Hit & Miss - Finalized/Updated?

[J.E. Sawyer]

Yes, our damage ranges will be narrower than what you see on most base weapons in D&D, more comparable to what you see under the bell in multi-die spell damage.  Without exception so far, minimum damage is more than 50% of maximum damage.  A Graze will always do less damage, even on the best damage roll, than the worst damage roll for a Hit.  A Crit will always do more damage, even on the worst damage roll, than the best damage roll on a Hit.

[Lephys]

^ That makes splendid sense. Thank you very much, Josh. ^_^

[J.E. Sawyer]

Actually, I'm sorry, that last part isn't correct.  A Crit could still do less damage than a max damage Hit.  On average, it will do more.

[rjshae]

 

It doesn't seem like this would be all that beneficial: if I understand correctly then it's mostly useful against enemies that have a much higher Deflection rating compared to your Accuracy rating, and even then it only gives up to half damage in the infrequent cases where you would normally miss completely. I guess I'd have to try it to convince myself.

As non-typical as it seems, try to think of the fact that certain enemies are going to have "super high Deflection" as their thing; their difficulty. So, even amongst higher-than-average Accuracy folk, that range is going to shift towards a lot of missing and grazing. Hell, imagine, even a 50/50 between those. (Well, 50/45/5, because of the "you can always Hit" thing). If you can increase the 45% chance to Graze to, say 75%, that pushes the miss chance down to 25% from 50. You're missing HALF as often as you were.

 

So, as strange as it is (again) for Grazing to be your almost-best-case-scenario, it kind of is, there. Hits would sort of become your crits. Basically, think of those enemies as being "immune to crits," just like others are immune to certain damage types or elements, etc. Then it makes a little more sense, I think. It's still very much not what we're used to seeing in existing games, though. 8P

 

Oh I get the scenario. It's just that (1) the actual situation may be uncommon at higher levels, (2) you're missing less often with your least damaging result. The net effect is you may slowly grind down the occasional enemy a little less slowly than you did before.

[Lephys]

Actually, I'm sorry, that last part isn't correct.  A Crit could still do less damage than a max damage Hit.  On average, it will do more.

That's fine, really. The only only annoying times are the BLATANT extremes. Those games that typically say "Hey, this weapon has a minimum damage of 1 instead of 8 or 10, but it's maximum is a lot higher, too!" (common thing that I've seen amongst even-pseudo-RPGs), but it's as if they forgot about crits. So then you end up with your crit-spec'd character (Rogue or what-have-you), running about doing 4-8 damage on crits, while everyone else with "normal" weaponry is doing 8-12 damage regularly.

Edited October 30, 2013 by Lephys

[Infinitron]

A Graze halves incoming damage, before armor.  Damage is almost always applied to Stamina, with Health damage being derived from Stamina damage at a (typically) 1:4 ratio.

 

Let's say an attack (the source doesn't really matter) would do 20-28 points of damage on a capital-H Hit.  The target has 6 points of Damage Threshold against this damage type.  The attack hits and does 24 points of damage.  Armor takes off 6 points, leaving 18 points of Stamina damage, which in turn means the target takes 4.5 points of Health damage (yes, we do track fractions).

 

On a Graze, the same 24 points of damage is immediately reduced to 12 points of damage.  6 points come off, leaving 6 points of Stamina damage and 1.5 points of Health damage.

 

 

 

Correct.  It's now half "rolled" damage (or duration).  Similarly, crits are now +50% "rolled" damage (or duration).

 

Doesn't this mean it's now much less important to optimize your characters towards scoring critical hits on hard-to-hit boss enemies? Just wear 'em down with grazes instead.

 

On a related note, I don't believe you've ever said whether there's still some minimum damage value that always penetrates the DT, ever since the armor system changed. If there is such a value, does it still differ per weapon, or is it a universal constant?

Edited October 30, 2013 by Infinitron

[Mico Selva]

(reposting from RPG Codex)

I like this change, as it means there will be an actual chance to miss now, so it will more viable to create a dodge-oriented character (which will still get grazed/hit 50% of the time, but whatever).

 

However, with all these changes, the double-random modification of damage is an artificial remainder from D&D. First we randomly determine if the target is hit, and it might affect damage, and then we roll for the damage itself. Rather superfluous. I would prefer a more fluid system when the weapon damage is set (instead of being a range) and the effect of the hit roll either reduced or increased it. Better hit roll = more damage (up to 150% or whatever), worse hit roll = less damage (down to 0, which would equal to a miss).

Edited October 30, 2013 by Mico Selva

[J.E. Sawyer]

 

Doesn't this mean it's now much less important to optimize your characters towards scoring critical hits on hard-to-hit boss enemies? Just wear 'em down with grazes instead.

 

On a related note, I don't believe you've ever said whether there's still some minimum damage value that always penetrates the DT, ever since the armor system changed. If there is such a value, does it still differ per weapon, or is it a universal constant?

 

Hit point- (or in our case, Stamina-) oriented slugfests are endurance races.  On a long enough timeline, even a D&D character with a 15% chance to hit will do enough damage to take down some big bruiser.  In practice, that character is probably going to have his or her face pounded in long before that time arrives.  When armor is involved (and most creatures do have some amount of DT), the practical effects of a Graze vs. a Hit are more than just .5 vs. 1.  In the previous example I gave, 6 points of DT meant that the Graze did, in the final tally, 66% less Stamina/Health damage than a Hit with the same base damage.  On a Crit, that 18 turns to 27, which means it does 21 Stamina damage vs. the normal hit's 12.

 

In practical testing, attempting to Graze your way to victory is often a dangerous road to follow.  I had a situation a few weeks ago where the party was pounding on a fighter in scale armor with high Deflection.  My fighter was occupied when he came up, so the enemy wound up Melee Engaging my wizard.  I dogpiled the fighter but most of my attacks were either Deflection-based or were Reflex-based AoEs (and now I had multiple characters stuck to this dude).

 

I was regularly Grazing him, but his Stamina was going down very slowly (especially since he had Constant Recovery).  Eventually I tried to have my wizard make a run for it.  He turned on Arcane Veil, took a step, got hit with a hard Disengagement Attack, and dropped capital-D Dead.  We eventually beat him down, but it took a while.

 

On another playthrough, I kept him at a respectable distance from my wizard, dropped my paladin and fighter on him, and then had the priest periodically cast Divine Mark, attacking his Psyche defense for targeted damage and lowering his Deflection for long enough to land some really solid hits.

 

Grazes are a nice consolation prize and they help normalize damage output, but Hits are typically WAY better.  We may still increase the effect of Crits, but currently I don't see Graze builds as being a viable strategy.  If I wind up attacking into a defense that outclasses my attacks by 25 points or more, I usually wind up regretting it.  In those circumstances, while it's true that 45% of your attacks are still Grazes, 30% of them are full Misses and 30% are Hits.

[J.E. Sawyer]

 

(reposting from RPG Codex)

I like this change, as it means there will be an actual chance to miss now, so it will more viable to create a dodge-oriented character (which will still get grazed/hit 50% of the time, but whatever).

 

However, with all these changes, the double-random modification of damage is an artificial remainder from D&D. First we randomly determine if the target is hit, and it might affect damage, and then we roll for the damage itself. Rather superfluous. I would prefer a more fluid system when the weapon damage is set (instead of being a range) and the effect of the hit roll either reduced or increased it. Better hit roll = more damage (up to 150% or whatever), worse hit roll = less damage (down to 0, which would equal to a miss).

 

Personally, I also like systems like that.  However, I don't have any design problems with randomized damage as long as it's relatively narrow band.  While it may seem at times like we're turning the world upside down with some of our system conventions compared to D&D, I'm trying to walk a fine line between familiarity and innovation.

[Infinitron]

Thanks for the reply. My other question...?

[J.E. Sawyer]

Sorry.  Yeah, we do still have minimum damage through threshold.  Currently, I believe it is a constant.  This is nice because it's very easy to change.  We may or may not put different values on certain weapons.  It will probably be a while before we finalize those numbers.  We do currently have (flat value) DT bypass as a property of weapons like the stiletto and estoc.

[Lephys]

So many infos! . I love it!

 

Is there anything you can tell us about the factors we can expect to affect the (typically fixed) 1:4 Health:Stamina damage ratio?

[J.E. Sawyer]

The only one I can think of currently is the barbarians' Thick-Skinned Ability that makes it more like 1:6.

[Lephys]

That at least gives me an idea of causes/rarity. Thanks, ^_^

[Karkarov]

 

Grazes are a nice consolation prize and they help normalize damage output, but Hits are typically WAY better.  We may still increase the effect of Crits, but currently I don't see Graze builds as being a viable strategy.  If I wind up attacking into a defense that outclasses my attacks by 25 points or more, I usually wind up regretting it.  In those circumstances, while it's true that 45% of your attacks are still Grazes, 30% of them are full Misses and 30% are Hits.

 

I guess this story and especially this final paragraph concerns me for a couple reasons.

 

1: It reminds of World of Warcraft or "Insert Trinity Based MMO Here"...  I don't have a problem with that type of game, the appeal (especially for multiplayer) is painfully clear, it is easy to design encounters for, encourages team play, gives everyone a unique and defined role in the party. Many MMO's use it because it really is one of the easiest and best ways to get a group of people to work together to overcome a wide variety of encounter types.  I even love to play tanks in MMO's, but while my primary job is "get punched in face and not fall down" there is some level of threat management, ability dodging, different cooldowns you may need to time, specific mechanics you have to counter.... 

 

PE on the other hand is a single player game, the cooldowns won't be that intense, the mechanics won't be as demanding (such as move 15 yards in 5 seconds or die), there is no threat I just use an ability with the fighter character to force "engagement" on those in melee.... or I don't. 

 

2: If grazes are basically sub optimal and not desirable outside of "graze or miss" situations, which can't be that common and could surely be fought with a better approach, what does that say about the fighter class if one of the top end skills is being able to graze more often?  It tells me they are a low damage class first off.  Per your own words even the worst hit you can get will do better damage than the best graze you can score.  Most of their use seems to be heavily reliant on positioning and use of engagement.  Based on your story a fighter can clearly take a hit... but unless someone tries to break out of engagement it doesn't look like they can deal one.  They sound like the very definition of the "get hit in face but don't fall down" character.  It sounds like the Baldur's Gate 1 fighter, except now he can force you to hit him but consequently does no damage.  Handy, but not really more fun for the player or all that interesting mechanics wise.

 

Why not just bring a barbarian and deal better damage and counter higher damage intake with higher hp?  Why not bring a paladin whose damage is still probably weak but has better utility overall?  I am sure caster classes have some form of mob controlling abilities that might paralyze or even prevent someone from moving and likely a far better offensive complement.  Sure there is all kinds of tactical synergy with the engagement system, but it sounds a little too much like MMO combat to me and it only works and is fun there because of all the things going on around it, very little of which will be going on in PE. 

 

A lineman on a football team does a lot of work to help his team win... but unless he is on defense and sacks the QB no one ever talks about him.  He does a key important job but he just isn't exciting or interesting.  I guess I am saying I would like the fighter to be more exciting and fun to have in my party, not just a meat shield who gets beat down so the rogue can score an easy backstab.

 

Hopefully I am just over reacting, but then that is what happens when you speculate based on limited info.  Normally I wouldn't do that but it has been a long day

Edited October 31, 2013 by Karkarov

[teknoman2]

 

 

Grazes are a nice consolation prize and they help normalize damage output, but Hits are typically WAY better.  We may still increase the effect of Crits, but currently I don't see Graze builds as being a viable strategy.  If I wind up attacking into a defense that outclasses my attacks by 25 points or more, I usually wind up regretting it.  In those circumstances, while it's true that 45% of your attacks are still Grazes, 30% of them are full Misses and 30% are Hits.

 

I guess this story and especially this final paragraph concerns me for a couple reasons.

 

1: It reminds of World of Warcraft or "Insert Trinity Based MMO Here"...  I don't have a problem with that type of game, the appeal (especially for multiplayer) is painfully clear, it is easy to design encounters for, encourages team play, gives everyone a unique and defined role in the party. Many MMO's use it because it really is one of the easiest and best ways to get a group of people to work together to overcome a wide variety of encounter types.  I even love to play tanks in MMO's, but while my primary job is "get punched in face and not fall down" there is some level of threat management, ability dodging, different cooldowns you may need to time, specific mechanics you have to counter.... 

 

PE on the other hand is a single player game, the cooldowns won't be that intense, the mechanics won't be as demanding (such as move 15 yards in 5 seconds or die), there is no threat I just use an ability with the fighter character to force "engagement" on those in melee.... or I don't. 

 

2: If grazes are basically sub optimal and not desirable outside of "graze or miss" situations, which can't be that common and could surely be fought with a better approach, what does that say about the fighter class if one of the top end skills is being able to graze more often?  It tells me they are a low damage class first off.  Per your own words even the worst hit you can get will do better damage than the best graze you can score.  Most of their use seems to be heavily reliant on positioning and use of engagement.  Based on your story a fighter can clearly take a hit... but unless someone tries to break out of engagement it doesn't look like they can deal one.  They sound like the very definition of the "get hit in face but don't fall down" character.  It sounds like the Baldur's Gate 1 fighter, except now he can force you to hit him but consequently does no damage.  Handy, but not really more fun for the player or all that interesting mechanics wise.

 

Why not just bring a barbarian and deal better damage and counter higher damage intake with higher hp?  Why not bring a paladin whose damage is still probably weak but has better utility overall?  I am sure caster classes have some form of mob controlling abilities that might paralyze or even prevent someone from moving and likely a far better offensive complement.  Sure there is all kinds of tactical synergy with the engagement system, but it sounds a little too much like MMO combat to me and it only works and is fun there because of all the things going on around it, very little of which will be going on in PE. 

 

A lineman on a football team does a lot of work to help his team win... but unless he is on defense and sacks the QB no one ever talks about him.  He does a key important job but he just isn't exciting or interesting.  I guess I am saying I would like the fighter to be more exciting and fun to have in my party, not just a meat shield who gets beat down so the rogue can score an easy backstab.

 

Hopefully I am just over reacting, but then that is what happens when you speculate based on limited info.  Normally I wouldn't do that but it has been a long day

 

that's not what i understood 

1 it is fairly obvious that certain classes have certain advantages over other classes, otherwise it would be meaningless to have classes in the first place. a fighter may act as a meat shield that keeps fighters off your wizard by doing and receiving mostly grazes, but that is just one of the things he can do. he can also go engage an enemy wizard in melee and do huge damage because the wizard has low deflection. it is situational

2 the skill you mention seems to be for fighter vs fighter situations where both deflections outclass each other's accuracy, making the numbers something like 30%miss - 45%graze - 25% hit - 0 critical. as i understand it, this skill will cut let's say 20% from the miss and add it to the graze. the one who has it, will do damage more often, even if small, while the other will be mising a lot

Edited October 31, 2013 by teknoman2

[Hormalakh]

Actually, I'm sorry, that last part isn't correct.  A Crit could still do less damage than a max damage Hit.  On average, it will do more.

Have you considered adjusting the critical damage bonus? I know 50% is a nice bland number, but what about 60, 66, or even 75%? Those are simple fractions too, and arent too much of a jump from 50% but are more likely to ensure that crits hit higher than highest base dmg.

 

Sword with 5-8 damage. Crit of 5 rolled is 7.5 in original percent. 8, 8.3, 8.75 with the new numbers respectively.

[teknoman2]

 

Actually, I'm sorry, that last part isn't correct.  A Crit could still do less damage than a max damage Hit.  On average, it will do more.

Have you considered adjusting the critical damage bonus? I know 50% is a nice bland number, but what about 60, 66, or even 75%? Those are simple fractions too, and arent too much of a jump from 50% but are more likely to ensure that crits hit higher than highest base dmg.

 

Sword with 5-8 damage. Crit of 5 rolled is 7.5 in original percent. 8, 8.3, 8.75 with the new numbers respectively.

 

as long as it is not like in dnd (icewind dale to be precise) where i did a backstab 5x with a roll of 20 and i did 35 damage, when max potential was over 100.

[Hormalakh]

That was probably a bug where crit overrode your backstabbing damage.

[teknoman2]

no, i did the math at the time and it was actually 35 the minimum possible damage i could do with a critical x5 backstab.

[J.E. Sawyer]

 

1: It reminds of World of Warcraft or "Insert Trinity Based MMO Here"...  I don't have a problem with that type of game, the appeal (especially for multiplayer) is painfully clear, it is easy to design encounters for, encourages team play, gives everyone a unique and defined role in the party. 

 

PE on the other hand is a single player game, the cooldowns won't be that intense, the mechanics won't be as demanding (such as move 15 yards in 5 seconds or die), there is no threat I just use an ability with the fighter character to force "engagement" on those in melee.... or I don't. 

 

2: If grazes are basically sub optimal and not desirable outside of "graze or miss" situations, which can't be that common and could surely be fought with a better approach, what does that say about the fighter class if one of the top end skills is being able to graze more often?  It tells me they are a low damage class first off.

 

Why not just bring a barbarian and deal better damage and counter higher damage intake with higher hp?  Why not bring a paladin whose damage is still probably weak but has better utility overall?  I am sure caster classes have some form of mob controlling abilities that might paralyze or even prevent someone from moving and likely a far better offensive complement.

 

Fighters are not a high damage output class.  Rogues are.  Fighters are the most durable and reliable combatants in the class lineup.  Barbarians are cool mob-oriented characters, but they cannot hold a line and they cannot endure long-term punishment like a fighter can.  Rogues will absolutely annihilate a single target faster than a fighter (or barbarian), but have limited durability and are bad at dealing with groups.  Paladins grant great bonuses to their teammates and are fantastic when paired with other nearby characters, but they are not as durable as a fighter and they don't have many potent offensive abilities.

 

Whenever I change my party lineup for testing, I miss the abilities of whatever character I dropped... until the next time I change the party lineup, and I miss the abilities of the "new" characters I drop.  When I drop my fighter, I absolutely miss his Defender mode and Knockdown ability because it's more likely that the melee landscape will turn into a free-for-all.

 

You're not playing a single character in PE; you're playing a party.  Differentiating the different members of that party in ways that make them unique and valuable is one of our goals.  While we do we want people to enjoy every class that we create, we accept that not everyone will like the flavor of every class.  If you don't like linebacker-style characters, that is unfortunate but okay.  Similarly, if you don't like support-style characters, that is also unfortunate but okay.  If you want to make a party comprised only of Vince Lombardi-friendly mid- to high-maintenance offense characters, you can do that.  You can have a party with a rogue, ranger, wizard, druid, barbarian, and monk raining down death at every turn.  You're going to be managing those characters a lot and your party drop rate will be relatively high, but fights will probably end pretty quickly.  That party would play very differently from one with a fighter, paladin, chanter, priest, cipher, and wizard.

[J.E. Sawyer]

as long as it is not like in dnd (icewind dale to be precise) where i did a backstab 5x with a roll of 20 and i did 35 damage, when max potential was over 100.

 

That's one of the biggest changes for rogues/thieves between 2nd Ed. and 3.X.  Because backstab in 1st Ed./2nd Ed. was a multiplier, you could perform a backstab and easily roll a 1 for your base damage, resulting in a pathetically low total.  In 3.X, this became additional d6s of damage.  It was a good change because it normalized that damage output, but it also caused a lot of consternation while we were developing IWD2 and NWN2.  Some testers simply couldn't believe that when they were doing +15d6 damage that they wouldn't get close to 90 points of bonus damage at least some of the time -- even though "some of the time" is extremely rare when you're rolling 15d6.

 

On IWD2, I eventually had to go over to QA with 15 actual six-sided dice and roll them in front of them 20 times, charting the results on a sheet of paper.  On NWN2, Andy Woo, who has a master's degree from MIT in combinatorics, had to explain the same thing, in detail, before testers would accept that the RNG wasn't flawed.

[Doppelschwert]

There is always this psychological problem about expectation towards randomness. I really like the way the fire emblem games handled this by lying to the player:

If the game told you that you had a chance of  p% to hit, then the game would actually roll two dice und take their mean against p% in order to normalize the probability, which is a lot closer to the actual expectation people have.

 

However, if you want a transparent game you have little choice to deal with this perception, so I really like the solution for the hit system you came up with josh.

[teknoman2]

it's a bit like playing phantom assassin in dota 2. you go in hoping that your hit will be in that 15% critical range and will  kill any enemy in one hit, but most of the time it is not and you should be prepared to survive the fight until the critical goes off.

the thing i dont like about randomness, and especially if the difference between min and max is big, is that im generally unlucky and always get min or close to it on the rolls

Edited October 31, 2013 by teknoman2

[J.E. Sawyer]

I am a believer in transparent numerical feedback.  As a designer, I don't like creating internal systems that translate and obfuscate mechanics.  E.g. I would rather not create an armor system that puts an otherwise unintelligible integer into a relative level-based formula to determine its actual protective value.  I want players to engage with mechanics, not disengage from them.  If only -- to use an already overused and misappropriated word -- "theorycrafters" can really understand how a system works, I would rather not use it.

 

I'm also not interested in perpetuating or catering to common misconceptions about probability.  I would rather show mechanics in their "naked" form, preferably with an option for extremely verbose feedback, and have players come to terms with the reality of probability.