I was thinking what was wrong with my fave CRPG, Fallout 2. I thought, and i thought some more. Then i figured it out! Its just no fun when i''m running around in Advanced Power Armor and 150+ Hitpoints. The baddies don''t even TOUCH me. So i thought of a way to fix this major problem in almost all (C/MMO)RPGs in some way or another. A few simple, basic rules. --YOU DO NOT GAIN F**KING HITPOINTS! --ARMOR IS NOT INVULNERABLE AND DEGRADES UNDER HEAVY FIRE! --A WOUND WILL BLEED UNTIL BANDAGED! --THE BADDIES HAVE THE SAME WEAPONS OR BETTER AT ANY POINT! Anyway, thoughts on these radical ideas? or do you need me to clarify them with less Caps Lock? -Run_The_Shadows -Run_The_Shadows@excite.com

I think the funnest part in RPG is to pick fights against everything. Think about Fallout or Diablo without useless fights?
It''s fun to fight in rpgs and it gives you feeling that you char is good when you smash army of bandits. I don''t know would that be fun, then, probably not. In my opinion fighting belongs to increase-attribute rgps as fist in your eye

Time comes, time goes and I only am.

Hey, there are RPGS without figths -> Adventure games and they aren''t fun. Probably Adventures with attributes and exp.

Ok, a dose of reality:

First off, armor doesn''t just "DAMAGE" it has certain things to it that matter. Now, let''s go with Fallout as an example. Power armor merely offers you protection by basically wrapping you in some kinda uranium-enriched armor casing with powered hydraulics to assit in movement. This is roughly the armor of today''s M1A2 Abrams battle tank. Depleated Uranium Enriched armor is HIGHLY expensive and HIGHLY portective. Let''s take a look at shell size vs damage impact on this armor..
Glock 9 mm, insignificant.
UZI 9 mm, insignificant with chances you''ll catch a bullet bouncing off.
.357 magnum, slight scratch.
.44 magnum, see .357 magnum.
.50 cal machine gun, see .44 magnum.

Ok, so we''ve established that small-arms fire is useless against this type of armor. Now, heavy stuff..
Mortar, slight dent
Hellfire Missle, dent with possible internal component damage, no armor pierced
Armor-piercing Missle, big dent with internal damage, possible breech of armor depending on warhead
Nuke, do i really need to tell you?

Now, the thing you have to realize is that the ability of this armor to resist motion is massive. Anything NOT designed to pierce armor will likely not have any effect. An armor-piercing missle is a specific design which tries to puncture the armor with a thin needle-like structure on the front, to allow the blast to rip into the pre-made hole. So, how does this matter in Fallout? well.. power armor can bounce gunfire all over when it hits the armor. 95% of the missles aimed at tanks aim for the base of the turrent. that''s the weak spot. So in a game, you have to have people able to shoot the weak spots In games like Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, you aim for the head or neck. The real question is:
How do you account for aiming in an RPG where the player is NOT the character directly?
One solution is to have real-time combat with first person perspective. That way people swing at things. However, unless you used some advanced mouse tracking system, it''d still be useless. Let''s say a fighter comes up to goblin and attacks. The front-end goes to first person mode. You click the left button to mean attack with weapon in left hand, and you drag the mouse across where you want the strike to go. The computer judges the mouse movements and strikes there. This all has to be done real-time, mind you. That way, when the player sees and opening, they can counter-strike with deadly accuracy. On things other than humaniods, you have to know their weakness and strike there, lest you fall victim of not knowing what to do This uses no character skills, and allows the player the ability to actually control the character. This is but one solution, and uses a massive processor to do it.. and is currently impossible to do in MMORPGs

Invincible enemies are an old, used up excuse to things. if i can''t be invincible, neither can the enemy. We''ll use Star Wars: Phantom Menace here. There''s a part where you''re rescuing the Queen, and you''re Obi-won. You run around the city finding tanks along the way. Even with a rocket launcher, these tanks don''t die. They''re FAKE. the programmers/designers left them out of the code to make it easy on them. You''re supposed to go around them. Well, why can''t they be killed? they got blown up left and right in the movie! That''s just plain stupid to say "well, let''s make it invincible because that''s not how we want the player to go about things". It''s sad, and makes people sick. It''s nowhere near reality and just shows how LAZY the programmers and designers are. It also shows that a company is more concerned with churning out half-done projects which hold little to no interest after about 30 minutes. You want to be like this? fine.. but get off gamedev.net, because here we''re trying to change how the industry works.. not support it.

J

If RPGs should be role-playing is it roleplaying to run around and solve quests? I think that''s directly from adventure games, except you get experience and your skills are main factors in quests. So, role-playing is taking role as bar tender or shop keeper and I haven''t seen any single CRPG where you could have done that. It''s different in live roleplaying games(those guys are really freaky, they book whole hotels and shoot each others in there with crappy bullet guns) or normal p''n''p games, but in those the idea is still to waste some monsters and save the prince & stuff.

Hey Niphty, in Fallout, power armor helps to evade hits, if I recall right Advanced Power Armor MK 2 gives you 35 points of ac which is directly off from to hit. If I remember right I haven''t ever seen policeman "evading" a bullet by his kevlar west, but I have seen how policeman doesn''t get hurt when shoot, because of this west.

So armors bring protection, they are not for dodging bullets.

Time comes, time goes and I only am.