Derakon's combat revamp

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I'd say take an older, stable version of V and put the basics to work and see how it plays. It's not going to be known what needs to be tweaked or tossed or built upon until the fundamentals are put through the ringer.

Maybe (just maybe, and I really should be doing something else) I could run a little test in Fay, since this intigues me and my weapons are already balanced almost like in Derakon's system. Shouldn't be too time-consuming.

In the test fork, I'd like to eliminate to-hit bonuses completely. For archery and throwing, I could have a percentage based Archery skill. Before rolling for hit, substract range * monster's speed, with slow monsters having speed 1, normal speed monsters speed 2, and immobile monsters speed 0 for targeting purposes.

The whole combat system would be even simpler than Eytan's original system, which is already the simplest *band combat system that I know of. At the same time tactical possibilities would increase, which is exactly what I'm striving for.

Argh, and then I would surely have to remove player's AC too, add a Parrying skill, random hit locations, and player's armor substracting damage from blows. The resulting game would just have to be called RuneQuestBand because almost all mechanics are borrowed from that classic rpg (with little tweaks).

[Estie]

As for to hit chance:

I still think that that is bad place to introduce difficulties for the @, for the same reason it was bad to have high spell failure rates back in the days. Having a long sequence of misses just feels more depressing than, say, having your damage reduced by armor each hit.

I would go sofar as to make to hit chance a constant, maybe 90%, and only modify it under special circumstances (like: attacker is stunned, target is of (much) higher level, attacker is a mage(?), attacker is blessed, ....).

This is not neccessarily also true for the monsters; having various means of not getting hit might be interesting for item choices, however as it stands now, the impact of high AC is small enough that applying the constant to hit for monsters would not change much.

[buzzkill]

Balanced warriors would likely carry both fast weapons against faeries and heavy weapons against trolls.

... or more practically, a weapon that suits them to deal with most monsters and then have other means available (or not, flee) to deal with the outliers. The basic premise sounds good but it's getting bogged down in the details, especially the fringe situations which are always going to be problematic.

I'd say take an older, stable version of V and put the basics to work and see how it plays. It's not going to be known what needs to be tweaked or tossed or built upon until the fundamentals are put through the ringer.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

A novel thought. Forget completely about how to-hit used to work.

All monsters have a "parrying" score. For example, a fairy would have parrying at 50%. For each blow against the monster, halve the parrying number. Against your first blow, the faery will parry at 50%, against the second 25%, and so on. As you can see, Finesse-based warriors have a clear edge against evasive monsters.

All monsters also have an "armor" score that reduces the damage you do by a set number. Against heavily armored monsters, Power-based warriors have an edge.

Balanced warriors would likely carry both fast weapons against faeries and heavy weapons against trolls.

[Magnate]

A simpler way to do that would be to use the sum of the weapon's blows + damage multiplier for to-hit. The minimum possible to-hit score would be 2, which is probably a good thing.

That's an interesting idea. I wonder if it is sufficiently granular. I guess it would be possible to come up with something that worked, once we included race, class and clev.

I suspect that having the same skill determine both blows and to-hit is a bad thing, even if it could be balanced somehow. If you take both of these away from Power-based warriors, players are going to get really frustrated.

This is a good point, but I think it would make more sense for power to affect the number of blows (being able to reverse the swing of high-power weapons, etc.) than the to-hit. But then it might seem a bit lame for Power to affect one and not the other.

I guess, as you said earlier, this isn't a major issue. The system seems fundamentally sound, and we can tweak the contribution to each equation made by each variable once it's up and running.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I like d_m's suggestion that to-hit is determined in a similar way to damage, by weighting the player's Finesse and Power skills according to the weapon's preferences.

A simpler way to do that would be to use the sum of the weapon's blows + damage multiplier for to-hit. The minimum possible to-hit score would be 2, which is probably a good thing.

But my one slight misgiving is that Finesse intuitively should be the dominant factor in to-hit for all weapons, however power-orientated (I think Derakon made a similar point).

I suspect that having the same skill determine both blows and to-hit is a bad thing, even if it could be balanced somehow. If you take both of these away from Power-based warriors, players are going to get really frustrated.

[Magnate]

Yet another. Use Prowess for to-hit for your first blow, and Finesse for to-hit for all the blows after the first. It's dead simple and it works!

The flavour is that your first attack is usually the one with most motion and strength behind it. After that the combat turns to quick attacks and counter-attacks that mostly require quick and accurate reactions.

I think we need to Keep It Simple. Having breakpoints at which different rules apply is a bad thing. Having stats have two different impacts on to-hit (one directly and one via a skill like finesse or power) is a bad thing.

I like d_m's suggestion that to-hit is determined in a similar way to damage, by weighting the player's Finesse and Power skills according to the weapon's preferences. But my one slight misgiving is that Finesse intuitively should be the dominant factor in to-hit for all weapons, however power-orientated (I think Derakon made a similar point).

That said, we don't want Finesse to be any more important than Power in the overall system. I think I preferred Derakon's original idea where Finesse essentially replaces to-hit, and Power essentially replaces to-dam. High-finesse characters using high-finesse weapons improve their damage by getting more blows and more (small) criticals. High-power characters using high-power weapons do lots of damage (with BIG criticals) in a smaller number of blows. The only problem is making sure they can actually hit things.

When we think about the evasion/absorption split, we can see that high-power characters are going to have a terrible time with really evasive monsters ... but perhaps that's as it should be?

[Magnate]

Coming from playing v4, i am worried about increasing the length of item descriptions. The presented sample obviously has entries wherever possible to show the extremes. However, I very much dislike that in v4 almost all weapons have a ton of entries about things that have little or no impact on gameplay.

When I come upon a new weapon, I first and foremost need to decide wether it is an upgrade or not. Given a longsword 2d5 (+5,+8) thats easily done at a glance. Given a Dwarven longsword of Agility 2d6 (+5,+8) <+1,+2> [+4] with 3 lines of additional information it becomes annoying.

With the new system we get even more numbers. That by itself is, I think, not a problem, as long as there is some restraint when applying all the new options.

What I mean is this: when deciding about a new ego or property, first ask "does it have enough impact to matter". A [+3] to AC does not, and hence shouldnt be on every other weapon found. In the current vanilla, it comes with the defender ego which itself is so rare that the (useless) AC adder doesnt matter. If a sizable percentage of weapons is "dwarven" (or whatever), it shouldnt spam the information line with [+3] or [+4].
If there is to be an ego with bonus to AC, make it [+30] so its noticable and rare to keep balance.

In all the v4 threads, I havent seen this topic surface, so I am wondering if its just me and everyone else is happy.

While this is a slight digression from combat, it's worth answering. Yes, people are concerned about the length of item names in v4 - Nomad is working on an improved naming system, but with hit/dam, AC and multiple pvals there will still be problems. These will get worse if the new combat system means that slays and brands end up as two-digit pvals.

But we don't limit design decisions for good gameplay around what fits on a 70-character item title. Instead, we change the rendering of the item title to provide the best info we can for the new gameplay.

By this I mean that information like a weapon's speed factor, or its finesse and power multipliers, will not be added to its title. They will be visible in its 'I'nspect screen (which I suspect will have to be split into two screens: one for combat info and one for everything else).

So we don't actually have to worry about adding more stuff to item names, and in fact your suggestion of not displaying AC on weapons is a good one. In fact we could choose not to display any numbers at all in an item title (or just base dice for weapons and base AC for armour). There's lots of room for experimentation to find what works.

But the basic issue is that the Inspect screen will become the primary source of information about an item. One thing to make this easier would be to move to the noun-verb model of item usage, so that when you press 'i' for inventory or 'e' for equipment, your next keypress automatically displays the 'I'nspect screen for the item (defaulting to the combat screen for weapons and the non-combat screen for everything else), and then the following keypress can be a command (use, take off, throw etc.).

This is off the top of my head and might have drawbacks, but it would help avoid RSI from pressing shift-i all the time ...

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Yet another. Use Prowess for to-hit for your first blow, and Finesse for to-hit for all the blows after the first. It's dead simple and it works!

The flavour is that your first attack is usually the one with most motion and strength behind it. After that the combat turns to quick attacks and counter-attacks that mostly require quick and accurate reactions.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Here's another option:

As long as you can get at least two blows (2.0) with a weapon, you may use Finesse for hitting monsters. As long as you can get at least double damage with a weapon, you may use Prowess for hitting.

If you can get neither two blows nor double damage, use the lower skill. If you can get both two blows and double damage, use the higher skill.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Lethality and Prowess both sound good to me.

It's probably not a good idea to let either Finesse or Power skill increase your to-hit chance alone. Having STR increase to-hit chance works well in Fay because Fay still has Melee and Ranged skills, and plusses to-hit on weapons. In my playtesting, STR was really not the main source of to-hit in melee.

I kind of like d-m's double-whammy solution. Take a square root of that if you want to reduce double-whamminess, and do the same for all monster ACs. The player doesn't need to really understand what is happening here -- if you want, you can show to-hit chance in percentages in monster status line, like I've done in FayAngband.

Some other (self-evident) options:

- Keep Melee and Bows skills. If you remove to-hit bonuses from weapons, innate skill from class and race would matter more.

- Have both Finesse and Lethality skills increase to-hit chance in melee. (This is the classic EyAngband solution, by the way: both STR and DEX increase to-hit chance.)

- Replace Dexterity with two stats, Quickness and Agility. Agility would help you hit.

[tg122]

On that note, we need a new name to replace "Power", since it's pretty lame and, as mentioned already, we already have Rings of Power in-universe. "Force" is the best I've managed to come up with, but if you can think of a term that would work well as a damage multiplier and also for affecting your chance-to-hit, then by all means, suggest away. sarily a bad thing. He also suggests "Prowess" as a replacement for Power.

How about "Lethality"

[Derakon]

My concern with tying hit chance to Power is that it's unintuitive. I'll grant it might work well mechanics-wise, but it doesn't seem like being good at landing blows with a lot of force would make you better at landing blows, period.

On that note, we need a new name to replace "Power", since it's pretty lame and, as mentioned already, we already have Rings of Power in-universe. "Force" is the best I've managed to come up with, but if you can think of a term that would work well as a damage multiplier and also for affecting your chance-to-hit, then by all means, suggest away.

I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations for using just DEX to determine hit rate. If we assume:
* Linear returns on DEX vs. hit chance.
* Melee-relevant DEX scores range from around 15 to 40 (i.e. below that and you shouldn't expect to be able to hit anything reliably)
* Acceptable hit chance should match monster AC

then we end up with endgame monsters being around 5-6 times harder to hit than monsters right at the beginning of the game. By comparison, currently Jackals have an AC of 3 and Morgoth an AC of 180 -- a factor of 60.

It may be we'll be able to switch to just using DEX sometime in the future, after some hypothetical stats revamp, but currently it doesn't look all that feasible.

EDIT: a suggestion from d_m is to re-use the Finesse / Power ratings on the weapon. That is, your to-hit is based on Finesse * finesse multiplier + Power * power multiplier. Daggers rely heavily on your Finesse skill to hit, Mauls rely heavily on your Power skill. It's a double-whammy -- if you're bad at one of the skills, then you'll be really terrible with weapons that use that skill -- but that's not necessarily a bad thing. He also suggests "Prowess" as a replacement for Power.

You could conceivably do the same thing for critical chance and critical power too.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Here's a suggestion that might seem counter-intuitive at first, but seems to work really well in practise. I tested it in Fay, which has a quite similar combat system to what is proposed here, only with STR and DEX in place of Power and Finesse.

Have Power increase to-hit chances in melee, and Finesse to-hit chances in ranged combat!

The flavour of Power and Finesse would change slightly. Combatants specializing in Power would be very good at smashing through opponent's defences and connecting with single, heavy hits. Combatants specializing in Finesse would jump around opponents, making several quick attacks, relentlessly and opportunistically seeking openings in their opponent's defences.

My playtesting revealed that those flail-wielding lizardmans really want to connect with their single attack. On the other hand, gnomes with dirks don't really mind if one or even two of their four attacks misses.

And on the ranged combat front, having DEX or Finesse associated with archery makes perfect sense.

EDIT: You'll probably want to keep both skills focused in melee combat. How about making Power increase your to-hit chances in melee, and Finesse your parrying, dodging, and shield block chances in melee.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I don't want to appear overly critical here. This is a cleverly designed combat system. Thinking about it gives me joy and makes me want to play Vanilla again.

I trust most issues will get solved eventually. Once the basic mechanic is coded, balancing and rebalancing should be relatively easy. The core parts work.