[crossfire] Redo wc/ac/armor (+dodge)

[Mark Wedel]

  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.