Tilting at Windmills

I’m stuck in design quandaries.

A staple of CRPG’s is a scaling power system. It can be summed as as, with time and play the characters get stronger.

This is a necessity in a CRPG for a few reasons:

• Players need a sense of advancement, or it feels as if they’re not accomplishing anything.
• Players need challenges, and stronger foes are more challenging and interesting. They also add to the sense of advancement; players needed to play more to get to the point they could defeat these enemies.
• Items and equipment in the game need a reason to be sought after… greater power is the best reason.

This does not mean necessarily that you need to have a level system. This is just one expression of the idea of advancement and power over time. You just need to make sure that game factors scale up as you play.

At their worst, though, level systems become just another boring activity to do, namely, level up so that you can do something interesting. Many older CRPG’s suffered from this problem. Old school CRPG’s tended not to warn you about this until you found out the hard way in battle that you were in over your head.

Newer CRPG’s, especially JRPG’s, prepare you with carefully scripted and elaborate mazes of invisible walls and choices so that you are (usually) strong enough to deal with the next event upon finishing the prior one. However, there was often some gaps here that could be taken advantage of.

For example, in the original Final Fantasy, the game had seriously nasty level-grinding. You spent most of the game killing monsters for loot and experience to get strong enough to actually do the main quest lines.

However, there was one place in the game (pictured at right) that carried over into a higher-level monster band. Once you could cast Cure2 and Fire2 spells, you could take on some of the monsters here and get a far greater amount of gold and experience. (Although one fight was usually enough to seriously deplete your party, if not kill a few members.)

Anyway, on to the problems…

I think I have a pretty good model in my mind on how to do fatigue. This would replace mana as a character factor; spells cost fatigue to cast instead. Actually, most combat actions cost fatigue, which recovers slowly during combat and (probably) instantly outside of combat.

The goal is to manage fatigue well enough to avoid exhaustion, which occurs when you max out the fatigue meter (probably around 8-10 units). Exhaustion is like permanent fatigue which reduces your fatigue capacity. Spells castable only outside of combat would cost exhaustion instead of fatigue, otherwise there would be no point in applying any penalty.

Where I’m stuck is with health and wounds… The problem is, I’d like to have the number of wounds be a static small number, around 3-8. However, this does not scale very well with power.

One idea I had to deal with this was to introduce “scratches” as well as wounds. Most damage is measured in scratches; criticals do wounds. Enough scratches turns into a wound. Still, this just makes scratches a fancy way of expressing a larger value, so I’m not keen on this idea.

The main problem is, wounds really can’t be static… but I don’t want huge big counts of hits, like hit points in most CRPG’s. I’m also aware that abstracting too much can lead to an unsatisfying game experience; if players can’t measure the effect of a new weapon or suit of armor to know if it’s doing them any good, it’s liable to be frustrating.

Anyway, I’ll devote some gray cells to it this weekend… I have to find the solution!

Well, my initial attempts to transfer comments failed… it seems BlogSpot requires an ID for each post, and does not permit anonymous ones. I could just post the comments under my own ID, but that would be messy and misleading.

I’m also re-thinking how I want to do hit points in the game… I’m favoring the idea of a wound/fatigue system. Wounds and fatigue would be static; classes would not have different values. Fatigue is used for combat actions and spells, and damage is done in the form of fatigue as well. When the threshold is exceeded, a wound is inflicted, which does not recover with time, and must be healed with spells, potions, or a trip to the healer.

I’m still trying to work out the details in my mind… I need to find a way fatigue comes into play with action points and defenses. A friend of mine suggested looking at Hero Quest, an old board game / computer game that used a body point system. It gave me some good ideas, but left others undefined. For example, how do different types of armor affect damage and defense, and what makes a mace attack different from a sword attack?

Spending so much time in design is annoying, since it does not produce code, but it’s a better place to hammer out ideas… nothing is worse than having to strip down and rebuild code because you changed your mind. I’m having to do that with the prior builds and it’s grunt work to say the least.

Okay, I’ve uploaded all my old posts. I still need to upload all the comments, but I’ll take a break for the night and get to it later this week.

I also took a stab at modifying the template a bit… I wanted it a bit wider on the screen, and to throw some of my own graphics up. This will be an ongoing thing, probably.

CRPG design work continues; I’m still reworking the character data out for the changes to the spell system. In particular, I decided to add more spells, to bring the total to 64. I ended up keeping the generic school, but half the spells are very simple, and the other half are very powerful. Hopefully I have the code space to implement all the spells.

I may also change how states are tracked so that instead of tracking every potential state it just tracks around eight per character (four good, for bad). So you could only have up to four “buff” spells on any one character at any given time. This frees up some space in the data array, and introduces a decent game limitation as well.

In case you’re wondering how old blog posts are appearing, I’m having to transcribe my old Yahoo blog entries… So far I got about 13 out of 60 done.

I do intend to go back and add the comments back in, but I’ll do that after all the entries are populated. Then I’ll just make a filler comment for each one and feed the others in via import.

The Blogger Import tool is incredibly unreliable, incidentally.

You may have noticed the format’s changed a bit… I decided to publish to my web domain instead of on Blogspot. I have the space, so why not? I also changed the URL and threw an index page on my original domain to direct here.

My old Yahoo blog is gone; I deactivated it earlier. I have back-ups of the entries, and I”ll get them in here by hook or by crook…

Also, this is NOT the final appearance, I plan on customizing it when I have time.

Additional: I’ve been thinking about getting rid of the Monk… he’s kind of a dull class, since he can’t use any equipment at all, and I’d have to special-code some kind of advancement system for his melee damage into my now level-less system.

Actually, I think I need to alter the magic system as well. My original plan was that certain classes had certain schools of magic (originally one each), and that tomes of spells would be equipped like weapons or armor that would give you your current spell list. If there were spells in the tome that were restricted from the character’s class, they would not be available.

I wrote up the code for spell list determination, and it was pretty nasty… a lot of complicated error checking. So something more simple seems ideal. Instead I may have each tome “teach” the player all the spells he can learn when he uses it. Each character then has their own “known spells” list.

I’m also considering eliminating one school of magic, the basic one that has the weakest spells that anyone can cast. Instead I can either add additional spells to the other schools (which is problematic because there’s seven other schools, and adding a seventh spell brings the spell count to 49… off a byte boundary), or I can maybe add multi-school spells…

Got to mull on this one for a bit.

Did some more design work on the CRPG… I’m facing a bunch of regression work I’ll have to do before I can code new stuff. I also decided I wanted to add SOME randomness to combat… but for ranged attacks.

In many CRPG’s, ranged weapons are very imbalanced because you can hit your enemies from far away with a lot less risk of taking damage yourself in the process. Many use ammunition to try and reduce their effectiveness, but even this is not always enough. A common tactic in Tunnels of Doom was to use a Weapon Honing touchstone to increase a sling’s damage. A sling had unlimited ammo, so the effect was a powerful ranged weapon with no limitations.

I decided to add a static miss chance for ranged weapons and spells that target locations. The exact amount I haven’t decided upon; my initial thought is 50%, but I may lower it down to 25% if it proves too much. The Ranger class, which is the master of ranged weapons, ignores the miss chance, and the Warlock class ignores it for targeted spells. Spells with an area effect, like fireball, don’t have miss chances, nor do spells that target specific enemies.

I also decided to throw in a resist defense for debuff spells, which inflict negative states. Much like other defenses, if you have a spare action, you can “resist” it. Debuff spells can also be blocked with a foci, the sorcery-equivalent of a shield or off-hand item.

I should take a moment to detail the classes…

• Fighter – Best melee combat skills, can wear any armor, use shields, and gets a free parry every combat round. No sorcery skills.
• Rogue – High critical melee chance, can wear cloth or leather, use one-handed weapons and a few ranged ones. High skill at disarming traps and unlocking doors. No sorcery, but can use scrolls, and is able to sense secrets and traps at all times.
• Wizard – Best spell selection (four schools), can wear cloth, use a foci, and use limited weapons. Can use scrolls. Gets a free resist every combat round.
• Ranger – Best ranged weapon skills, can wear up to hide armor, use a decent spread of weapons and can cast two schools of sorcery. Ignores the miss chance with ranged weapons.
• Paladin – Decent combatant, with high defenses. Can wear up to plate armor, use shields, use good amount of melee weapons but few ranged. Can cast two schools of sorcery. Gets a free block every combat round.
• Warlock – Strong spellcaster (three schools), like a wizard but more focused on damage and debuff. Ignores the miss chance for targeted spells.
• Crusader – Good spellcaster (two schools), with a lot of martial skills. Can use shields or foci, and wear up to mail armor. Can parry targeted spells and block area spells with a shield.
• Monk – Fights only with bare hands and with no armor other than cloth. Gets a free evade every combat round, and bare hands damage scales up over time. Can also parry ranged attacks.
• Hero – This class is only available if you opt to have a one-man party. They basically are the everyman class, able to cast every spell, use any item, etc. They also have higher health and mana than any other class, and get one free defense of each type every combat round.

I’m not going into detail on the magic system quite yet… I had originally intended it to be more free-form than class-based, but it still works all right in its original incarnation.

Welcome to the new home of “Tilting at Windmills”… since Yahoo is finally killing their blog services, I decided to pull up stakes now and relocate.

I was never that impressed with Yahoo’s service anyway… it only allowed a single picture per entry, and only in JPG format.

I’m hoping I’ll be able to port over my old blog entries here, but Yahoo 360 is being very unhelpful in this… I set it up to download files and I just get an error page when I go there.

Anyway, stay tuned for further updates on my CRPG development.

Well, Yahoo 360 (this blog service) is coming to an end in a month or so. So I’m moving over to Blogger.

You can find my new blog at: http://adamantyr.blogspot.com/