Combat redesign - taking a step back

[Derakon]

You can also just insert whatever name you want, like

this

. The semicolon and numbers cause the bulletin board software to include a link directly to the post you're quoting.

[jens]

I would rather disagree, but maybe i understood something wrong again. clvl is determined by gained XP. So if i over and over kill small easy stuff (thats what i call grinding) i can accumulate enough XP to raise the level - and gain more powerfull. I would say exactly the opposite:
Getting combat abilities from clvl is the main reason for people to grind, if XP had no realtion to character-power they just wouldn't do it, except they derive fun from it.

Yes, that is what people refer to when talking about grinding. But to make it clear I'll expand on it a bit:

Grinding: To repeatedly kill monsters that pose no to low risk, in order to gain a desired advantage.

In what you claim to be your preferred system (no combat abilities gained from XP) what we would get is this:
1)If we start out with numbers similar to today you'd have a warrior with say 20 hp, that after advancing to something like dlvl 5 would find that advancing any further was too dangerous, because he still has 20 hp, and it's getting harder to hit the monsters. He'll be stuck, killing the same monsters over and over again, until he gets an item that helps him enough to move on. The problem here is that staring with so low hp, you will soon find yourself at a dlvl were every monster is a deadly threat, so you cannot go deeper, so you have to grind, even if you are grinding against monsters that provide plenty of risk.
2)Lets design a better scenario. You start out with enough hp to survive for a while. Now there is more room for the RNG to provide you with equipment to get deeper, but sooner or later you will get stuck again, and need eq to advance. Since you have more hp in this scenario, you can push your luck further than before and keep on diving for a while, but since you will not develop gradually from killing monsters you will eventually reach a level were you cannot advance any more, you have to just grind along, waiting for the next eq that will help. Of course we could redesign object generation, so we would start developing more gradually from eq, but that seems to be quite contrary to what people want.


All I am saying is that the current parity between clvl, stats, and eq seems OK. Jumps in eq ensures you get a sawtooth wave, while the smoother curve from clvl helps tide you over when the RNG is unhelpful.

[Derakon]

Generally speaking, major abilities imparted by equipment in the current game are all "important but not vital". You can survive without Free Action, or the base 4 resists, or massive melee damage, or an extra 200 hitpoints, and so on and so forth. It just gets riskier and riskier the more you forgo. But that's fine -- just choose an acceptable level of risk, and play at that level. This entails a certain amount of grinding for gear once you hit your risk threshold, sure, but that gear could come at any time, so there's plenty of uncertainty involved to keep you on your toes. And generally, the game's pretty good at giving you the right item at approximately the right time, so all is well. The only thing I run into trouble with on a regular basis is Free Action, which I blame on a combination of favoring rapid diving with moving to no-selling; I think I used to get my first FA source from the Black Market (as a ring of FA) in most games.

However, major abilities provided by character level are different. Specifically here I'm thinking of spells, though things like extra shots, inherent resist fear, etc. also fall into this category. If there's a spell you want to use, you have no choice but to kill monsters until you've gained enough experience to get the spell. There's no possibility of a shortcut and no uncertainty involved except that of finding the spellbook that has the spell -- and last time I played, I found most spellbooks before the spells I really wanted from those books were available.

Obviously hitpoints are a separate issue, mostly because there's such a huge inherent difference between a character at level 1 and one at level 30. However, I don't think it'd be unreasonable, as a thought experiment if nothing else, to reduce the maximum character level to 30, and require all remaining power to be gained via stat potions and equipment.