I really like your idea about geographic distribution of materials influencing their price.

How about if different areas have different resources, and so the fighting style is shaped by the type of weapons that are easiest to build? A place with lots of "light" materials would develop a speedy combat style, whereas a place with "hard" materials would have really terrific armor and blunt weapons and a place with "sharp" materials would encourage characters to take advantage of damage-dealing bladed weapons.

So a foreigner would be a novel challenge in any of these places, and you'd have to rethink your strategy based on the type of gear and skills you were used to fighting. Maybe guys from the stony isle can generally tank very well, and the ninja people of the leather jungle use hand-to-hand grappling unbuff techniques and stealth.

I love the idea of weapon history. If weapons require maintenance, and can be destroyed or lost easily, then relatively few weapons will last for a long time. But once a weapon has been around for a certain amount of time, or been used for a certain amount of deeds, it is smiled upon by the gods and becomes a legendary weapon. That way, epic loot doesn't just mysteriously inhabit the world, it can be generated by historic events.

There should be no "golden hammer" which solves all problems on itself. Yet if there is any cost associated with any weapon, it is not possible to make expensive weapons suck because no1 would buy them, right:)

Solution to this problem is not a simple one, yoda says.

A) It would be extremely good for any advanced weapon to be really advanced in a some narrow area. For instance all swords do X slash damage and Y piercing damage.

But double curved sabre does XX slash damage and 10% of Y piercing damage. So it is very good against some subset of armor which is weak against slash, but pretty bad against anything else.

The more uber the gear is the more specialized it has to be or it will be good for everything.

B) It should be hard for player to use uber weapon all the time. Mostly cost wise. Lets say no matter what you hit your weapon losses some durability, to restore it you have to spend some materials to repair it.

Obviously uber-shmuber methril ultra charged plasma blade will take much more materials for repair it then rusty dagger. So you can smash barrels with plasma blade all day long, no problem, but it will cost you 3 months of work to make money to repair it.

This can really be interesting in pvp. Then you want to win so you want best weapon, but on the other hand the cost of such victory will drive to use more appropriate low cost gear depending on possible benifits of the victory. I mean whats the point wasting 100k worth of weapon durability to kill a noob with 1k worth of possible loot on him.

But you sure can plasma blade him if it really matters.

You could have a Scissors/Paper/Stone type relationship between the weapons (and armour).

For instance if you had chainmail armour you would have good protection from slashing weapons, but maybe against thin peircing weapons (eg stilleto) it would have little protection. This way if someone was useing chainmail you could switch to a peircing weapon and reduce the effectivness of their armour.

Also a long reach weapon, like a pike would be less effective against a dagger if the attacker could get close to you. On the other hand a pike would be very effective against an opponent that you could keep at a distance from you (say moveing backwards).

If you give weapons (and armour) some kind of disadvantage then you can avoid the "Uberweapon" problem as there will always be some way of negating its powers.

Sure, arrange it so that the more powerful extremes of gear are also more susceptible to the counters.

I hate coming in late on discussions like this...

Anyways, back to the original question of:

<quote>say if you combine 5 resources to make metal x, 3 metals to make crafting material y, and finally 3 crafting materials to make weapon z, then you would have completely original weapons</quote>

Lets just do some really simple math. Lets say there are 10 basic items that can make this metal x, 8 special items that could be used to make material y, and 6 rare items that go into making weapon z... then your math would look like so:

10C3 * 8C2 * 6C2

That is, 10 choose 3 * 8 choose 2 * 6 choose 2 = 50400 unique combinations for weapons. So yes, this would definatly give you a super wide range of unique choices... but the chances that you'll be able to come up with unique abilities/designes/names/etc for all of these in one lifetime is next to zero (unless you take some serious shortcuts).

So... I'm going to go on record as saying that systems like these really need to be modeled out mathematically before even bringing them up for discussion.


As a side note, I love the concept of achilles with an achilles heel. I have several units in a game i'm making that are virtually invulnerable to some types of attacks, but take 3x damage from others. It makes things fun.

Quote:Original post by Cygnus_X
I hate coming in late on discussions like this...

Anyways, back to the original question of:

<quote>say if you combine 5 resources to make metal x, 3 metals to make crafting material y, and finally 3 crafting materials to make weapon z, then you would have completely original weapons</quote>

Lets just do some really simple math. Lets say there are 10 basic items that can make this metal x, 8 special items that could be used to make material y, and 6 rare items that go into making weapon z... then your math would look like so:

10C3 * 8C2 * 6C2

That is, 10 choose 3 * 8 choose 2 * 6 choose 2 = 50400 unique combinations for weapons. So yes, this would definatly give you a super wide range of unique choices... but the chances that you'll be able to come up with unique abilities/designes/names/etc for all of these in one lifetime is next to zero (unless you take some serious shortcuts).

So... I'm going to go on record as saying that systems like these really need to be modeled out mathematically before even bringing them up for discussion.


As a side note, I love the concept of achilles with an achilles heel. I have several units in a game i'm making that are virtually invulnerable to some types of attacks, but take 3x damage from others. It makes things fun.

No, no, no, no. That is what you are mistaking. You don't making every single weapon, basically you just make a list, and the player chooses what the weapon looks like from a list, maybe make a fire sword look like water to trick an opponent, and if that becomes to common make a fire sword actually fire, and confuse them even further, or just make it your favorite style. As you said before, it would be impossible to make every single weapon, just create a useable formula that would work in every case.

I'm apprehensive about that idea.

First, the aesthetic end of it will be gruesomely cheated when every newbie makes a lousy weapon that looks like it was forged from the love of angels, and the player's inventory will soon be filled with crap that looks like spun crystal.

Second, the attributes will inevitably result in a few combinations that will be exploits. They will wreck the game, like the "level-up spells" do in Morrowind. My Morrowind character can leap tall buildings in a single bound and defeat armies of Deadra with his bare hands. If you patch it out, people will just not install that patch.

The only way to avoid that problem is to pre-emptively nerf the crap out of everything in the game, so that the weapons will be almost indistinguishable from one another, except in the gaudy, crappy appearances that players choose for them.

Quote:Original post by sanch3x

Quote:Original post by ForeverNoobie

Quote:Original post by yapposai
Weapon history:
The weapons keep some of their history. A weapon used by several powerful PKers in the past might change its change its name to "BloodSword" and be hated by NPCs. A sword used to kill 1000 orcs becomes "Orc Slayer" and have bonus stats against orcs.

I like that idea.

I don't see why the sword would get bonus stats... the blood of your enemies somehow changed the physical properties of the sword? Nah. Have some kind fear effect any orc in a certain radius of the weapon. You know so you have some "Ug burg ug nog nog" ("Damn that's the uber orc slaying sword", for those of you who don't speak fluent orcish)

15% chance to miss or something...

Neither do we see Orcs in the world...