Halls of Mist plans

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I went through the weapon list for Classic and noticed that this would work quite well:

- Weapons that require 10 STR to wield have 2.5 blows. Falchion, Three-Piece-Staff, Khopesh.
- Weapons that require 13 STR to wield have 1.5 blows. Mace, Bastard Sword, Baculus.

Warriors and Shamans round up for these weapons, Mages and Mystics round down, everybody else flips a coin.

I think I may remove polearms from the classic version, too. They don't really add anything to the game. Surely 36 different melee weapons is enough for any game?

[fizzix]

I think I may remove polearms from the classic version, too. They don't really add anything to the game. Surely 36 different melee weapons is enough for any game?

I think distinction between the weapons is more important than the number of types. I would remove weapons that are not distinctive. For example there's no reason to have both a flail and a morning star if both weight exactly the same and have the same dice. Polearms can be distinctive with special combat rules (allowing you to hit a monster 2 squares away, for example). But if you're not planning on doing that it'd be fine to chuck them.

As a side note, there is room for flavor distinctions alone, but those should come at the end.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I think distinction between the weapons is more important than the number of types. I would remove weapons that are not distinctive. For example there's no reason to have both a flail and a morning star if both weight exactly the same and have the same dice. Polearms can be distinctive with special combat rules (allowing you to hit a monster 2 squares away, for example). But if you're not planning on doing that it'd be fine to chuck them.

EyAngband combat system needs weapons to get progressively better deeper in the dungeons. 36 weapons seems to be enough to achieve this, and to have enough weapons for every max blows/STR requirement category.

There is some difference in how reliable the damage of the different weapon types are. A sword might have 1d13, a polearm 2d6, a club 4d5. With only swords and clubs I can actually make this disctinction more interesting, not less.

The second difference is that sword critical hits cause bleeding, clubs stun, and polearms just do extra damage.

The third difference is that clubs tend to be the heavier, swords lighter, and polearms somewhere in the middle.

Everywhere polearms seem to be the least interesting weapon type. Swords and clubs have personality, polearms don't.

Ah, one more thing that favours having only swords and clubs. Shamans and priests love clubs, and Templars are expert fencers. Nobody cares about polearms.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I revisited the Mist Classic number of blows ideas yet again.

I figured I don't probably need any special rules for Warriors and Shamans if the tables have enough granularity to let these classes benefit reliably from their higher combat stats. After I added 1.5 and 2.5 blows per round (a coin flip for the half-blow) to the tables they look like this:

DEX/Blows	Weapon STR requirement/blows

0-7	1	14+	1
8-9	1.5	13	1.5
10-11	2	11-12	2
12-13	2.5	10	2.5
14-16	3	8-9	3
17-19	4	6-7	4
20-22	5	4-5	5
23-26	6	2-3	6
27-30	7	0-1	7

Wielding too heavy weapons lowers your blows by one category per missing STR point. Below one blow the blows decrease like this: 0.8, 0.7, 0.6, 0.5, 0.4, 0.3, 0.2, 0.1. This change should make all those super-heavy weapons you find usable for a much bigger range of characters.