My New System Post 1 of Part 3: Tooth and Claw (Weapons and How to Assemble)

Weapons in stories are things of legends; if you possess a weapon which was once held by some fabled hero, you can be sure of victory. You have Excalibur, given to King Arthur from the Lady of the Lake (Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government), and its companion, the Sword in the Stone, which, despite its name, was drawn from the stone by the aforementioned king. You have Mjølnir, forged by dwarves who had forged other weapons for the gods in the bowels of the Earth and then given as a gift to the God of Thunder himself, Thor, who uses the hammer by throwing it and having it return to him so fast that it's seen as a lightning bolt. You have the sickle of Kronus, which was given to its owner by the personification of the Earth herself to slay her lover, his father. You have the Gáe Bulg, the spear of mortal pain which was made from the bone of the sea monster, Coinchenn, which died from fighting its enemy, the Curruid, and then was given to Cú Chulainn so he could slay his brother.

Weapons in D&D and many other games are "+1 Sword of Flaming Burst" and are tossed as soon as you can find a "+2 Sword of Flaming Burst". They hold no tradition, they aren't better when the wielder learns how to use them more efficiently, and they are often sold off long before they're used simply because spending feats on using them properly would hinder the progress and power of your character. This, in my humble opinion, is utterly stupid and degrades the roleplay value of weapons and the value of a good weapons system.

Please note that everything from this point on is subject to some pretty drastic changes as I figure out how to work with character concepts and all the options as I begin to define them. While I'll lay out the ideas I've got right now, I really need to understand exactly how to balance things so that no kind of character is too powerful and no kind of character is too weak. Characters who primarily use weapons to do damage must to be balanced with characters that primarily use class abilities to do damage. And pretty much the same thing for every other role. Each role and hybrid role needs to be satisfying to play, and needs to do its job, elsewise, I'll have to completely re-work it.

To help this, instead of giving a character a "base attack bonus" like one gets in D&D, a character will get a "Weapons Skill" score or something of the like (Name very subject to change). This may end up being incorporated into the perk system, but I'm not quite sure if I'll end up doing that. Anywhen, the idea is that the better your score gets, the more damage dice you get out of using a weapon. Accuracy is also going to be determined by the score. The basics for characters are that characters who need to rely on weapons to use their abilities won't be able to use their abilities as readily as characters who don't, but by using their abilities, they get extra extra damage out of it. In the end, it should all even out so that Constant Damage characters are putting out the same kind of damage whether or not their using abilites or weapons to do damage, and the same for Spike Damage characters. (I'll need to talk about character roles and how they play into the game in a later post.)

Now that that's out of the way, time to talk about Weapons themselves.

The number of traits you can use in a Weapon is determined on how high your weapon skill score is. And that's a horrible way to lead off this paragraph. Let's start again.

You can add traits to a Weapon when creating the weapon, or whenever you can add traits to them, such as when you gain a level and are able to use more traits. Traits are the main way for people with roles other than damage to power up their abilities. For example, a character in the role of Battlefield Controller can have a hammer that throws people back further when he uses it in conjunction with an ability that tosses people around when you hit them. You could have a whip that entangles people so they take penatlies when they try to use abilities and such. Basically, you trade damage for the supped up abilities. There are traits for everyone, though, but the traits for Spike Damage and Constant Damage are not as prevalent as other traits.

A weapon is built by allocating the points for traits or damage. The number of points you are able to use is determined on how high your weapon skill score is. For example, at level five, you might have a weapon skill score of 5. You then can use a weapon that has up to the number of points that you can use at 5 weapon skill. If you use a weapon that has a higher amount, you gain only the first number of traits/damage allocated to it equal to the amount of points you could use at 5 weapon skill. This is because you are not skilled enough to use all of its traits together. Different traits are actually considered differently when choosing which traits you can use when a weapon is outside your point range. First are permanent traits, things that the weapon just has. If you make a weapon out of mythical golden steel it will still be made of mythical golden steel no matter who is using the weapon. Second are magical traits, enchantments and spells placed on the weapon. Using an enchanted weapon doesn't actually take much skill, but most enchantments require activation or something of the sort, so if you are not skilled enough to use the weapon and keep the enchantment active at the same time, then you can't use the enchantment. Third are skillful traits, things that the weapon can do, but it takes knowing how to do them. A scythe has its blade at such an angle that you could loop it around someone's ankle and trip them quite easily, but that's actually not the easiest thing in the world to do, and it actually takes training with a scythe to do properly in battle. Lastly, there are damage traits, which is basically just the points you allocate to damage. The better you are with a weapon, the more damage you can do.

Hopefully, this way a character doesn't get some way super powerful ancestral weapon and is suddenly much better at everything than his companions. No, his weapon might be completely different than the steel and wood weapons his comrades are using, but he's just as inexperienced as they are.

Well. I think I'll talk a bit about classes next time and then come back for some talk about armor, which is somewhat similar.

Song of the Post: "Tooth and Claw" by Animals as Leaders

My New System Post 2 of Part 1: The Message from Dr. Light (Design Goals of Subsequent Parts)

Though I said I'd be moving on to Classes and/or Weapons, I feel that I need to address some design goals of each of these sections before beginning to lay down the ground work of these parts. So, that's what I'm going to do.

Firstly, I'm actually going to talk about Equipment in general as a single Part, with sub-sections about armor, weapons and adventuring gear. To address the concerns about equipment, I've made a handy bullet point list.

• Armor adding to dodge chance has never made sense to me
• The enchantment system for armor and weapons puts too much power in the hands of casters and removes it from other players
• Upgrades are needlessly tedious to obtain
• Keeping track of adventuring gear is too tedious and boring, so nobody actually does it
• Carrying capacity takes too much time to actually figure out
• Weapons become somewhat useless too quickly
• Weapon and armor proficiencies have always been a little weird

Now, to keep up the trend, I'll make another bullet point list to list some design choices I want to promote and how I'm looking at fixing the problems that I see with previous systems.

• Armor and Weapons are each created using a modular point-buy system
• This allows for players to create really cool or interesting weapons, as well as have new traits added or subtracted from a weapon easily
• Because this may be confusing for new players, there will be a set of basic equipment that shows off some common configurations for weapons and armors
• Weapon proficiencies and Armor proficiencies are based off the styles of the weapons and armor
• Weapons are grouped by the way you use them, and each grouping has traits that you can add to your weapon that match the style of how you would use it, but are unique to that group
• Armors are grouped mostly on similarity of make and how you can wear it, each group has certain traits that can be added to it that match how you would use it
• Shields boost your ability to parry/block attacks
• This is much more like real life, and matches the active defenses that I've mentioned earlier
• Adventuring gear is going to be based mostly around a "kit" system
• Kits are going to mostly be integrated with the skill and explortation systems, and so they will be explored there in more detail
• Kits allow you to have a general idea of what you have without having to keep track of every single piece of equipment
• Kits will probably degrade after a few uses and need to be kept up with some small change or small amounts of time gathering supplies

Now, for some talk about classes and class abilities:

• Classes are based around a concept and a single basic ability that matches that concept
• Combat and exploration roles are not determined by class, but by build
• Every class should be able to specialize in one of at least three different combat roles by choosing certain options, or they can choose to pick up options from multiple combat roles
• Exploration roles are decided by the character's skill choices, which will be covered in exploration
• At each level a character gains a predetermined number of "perk points" which can be spent in a number of different perk trees available to the character
• There are a set of basic perk trees available to every character
• Some perk trees are available to the character based on weapon proficiencies that the character has, these allow the character to gain advantages when using those weapons with certain traits that the weapon has
• Some perk trees are available to the character based on the character's chosen class and they alter the way the character's class abilities act and react
• Perks replace the design space of feats and chosen class abilities, allowing the player to create the character they need and fulfill the combat role the party needs

Classes will probably get more talk at another time, as I'm going to most likely detail more about weapons and then armor first.

Song of the Post: "The Message from Dr. Light" by The Megas

My New System Post 4 of Part 2: Polyhurt (Dice, Damage and Dealing it)

Now. Dice are wonderful things that allow us to randomize the experience of play, so that we're able to have experiences with a bit of randomness injected into them, much like real life. Things don't always happen just according to plan. In fact, most of the time a plan never survives contact with reality because of circumstances that have incomprehensible complexity, which the randomness of dice-rolling simulates.

However, dice are not completely random. They do have average ranges that they will roll, and that's what we need to balance off of in a game. For example, the 20-sided die, which was determined to be the main way to determine the success of various actions in this system in the last post, has an average roll of 10.5. Now, you can't actually ever roll a 10.5, but if you roll a ton of d20's, then you'll come up with an average roll of about 10.5. But with our average, we have a deviation of 5.77. This means that any roll is most likely to fall within 5.77 of 10.5. This isn't terribly important, but it helps us understand how to make a task difficult or easy. If we want a task to be extremely easy for a character, then we put the level of roll we need the character to at least make over 5.77 below 10.5, making it very, very likely that the character would be able to hit that mark. If it just needs to be easy, then put it about 5.77 below 10.5. If it needs to be averagely difficult, then we put it as close as we can to 10.5. And then so on and so forth for the harder things.

This applied to the damage dice, as well. For example, if we have a 4-sided die, the average is 2.5, while the deviation is 1.12. That's a fancy way of saying you're going to deal about 1 to 4 damage with it.  It's most likely, however, that you're going to deal 2 or 3 damage with it (unless you step on it; there's a reason most people call d4's caltrops). So, that's that.

With a d6, it's 3.5 with a deviation of 1.71. With a d8, its 4.5 with a deviation of 2.29.

Anyway, now that I've collected and explained most of this information, I think I'm going to move onto working on damage some more.

While I would really like to consolidate the damage dice, but from what I've been looking at, the deviation between amounts of damage on different categories of weapon would be too much for the system to balance out with non-random damage. However, I've decided that three different dice, which each larger one having 2 more sides than the one smaller than it, would work just as well.

Now this is going to dip into both character abilities and the weapon system a bit. Yeah.

So, most characters are going to be doing damage through their weapons, but others are mainly going to rely on their class abilities to do damage. It doesn't make sense for the guy who can call flame from his fingers at will to go around using a stick trying to bop people over the head. He's got his fire fingers for that. So, this means that damage must be consistent across class abilities and weapons, and it must scale properly on both weapons and class abilities.

Scaling damage is easiest when working primarily with constants, rather than variables. Adding a new damage die can increase damage by a huge amount or barely any at all, depending on what you end up rolling for damage. Plus, the span between increases in damage are considerable, as you have to work on the basis that characters are probably going to be dealing an average of X amount of damage, but you still have to take into account the extremes of damage dealt by the die, which puts you at actually gaining the damage later than you would with simple constants. Another reason to mainly use constants is that it moves the majority of math to character building or non-combat situations. The plain fact is that most people aren't good at adding figures in their heads (including someone like me, who is rather good at math) and trying to do so slows down the real-time pace of combat too much.

However, constants are boring. So, while it is harder to do the math, and much more time-consuming to do it over and over and over again, the variability that dice add to damage makes it really exciting to do damage. When you get five 6's out of five d6's, you grin uncontrolably and probably spend the next seven years telling stories about it. However, you don't seem to remember a whole lot about the times you end up with all five ones staring at you..... Hmmm...

Anyway, the point is that there needs to be a balance between damage gained through dice and constants. So, for class ability-based damage, dice are going to come from the times that ability actually "levels up", such as an ability which says "this ability deals 1d6 + ability score damage at first level, and gains a 1d6 damage at levels 4 and 7". The constant damage is going to come from "modifier options" or "perks" or whatever I end up calling them. So, for options that add effects or damage to a class ability, that is going to mostly be constant damage. For weapons, the dice-based damage is going to come from "leveling up" the weapon. That's probably going to be talked more about in the actual weapons section. And the constant damage is from purchasing damage and will also be talked about more in the weapons section.

The main dice for damage purposes are going to come in three flavors. The d4, d6, and d8 are our main dice, and I'm going to try my best to keep it within those constraints. The discrepancies should be easily enough repaired with extra constant damage or different pools of perks or abilities to add on top of damage.

So. With that, I'll leave you, and next time, I'll come back with the first bits of classes or weapons. Probably both on the same day.

Song of the Post: "Polyhurt" by Com Truise