Friday, July 9, 2010

7DOMC - Day 6 - I thought I was done with items, but I made them better.

So on day three I said I was done with the item rewrite. While this was a true statement, I realized today that there was one way I could improve items even more. The current system had each material list the base stats for a weapon/armor made of it. Something roughly:

Wood Club - 3d3  CTCost=1.0
Iron Sword - 4d6 CTCost=1.25
Cloth Armor -  +5 stamina

The issues is that I had to list out each statistic for each material. If I know that say leather is 20% more stamina than cloth (the base type), I'd need to calculate that and put both values into the XML. If I decided to increase the base later, I'd need to update all the values again.

To fix this, I now have materials list a percentage or linear amount better they are than base. For example, Wood adds 1d3 damage and leather adds 20% more stamina than base. If I update the base values, the change will propagate to all armors/weapons.

3 comments:

Ed said...

Hmm, if wood adds 1d3 damage, could you not wind up with a weapon with silly damage like 4d6+1d3? Or does that not matter?

donblas said...

That is a good point. Right now I'm planning on picking a single sided size to use for most everything, probally d3 or d4, maybe d6.

I added an exception for the case you mentioned.

Ed said...

Here's a thought I had the other day... what if damage were done as XdY, where X = strength bonus + weapon dice, and Y = dexterity bonus + weapon dice sides? So if you had a longsword with damage 3d6, and you had a strength of 5 and a dexterity of 3, you'd wind up with a damage roll of 8d9...

You could then do the same for blocking with armor/shields and for spellcasting - the difference being that blocking and spellcasting would use a different set of stats - say, resilience and dexterity for blocking, and intelligence and dexterity for spellcasting! (Dexterity can get reused since it's a lesser factor, as 4d2 is better than 2d4!)

So, that 8d9 sounds quite deadly - but if the enemy has RES=3 and DEX=8, and he's wearing a leather armor with 2d2 defense... then he gets to roll 5d10 to block your strike!

Hmm, I wonder if this is roughly how Final Fantasy worked, only with less dice-rolling and more maxing out the stats... I did find that if I had strength 20 and wielded a weapon with attach 30, then I did roughly 600 damage per hit... that's the max value rollable by 20d30!