Quote:Original post by JasRonq
Swiftcoder, what do you suggest when it is the player who is against the archer and has no pals at his back (or doesn't wish to risk being the unlucky man to take the shot)?

It is the same game of stealth - flit from cover to cover, and try to flank the archer to catch him unawares at close range.

I'd like to echo sandman about balancing. If you have absorption and avoidance, and they are totally balanced, then the choice is meaningless. It's just an aesthetic choice. I think it would be more interesting to make the choice about what play style players want to use.

Some historians got the weight of armor wrong because they weighed either ornamental pieces or armor from the age after gunpowder was introduced.

They made the same mistake with swords as well.

Plate armor was really an awesome invention at it's peak. Later versions were even relatively resistant to piercing from arrows. The problem with armor is that it isn't balanced. If you had the money you would want to wear it unless you are dealing with a very specific situation where armor is not beneficial like swimming or something.

Plus if you really wanted realism you would have lines of horses attacking an enemy.

IMO you really should just focus on the game aspect. You have ranged attacks, magic and arrow. How are they different? How can players defend themselves against those attacks?

Quote:Original post by Sandman
Don't overbalance things, or decisions become unimportant. All too often I find the decision to wear armour or not in RPG games is little more than a cosmetic choice - often the advantages and penalties are too small to be of any real significance.

What if you left arrows as they are? Sure, unarmoured characters might get murdered if they charge blindly into melee with an archer. That is the price they pay for being stupid.

Armour is expensive, somewhat encumbering, and requires maintenance. But it gives you protection. If you choose to forgo that protection, then you will have to adapt your playstyle accordingly. No more bumrushing archers across open ground: you'll now have to use cover, stealth, misdirection, magic, or archery to get the drop on your enemies.

Of course there will be times when you're caught in the open and using tricks like stealth etc. will be difficult or even impossible. Tweaking the archer's accuracy characteristics could go some way towards limiting their damage. It may be that if you're far enough away, and moving quickly enough, they can't shoot accurately enough to take you out.

First off, it's totally impossible to overbalance something. It's either balanced or it's not. There is no gray area with balance. Imagine walking on a tightrope. You're either balanced and manage to walk across it, or you're not, and you fall. You can't be "overbalanced" or "underbalanced" in this situation. If you are having difficulty making it across but you still make it, then you're still balanced, you just had moments of imbalance where you had lost balance but then regained it.

Balance is 100% or 0%.

Secondly, you mention the insignificance of armor that has small advantages/disadvantages... Well this has little to do with balance at all. It has more to do with just how significant you want armor to be. If armor is nearly insignificant it won't factor into balance at all. Like you said, it's like wearing something that is purely cosmetic. This isn't for lack of balance, it's for lack of making armor significant.

If arrows are devastating to anyone who doesn't wear armor, it would be stupid to not wear armor. Not just stupid to charge at an archer when you're a melee based fighter, but stupid to even walk around anywhere without being heavily protected by armor. You're seeming to assume that archers are just going to defend and not go on the offensive.

When given the choice between ranged and melee, why would anyone choose melee? The closer anyone gets to the ranged fighter, the more accurate the ranged fighter's attacks become. So you become even more powerful in melee than when you're ranged. Especially if you're capable of firing off several arrows in a matter of seconds.

1. Melee guy running at you with no armor = dead meat
2. Melee guy coming (slowly) at you with heavy armor = you can easily outrun them anyway

So why would anyone want to wear armor and fight melee style in this situation?

It's incredibly hard to balance all of these different fighting styles so that one way doesn't have a distinct advantage. Heavy realism in combat with a wide array of weapon/armor choices means you're going to end up with people picking the most efficient/best weapon and armor. You have to break realism in order to properly balance things or else you're doomed. Not to mention you want magic, which is totally unrealistic, but you want it to fit in this realistic combat environment.

If you really made this game realistic, I'd just get a character with some light armor who has a half dozen crossbows strapped to my body and I'd just pull one off and fire it right into a guy's chest whenever I needed to. I would have fast movement speed due to my light armor and I'd have a powerful ranged weapon with multiple shots available. Any unarmored person would be toast no matter what their range, and it wouldn't even require much accuracy on my part since I just point and pull a trigger. My arrows would tear through armored opponents at close range, which means all melee classes would get destroyed.

There could be a situation where I am outnumbered and used up all 6 shots with more enemies approaching, but they'd have to be faster than me to catch me as I ran off somewhere to reload.

I know this is sort of a silly notion, but you've got to think about this stuff when you're making things so realistic. Balancing this stuff becomes 100x as hard when you have to keep everything realistic.

It's a noble effort but in the end I just don't think you can balance everything without bending the rules a bit.