[crossfire] Getting rid of AC/WC

[Mark Wedel]

  With the recent discussions on spells and this or that, tossing out this one - 
get rid of AC and WC (one goes with the other really).

There are a few reasons for this that I found from my rebalance work:

- Going on a rough target of opponents should hit each other about 25% of the 
time (fighter against monster), getting various bonuses can really shift this 
around since the range is D20.  Pick up a few +ac items, and that chance can 
reduce to 5-10%.  Likewise, pick up a few items that increase your WC (magic 
weapon, increase strength, etc) and your hit odds could perhaps double.

- Since WC gets better as a character melee skill gets better, the monsters AC 
also tends to get better.  This basically mean that non melee characters have no 
chance of hitting higher level monsters, even if their overall level is also 
higher.  And while going back to work up your melee exp on low level monsters 
may be realistic, it is pretty boring.

- Compounding the above, fighters will tend to have better stats to give them a 
leg up in WC, so while a first level fighter may have a 25-35% chance to hit 
monsters, a mage may only have 10-15%.

  That said, just getting rid of it would make the game a bit less interesting 
IMO.  So instead, I propose what is currently just physical attack/damage type 
gets split into a few pieces: Blunt, Piercing, Slashing.

  Most player armor would have different values for this - one could imagine 
some types of armor may be pretty good against blunt, but not so good against 
piercing.

  A better example of this for monsters would be skeletons, following the D&D 
model.  They might be something like:

resist_piercing 90 (piercing doesn't do much if you are just a bunch of bones)
resist_slashing 50 (slashing isn't bad, but not great)
resist_blunt -50 (blunt objects pulverize them)

  Most weapons would have just one attacktype, since they can only be used in 
one way (a hammer is only going to do blunt damage, a spear can only really be 
used for piercing).  There may be a few that has some combos.

  To still make fighters worth playing, they'd get various bonuses based on 
their skill - more damage, faster attack times.  Perhaps even extend this to 
some special effects (slow, weakness, etc, although we don't have a good 
mechanism for some of that right now).

  This doesn't fix all the problems, but does reduce the number of variables for 
damage.

  For game play, I see these as some positive effects:
- Simpler to understand - those not familiar with D&D may be a little confused 
with AC and WC (and the fact you want those lower, not higher)
- Anyone at any level can pick up a weapon and do at least some damage.  That 
mage may not be as effective - I'd forsee a level 20 melee skill be twice as 
effective as a level one (based on speed of weapon, extra damage, etc)
- This perhaps reduces the handicap for non armor wearing classes some - right 
now, the 1 or 2 AC points a mage gets for the mage robes is fairly meaningless 
anyways.
- More likely to have more combinations of items - less likely to have a best 
weapon/armor (in that skeleton example, a non magical hammer is likely to still 
do better than a +4 longsword)
- A bit easier to correlate damage that spells can do with physical attacks - 
one doesn't have to guess the chance of an attack hitting, since spells always 
do - a spell that does 10 damage and can be cast once a tick is pretty easily 
comparable to an attack that does 10 damage and can be done once a tick 
(presuming both of those hit one target)

  Downsides:
- Work to redo this all - that said, scripts can find everything that needs to 
be updated, and since rebalancing is needed in various areas anyways, this can 
go with it.  For most things, a base conversion of 
resist_{slashing|piercing|blunt} = current resist_physical could simplify that, 
with additional adjustments.
- It does remove an aspect of the game that has existed for a long time.

  Thoughts? Comments?  Suggestions?