DeciusBrutus's page

A circle oriented to north with an arrow in the center pointing the way your character is looking is an improvement over nothing.

There are ideas coming into shape that might have a pilot training program offered during the Pit Fight stage.

What are some concrete examples of features that you would like to see in such a system?

I think that t1 weapons will have BETTER base damage than t2 weapons, given the same quality. I think that there will come a point where a decision will be made between a tier upgrade and additional keywords, and for a while the additional keyword(s) will dominate.

I didn't see where damage resistance scaled with tier; is a reference available?

Secondary resistances have IIRC already been discussed; they add to your defense value for the purpose of determining the duration of the effect.

e.g. if you have bleed resist 16, an attack that was 9 below your defense value would do 85% of the hit damage but only apply 75% of the bleed; if the attack roll was 12 over the defense value, full damage on the hit but 90% of the bleed.

And teamwork is more important than ever: I predict massive coordination where one character puts a debuff on an opponent and another immediately drops an attack that takes advantage of that new debuff.

Oh, and the case remains rather much like tabletop in terms of the number of conditions in effect; things like Protection from Evil, bleed damage, being flanked, threatening, fear effects and fatigue effects all play together.

Dancing and oratory don't physically occupy your hands the same way as an instrument, but barring a special ability like Sword Dance, they do typically prevent you from fighting while you're performing.

Not only can Pathfinder bards sing, orate, and/or dance while fighting, they are better fighters while doing so. (As a supernatural ability)

@KarlBob Depending on your interpretation of quantum mechanics, reality could be 'turn-based' by that definition. (With each turn lasting one plank time).

I'm a little concerned with pacing; are players expected to identify and react to status changes basically instantly, and are we expected to learn what every animation signifies?

Skwiziks wrote:

Hmm, complex but manageable. Intriguing.

Will players be able to "build" attacks through a combination of stems and affixes?

But to answer your question... maybe, eventually.

Perhaps as the highest focus ability (or whatever the term is that replaced capstone)?

You don't need to execute a rollback to fix the economy. If it's the result of poor balancing of faucets and drains, simply re-adjust them. If it's due to abusing a bug, then make stuff disappear.

Being wrote:

Yeah he is notorious for that. Encyclopedic.

There's a reason I put a very high priority on infiltrating his company, and it has absolutely nothing to do with doing any harm to said company.

To be fair, said infiltration consisted of two steps: 1. Wanting to. 2. Complete an application.

The restrictions of alignments on each social group are of concern to us all. One compromise position I can find would be to allow either a small percentage (5-10%) or small number of the residents of a settlement to have excessive alignment variance; there are lot of complicating factors in that solution.

A different solution would be to penalize the settlement (by reducing the alignment-based bonuses) for each character (or charter company?) misaligned.

Either way, one could be evicted for changing alignment, but that would be an active decision by the settlement leader, not an automatic penalty for crossing an alignment threshold.

I see lots of room for dual-wielding two weapons that synergize with each other.

What about non-weapon attacks? Will there be as many options for wand attacks?

DeciusBrutus wrote:

Running the math, it looks like someone with throwaway weapons will be virtually ineffective against someone with mid-range armor, and literally ineffective versus someone with top-tier armor. If you are risking literally noting and your opponent is risking as much as possible, then you will be completely ineffective. Don't compare a free BB from Eve, compare the free starter ships that Eve actually has.

No, that maths was flawed since it was under optimal circumstances for the overleveled one and getting a lvl 4 sword or just get something that deals elemental damage instead will be enough to penetrate almost all armor in the game.(Based on their numbers) And please don't bring up possible mechanics they haven't talked about that probably wont be in. Or do you honestly think that they allow you to protect your gear to prevent griefing but at the same time gives some a sunder ability to just ignore this mechanic?

What makes you think that flaming swords will be easy to thread, or that having trash armor and even the best weapons will make you a threat to someone with great armor and great weapons? There might be a zone where one can risk nothing and be practically ineffective rather than literally ineffective.

Oh, and the numbers I ran were for longsword vs. medium armor, on the assumption that medium armor will be roughly equally as effective against energy damage as it is against physical damage. If that is the case, and energy damage is common, I predict that medium armor will be most popular.

Threading is not about stopping griefing, it's about making losing fun instead of frustrating; players revive with at least some minimal equipment to make a corpse run.

I also suspect that most PvP will be subsidized by settlements with gatherers and crafters; those settlements have a vested interest in their armies being as effective as possible, and skilled players will probably have easy access to the best equipment their group has to offer, including replacements when required. Warfare isn't just about the quality of the players fighting the battles, it's also about the ability of the social group to provide and replace equipment.

I would not be surprised to learn that a game might have that kind of functionality build in. "Random" numbers in computer software has always been a sore point because there really isn't such a thing as a random number. And random number simulation can get funky.

I remember in City of Heroes, they had to introduce a "streak breaker" functionality into the to-hit calculations because people were observing that they would occasionally miss a lot more than their to-hit chance would indicate. This was scoffed at as superstition at first, but I guess the RNG was quirky enough that the developers eventually felt the need to compensate for it.

The Streak Breaker would scale with your to-hit chance, I don't remember the specifics, but at 95% chance to hit, it would cut in after missing five times in a row, and make the next hit an automatic hit.

It's one thing to complain about missing twice in a row with 95% to-hit, but it's expected roughly once for every 400 attacks. I doubt that there was any significant streak-causing behavior in their RNG, because I think the same function was called for everybody, rather than creating an instance for each entity. If there was a streak effect, it would manifest as two actors getting rare results at the same time, rather than one getting consecutive rare results.

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Dario wrote:

That's not the only way.

You're right. I try to avoid using absolutes, and this reminds me why.

I think it makes a lot of sense to let the players fund the development of additional races. I'd love to see them have something like an open-ended Kickstarter, where the development work would proceed once the appropriate funding level was met. I think charging for access to those races after they've been developed is perfectly reasonable as well.

Interesting concept; how much would you estimate the work required for a new race would be?

Fermi estimate: Assuming high-quality experienced artists at every stage, not trying to do anything revolutionary, plus a negligible fracion of a manager:

1 week (3 man-weeks) to develop all of the concept art; 1/3 week (1 man-week) to develop each basic mesh, then 1/3 day (1 man-day) for each animation with each existing equipment mesh, making sure that it exists and doesn't clip too badly.

Figure each archetype has 5 distinctly different animations, plus twenty emotive animations, each of which has to work with 6 different armor meshes and 10 different weapon meshes. (They have to test all of these combinations because there WILL be someone who notices and complains that a troll wizard casting fireball in sexy heavy armor with a double-ax cuts his arm off if they don't.)
(11*5+20)*6*10+15+20=5000 man-days spent on the project. Figure the quality of artist specified costs $40/hour for 8-hour days, and the total cost of developing the art for a new race is on the order of $200,000.

Checking the stretch goals from the KS, a race was added at $60,000 over the funding goal, in addition to hiring Chris Pramas for the Emerald Spire at +$50k. Guess $14k for the cost of of Chris, $6k for the overhead of the KS, and Gnomes were estimated to cost about $40k to develop.

I don't think that there's a price point for a new race that would allow the development costs to be met only by the MTX selling the race.

Consumables aren't a major coin drain, because they aren't literally made out of coin. Try comparing them to ammunition in Eve in terms of cost.

Running the math, it looks like someone with throwaway weapons will be virtually ineffective against someone with mid-range armor, and literally ineffective versus someone with top-tier armor. If you are risking literally noting and your opponent is risking as much as possible, then you will be completely ineffective. Don't compare a free BB from Eve, compare the free starter ships that Eve actually has.

Ideally an abusive settlement would become vacant when the major powers decided to excommunicate them.

Bardic casting has more in common with sorcery than wizardry. I'm not sure how to implement sorcery with the other announced features.

As currently discussed, wizards can change spells by swapping equipment. To remain different, bards should not swap equipment to change spells. It should be harder to change bard spells, in addition to those spells being different in nature. Additionally, bard weapon abilities should be different in nature from fighter weapon abilities.

I would hate to force a choice between weapon-bard and instrument-bard, but I don't want to deny the effectiveness of the pure-instrument bard. Allowing for equipment which is weapon and/or instrument gives the full range of options from greatax-orator through song blades to the one-man-band.

DeciusBrutus wrote:

The fair value falls somewhere between the expected return of each of the two parties if the negotiation fails; at those offer points, both parties should either prefer the SAD offer or prefer to duke it out.

Any point where one party wants the SAD but the other would rather fight is clearly not a fair offer.

Incorrect. This only means that one party does not agree with the offer. It says nothing about the "fairness" of that offer.

The only fair offer is one that is given and accepted. In these cases, both sides came to the same conclusion, it was fair, otherwise no agreement would have been met.

"Fair" is not objective, but subjective to the participants. If they mutually agree, I conclude that they prefer the deal to the alternative.

The other type of fair deal is one that both parties find unacceptable; they instead mutually choose to fight.

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It would be interesting if there are enough ways to specialize that different companies have radically different effectiveness in different situations.

Welcome Rinn, and thanks for joining the conversation.

First, I strongly suspect that bardic music will affect significantly less than "all allies who can perceive the performance". However, the various defined social structures provide a quick (if not always accurate) way to figure out allies.

I'm rooting for instruments to be viable replacements for swords and wands, not spellbooks. Among other things, that introduces the concept of the axe-axe.

I'm not sure what advantage, if any, would be served by knowledge mechanics. Since that is a big part of what the bard does in many PnP games, it makes sense to have a situationally useful knowledge ability that does something that neither Google nor global chat can duplicate. Perhaps they could gain information about dungeons and ruins without delving bodily into them; knowing "this is the lair of a den of ice wolves" provides specific concrete advantages.

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It would be nice to have some kind of acknowledgement that I'm missing a large fraction of my field of view along with kinesthetic information and small details that help to establish location and orientation.

Implementation could be any combination of a compass, indications of things both in and out of my field of view, or automated maps and localizing.

At the very least, recognize that third-party software will exist and attempting to fight it is a losing proposition; players who choose so will be aware of their character's surroundings regardless.

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I don't see how goblins could be implemented in a manner that is both intrinsically different from PCs and can benefit from the same development.

Goblin settlements that are just reskinned player settlements aren't interestingly different, and if the goblin settlements have different effectiveness at the same thing that PC settlements have, then goblins become just another PC race without particularly special properties.

You can't have special things in a MMO be accessible even to everyone who wants them. SWG limited Jedi rather strictly, with hard and uncertain prerequisites. Perhaps some kind of limit well beyond self-selection combined with monstrous players being radically different could satisfy most advocates here.

Oh, I'm considering the effects of things that work outside of sword-hitting. I'm still assuming that a group that can reduce the HP of the other group to zero first wins (counting an 'opponent retreats' result as a win, even with abilities that modify every aspect of that.

For what it's worth, I don't think that Fighter abilities should simply do more damage, but should limit the ability of the target to do what they want. Reducing enemy stamina directly is just the simplest way I can conceive of to do that.

@Decius

The revocation of the sponsorship you mean, it has since been stated this just means they need to go find another settlement. This you believe is the worst thing that could happen to them?

When your settlement sponsors a company the reputation of your settlement is in that companies hands and any ill will they generate will reflect on your settlement. That is how a company affects your settlement

If it's easy to find another settlement to sponsor you, that's because there's little harm that you are expected to offer. It can't be both ways.

The fair value falls somewhere between the expected return of each of the two parties if the negotiation fails; at those offer points, both parties should either prefer the SAD offer or prefer to duke it out.

Any point where one party wants the SAD but the other would rather fight is clearly not a fair offer.

Are you asking for the political emergence to have rules set by the game developers?

There will probably be additional ways to get into Early Enrollment, but we don't know the details.

Revoking the charter is what the settlement does when all other sanctions have failed; there's nothing worse that can be done.

What can the company do to make the settlement look bad, or otherwise affect it?

Different tier armor shifts the x-axis; different tier weapons are more complicated.

What's wrong with forcing the owner of the items to contract somebody to move their stuff?

Any settlement that abuses people will stop being a settlement soon enough.

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It will take a long time for the theme park MMO to finish dying. WoW isn't goin to shut down anytime soon, but they have passed the point where they can adapt to a changing market.

Doesn't Python have a 'median' function that returns the median value directly (Rather than taking the sum and dropping the min and max)?

Or you could go the easy way: for every attackroll from 1-200, calculate the damage done if that value is rolled, multiply by the frequency of that attack roll in that tier, sum, then divide by 8m to get the average. That way your cluster is only doing 200 square roots for each x-value rather than 10,000.

There are ways to optimize it down to about 300-400 square roots for the entire graph; just cover all of the in-domain values of the attack roll+attack bonus-defense bonus-tier bonus once, and then figure the frequency of each outcome based on that.

DeciusBrutus wrote:

I don't see why your RP choices should it could alter your combat effectiveness.

I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to communicate here.

Sorry: "Should or could". My phone often ignores what I type and outputs what it decides I wanted, despite very rarely being right.

Basically, your RP choices don't consume XP, so they shouldn't effect your skill training. Character concept, of course, can effect both RP choices and skill training choices; if you want to be a noncombatant politician or crafter, you can make roleplaying choices not to be a combatant along with skill training choices not to be a combatant.

I think that there are two conflicting uses of "immunity from bounties and curses".

The first is that an assassin in a mask cannot have a bounty or curse issued on him as a result of things he did while wearing the mask.

The second interpretation is that bounties, contracts, and/or curses cannot be collected on the character while he is wearing the mask.

I would also implement a requirement that a mask may only be donned or removed in a secure area, perhaps a specialty assassin structure. A disguise can also be donned at the same time, and the disguise conceals the mask until the disguise is broken.

The activity required from a leader to provide their bonus should require their clear identity be used. That activity might only need to happen 1/week or however often, but if you're out not administering your business it should matter what face you wear.

If your doctrine and training proves as good as your confidence indicates it will, I might be interested in adapting it to a wider audience.

Give a man a fish, &tc.

I will probably make a character that specializes or generalizes in PvE, most likely a hybrid caster.

I suspect that you might have a problem with an over abundance of groups, all of which want to kill the dragon and take its stuff.

I don't see why your RP choices should it could alter your combat effectiveness.

I wouldn't hold ceremonies in war zones or other dangerous areas anyway. Also, neither I nor my character has a problem with wedding guests being armed. You'd be surprised how much you can carry in a tux or dress.

Wearing an assassin's mask costs you all of your threads for the duration.

That cost is the penalty of a death curse...

@cartomancer: Right. I would go one further though; one skill would be 'evade and escape' but offer several different abilities, while the other skill would be 'tracking', and would likewise have several abilities available. The two skill trees could even share prerequisites and intertwine; spotting where a good hiding place could be is the same action, whether you're looking for a place to hide or looking for the place where someone hid, and likewise for rapidly leaving an area.

If this were Thief Online, I'd suggest making those skills and abilities very detailed and complicated. The focus is on other things, and the trackers will also have to be combatants.

Given the cost of the assassin's mask, I doubt that this scenario will come up in non-contrived circumstances. That said, I think that someone who holds a bounty or assassination contract for someone who is wearing an assassin's mask should not be able to collect.

My primary basis for that is that a significant portion of bounty hunting is the death curse mechanic, giving the bounty hunter more than the usual amount of equipment from the target. A significant portion of the assassin's mask is destroying all of the assassin's equipment, preventing any of it from falling into enemy hands. Those two effects are directly contradictory, and the assassin's mask requires a significantly greater investment to use.

Reasonable people might disagree with my reasoning and/or conclusion.

The results (if not how to get them) can be explained to just about anyone literate enough to use a calculator.

To use the rainbow graph, first estimate the difference between the attacker's attack skill and the defender's defense skill. Find that point on the horizonal line. Then estimate the difference between the attacker's base damage and the defender's damage resistance on the vertical line.

At that intersection, the color indicates your average damage per attack; find where that color appears on the key to the right to get your answer.

Part of the conclusions I draw from that is that if the attacker is just barely penetrating armor, an extra point of damage is worth a very large attack skill drop. Noting that a keyword is worth 5 extra points of damage there, I can estimate that I might prefer adding the 'sharp' keyword to a longsword (+5 to damage) over 'accurate' (+25 attacker skill) so long as the total damage remains below about 70 and skills are in the same league.

What interests me the most is figuring how how to model the effects and benefits of non-weapon attacks; the arcane spell flare strikes me as one of the tabletop elements that transfers very easily and has interesting effects.

Nihimon will add your Guild to the Guild Recruitment & Helpful Links list shortly. If you have a brief description you'd like to appear there to let people know about your guild while they're browsing that list, just PM him or post a clear request here.

Also, The Seventh Veil welcomes you to the community, and extends an offer of Diplomatic Outreach. (Note, this is not an offer for Alliance, just a way to open formal channels for private discussions.)

There should be no two points such that one of them is within the zone which the attacker must occupy to capture, the other is within the zone that the defender may occupy to deny the capture, and line of sight does not exist between the two zones.

I.e. if you are trying to capture and being blocked, then you have line of sight to the character blocking you.

DeciusBrutus wrote:

Consider the variant where a single living defender in the zone prevents all progress towards the capture, which has to start again after the defender is eliminated.

There would have to be the possibility of the attackers exerting enough control to keep defenders from entering and resetting the timer.

Yeah, that's the system described in the blog: Have someone in the area for a consecutive minute while no defenders are in the area.

I specifically think that "We kept an average of 21 people alive in the zone for a minute while you averaged 20, therefore we win." is not a good summary of a battle.

Yes the skill is less important. Heck they could even be entirely different skills or a set of skills. I just think it would be neat to have Counter Measures to weapons.

So if you consider Tracking a Weapon. If I am a Master of Tracking I should be able to hunt you down very efficiently.

Then their should be a skill to counter tracking, separate from stealth. where stealth lets you remain hidden and unseen for combat or sneaking around. There should be an ability to make you hard to find, or track down.

So if you are a Master at "going underground (hider for shortness of term)" it should be nigh impossible to hunt you down and find you.

Then if a Master Tracker hunts down a Master Hider there ability sort of cancel out so the Tracker is tracking the hider at average efficiency and the hider is remaining underground from the tracker at average efficiency.

Expand the scope; if searching is the counter to hiding, fleeing could be the counter to searching. Chasing could be the counter to fleeing, hiding the counter to chasing, and searching remains the counter to hiding.

The hunter must choose between chasing with speed and searching the area carefully; the hunted must choose between fleeing and hiding.

Two choices cannot mutually counter each other; if the way to find someone who is hiding is with tracking, then the way to escape someone tracking you cannot be to hide.

Maybe I'm looking at this wrong: How much lead time is required to change or reduce the PvP window? As a settlement loses control of POIs and wilderness hexes, the capping of DI will be a smaller disincentive and the benefits of more defenders become more and more attractive.

I love the implications for a defense-in-depth strategy, where a nation has a shell of either member settlements or pets with low DI and full factional protection surrounding a few high-value settlements.

GrumpyMel wrote:

Also, you may want to think about the actual "Hall Capture" mechanism a bit. The "1 guy doing an action uninterrupted for x seconds" seems like it might be a bit gamey/quirky/simplistic. I've seen some FPS games use what I think are better capture mechanics. Usualy it's something like each active defender in the area pushes a capture meter 1 tick toward the defenders side, each active attacker in the area pushes the capture meter one tic toward the attackers side.

Yeah, this seems like a better mechanic to me, too.

Consider the variant where a single living defender in the zone prevents all progress towards the capture, which has to start again after the defender is eliminated.

I'm cautious against any mechanic that allows for the victory condition to be met without actually winning the battle. (Reference the last battle of Dragon Army in Ender's Game.)

Zoomed In (scale changes on zooming)

Nice. Can you do the first and second derivitives with respect to the skill advantage of the attacker?

DeciusBrutus wrote:

In all cases, adding an equal number of equal-tier keywords to both the attacker's weapon and defender's armor favors the defender...

Is that what you intended to say?

My understanding was that it would favor the attacker.

Derp. Yes.

I'm also seeing that a masterwork longsword vs. masterwork heavy armor is significantly better (~70% more damage) than a longsword with no keywords vs heavy armor with no keywords. That drops to about 32% more damage if you give both weapons and armors 6 common keywords.

The percentage effect is significantly lower on light armor, although the absolute magnitude of is higher. In all cases, adding an equal number of equal-tier keywords to both the attacker's weapon and defender's armor favors the defender, because the only result is effectively a base damage increase.

Abilities which alter the defenders damage resistance by a percentage change this, provided that they increase it by enough.

@Nightdrifter:

Rather than running more than 200 rolls, try figuring the damage for each of the 200 possible outcomes of the attack roll and take the weighted average, using the likelihood of that outcome as the weighing factor? (The discussion thread of the blog post has the likelihoods of each roll for each tier of weapon).

I'd like to see the delta-DPS for +1 attacker skill, as a function of the difference between attacker skill and defender skill. Right now my gut and initial checks indicate that the best returns of +1 attack or +1 defense are roughly when attacker skill is ~10 above defense skill for T1 weapons and armor.

ASSUMPTION: There might exist weapons with lower base damage but higher damage factors than the longsword (and vice versa).

Conclusion: There could be weapons which could be more effective than the longsword against opponents with low physical resistance but less effective than the longsword against opponents with high physical resistance.

Further assumption: All weapons gain the same +5/+20 to base damage from having applicable common/masterwork keywords
Further conclusion: Keywords will provide a larger percentage increase to weapons with lower base damage, and a lower percentage increase to weapons with higher base damage.

Unless more information is revealed, I'm going to consider attack abilities which modify the die roll/attacker skill, modify the base damage (before keywords) by multiplication, modify the damage factor by addition, and/or bypass a percentage of Damage Resistance. On the radar is non-physical damage types.