[Crossfire-wiki] [Crossfire DokuWiki] page changed: user:saru:balance

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Date        : 2014/09/14 03:40
User        : saru
Edit Summary: Inclusion of mwedel's ideas

@@ -46,8 +46,9 @@
  
  If we create an arbitrary formula to model how 'good' each item is it might look something like this:
  
  {{user:saru:image.png|}}
+ 
  
  we can see that the items appear to progress fairly linearly with the exception of one of the types of platemail which is clearly a lot worse. This item is the bronze variant of platemail listed last on the above table. One approach might be to move it back into line, however, items will all start to feel the same. Instead I intend on creating different 'tiers' of armour balanced on the level of the user. This would result in poorier quality items being readily available at low levels whilst much more powerful types of armour only available at higher levels. A formula for generating items out of treasure classes should be created. This would result in a table of general armour more like this:
  
  ^Armour group^	light - casters^	scales - thief^	Composite - barbarian^	full plate - warriors^
@@ -125,4 +126,120 @@
  |Lava Slasher	|2	|30	|9	|42	|58.5	|133.5|
  |Firestar	|2	|35	|9	|58.8	|78.05	|165.55|
  |Bone Crusher	|2	|50	|15	|55	|82.5	|207.5|
  
+ ====Character simplification====
+ ===race===
+ as per [[user:mwedel:characters]].
+ 
+ ===class===
+ Class really represents the skills that a character would be likely to be proficient at. The current skill system does not lend itself to specialisation, there I suggest moving to [[user:mwedel:characters#new system|mwedel's advancement approach]]. 
+ 
+ Each class should be associated with a primary attribute that has an affinity with their specialisation:
+ 
+ {{user:saru:class_attribute_affinity.png|}}
+ 
+ ^ Primary attribute ^ Definition ^ effect ^ class ^
+ | Strength	| The ability of a character to lift heavy objects | Strong characters tend to rely on their ability to hit harder than they receive | Barbarian |
+ |Constitution	 | The tenacity of a character | Tenacious characters tend to out live or outlast their opponents | Warrior |
+ |Dexterity | The precious of movement | Dexterous characters out position their opponents through speed and style | Ranger/Assassin/Rogue |
+ |Charisma | Social inclusion | Charismatic characters can talk their way out of a jail cell | Bard/Thief |
+ |Power | Ability to outwit an opponent | No personality is able to resist their views | Summoner/Demonlogy |
+ |Intelligence	 | Ability to think creatively | No puzzle or spell is too complicated to master | Wizard/Sorceror |
+ |Wisdom		 | Ability to use knowledge | The wise need little help, they've seen it before | Priest/Cleric |
+ |Memory	 | Ability to retain knowledge  | These characters are firm in belief and let that empower their actions | Paladin |
+ 
+ ===skills===
+ Skills need to be simplified into much tidy categories. I suggest following mwedel's approach here: [[user:mwedel:skills#Specific Skill Ideas]]. 
+ 
+ I would like to add //proficiency// in to each category which enables users to further specialise skills based on time in use. A character that kills a lot with an axe should get better at using an axe. Proficiency could possibly have a lower bounds based on level such that a level 100 character doesn't have to level a new proficiency as if they were level 1.
+ 
+ I have summarised the changes in the table below.
+ 
+ ^ Skill Set ^ Old skills included ^ explanation ^ proficency ^
+ ^Item Creating & Identification Skills | Smithery (depends on specific knowledge of weapons and armour from combat skill), Jeweler, Alchemy, Bowyer, Thaumturgy, Literacy, woodsmand (?harvesting?), ?leatherworking?, ?tailoring?, | The item creation aspect should get expanded so there are more easy things to create give minor amounts of experience (for example, smithing a dagger should not be a hard task). Identification of items should change - instead of there being a chance, it a straight level comparison - to identify a level 5 item, you need to be level 5 or greater in the appropriate skill. Non magical items would be level 1, each plus of an item might add one level, each 20% resistance adds one level, etc. Some formula could be determined for objects that do not have an item power setting. There are a few advantages of this: | Each type of item has a separate proficiency |
+ | | |The server no longer needs to track if an identification attempt was made on the object or not - either the character succeeded or not, and retrying will not work better since there is no random chance.|
+ | | |Related to the above, a character can retry and perhaps succeed if they have increased the level in the skill.|
+ | | |Items can be traded in hopes that the other character may be able to identify them.|
+ | | |Right now, with current formula, even at low levels, characters can identify the vast majority of items. This would make that harder.|
+ | | |Greater level difficult for items could give much greater rewards - completely reasonable that if you are able to identify a level 20 item, you get lots of experience - there are not going to be many such items about.|
+ | | |In many ways, this would just have it work the same as literacy and reading books - either you are sufficient level to read it, or you are not - there is no chance involved. |
+ ^ Combat Skills - STR based | 2 handed, 1 handed, missile, bow use | Proficiency in weapon type rather than # of hands in use. Consider races with more than 2 arms? Could work almost exactly the same as current system, as you use particular weapons - proficiency improves. Particular races or classes get bonus to proficiency rate such as maces for clerics. Proficiency also links to smithery/bowyer for identifying.| Each type of weapon has a separate proficiency |
+ | | Axe, Sword, Hammer/Mace/Club, Spear|Each of these types of weapons break apart the one handed/two handed weapon skills. However, they also incorporate the throw skill - eg, the Axe skill will let you throw throwing axes, the sword skill lets you throw knives, etc. Throwing of misc objects (non weapons) becomes an ability|
+ 
+ ^ Combat Skills - DEX based | missile weapons + thievery
+ | | Missile Weapons: |This is really bow and crossbow, and is unchanged. Improvement in this skill means faster firing rate and more damage when firing.|
+ | | throwing | - anyone can throw a flask and one does not need a specific skill for that (plus, I don’t think such a skill would generally be valuable enough for most people to bother improving). Note that the logic/ability to throw items probably needs to be streamlined some with a better interface on the client to make it easier to do, but that is a different issue. |
+ | | Unarmed Combat |This merges punching, flame touch, karate, clawing, wraith feed all into one skill. Certain races may be special abilities with this skill or it has other effects - eg, it does flame damage, it drains hp, etc. I don´t see a real need for these to all be separate - I just can not picture a dragon is going to be getting up and doing karate in any case. Note that for normal humans, this skill should generally be a bit weaker than the weapon skills above - there is a reason people pick up a sword to hit the other person with vs hand to hand - the sword is more effective. Probably simplest way to do this is that unarmed combat damage goes up just like the skills improve weapon damage - however, in this case, you don’t have a weapon to increase the damage with. But for special characters, like dragons, they may have a symbolic dragon claw weapon which does go up in damage. |
+ ^Magic Skills| air magic, fire magic, water magic, earth magic work | Increasing level increases the potency of the spells, the spells you can cast, as well as the pool of sp. These also replace the summoning, pyromancy, evocation, and sorcery skills. A system of proficiency for various elements could be added as well as items/races that add attunement, repelled and denied.|
+ 
+ ^ Armour skills | smithery | unlike weapons, characters are not able to become proficient at all armour due to the inherent limitations/compromises of armour. Armour should be split into separate categories and targeted at 4 primary disciplines of combat strength (heavy armour), combat dexterity (medium armour), spell use and piety (light armour)
+ 
+ 
+ 
+ These are largely unchanged - air magic, fire magic, water magic, earth magic work as they do now. 
+ 
+ Divine Casting: I don’t really like the name of praying, but that is basically what skill this replaces. Anyone should be able to pray (innate ability), but characters with high divine casting get more favor. Given the proliferation of of cleric spells, it may also make sense to have more god specific spells - perhaps going so far as having god specific prayerbooks. There would still be various common spells - healing is only available via this divine spellcasting. This could be renamed better, but since what the characters are doing most of the time is casting priest spells, a skill that better describes that makes sense.
+ 
+ Thief/Bard Skills
+ 
+ These are perhaps not well balanced now, but my thoughts:
+ 
+ Traps (find, remove, create) This combines the find trap, remove trap, and set trap. As a general principal, it is easiest to find, harder to disarm, and harder still to make a trap. In terms of balance, a character should have a 50% chance to find a trap of the same level of the skill, a 25% chance to disarm, and 10% chance to make. Note that failure to disarm does not mean that trap goes off - it may be a 25% disarm, 50% no effect, 25% trap goes off. Note that because one can repeated search for traps, having it be a chance may not make a lot of sense - I know right now I just search 10 times, figuring I’ll find it or a trap doesn’t exist, so perhaps a straight level check is in order instead - I’m not really sure on that. The different facets of this skill could be done by the granted abilities, eg, having this skill gets you the find trap, disarm trap, and set trap abilities (I don’t think that last was ever implemented, but if it was...).
+ 
+ Thievery This combines hiding, lockpicking, and stealing. I think as individual skills, once again, I think they may be too broad/general to be worth advancing. Hiding should grant a sneak attack ability, which if the character is successfully hidden, does extra damage on the creature. A character should have perhaps a 75% chance of hiding against a creature of the same level, with various modifiers - bright light decreases this, as does armor and movement. An attack may decrease this chance 100%. It should take several ticks to start hiding - this gives a chance for monsters to spot the player - this time may decrease as the skill improves. Note, it is probably completely reasonable that a level 100 character in hide could sneak attack a level 10 monster and that level 10 monster still have no idea what happened, but a 0% chance to do that on a level 100 creature (he can get the sneak attack off, but the monster will spot the player). For lockpicking, chests should be given a level, and a 50/50 chance to unlock a chest/door of the same level. In order for there to be some penalty, there should be a chance of lock picks perhaps breaking - any case where a character can repeated try something with no ill consequence, there is no reason to have a check. Stealing should allow characters to steal items, even from shops, but it should be hard - but this one really does have consequences.
+ 
+ Singing/Oratory: I suggest these two get combined into one skill - maybe just called singing - I think this being 2 unique skills just makes them too dilute. A character can calm (make non hostile) up to their level, and charm (make friendly) monsters up to 1/2 their level. There should be some time delay to start singing, and a character can not sing if in combat (eg, taking damage).
+ 
+ Acrobatics: This combines jumping and climbing. As it stands, even this combined skill may be too weak for anyone to bother improving - maybe it also gives some minor dodge bonus also.
+ 
+ Bargaining: As it is now, character gets better prices with higher skill. Really high skill may start to offset shop specialization (eg, you can sell spellbooks to the armorer for good prices). I’m not sure if that by itself would make it a good enough skill, so possibly including the ability to detect magic and cursed items as well as identify items (at a lower proficiency than the item skills themselves) may be reasonable - eg, if one is going to be buying/selling stuff all the time, they need to know what they are selling.
+ 
+ Misc Skills
+ 
+ Literacy Literacy would be as it is now - reading of various items. It should also incorporate inscription - once again, I think that as a unique skill would make it not useful enough - perhaps inscription at half the level of the literacy skill - for example, a level 10 literacy skill could inscribe level 5 scrolls.
+ 
+ Skills that Become Abilities
+ 
+ These are skills which never really improve, and thus are really abilities:
+ 
+ Detect Magic, Detect Curse - while there is some level check, pretty much it hits everything. These should be given as innate abilities for classes/races which warrant it, and should be 100% success rate. Detect magic is a first level spell in any case, so really not giving much away to let some particular race/class use it all the time.
+ 
+ Meditation - monk specific ability which never scales - give it as an ability to them
+ 
+ Levitation - like meditation, this is given for certain races, but it never changes, so is really just an ability.
+ 
+ Use Magic Item - all races/classes can use magic items, so this really is not necessary. If one really wanted to put checks in the ability to use wands, then that check should be in the thaumaturgy skill. The only reason this skill really exists is that a skill bucket was needed to put exp gained by using wands, etc.
+ 
+ ====Attack system simplification====
+ ===combat general===
+ AC and WC replaced with chance to dodge and chance to hit. 
+ ==dodge==
+ As per [[user:mwedel:skills#dodge]]. I would also include a dodge bonus for level gaps which could be as simple as level of attacker/level of defender. E.g. a level 10 player fighting a level 20 monster might have 50% chance to hit + any additional dodge bonus the enemy has.
+ 
+ A bonus to chance to hit could also be added which counteracts dodging.
+ 
+ ===Attack_types===
+ Attack types should be able to constitute a fraction of an items damage. (e.g. if the Dam = 10, and physical is 1 and fire is .5 then the total damage should be 10 physical damage + 5 fire damage reduced by their respective resistances). This prevents attack_type stacking being too all or nothing where warriors either need every attack type (fire, cold, electrical) or don't care about attack types at all (weaponmagic)
+ 
+ Attack_types and their respective resistances should be entirely simplified to mwedel's plan here: [[user:mwedel:skills#resistances]]
+ 
+ I have summarised this approach with the following table.
+ ^ New attack_type ^ Included old attack_types ^ Explanation ^ Thoughts ^ 
+ |Blunt | Physical | Blunt trauma from the mass of weapons | (new) **Blunt, Piercing, Slashing**: This splits apart the generic physical into 3 sub categories - different weapons do different attacks - different items may also provide different levels of protection (chainmail may be very good against slashing, less good against blunt).  A simple way to make this change is just take all armor values currently in the game and assign the blunt/piercing/slashing resistance as that value.  I'm not 100% if splitting this is good or not - it certainly makes sense for some monsters (skeletons should have resist_piercing 90 for example), but it may just be that is too specific for this general split. |
+ |Piercing | ::: | Penetration or piercing due to point or spike | ::: |
+ |Cutting | ::: | Slash or cut due to sharpened edge such as knife | ::: |
+ |<del>Magic</del> | Magic | magical damage | This has always been a messy one - the idea behind it goes back to AD&D where creatures had magic resistance - this corresponded to that - if the creature was hit with a magic attack, this resistance would apply.  I think this should just get removed - we shouldn't care where the attack comes from (magic or otherwise), and removing it simplifies the code. |
+ |Fire | Fire | High temperature | Elemental resistances are fine, and are unchanged. |
+ |Electricity | Electricity | Electrical Current | ::: |
+ |Cold | Cold | Low Temperature | ::: |
+ |Mental  | Confusion, Slow, Paralyze, Fear | Effects the mind | (new) Mental This new attack encompasses all attacks that try to effect the mind - confusion, slow, paralyze, fear |
+ |<del>Cancellation</del> | Cancellation | Removes magic | Cancellation is used so infrequently and is irreversible (it just removes the magic plus from items) that I think it should get removed - I don't think there would be any real change in play balance by removing this. |
+ |Acid | Acid | Destroys equipment | Acid remains, but the damaging of items needs to be revisited. Should probably be reversible? |
+ |Negative Energy | Drain, Ghosthit, Death, Depletion, Life Stealing | drains body | (new) Negative energy covers all attack forms where some aspects of the character lifeforce is being attacked or threatened.  Not that in a basic mode, it may just do HP damage, with other attacks draining experience, stats, etc.  It encompasses drain, ghosthit, depletion, death. For Death: This could really be any of Mental (frightening visage scares character to death), negative energy (drain all lifeforce) or fortitude - whatever the case, it doesn't need to be its own top level attack. |
+ |<del>Weaponmagic</del> | Weaponmagic | This goes back to AD&D where certain creatures needed to be hit by magic weapons. | Weapon magic: Crossfire did this by giving such creatures immunity to physical, and some weapons had weaponmagic set.  However, this is largely broken - very few creatures actually have resist_weaponmagic set, and things like normal armor should make one resistant to these attacks.  In addition, under AD&D rules, a +1 sword would be magical, and thus could hit such creatures, but that doesn't work in crossfire - only a few artifacts have weaponmagic set.  For these reasons, it should get removed, and if we really want to come up with some idea of 'needing magic weapons to hit', we should re-examine the best way to do that - but I personally think there will not be any great harm just removing this. |
+ |Fortitude | Blind, Poison, Disease | disrupts body function |**Fortitude** (new) I need a new name for this, but basically this covers all attacks which try to do some physical effect (poison, disease, blindness) |
+ |Holy Fire | Turn Undead, Godpower, Holyword | heavenly interdiction | **Holy Fire** (new) This describes all effects which are attributed to the power of the god - covers godpower, holyword, turn undead.  Actual effect depends on the attack. |
+ |<del>Chaos</del> | Chaos  | Randomized attack | This is really an administrative/effect - it is supposed to randomize for one of the other attacktypes, so characters should never be facing chaos itself. |
+ |<del>Counterspell</del> | Counterspell  | Stops a spell effect | Once again, this is an effect, can get removed. |
+ 
+ Internal: This continues to exist, but should never be visible to players - this is really just used when a convenient way to do damage to the character is done (eg, ceiling collapsing, crushing you, character is dead) - it probably should be used sparingly.


IP-Address  : 59.167.121.117
Old Revision: http://wiki.metalforge.net/doku.php/user:saru:balance?rev=1410090485
New Revision: http://wiki.metalforge.net/doku.php/user:saru:balance

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