Feature Specification: Weapon Breakage & Armor Damage

[ç i p h é r]

I'd rather avoid the philosophical debate here. For every 'why', one could easily ask 'why not'. The very simplest of reasons for having anything is that sophistication makes the game more interesting. It offers some people challenges and others a needed preoccupation. The challenge is in finding the right balance between micro (too much) and macro (not enough) management.

For an RP centric world, I wouldn't expect weapon breakage to be so feared or loathed. Weapon breakage adds to role play and immersion; it's the manifestation of luck in a fairly static world. It adds a wrinkle to our otherwise predictable lives and to encounters with creatures we've defeated a hundred times before. It also allows crafting to possibly flourish as a viable profession. Where weapon breakage takes away from the game is in grinding spawns.

So my call to all of you is, what would you like to see in a weapon breakage system that would enhance your gaming experience (in terms of challenges, role play, and immersion)? Saying it sucks provides no useful feedback so save that for the philosophical debate when it comes time to have it.

[NickD]

Saying it sucks provides no useful feedback so save that for the philosophical debate when it comes time to have it.

There is no useful feedback. It just sucks. Going through 3 bastard swords in a week when you can't buy bastard swords on your server and then you have to travel to Waterdeep to get it customised all because you get a few critical misses in what is a high combat world in comparision to PnP doesn't enhance roleplay, it just serves to get on people's nerves. Ask Cynon about that.

[AlmightyTDawg]

So my call to all of you is, what would you like to see in a weapon breakage system that would enhance your gaming experience (in terms of challenges, role play, and immersion)? Saying it sucks provides no useful feedback so save that for the philosophical debate when it comes time to have it.

Perhaps I misapprehend the purpose of the forum then.

Threads will be posted in this forum to define the scope and flesh out the details of every feature we intend to build. It's imperative that we understand all that we want to build and how each feature might interact with another prior to building it. This will ensure we create a well documented and designed holistic system that serves as a solid foundation for ALFA's modules and hopefully for the community at large.

I believe it's quite legitimate to question the nature of a feature as being one worthy of "intend to build." As you said, you want to see how features will interact with others.

My point earlier is that you can add a bunch of little things into the world that all independently add immersion, but when taken together create gameplay grind of a magnitude higher than any MMORPG in existence. You /have/ to consider the fundamental question of "what does this feature add positive" versus "what does this feature add negative."

If you think all I'm doing is saying "this sucks" I invite you to reread. I'm asking the question what the benefit is. Just "being realistic" has never been enough. Or else, say hello to taking a tinkle with your PC to avoid that 1 pt of CON damage, and I don't think anyone wants to go there.

There are two different aspects - weapon breakage (critical failure) and weapon maintenance (long term).

Start with breakage. Adding a chance of randomness that you can lose a weapon is interesting to a point, but adds a lot of possibility for grind if not handled appropriately. It is very sensitive to individual economics and DM reward considerations as to how it affects players. While it can be interesting, without proper DM support it really just encourages farming as players try to reclaim what they think they "deserve."

Now with maintenance. What does it take to maintain a weapon? Is it a click fest (F2, target weapon.. rinse... repeat). Is it based on a skill, and then how much of that skill - since there aren't any real rules for it except what we make up, the numbers affect my perception. Is it intended to sink something like time (spend X time fighting, spend X/10 time maintaining your weapon), or money (spend X time fighting, spend Y gold on maintenance), or something else?

As far as I'm concerned, that's about as useful a feedback as you get. Everyone sets fun v realism on different parts, but for a feature to be included that's not core to the game engine, I do think you need to establish some fundamental value to it first.

[ç i p h é r]

Regarding feedback, I'm looking for specific ideas. What are things ALFA members want to see in a system like this, particularly when much of it is arbitrary.

* Grind - what do you suggest we do to avoid excess? I understand where guys like Nick are coming from. I don't think we want this system to be a *focus* for players, just something in the background which can rear its ugly head in untimely situations or if left ignored for too long.

* Farming - the irony here is that this sort of behavior will lead to weapon deterioration and possibly breakage. A fringe benefit might therefore be that players exercise some selectivity to avoid unneeded battles.

* Economy - We can't really tackle economic concerns directly. I'm not sure how or what we would advise builders to account for either. Perhaps making them aware of the implications is sufficient counsel to address the issue. It certainly can be viewed as a money sink.

* Maintenance - up to us to define that. It could be nothing more than a visit to an NPC. It could take some time and materials. It could be based on a blacksmithing skill (ties into crafting) where the higher the skill, the more wear you restore per attempt (hammer + anvil or whetstone).

Everyone sets fun v realism on different parts, but for a feature to be included that's not core to the game engine, I do think you need to establish some fundamental value to it first.

Define value. Does CHALLENGE represent value? Does realism, or role play, or immersion? If weapon wear and breakage helps support player crafting and/or professions, is it then worthwhile? If we successfully build dependence among players that forces interaction between them? If there wasn't *some* value, I don't think anyone would express interest in having a system such as this...but whether the majority find it appealing or not is a reasonable question. No point building a system that stands no chance for adoption.

[Blackwill]

I love the idea of weapons breaking if no upkeep has been done to the material.
What I would like: A weapon or piece of armor should brake after enduring a lot of useage. With a lot I don't mean 10 battles, but probably 50. The player should be able to check the quality or damage done to the weapon or piece of armor. This should if the material needs repairs or replacement. Repairs to armor and weapons should fall under a Crafting catagory.

So any numskull would know his weapon is about to brake if he checks his item, even before it brakes in battle. This is of course a vital part to make a good brakege system IMO.

[wvincenti]

I'd suggest testing NWN2 first.
Part of the problem with weapon breakage in ALFA is that the NWN randomization programming gets in ruts and produces the same numbers pretty regularly. We've all seen rats roll 3 or more Critical hits in a row, and most of us know folks who had absolute hell with weapon breakage. Things like brand new MW weapons shattering during their first fight.

I like the idea of weapon breakage on paper.
I didn't like the reality of how it played out for others in game.
I was one of the lucky ones who rarely saw it while it was in effect.

-Bill

[Swift]

I like the idea of weapon breakage on paper.
I didn't like the reality of how it played out for others in game.
I was one of the lucky ones who rarely saw it while it was in effect.

-Bill

I hold the same opinion. On paper its fine, and in PnP, where the frequency of battle is alot less than in ALFA, weapons breakage isnt a problem.

However, alot of people can recount horror stories about our last weapons breakage system, which has stuck in their minds, and no matter how you portray any new system, it will face heavy resistance from much of the player base, either those that had weapon after weapon break, or those that saw/have read the stories of it.

Thankfully, i never had a weapon break, but i did see people go through weapons like they were made of plywood.

I do not think it is something we should pursue. It adds very little to the game (IMO), and is extremely annoying when it does pop its head up.

If there wasn't *some* value, I don't think anyone would express interest in having a system such as this...but whether the majority find it appealing or not is a reasonable question. No point building a system that stands no chance for adoption.

Poll the player base then. Id be willing to predict you would get a very large no vote for any kind of weapons breakage, after the last time we had it.

[AlmightyTDawg]

* Grind - what do you suggest we do to avoid excess? I understand where guys like Nick are coming from. I don't think we want this system to be a *focus* for players, just something in the background which can rear its ugly head in untimely situations or if left ignored for too long.

For example, I do not believe that "realism, roleplay, and immersion" is a sufficient rationale here. Eating, resting, and bowel movement scripts are also realistic, and failing to take care of these vital necessities could legitimately hamper one's effectiveness. You can have complications from weather, or all sorts of picayune details that all fall under the same mark. Now you can later say, "oh we'll pick and choose which of these we'll use" but now you're talking in a different vein. You're working backwards from the player experience, saying "things are too easy on the player here" or "Craft weapons/armor is too useless, let's add something" and establishing realism aspects that way.

Assume we keep weapon maintenance for whatever reason, my suggestion is to put a cap on the direct time investment required. For example, having to click a whetstone on your sword a hundred times will never cut it. The possibility of a script where you click once and it keeps repeating in the background until you're done, allowing you to talk and RP by the campfire, well now perhaps there's a solution to the grind of maintenance. But if people turn this into a job or a clickfest, it immediately has zero value to me.

You'd also want a warning system for those people who get forgetful for whatever reason. Some people have kids, some have work pressures, or playtimes are so compressed that for whatever reason they don't check things which are just plain habit for adventurers. Perhaps on login and/or when a weapon category worsens.

* Farming - the irony here is that this sort of behavior will lead to weapon deterioration and possibly breakage. A fringe benefit might therefore be that players exercise some selectivity to avoid unneeded battles.

You're thinking how you might react, but I don't think it's universally applicable. In general, for example, fights should be cash-flow-positive experiences. And experience-positive, as whooping on 0-1 xp mobs for loot solo often counts as farming. Only in the absurd condition where weapon breakage scripts make adventuring cash-flow-negative would that condition hold. So, unless you subscribe to the gambler's fallacy in a serious way, any individual fight you'd get into shouldn't be pulled back by breakage scripts, particularly if you care for your weapon. Once a weapon /does/ break, however, there's immediately a feeling that one deserves to be at the place they were just at, and will grind to get back there unless DMs are clever about supporting it.

* Economy - We can't really tackle economic concerns directly. I'm not sure how or what we would advise builders to account for either. Perhaps making them aware of the implications is sufficient counsel to address the issue. It certainly can be viewed as a money sink.

Now you're getting into another field of things. The extent by which a non-canon feature would conceptually dictate local economics is a pretty scary one. Something I think we're both dancing between on this point is how numerically significant this effect would be. How much would it take to repair, and how frequently would it need to be done? For example, I can't see justifying paying for my sword five times over within the course of my life. Some softening in key areas and reforming should do it in a fraction of the time and cost. This isn't exactly going to be a high-margin activity for blacksmiths, and arbitrarily making it so to support PC blacksmiths seems a poor choice. Even if you make it based on a fraction of item value, you'd basically be capped off at no higher than masterwork value even for magic weapons just for common sense reasons.

Define value.

That's what the feature is supposed to do. And you find with every possible change or edit you make to it, that changes. But saying "some people want it" is not intrinsically indicative of value.

Does CHALLENGE represent value? Does realism, or role play, or immersion?

In and of itself no, because we can see the end-state of hyperrealism and we already know that it's the mother of bad ideas. We should take a lesson from D&D, where abstracting key things out = fun.

If weapon wear and breakage helps support player crafting and/or professions, is it then worthwhile? If we successfully build dependence among players that forces interaction between them?

Certainly this is an argument over most of the other "realism" aspects, but now you're kind of stuck. Earlier you said NPCs could do it - so it doesn't really "force" interaction. You can make interaction with PCs more efficient, but DM plots or just random RP does this as well. The extent to which this supports crafting is based heavily on the significance of the effect, and arbitrarily inflating the value to justify crafting I believe will end up being a poor choice. Maintenance isn't exactly the high-margin work here. As for breakage, what you're talking about is someone's loss is someone else's gain, which sounds an awful lot like a redistribution of wealth filtered to crafters. I think this benefit could be overstated.

Or, put another way, if the effect becomes significant enough that a sizeable portion of the playerbase suddenly becomes part-time blacksmiths, I think we've gone too far.

I'm not saying there's no value here. I'm just hedging against the dangers. I can't actually judge a feature, particularly a non-canon feature, until I'm looking at a pile of actual numbers and some rate equations. All that above, and every other post, are just worries. Bounds by which I'm going to judge a given set of numbers. But how can I really judge something I don't understand - it isn't even one of those cruddy canon rules I can say off the cuff I don't like.

[ç i p h é r]

A warning system is a good idea. To avoid notification overload, I'd say only notify at specific thresholds (from mint to good to average to damaged to broken or something along those lines).

Regarding the grind. I think weapon maintenance has to be related to a skill for it to have any real meaning or value. If it's a one-click-fix-all it's pointless (just roll it into resting) or if it's a click-fest it's excessive to the absurd. Clearly, we don't want weapons breaking in a day's worth of use so I think we need to look at maintenance as an incremental process.

A whetstone is a mobile "weapon maintenance" tool. It can only be used to work out the wear. It cannot be used to repair a broken blade.

A smithy on the other hand could do both, but you can't take that adventuring with you. A forge, bellows, anvil, and sharpening stone (wheel) are simply not mobile.

So for the sake of discussion, what if we tie weapon maintenance to the "Craft Weapons" skill and make the whetstone a 1/day use item? A player could then attempt to work out any wear once each day (presumably night or morning). The damage restored might be 1d4 + skill rank. If they have enough ranks in Craft Weapons, their weapon is restored in one use. If not, then only a partial amount is restored. If a player damages his weapon at a faster rate than he restores it, a visit to a blacksmith will eventually be required.

From an economic point of view, smithing wouldn't necessarily be high margin, but tidy profits certainly exist if there is volume. I'd make maintenance a % of the cost of the weapon. <= 5%

But saying "some people want it" is not intrinsically indicative of value.

But the reverse is true. If the feature has some intrinsic value, players will want it. What is unclear is what that value actually is.

As regards crafting, competition with NPC merchants already exists regardless of weapon breakage. I'm merely pointing out that weapon breakage is just one more thing which adds value to the crafting profession. No, we don't want this to mean crafting is the new gold exploit, but prices between players and crafters is always going to be negotiable. There's no set price to be enforced here with a script. Price will depend heavily on competition AND desperation I suspect. It also wouldn't make sense for non crafting players who have taken skill ranks to begin offering part time services - it would have to fit the role playing or else...

[Blackwill]

sounds good to me cipher.

[Joos]

Doesn't sound good at all. We had a system in alfa for this before, and it didn't "enhance" roleplay one bit. Weaponbreakage has a function in a PnP campaign where one round takes a few minutes to play out. In NWN, where rounds tick in seconds, it usally takes a round or three before you notice that the weapon is gone, wich usually results in the characters swift death after a few AOO's. All in allending up in a situation that ends RP rather than enhancing it. I dont know about you guys, but my idea of fun is not to try to emulate being dead.

Weapon breakage is an interesting feature for a PnP group. It doesnt belong in a realtime environment. Most old alfa'ns has seen this in action and has seen what it leads to. Frustration and resentment, not a laugh and a half how to survive a tricky situation.

All these smithy's and whetstone thingies may sound like really neat features. However, they are only a tedium hampering play. And, if echonomy really is an issue, there are more creative ways of reducing players wealth. How about a gang of bandits that actually doesnt die as soon as you look meanly at them?

Edit: some spelling.

[NickD]

Very few people who were actually around when the old weapon breakage scripts were in are the ones saying weapon breakage is a good thing.

Personally, I'm not strickly opposed to it as long as it isn't completely random. But then I'm not strictly opposed to tiredness, hunger and toilet break scripts either. I think we should either go fully micro management or avoid it completely.

[Audark]

I do not believe weapon breakage adds anything but a hinderance to gameplay. ALFA is an RP centric community, but it isn't a sim. This does not need to be coded in for people to RP their axe being notched in battle, or sharpening their sword with a whetstone (both of which i have seen doen in the last couple days).

While I agree it may add to realism, I do not think it is necessary in the slightest. PCs are unique adventurers of skill, and it would make absolutely no sense for these characters to not take care of their gear, especially during the time a player is offline. I would say leave the condition of weapons to emotes, if I lost even one weapon I would be royally frustrated.

Furthermore this idea alters gameplay enough that I would hope it be put to a vote by the entire community before such a system was implemented. I for one would not especially wish to play on a server with any chance of weapon breakage, no matter how remote.

[ç i p h é r]

I'm not advocating it one way or the other, although I personally do like the concept. What I'm trying to do here is collect enough feedback to arrive at a reasonably good system. I'd poll the community at large to gather yet another data point for consideration, but I'm not sure I have polling rights in the general discussion forum. I'll check it out, but if I don't, can someone with permissions help me set this up?

Joos, I'm not at all familiar with the "old scripts" so I have no basis upon which to draw judgements on them (but feel free to share the specifics of how it worked if you know). Just because we're talking about the same concept does not mean it has to work the same way however. If it was an entirely poor implementation, I don't think it's fair to simply conclude that the concept is a bad one. Your objection seems to be strongly based on the rate of breakage, which is a common theme on this thread.

I think an easy solution to that problem would be to only allow for "critical breakage" once the weapon has achieved a certain level of wear (ie material is sufficiently weakened over time to suffer possible breakage). But if we do that, we may want to reconsider maintenance as that has the potential to totally negate any breakage possibility. Perhaps maintenance is implied with ranks of Craft Weapon, and the more ranks you have in this skill, the slower the wear on your weapon will be - no whetstones or click fests, but breakage is inevitable, though when it happens is greatly dependent on your weapon's material and your skill. Weapons might also fetch less at the local market in proportion to the wear on them.

If we do want to introduce whetstones, its best use might be for handling the physical consequences of wear, like less damage as a result of a dull edge (bladed weapons only).

Just thinking aloud.

[Mulu]

Define value. Does CHALLENGE represent value?

No. This is an rp-based gameworld, not WoW. The only challenges here should be rp-based. It's more soap opera than military channel.

I can see the argument "having a weapon break could be a plot element" but it'd better be darn rare, and NOT require any grinding aspect, e.g. actually wasting in game time to do weapon maintenance rather than role play. Grinding is not role playing, it's just wasting time. Many of us don't have the time to waste.