[CF-Devel] Item Damage idea

[Mark Wedel]

  This idea was originally brought up in the dis-economy of crossfire.

  The basic idea is that equipment gets damaged, and you need to pay for it to 
get repaired.  One goal of this is to chew up the money of higher level players.

  In more detail, this is what I propose:

Give equipment a quality rating, which determines what shape the item is in. 
For simplicity, this range would be from 0 to 200.

  If the item quality is 0, the item is broken and can not be used (equipped).

  If the item quality is between 1 and 100, the item can be used, but at 
diminished effects (quality 50 = half the effects, quality 5 = 5% of the 
effects). Due to rounding, items below some range are effectively useless - An 
item that gives +2 ac would effectively do nothing if its quality was 49 (.49 * 
2 = .98, which gets dropped to zero).  This diminished effects would all be 
handled in fix_player and examine logic.  In this way, we don't need to store 
original values of the object - we always store those, we just figure out what 
they are now based on quality.

  If item quality is 101 -> 200, item is in fine shape and works as expected. 
This range of working fine is provided so that you can go into the dungeon and 
still have your stuff working as expected throughout the exploration - this 
removes the annoyance of going into the dungeon, and five minutes in, your best 
item gets dinged up so you need to return to town to get it fixed.

  Cost of repairing items is directly related to the value of the item, and how 
much damage.  An item that is down to quality zero would cost full price of the 
item to repair (so would be just as cheap to buy, _if_ you could find one).  And 
item with a rating at 100 would cost 50% to repair.

  There would be repair anvils in some of the shops (at least one such place in 
each city).  There is no requirement that you fully repair your item to perfect 
quality.  I'd envision that you drop your damaged piece of equipment on the 
anvil, it would say 'to fully repair this item would cost 100 pp'.  You then 
drop the money to repair it.  If you drop 50 pp, only half the damage on the 
item is repaired.

  Note - some things need to get altered for this to work better - if you 
enchant your armor or weapon, their value should go up, so it would then cost 
more to repair.  Currently, value for such items is unchanged.  Exactly how this 
scales would have to be tuned.

The hardest thing to perhaps tune is how items get damaged.  My idea is that the 
amount of damage th player takes is the percent chance that one of his items 
will get damaged.  Thus would typically work to the higher level players 
disadvantage (as attacks do more damage).  It also makes some sense - a goblin 
hitting you isn't likely to damage many items, but that titan bashing you with a 
bonecrusher is likely to do some damage.  Basing this on the damage caused also 
means that if the player is immune to the attacktype, his equipment won't be 
damaged either.

  If an item is damaged, we randomly select one of the characters equipped items 
to damage.  Any number of clever mechanisms could be done here (try make it so 
that big items are damaged more, or whatever else).  I'm thinking purely random 
is good - if done by size, then small items (like rings, bracers, and amulets) 
effectively have more value because they wouldn't be damaged.

  The amount of damage done to the item would be some small amount - perhaps 
constant.  Note that this value and how often the equipment is damage are the 
main tunables in this.

  Special Note: I would propose that instead of acid attacks working the way 
they do now, they go into this same mechanism - they just do damage whenever 
they hit, and perhaps do more to the item.  This would fix the always annoying 
issue of your good armor being ruined by running into a black pudding, and 
having no recourse to fix it - now you could.

  Note that the effect of damage would be a bit different - currently, acid just 
puts a negative, which basicall hits AC.  Thus, -4 plate armor right now still 
gets you 40 armor or whatever, you just don't get any AC.  With the above case, 
if your plate armor is fully damage, it now offers no protection, but still has 
the disadvantage of max speed penalties as well as weight (it could be argued 
that damaged armor should in fact impose an even greater max speed penalty - if 
the item is falling apart, chances are it won't fit as well or whatever else)..