto-attack at a certain step to save it for its knockback or stun effect at a slightly more useful time) much more quickly (probably an attack at least every second, because each attack is just a type of axe swing, or kick, etc... minor individual "moves" that one would probably perform whilst engaging a foe in melee combat.

[TRX850]

So yeah, but they need to have a few variations of the 3-4 attack chain animations to randomly cycle through.

 

Exactly. There should still be a random factor in each permutation so you don't get the same patterns recurring too often. I just mean there should also be some logic applied to where each successive blow lands, based on the previous blow, but not necessarily sticking to any predefined combat chain. I guess maybe it's a combination of both historical and random in that case.

 

I've often thought about this, in almost any RPG. Why does my Level 1 character take up a goofy "I'm gonna swing my sword like a baseball bat at yer head!" stance and swing once every... oh.. 3 seconds, in combat, and deal 12 damage, when he COULD swing every second (in a flowing sequence of little animations that rely on a handful of resting-point poses for all animations) and just do like 4 damage per swing? Hell, even dodges and parries could be worked in, because, as has already been said, a modern computer can process these rolls STUPIDLY quickly.

 

I am also reminded of games like Pirates of the Burning Sea, which, despite its way-too-fast melee system, did have interesting fighting style chains you could improve on as you levelled up. I'm sure there are many other games that do this, but conceptually, it could add a ton of flavour to P:E if the soon-to-go-exponential-number-of-attack-animations can be smoothed out through a motion flow system.

 

So instead of choosing the old school feat of "Dirty Fighting" which dealt bonus effect damage on a crit, it could actually represent a new visual style in the animations too.

 

Or if you wanted a Florentine style for your swashbuckler or an Anglo-Germanic style for your paladin, these all made some additional visual sense during combat.

 

I love the idea of the dirty fighting rogue making a desperate tumble and ending with a knife-in-the-bollocks maneuver. Ouch! Then again, it might go too far into RTS territory for it to "look and feel right", but I really couldn't say.

Edited January 9, 2013 by TRX850

[Lephys]

So instead of choosing the old school feat of "Dirty Fighting" which dealt bonus effect damage on a crit, it could actually represent a new visual style in the animations too.

 

Or if you wanted a Florentine style for your swashbuckler or an Anglo-Germanic style for your paladin, these all made some additional visual sense during combat.

 

I love the idea of the dirty fighting rogue making a desperate tumble and ending with a knife-in-the-bollocks maneuver. Ouch! Then again, it might go too far into RTS territory for it to "look and feel right", but I really couldn't say.

 

Yes! And that 2-second stun could actually be a stagger animation. Dodge would actually look and feel like a dodge, in the midst of ongoing combat, and block/parry would actually result in a little animation segment that shows a blow being parried rather than taken, etc. It's really nothing THAT complex. Just enough to make it look like two people fighting each other, rather than two people dealing damage to each other. It just tends to feel like they took a turn-based RPG and simply sped everything up, in most games. Which is silly, because turn-based gameplay abstractly (and understandably) separates the actions of both parties involved, for the sake of turn-by-turn decision-making complexity. But, when you just mash 'em back together, it feels very disjointed.

 

At the very least, my character swinging his sword in 3 different aesthetic ways every second for 4 damage per swing is 37-times more interesting than watching him swing once every 5 seconds for 20 damage and stand still the rest of the time. They could go as complex with it as they wanted, but that alone would be loads better than many typical games.

[HansKrSG]

So yeah, but they need to have a few variations of the 3-4 attack chain animations to randomly cycle through.

 

Exactly. There should still be a random factor in each permutation so you don't get the same patterns recurring too often. I just mean there should also be some logic applied to where each successive blow lands, based on the previous blow, but not necessarily sticking to any predefined combat chain. I guess maybe it's a combination of both historical and random in that case.

 

I've often thought about this, in almost any RPG. Why does my Level 1 character take up a goofy "I'm gonna swing my sword like a baseball bat at yer head!" stance and swing once every... oh.. 3 seconds, in combat, and deal 12 damage, when he COULD swing every second (in a flowing sequence of little animations that rely on a handful of resting-point poses for all animations) and just do like 4 damage per swing? Hell, even dodges and parries could be worked in, because, as has already been said, a modern computer can process these rolls STUPIDLY quickly.

 

I would say that, instead of gaining attacks-per-round (or basically attack speed, in a non-round-based game) as you leveled up, you could increase your auto-attack reportoire of moves. There'd be 4-5 different little weapon-swing (and enemy weapon swing) animation permutations to start out with (so it would actually look like you're both fighting each other at the same time, rather than just focusing on swinging a weapon on a cooldown and see who dies first), not including dodges and blocks and parries and whatnot, and then you could gain different essentially passive abilities as you went. For simplicity's sake (and example's), you could just throw in typical RPG things like stuns, knockback, trips, etc.

 

Your "auto-attack skill" could be Swordplay, or Axe Mastery, or whatever (also already in a billion other progression systems in the universe), or there could even be a General tree that would provide a lesser degree of bonuses at the ceiling, but would apply to any weapon you were using. The only difference from typical systems is that auto-attack combat, in between active skill usages and movement active commands, would flow awesomely nicely, and you'd actually see an improvement to this as your character supposedly became the supreme master of all things blade, rather than him just standing around Rock'em'Sock'em Robotting away like a doofus until you click "Axe Hurricane of Impending Disintegration" and select a target.

 

I just think this would do well in support of the whole "player skill and character skill are separate things that are both at play" idea. You could take any existent combat system (that's not turn/round-based) and work this in, simply reducing the amount of damage dealt by weapons proportionate to the increase in attack speed, and the combat pacing stays exactly the same. Combat just rocks a lot more is all.

 

By the way, the little passive bonuses and effects I was talking about in your general auto-attackery would be quite minor compared to other things. No "50% chance to stun on each hit!" or anything. Pretty much any effect that's usually passive, in combat, could be applied in this situation. Because your auto-attack damage is pretty much passive. I think that's the problem. That's what it feels like in most games... That you might as well just have a damage aura that only hits your selected target every (insert weapon speed here) seconds, and there happen to be "Oh look, I'm supposed to be attacking him" animations attached.

 

Guild Wars 2 actually does this, slightly. Your slot-1 skill (1-9 keys on the keyboard) is pretty much your auto-attack, no matter what class and weapon you're using, and on most of the melee weapons, it actually cycles through various slightly-different attacks (they actually have different tooltips and everything, and some of them apply effects, so you can halt your auto-attack at a certain step to save it for its knockback or stun effect at a slightly more useful time) much more quickly (probably an attack at least every second, because each attack is just a type of axe swing, or kick, etc... minor individual "moves" that one would probably perform whilst engaging a foe in melee combat.

 

The problem in the old IE games is that they tried to follow the pen and paper system AD&D 2ed. In this edition, it is implied that you try to hit and dodge and parry several times within the 6 second round, but that of these attacks, only one is considered an attack with a chance to connect. This works well in a turn based system, but seems slow and uneccesary in a real time system. The good thing is that PE does not have 6 second "rounds" and is not based on a pen and paper system. They can easily have you make an attack every second, or every two seconds, or whatever integer they want and feels correct.

[Helm]

The problem in the old IE games is that they tried to follow the pen and paper system AD&D 2ed. In this edition, it is implied that you try to hit and dodge and parry several times within the 6 second round, but that of these attacks, only one is considered an attack with a chance to connect. This works well in a turn based system, but seems slow and uneccesary in a real time system. The good thing is that PE does not have 6 second "rounds" and is not based on a pen and paper system. They can easily have you make an attack every second, or every two seconds, or whatever integer they want and feels correct.

The worst part of the round based RTwP system ist that you always had to wait until the end of the round (as you said, 6 seconds) before you could cast a spell, attack, drink a potion etc. In a worse case scenario your char would just stand there for for almost 6 seconds until the end of the round ended before he would actually do what you told him, so it was a rather awkward sometimes.

 

Btw , theoretically you could parry an infinite amount of times in the D&D system. ^^

[Luridis]

While I'm sure whatever Obsidian comes up with will work well, I do have a couple of questions about this myself...

 

Can DR negate this "miss damage"?

 

What will prevent the player from stacking for miss damage? i.e. If you look at 3.5e, a system like this would basically make Frenzied Berserker required for any melee build. You'd use every slot you can to stack one stat (STR) at the exclusion of all others, to bring that bonus damage up. The weapon would no longer matter as your goal would be to be pushing huge bonus damage so that you can crank out an at minimum 1+60/2 for misses with supreme power attack. This could be made even more silly if sneak-attack couldn't be missed.

 

I can see the same happening for casters. What do you memorize? Whichever spells have the highest half-damage on a save miss. They'd all feel like playing a Favored Soul in NWN2. (I don't even want to get started on how WoTC completely failed at a chance of finally making a decent chaos-aligned divine caster with that one; RP wise anyway.)

 

That said, I can agree with Josh that missing is frustrating. The most annoying part of NWN2 for me so far is that whole concealment mechanic that just needs to die in a fire. Even with Blind-Fight it gets really annoying when you watch a fighter or ranger go 5 or 6 rounds and land one hit.

Edited January 9, 2013 by Luridis

[Tamerlane]

Josh actually talked about that already. DR will affect miss damage, though it will always let at least 20% of the attack through, similar to New Vegas. He also said that builds focusing on keeping minimum damage high and relying heavily on miss damage won't be very viable.

Edited January 9, 2013 by Tamerlane

[Lephys]

The problem in the old IE games is that they tried to follow the pen and paper system AD&D 2ed. In this edition, it is implied that you try to hit and dodge and parry several times within the 6 second round, but that of these attacks, only one is considered an attack with a chance to connect. This works well in a turn based system, but seems slow and uneccesary in a real time system. The good thing is that PE does not have 6 second "rounds" and is not based on a pen and paper system. They can easily have you make an attack every second, or every two seconds, or whatever integer they want and feels correct.

 

Yeah, I get the PnP to in-game rounds transition. But many RPGs, for a while now, have not used the round-system and instead have used real-time, yet they still have weapon speeds like 2.7 seconds and such, even though your character completes a huge axe swing in about .5 seconds. So you get that *swing, wait... swing, wait... swing, wait...* thing that feels very artificial. You can generally even treat it like a cooldown, and time things so that you run away right after you swing, then are back within melee range at the 2.7-second mark so your character can swing again. Since actions aren't tied to rounds, this will sometimes delay your opponent's attacks, since they can only swing at you when you're in range, and you're only in range when you're ready to swing.

 

Kudos to the player in that respect for such a degree of micromanagement, I suppose, but that's not a melee fight. You don't just do nothing, nothing, nothing, swing, nothing, nothing, nothing, swing. You might sometimes stand at the ready to parry the next attack before swinging again, or prepare to dodge, or reposition yourself, or change stances, but you're constantly engaged in combat, dealing with things and preparing for your next move. You don't just happen to be standing near an opponent, waiting for that instant attack proc at 2.7 second intervals. Feasibly, if it only takes you .7 seconds to swing an axe, you should be able to (within fatigue limits and whatnot) swing it every .7 seconds, each time swinging from the end-position of your previous swing.

 

Obviously I'm not expecting heavy axe combat to consist of 10-straight minutes of your character speed-swinging the axe. I just think it's been long enough since we've progressed from the round-based days and the "we can't really do that with graphics and processing" days to be able to visually represent the flow of combat. *Swing-swing, kick, dodge, swing, get hit and stagger for a second, regain footing and swing again, parry, swing*. Something like that.

 

In other words, it just shouldn't feel as if nothing, or simply waiting, is all that's occurring between actual actions in combat, methinks. It kinda baffles me that you don't see that very often in RPGs (if ever) when we've come so far in game design. You see it in more Action-type games, like Assasin's Creed's fighting system, and such, and it'd be even easier to represent with an auto-attack flow. It's not a necessary improvement to the cRPG genre, but I think it would be a welcome one.

[Karkarov]

You guys do realize no one ever said that every "hit" would always do HP damage right? The theory crafting in this thread is getting totally out of hand. We don't know enough to make even a quarter of the assumptions I see in this thread and they are being bandied about as if they are stone cold facts.

 

In other news this isn't D&D 2nd Ed. So why does everyone keep acting like the ruleset of 2nd Ed (or any other edition for that matter) has anything to do with P:E? It doesn't, drop the D&D based arguments, they simply don't apply.

Edited January 10, 2013 by Karkarov

[Lephys]

You guys do realize no one ever said that every "hit" would always do HP damage right? The theory crafting in this thread is getting totally out of hand. We don't know enough to make even a quarter of the assumptions I see in this thread and they are being bandied about as if they are stone cold facts.

 

In other news this isn't D&D 2nd Ed. So why does everyone keep acting like the ruleset of 2nd Ed (or any other edition for that matter) has anything to do with P:E? It doesn't, drop the D&D based arguments, they simply don't apply.

 

o_o... *Rolls percentile*... Actually, it seems they do, u_u.

 

Haha. Sorry, I had to.

 

No, no, back to seriousness, I will say that, thus far, they haven't stated that there will be any situations in which damage doesn't always apply to Health. BUT, they also have not stated that there will never be a situation in which damage doesn't apply to health. So, it's kind of one of those "Here's how damage works, but we haven't actually said that's all there is to the damage system" things.

 

I can see discussing the possibility that damage always applies to health, just as I can see discussing the possibility that it sometimes won't, 8P. It's slightly silly to act like either one is fact and disregard the other. And I get your point about the level of D&D ruleset purism that pops its head up from time to time, heh.

 

There's nothing wrong with taking from D&D systems what is beneficial to cRPG design, and changing what is not, no matter what it is. Changes aren't bad until they're bad. They're not automatically bad because things are now different.

[Somna]

You guys do realize no one ever said that every "hit" would always do HP damage right? The theory crafting in this thread is getting totally out of hand. We don't know enough to make even a quarter of the assumptions I see in this thread and they are being bandied about as if they are stone cold facts.

 

I don't think he's explicitly said it, but it sounds like he's implying it here.

 

In other news this isn't D&D 2nd Ed. So why does everyone keep acting like the ruleset of 2nd Ed (or any other edition for that matter) has anything to do with P:E? It doesn't, drop the D&D based arguments, they simply don't apply.

 

People do that because P:E combat is "close to BG2/IWD" which uses the AD&D combat rules...mostly.

[Adhin]

Saying blancing blows (misses that do small dmg) do stamina and health isn't really implying it, its stating that's how it is at the moment. So yeah he did say it does stamina and health damage, just heavily reduced and will even do less then 1 dmg as it keeps track of decimals.

Edited January 10, 2013 by Adhin