Sounds neat to me.

Its definitely better than Diablo''s durability system. If you stand still and swing a weapon a bunch of times, you can break it yourself, without hitting anything. I think it just uses a "swing" counter.

Either way, very indepth and well thought out.


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Use play balancing judiciously to make sure that gear has high enough HP to not break quickly. Part of "growing up" in an RPG is being able to explore farther and farther from safe places for long periods of time.

The fact that items degrade and need repair opens the door to a couple opportunities:

1)NPC smiths/tailors/carpenters could specialize in only being able to repair certain types of materials.

2)Players themselves could learn how to do makeshift repairs when on the road.

3)If the players can learn to mend their own gear, then the difficulty of each material scales up as well. The player may choose to use his weaker wood staff since he can repair any damage, but whips out his iron staff for the risky encounters.

And in a general design standpoint, I like that it is not just gear that makes the man, or just leveling. A player may find a situation is too risky for either reason. If a degradation system is used, make sure that the inconvenience is balanced by opportunity and development.

As for items degrading in combat effectiveness, I would say no.
The only exception I would make is within the degridation system itself. Example: If the attacker has a metal sword(4) and is slashing at a wood shield(3), the sword is slowly damaging the shield''s HP. If the sword was down to 75% if its HP remaining, then lower its damage dealt to the shield. Basically, a dull sword will wear down things slower. It still has the benefit of high HP (durability) and a high rating (strength) but needs to be sharpened often to be the most useful. This is a weapon-only trait.

The flipside of this is that if a player that invests in strong armor can try to wear down the enemy''s weapons through defense. Outlast, outlive.

CDV

Yeah, sounds good. Once you''re careful to test and balance comprehensively it should add a nice touch of realism without being annoying.

You could tie the weapon type vs armour type system in with your combat system - save duplication. Similar to the AD&D system where certain categories of weapon get a bonus to hit against certain types of armour - like the hammer vs leather/plate example you mentioned. Just use the same realationships for combat bonuses as for wear/tear effects.

A few other simple ideas, depnding on your game type/paradigm:
*Environmental interaction. Have the weapon get damaged if the player bangs it off walls too often, maybe depending on the wall''s material. No great gameplay effect (I think) but a nice touch of realism - normally in games you can batter the walls all you like with no effect. Might have an effect if the player is trying to find secret passages/destructable walls - they''ll be more careful.
*Other damage effects. There''s an optional rule in AD&D for the effect of things like spells/breath weapons on equipment PCs are carrying. You could use this, for example, to simiulate damage to the player''s weapon if he''s hit by a spell, caught in an explosion, breathed on a dragon, long fall, lava/acid, etc.
*New gameplay elements. As Warsong002 mentioned, this system makes room for new skills for repair and the like. It might also lead to new combat strategies where people take advantage of weapons'' fragility - eg using weapons like sword breakers, using aggressive blocking, deliberately targeting someone''s weapon, etc.

Yes, it would probably work if you balanced it right, so that it wasn''t too annoying, having to repair every 10 mins, but also don''t make it so long that you just repair whenever you see a blacksmith and its all good.

I think I might use an idea like this if I ever make a game, because I also plan on making the weapon/armor system sorta like Legend of Mana (Seiken Densetsu III) for the PSX. In that game, you could forge your own items out of any metal, stone, or wood (for bows). Then, you could temper in various items to enhance the power of the equipment. I plan on doing something like this, maybe not tempering in elemental coins, like LoM, but I want a very complex, yet easy to use, system, and this durability thing seems to add to the overall idea. You might be thinking how can you make it very complex, but easy to use? Well, think of all the Capcom fighting games (street fighter, etc). Any newbie could walk up and start punching the other guy in the face and it was fun. But then an expert walks up and puts his coin in, and does a 66 hit combo with an air finish (I dont know) and massacres the newbie. Well, same idea.

Also, for this, make the stronger weapons take longer comparatively. IE- wood weapon fighting wood armor would take, say, 30 minutes before they needed to repair. But Titanium Blessed Invulnerable Indestructable Godly Adamantite Power Sword of Unbreakable Strength would take a month of straight fighting to break, even if it was put up against armor of the same quality. (Okay, maybe not so exaggerated - a plain titanium, or very strong material in your game, would take say 2-3 hours to break) Basically, you want the player to feel rewarded after finding the best treasure - it feels like an extremely powerful weapon should kill in one hit and never break, so make it like that. Also, one thing I hate from Ultima Online, is that weapons total durability goes down each time you repair it. Dont do that - make it perfectly new after each repair, so you don''t get people saying "Damn, I don''t want to use my awesome new weapon to kill these crazy powerful monsters, because I''ll have to repair it and it will break eventually. Therefore I''ll save it and use my peashooter." Trust me on that one - it sucks to have repairing it weaken it.

sounds like a good idea, but the HP system doesn´t do much better than diablo´s in regards to realism.

Here´s a few thoughts on real life swords and armor:

Plate armor doesn´t break, but gets dented. If it´s dented it´s still usable, it just doesn´t look as good. If the dent is deep enough it becomes impossible to wear it, if you hammer it out it becomes usable again. If plate armor becomes pierced (the next worse damage after dented) it still retains most of its integrity and protection (unless the enemy hits the exact same spot again) - a hole in the armor would reduce its effectiveness by something around 1%. For a piece of armor (assuming that you´d use pieces for each part of the body instead of whole suits) to break a lot of piercing and denting attacks would have to have been made - many more than the wearer could survive.
Chainmail or leather armor work differently, since chainmail offers very little protection against piercing and blunt attacks damage effects such as holes don´t play a large role.
Leather armor is usually boiled leather (-> rigid), so the effects could be similar to plate, with the added feature of hacking pieces out of or off it.

my point: don´t let armor break, but slowly decrease its protection factor and increase negative effects (decreased movement due to bent or mismatching joints, npc reaction modifiers due to obvious wear or neglect, etc.). And let the player know the exact status of their armor, if the player has feedback he´ll be inclined to maintain (yup, oil it regularly or it will get rusty and move less easily) and repair his armor.
I´m not saying that armor can´t break, it´s just that the wearer will die long before that happens.


Swords:
Basically the same goes for swords, a sword can get nicked and bent. Nicks occur naturally when hitting another sword or parrying with the sword, bending occurs mostly through wrong usage (parrying or hitting with the broad side, etc.).
Nicks or even larger holes in the edge of the sword don´t affect it´s effectiveness by much, as a large part of the damage comes from the impact, not the cutting/slashing. Furthermore these are easily repaired with a whetstone.
Bending would affect the balance of the weapon, making it more difficult to wield.
Breaking occurs only in special situations: one possibility (frequent) is that the sword is of poor manufacture and the repeated stress of usage has weakened some part, usually the part of the grip just above the pommel (don´t ask me why, but that´s where they break).
Another possiblity is that you´ve hit something very solid (such as a rock), if the blade isn´t strong enough (and the strike is powerful enough) it will simply snap. The same goes for thrusting, if you hit something unyielding hard enough the blade will either bend or snap.
Blade-on-blade breaking occurs only very, very rarely and is probably not a factor in regard to realism. It would be cool however to have some sort of check (weapon strength vs. weapon strenght) to see if a very powerful attack can shatter the opponents weapon.

Again, don´t let swords deteriorate and break, let them deteriorate and have negative effects. A sword can become nicked, bent and rusty, it may even break. But breaking occurs due to the situation and quality of manufacture of the sword, not the overall status of the weapon. This would give you the opportunity for greater diversity - the players could choose from similar weapons of different manufacture (instead of the usual "Sword", "Sword+1", etc.) which might even react different to different situations (i.e. particularly hard steel: will not get bent or nicked easily, stays keen for longer but may break more easily). Maintenance would again be a factor, possibilities rangeing from keeping the blade keen and clean to letting the blacksmith repair chips and dents or even reforge it.