To-hit and Criticals in new combat

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Why? What's wrong with a trade off where you have a weapon where you frequently miss, but when you connect it does a lot of damage?

Nothing as such. I believe the effect is just too pronounced here because the characters/weapons with the worst to-hit also have only one blow.

Having only one blow is enough to reduce to-hit chance radically even if to-hit percentage stays the same.

Against especially good dodgers, though, heavy weapons should be ultra bad.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

This is pretty much what I said.

Good! The discussion is moving so fast that I have some difficulties following your jargon.

[Derakon]

Why? What's wrong with a trade off where you have a weapon where you frequently miss, but when you connect it does a lot of damage?

Mostly I suspect it'll be very frustrating to be playing as that kind of character, especially when fighting groups of dodgy monsters (c.f. blink dogs, who are bad enough even when you have multiple blows/round). As always, we'll need to playtest and see, but it's not unreasonable to try to aim our first pass at where we think the balance is (both in terms of mechanics and in terms of fun).

[buzzkill]

Nothing as such. I believe the effect is just too pronounced here because the characters/weapons with the worst to-hit also have only one blow.

In with Andrew. That's why these exact characters either have a spell handy to increase chance to hit, or shouldn't be engaging in physical combat to begin with. I'm beginning to lose faith in this whole over-analyzed concept.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

I'm beginning to lose faith in this whole over-analyzed concept.

Have faith! It all will come clear after endless hours of (fun) playtesting, balancing & rebalancing. This design has enough nuts and bolts to tweak.

[AnonymousHero]

Why? What's wrong with a trade off where you have a weapon where you frequently miss, but when you connect it does a lot of damage?

Lack of fun factor? There is a psychological effect (not unlike addiction) which occurs if you "give" players random small "wins".

Seeing "you miss" repeatedly isn't fun.

[fizzix]

In actuality, I personally do not see a difference between a character with a 10% chance to hit that does 100 damage, and one with 100% chance to hit that does 10 damage. In fact the 10% to hit character might be better off because he has a very good chance of killing a 100 HP monster in <5 blows, where the 10% character always needs 10 blows. So if the player can only handle 5 blows worth of combat, then the low to-hit chance guy is better.

On the other hand, the 10% to-hit-chance guy has a 35% chance of the combat going beyond 10 rounds. So if the player can handle >11 rounds of combat, the more sure-hitter is better off.

The point being, that as long as the expected damage between a high and low hit percentage character are within 90% of each other, we should be ok. When we think about tweaks to balance damage output across classes, that's the calculation we should do.

[Mikko Lehtinen]

In actuality, I personally do not see a difference between a character with a 10% chance to hit that does 100 damage, and one with 100% chance to hit that does 10 damage. In fact the 10% to hit character might be better off because he has a very good chance of killing a 100 HP monster in <5 blows, where the 10% character always needs 10 blows. So if the player can only handle 5 blows worth of combat, then the low to-hit chance guy is better.

And if the target has even 5 points of armour the calculations are even more in favour of the heavy weapon!

I think theorizing about to-hit chance is worthless until we have some idea about how big the armor scores will be. I'm gonna wait 'til we get to playtest this thing. I want to see it playtested with many different kinds of numbers. Theories lie, we aren't as smart as we think we are.

You're not going to keep calling it "absorption" in the actual game, are you? I always have to check how to spell it from an older post. Why not something simple like Armor and Dodge?

[sethos]

Hmmm. I'm not sure if you saw my last post in Derakon's thread, but I think it would disappoint a lot of people to think that a cl50 character has the same to-hit chance as a cl1 character, and that a dextrous Dunadan warrior wielding a rapier has the same chance as a clumsy half-troll mage wielding a whip.

My view is that all of those variable factors (class, race, stats, clev, weapon balance) can be incorporated into the calculation of @'s finesse score, which means that to-hit boils down to

X% + finesse - evasion

So if standard evasion is 25, and you want 75% chance to-hit as the average, then we want X to be 75 and the finesse component to range from about 10 for cl1 magi to about 40 for cl50 warriors. (Note to Derakon: this would be easier if finesse increased linearly with both stats and clev - we can then just divide @'s total finesse score by a scalar (10?) rather than messing with sqrts.)

This would give a cl1 mage about 60% chance to hit the average monster, and about 85% chance to hit stationary monsters. It would give cl50 warriors about 90% chance to hit average monsters (though the average evasion might be higher than 25 in the depths), and about 75% chance of hitting Harowen or the Cat Lord.

EDIT: of course, we should use more granularity: a d1000 hit roll instead of d100, with X as 750. Then we can use unmodified finesse, and either multiply Ev by 10 or just increase its granularity too (I prefer the latter).
I have no problem with this proposal - it's clean and simple and the added damage from crits can be balanced accordingly. My one reservation is that I think finesse crits should be different from prowess crits. The latter should add more damage (and perhaps therefore be less common), while the former should add less damage but with a higher chance of disabling effects. But I'm now straying into procs, which means I ought to shut up and get on with the effects stuff.

Sorry for the mass quote.

just thinking about the crits here - I believed that Finesse Characters would be getting more swings in, and thus get more chances for criticals. followng that route, I'd think that finesse criticals should likely be more common (skillful stab wound to the liver... and one to the eye! eat that!) and prowess criticals should be devestating (hammer to the skull... anybody got a wet wipe? or heavy mace to the chest - multiple broken ribs, punctured lung, and bleeding heart.) at least that is how I see it.

[fizzix]

Sorry for the mass quote.

just thinking about the crits here - I believed that Finesse Characters would be getting more swings in, and thus get more chances for criticals. followng that route, I'd think that finesse criticals should likely be more common (skillful stab wound to the liver... and one to the eye! eat that!) and prowess criticals should be devestating (hammer to the skull... anybody got a wet wipe? or heavy mace to the chest - multiple broken ribs, punctured lung, and bleeding heart.) at least that is how I see it.

The way I eventually see it is that Finesse criticals will cause cuts in the monster. They bleed damage each turn until they heal. Prowess criticals will cause monster stunning giving them to-hit penalties (like player stun) and higher spell failures, and possibly leading to knock out. This is a while down the road. For now, I'm ok with treating them both the same.

[Derakon]

Okay, for now I have critical hit logic as this:

chance = 1 + (finesse squared + prowess squared) / 2500;
power = 0;
while (power < 4 and d100 <= chance) power++;
multiply damage based on power

It's a bit rough around the edges but at least gives vaguely sensible values. My test character, a level-50 kobold paladin with rather untuned equipment, has a 30% crit chance (and thus a 9% chance of getting a great hit, a 2.7% chance of a superb hit, etc.).

[fizzix]

And if the target has even 5 points of armour the calculations are even more in favour of the heavy weapon!

I think theorizing about to-hit chance is worthless until we have some idea about how big the armor scores will be. I'm gonna wait 'til we get to playtest this thing. I want to see it playtested with many different kinds of numbers. Theories lie, we aren't as smart as we think we are.

You're not going to keep calling it "absorption" in the actual game, are you? I always have to check how to spell it from an older post. Why not something simple like Armor and Dodge?

Good point. I'm going to make another post, to discuss how I envision this. Absorption is technically accurate, but maybe armor is a better choice for in-game? I've pretty much solely been doing technical writing of late, so I'm a really bad person to do flavoring. I think "evasion" is ok though, what are people's opinions of this word?

[ekolis]

Evasion? Beats "dodginess", that's for sure

Seriously though, sounds like a good term!

[myshkin]

Good point. I'm going to make another post, to discuss how I envision this. Absorption is technically accurate, but maybe armor is a better choice for in-game?

ADOM has DV/PV, but that doesn't really fit. Resilience? Toughness? Hardness?

[Magnate]

Okay, for now I have critical hit logic as this:

chance = 1 + (finesse squared + prowess squared) / 2500;
power = 0;
while (power < 4 and d100 <= chance) power++;
multiply damage based on power

It's a bit rough around the edges but at least gives vaguely sensible values. My test character, a level-50 kobold paladin with rather untuned equipment, has a 30% crit chance (and thus a 9% chance of getting a great hit, a 2.7% chance of a superb hit, etc.).

That seems a little high, for a prowess-favouring class with untuned equipment. I'd imagine that we don't want chance to go north of 50% even for cl50 rogues with endgame gear. But it's high time I did a spreadsheet for this ;-)