[crossfire] Items and balance, was Re: race/class lacks distinctions

[Mark Wedel]

Wim Villerius wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-06-29 at 22:48 -0700, Mark Wedel wrote:
>>   It has long been discussed that with a few exception (the non humanoid races 
>> and the classes that prohibit weapons/armors), a lot of race/classes tend to 
>> blur together.
>>
>> There are several reasons for this:
>>
>> - There are not really any race/class restrictions for objects (or conversely, 
>> not any objects that only clerics can use, or that only fighters can use, etc). 
>>   While there is a 'ring of the paladin', you don't need to be a paladin to use 
>> it for example.
>>
>> - Pretty much all the skills are learnable, so what skills you start out with 
>> are not very important - you can learn everything else later.
>>
>> - Most differences in stats can be overcome fairly easily by use of items that 
>> improve your stats.
>>
>>   In terms of these issues, I think the first could be fixed by adding new items 
>> and a little code - use a key/value to store what class/race can use an object, 
>> and add some code in the apply logic to check for it.
> I would suggest also to modify quite some existing items. Adding still
> more items degenerates the value of current items. Why would you search
> for 'special item' if the so-and-so not so special item gives almost the
> same benefits?
> Perhaps - but that's quite a different discussion - it's worth to remove
> a lot of (more or less) special items from the game.

  Possibly.  I think Raphael had got some script which showed all the items in 
the game.

  But my thought for class/race specific items also does help out balance some.

  For example, monks are banned from weapons and armor.  Certain races are also 
banned from certain objects.

  It may be desirable to give those classes/race combinations some items to help 
restore their balance some.  However, you don't want to make them available to 
everyone, as then the human fighter can use it and really get things out of whack.

  So such a feature can be used to further help to balance the races and classes.

  But the other thing, going back to the original discussion, is it starts to 
add some distinction.  As a mage, I can were that diadam of spellcasting, which 
gives some cool bonus, which fighters can't.  This would also likely make it so 
that all high level characters don't go around all wearing the same equipment, 
as there sort of is the 'this is the best set of stuff' thing.

  Another thing, long discussed, was to split attack damages based on attacktype.

  Right now, if a character does damage, it uses the best of any attacktypes the 
item(s) he has does.

  This means that any item that gives you an attacktype is really pretty handy. 
  It also means that balancing some objects is harder.

  But if you did things like 'dam_fire 12' 'dam_weaponmagic 4', it can help to 
reblance things some.


> 
> Another great way to eliminate the problem under discussion is to remove
> quite some races/classes! Simplicity is a key to success.
> Besides, that allows to create really different races/classes

  Yes - although if different skill levels are done, getting rid of some classes 
may not work really well.

  It could perhaps be interesting to have an advanced character creation method 
where each character is allowed X expert skills, Y basic skills, Z advanced 
skills, and they can choose which skill they want and customize themselves.  But 
that starts to get really complicated.

  I haven't looked at all the races recently, but at one time, there were 
several human type races because there were not different classes, just races, 
and race sort of determined class.    So some of the human type races could 
probably go away.