theWulfen 2 – Blog

Armour Pt2

One thing that drives me nuts in all games is that low level armour sucks.  I don’t mean in game terms, but in terms of naming and looks.  “Knackered Leather Armour”, “Armour with holes in”, you know the type of thing.

So as I do have a problem with this, I’m going to tackle the problem head on.  Naming is always going to be a problem anyway as you potentially will have dozens of different types.  My current thought is that common armour will be named simply – ‘Light Leather Armour’, have a category - (Medium Armour) and have a quality (Low~High) that will correspond to level requirements.  So High quality Light Leather Armour will be used by Hybrid classes at high level.  Its a simple solution but hopefully one that will suffice.

Obviously rarer armours will require different naming conventions.  Uncommon armour (i.e. with one benefit) will share the common name, but have ‘of Strength’ or whatever appended.  True tiering might be useful, but I’ll have to see how things go on.  I don’t want to overload the game with special items though – uncommon needs to be just that, same with rare and legendary, epic etc need to be like rocking horse poo.  Having said that all creatures need to have access to nice kit in order to encourage them to play.

D100.00

One of the key elements of the game is going to be the mechanics behind the combat aspect of the game.

In the original it was very simple.  Basically every creature (both playable and not playable) had an attack and defense value.  Dividing one against the other gave a chance to hit percentage.  In game, a random number was generated between 1 and 100 (in essence a D100).  The hit percentage was inversed (thus making a low roll bad and a high roll good), and if you got high enough then you hit your opponent.  If you rolled 1-5 you would always miss and if you got 95-100 you got a crushing (double) hit.

Now after a while I added creature specials once they hit level 10.  If memory serves these had a secondary chance to occur that ran independently of the main setup.  This didn’t work very well and the special abilities weren’t very well thought out.

In W2, I’m going to follow on with this method to a certain extent, but want to add extra ‘chances’ such as dodge, block (if using some kind of shield), critical hits, secondary effect and so on.  The important thing is that this has to be decided in one roll of the dice so to speak.  Now one game has a novel way of dealing with this, in that everything is placed into a chart, that has an infinite number of possibilities, but only the first 1~100 are used.  There are various benefits to this, but I’ll skip those for the time being.  The biggest bonus is that instead of a dedicated chance to hit (which is split into what type of hit has been caused), you have a chance to miss, chance to have your attack mitigated (blocked, parried), cause special damage (crit, crush, secondary) and anything else is a plain hit.  Now going for a method like this makes D100 pretty inaccurate, so instead I’ll use a D100.00 instead - i.e. the number generated is to 2 decimal places.

As in the original you will have an attack and defense value – but these will be secondary stats, calculated from your weapon proficiency, abilities, agility etc.  Your level and your opponents level will be irrelevant, as in the first game – but obviously a higher level will have higher attributes.  One key thing I will do in contrast to the original is to lower the chance to miss.  If you faced an equal opponent, then you’d have a 50/50 chance to hit and miss.    Hit chance won’t exist as a direct stat, and the chance to miss will likely be around 15~20% although this will be subject to change.

One things that has just occurred to me is that I can make two-handed weapons more powerful than I originally was going to.  I was thinking of making them half the speed and twice the damage, however this isn’t an incentive to use them, as one miss with a slow weapon reduces damage output by more than a miss with a faster weapon.  So what I could do is to increase the damage more, but give all opponents an increase to the chance to dodge.  This might sound like the same as a miss, but certain abilities will trigger after dodges, plus I’ll likely have skills that will reduce the chance your opponent can dodge.

Secondary effects are worth a quick note here.  All damage types have a secondary effect that they can cause.  Physical damage can stun for example, fire damage can cause burns (or ignite?).  Resistance to each type of damage will help reduce the chance of secondary effects.  This also opens up a balanced way of creating vulnerabilities, as I can decrease the resistance to a specific damage type thus increase the chance of incurring a special effect – which is more balanced than directly increasing damage taken from a specific damage type.