Fix weapon weights?

[wobbly]

Cross-posting from another thread:

Also, a gameplay feedback: the runes identification is great fun, but I'm staying around DL10 with a ranger, lugging 3 heavy unidentified weapons at speed -3, (in addition to 2 identified ones), I peeked and two are Slay Giant, one is *Slay Troll*, I'm swapping them before each new kind of fight to identify them either via damage dealt or received and I'm getting tired of the minigame at this point. No items of Identify in the shops nor in the dungeon. I know I can give such a weapon to a shop, but I'm too poor to buy it back. At this point I'd even buy overpriced rune identification service at a shop and be done with it, but I can't find such an option.

I'm going to suggest a halving of weapon weights which I think are too heavy to start with. This only solves part of Bandobras issue but I'm pretty sure the id mini game is less painful when you're not at -spd. Currently I recall more then I'd like to, just to dump a bunch of junk weapons at shop 3.

As long as the ratios between weapon weights stay identical you can change their weights & maintain the same balance by making the same adjustment in tunnelling, criticals & blows. So this would be a change to encumbrance + cosmetics.

Unless people like the current balance between weapon weight & encumbrance? I don't.

[Grotug]

I thought the general consensus was if weapons were going to be messed with they were going to be fixed since the current weapon system is fundamentally flawed. I like the idea of blows per round, but it's silly that a mage does more damage with a maul in the early game than with a dagger, but a warrior with bulging muscles does more damage with a dagger in the early game than a maul.

I think the current weapon weights are important to keep mages from running around with mauls--at least until the weapon system gets rewritten in a way that bears in mind some kind of logic of the real world.

[wobbly]

I thought the general consensus was if weapons were going to be messed with they were going to be fixed since the current weapon system is fundamentally flawed. I like the idea of blows per round, but it's silly that a mage does more damage with a maul in the early game than with a dagger, but a warrior with bulging muscles does more damage with a dagger in the early game than a maul.

Here I agree. Here I agree *if* this is something happening in the foreseeable future. I'm only suggesting a stop-gap because I think change starts with sane weapon weights. Not a necessity, but something I think should change as part of a general overhaul.

I think the current weapon weights are important to keep mages from running around with mauls--at least until the weapon system gets rewritten in a way that bears in mind some kind of logic of the real world.

Here I don't quite agree. It causes more problems then it fixes, it overlaps with minimum str by weapon weight & is mostly pointless. If one blow of mage-melee with a bastard sword isn't working, a maul is little improvement. Until you have blows on a mage you melee wolves, you melee yeeks, you melee a bunch of stuff that a good bastard sword will work on. Going heavier doesn't help, it's an extra 2 average damage (I think, don't have the no.'s in front of me).

[tangar]

Yep, lightweight weapon too imba atm. I suppose there could be certain restriction towards maximum amount of runes inscribed at weapon. You can not inscribe loads of magic runes on tiny dagger; at the same time it's quite easy to do so at huge Zweihander.. So alrighty - lets lightweight weapons still would have moar dps, but make heavy weapons to have more 'magical' potency

[Carnivean]

You can not inscribe loads of magic runes on tiny dagger

This misconception is indicative of the whole "nerds don't know anything about weapons" problem that got us here. Daggers (and other similar small blades) are usually 20-30 cms long after the hilt. I'm not sure about your handwriting but I guarantee that I could fit 20 runes on a dagger easily.

[tangar]

This misconception is indicative of the whole "nerds don't know anything about weapons" problem that got us here. Daggers (and other similar small blades) are usually 20-30 cms long after the hilt. I'm not sure about your handwriting but I guarantee that I could fit 20 runes on a dagger easily.

It depends on rune size. Rune could be complex and long. Maybe runes in tiny handwriting would have less potency than in my, dwarwen penmanship? Also is it rune or actually runeword?

Anyway it's just a logic 'way' toward rebalancing imba weapons

[Derakon]

I'd be fine with your proposed change, wobbly. Weapon weights have always been fairly absurd. Swords don't weigh 10 pounds (nor mauls 30!), and if they did nobody would be swinging them very quickly regardless of how ridiculous their stats are. We don't have to rejigger the entire system to fix this one glaring oddity.

[Grotug]

Some pertinent discussion from a medieval arms web forum: http://myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.8998.html

Garrett Hazen wrote:

I cannot find any history of a big warhammer, or a maul, more like. I guess I am just hooked on fantasy, or were they ever made? I am thinking of something sort of like a sledgehammer, but more like a medieval weapon.

I would appreciate to hear your thoughts on the subject

Jean Henri Chandler replied:

I don't think you are going to find a weapon like that outside of dungeons and dragons.

When you look at historical examples of weapons which are adapted from tools, such as hammers and axes, contrary to the fantasy portrayals the business ends of these things are smaller and lighter than on equivalent farm tools. That's partly because it doesn't require as much energy to hack off an arm as it does to chop down an oak tree, nor to cave in a head as it does to smash stone. (Real people don't have hundreds of "hit points" where they can absorb blow after blow unharmed...)

Even more important, weapons with ten pound striking heads are awfully clumsy to wield. By the time you swung an iron maul at someone they would have killed you five times over with any number of normal military weapons.

One constant you will run into over and over and over again is that military weapons tend to handle well and weigh a lot less than you might think, most swords for example are in the ballpark of 2-4 lbs, 4 lbs being unusually heavy in fact.

[MattB]

I'd be fine with your proposed change, wobbly. Weapon weights have always been fairly absurd. Swords don't weigh 10 pounds (nor mauls 30!)

I totally rabbit-holed on this.
And ended up here:

https://www.wired.com/2013/02/how-much-does-darth-vader-weigh/

[Pete Mack]

Speaking as one who has split a few cords of wood over the years, mauls usually weigh 10-12 pounds. You can get them up to 20 pounds, but those would make terrible weapons.

I'd be fine with your proposed change, wobbly. Weapon weights have always been fairly absurd. Swords don't weigh 10 pounds (nor mauls 30!), and if they did nobody would be swinging them very quickly regardless of how ridiculous their stats are. We don't have to rejigger the entire system to fix this one glaring oddity.

[luneya]

Weapon weights have never been a measure of real-world weight, but rather of how awkward an object is to carry. The easiest fix is to just remove the labels "weight" and "pounds" and instead report that "carrying this object takes n units of encumbrance."

Small weapons like daggers have the least encumbrance because of their compact design. A dagger can be stowed almost anywhere amongst a person's gear, and can be held in hand almost indefinitely without any special effort. By contrast, a sword or battle-axe can really only be secured to a belt-scabbard or a baldric worn on the back, and it's harder to carry one in hand for an extended period than the difference in weight would suggest, because these weapons are not only longer than daggers, but have more of the weight distributed to the end away from the hilt. The really big weapons like polearms are actually somewhat easier to carry in hand over time, as you can just treat them as walking sticks, with the weight of the weapon resting against the ground, but it's nearly impossible to wear them across the body rather than carrying them.

It also makes good physical sense that this notion of encumbrance would affect attack speed and damage. In the real world, you can deliver multiple stabs with a dagger about as quickly as you could land multiple punches. With a larger weapon, the leverage effects cause each strike to hit with more force, but also to require more recovery time between strikes. So in a sense, the current Angband model is accurate.

The problems are that the combat model overvalues the speed benefits of a smaller weapon as compared to the force benefits of a larger weapon, and that all weapons have a fixed minimum striking speed. In the real world, an unathletic bookworm like the average mage would probably be slow with a dagger--perhaps as slow as a fighter would be with a maul--but would be even slower than that with a polearm. The game can't capture this, as no character ever drops below 1 blow per round.

[tangar]

Realism in Angband

In general, game balance is more important than realism. Of course it's great to make stuff to make sense.. But if there is a choice between following precise realworld medieval experience and making game less balanced - hell to realism. This is magic world which has it's own magic physical laws

At the same time it shouldn't be too non-realistic. We have to find compromise between realism and game balance.. I mean - we shouldn't be too tedious in trying to match precise values to real-life.

Current weight is ok in terms of lore/realism to me. Imho the problem is to rebalance different weapon in early/mid/end game; so heavy weapons would be more useful for early-mid game. How come that dagger is more 'dangerous' weapon then bastard sword? It's actually makes less sense and more important than 'realism weight problem'.

[wobbly]

Would it be simpler to have weapon energy in a dex table running from 100 down to 16.
Then a multiplier in adjusted str/weight running from 2.0 down to 1.0

That gives you a balance where you are never getting more then twice the number of blows by switching to the dagger.

Edit: I'm assuming every class using the same blows table here(with an adjustment for warrior if necessary). Also suggesting a mage might have less then 1 blow/round with a big weapon & more then 1 blow/round with dagger & enough dex.

[Derakon]

Weapon weights have never been a measure of real-world weight, but rather of how awkward an object is to carry.

You say that, and that may well have been the original game designers' intent, but I can pretty much guarantee you that the majority of players that have given any thought to weapon weight have looked at our weapon weights and thought "WTF, a longsword doesn't weigh 10 pounds". It's misleading to use a unit of weight to measure encumbrance. If you wanted to rewrite things so that values were given in some artificial "unit of encumbrance" then you could keep the "weights" the way they are now...but you're only shifting the focus to other unrealistic ways we handle limiting what the player can carry.

Basically I see reducing weapon weights as a strict improvement to the system: it fixes one glaring misfeature without requiring substantial work or touching anything else. About the worst you can say about it is it makes the game slightly easier by letting the player carry more swap weapons, but if you're worried about that, tweaking carrying capacity is easy enough.

[MattB]

That said, I thought Luneya's post was well-reasoned. Maybe the solution is to make daggers 1d2 damage and recalibrate the weapons so that the heavier they are, the bigger the dice. Like it is now to a degree, of course, only more so.