Some discussions recently have discussed that we should think fresh about different ideas/balancing the game.
And the current wc/ac/armor got me thinking about this. Right now, AC and wc basically follow the original AD&D model - low AC is good, armor gives an AC bonus, and low wc is also good. But perhaps from the start, crossfire also had the armor (resist_physical) field which denotes armor/damage absorption (but in a percentage term). In pretty much all games that have some armor absorption rule, your equipment typically gives you absorption, but makes you _easier_ to hit - less likely to dance around wearing plate armor. So thinking about that, and thinking about how AD&Dv3 actually made things a bit simpler by characters always wanting higher values (ac goes up, not down, as it gets better), these are my thoughts: rename ac to dodge, and make it start at ten. Remove this bonus from pretty much all armor currently in the game, and/or perhaps add penalty for most of the armors. I mulled over the idea of making dodge a skill, but handling exp on that is tricky - instead, I think base dodge should be based on dexterity, certianly races/classes may get a dodge bonus, and certain skills may give increasing dodge bonus for higher levels (like karate - high level person in karate should have an excellent dodge) make wc start at zero and go up - thus, always clear that higher wc is better. Also explain to explain things like d20 + wc > opponent dodge means you hit armor (resist_physical) remains as same - if you are hit/hit something else, this works as now, reducing the amount of damage. The one change I would make is that enchanting armor would increase the resist_physical value, and not the armor. Right now, boots +1 give you 1 ac point and perhaps 3 resist physical - under the revised system, those boots would still not give you an AC, but 4 resist physical instead. I think this has some nice effects - it adds some additional tuning/balance factors to armor - that best armor may not be say if it has a big dodge penalty. And it sort of opens up two playing strategy - the character that tries to avoid being hit, but when hit, takes a bit of damage, and the character that will get hit a lot, but not take much damage when it does happen. And it also makes some skills more interesting - characters/classes that can't wear armor may not be so bad to play if they have the karate skill to get a high dodge. The tricky part on this is balancing it out - since the to hit rolls is d20 based, it doesn't take too much a difference for something to be deadly or not deadly enough. For example, suppose a monster is supposed to hit on a 15+ (25% of the time). If you are off +5, such that it needs a 20, it now only hits 5% of the time. And if you are off -5, it now needs a 10, and hits 50% of the time (meaning twice as many hits as expected). These are bit differences - much bigger than a character having ±10% expected resist_physical values. Now one thought I have here might be to sort of say what are reasonable/expected values of those different attributes, eg: level wc dodge resist value 1 1 10 20 10 5 15 30 20 13 22 45 ... 100 90 106 95 (numbers made up) - the point is they may not really be linear - at certain points, characters may get different items that give them certain boosts, etc. I think the values derived from skills should be fairly linear. The point of such a table is that it gives some idea of what values should be in a given monster - according to that table, a typical level 20 character as a 22 dodge. So if you want that monster to hit 25% of the time, you give it a wc of 17. And you know how much damage will be absorbed, so can tune its damage to some extent. such things also help in determine balance of items. An item that a level 20 character can get that gives them a resist value of 50 is probably too powerful from that table (because when stacked with other items they have, that means their resist value would be something like 60-70, well above the curve). In any case, just some random thoughts. _______________________________________________ crossfire mailing list crossfire@metalforge.org http://mailman.metalforge.org/mailman/listinfo/crossfire
