Dachimotsu
2015-01-09, 10:15 PM
I've been working on an original tabletop RPG for a few years now. Deciding that he wants to give it a try too, my friend decides to start building his own game as well. It was kind of an on and off process for the first year, but recently, we've both gotten really into the creation of his game. Whenever an aspect of the gameplay comes up, we can usually come up with something great and balanced within the hour. One thing we're really struggling with, however, is equipment.
My friend has this vision of what he wants the game to be like, and one of those visions involves balanced equipment usage. The idea is that a character's armor will degrade with time and wear, which will make all the armor found on dead bodies while adventuring far more useful, rather than them just being loot to sell. It's also necessary to make one of the game's classes more useful, in that it will be coveted for its ability to repair items mid-battle.
As far as my knowledge extends, armor in tabletop games tends to attribute to Armor Class, which is the threshold that attack rolls need to meet in order to hit. My friend wants to do away with that, and has implemented a new feature called Evasion, where the target makes the roll instead. The lighter your armor, the easier it is to evade.
Right now, there are three types of armor: Cloth (light), Mail (medium), and Plate (heavy). Cloth offers the least protection, but grants the largest bonus to evasion (the same as being naked, actually) as well as the ability to have two enchantments on at once (as opposed to mail or plate which can only have one). Plate offers the best protection, but slows movement slightly and makes you unable to evade. As for mail, we haven't come up with anything that makes it unique.
With all that out of the way, our problem is this: how do we handle equipment breaking? At first, it was simple, but it just ended up getting more and more complicated, until eventually it just stopped making sense. The idea is that each piece of armor can take a certain number of hits before it's destroyed, but determining this number has proven incredibly challenging.
The following is a list of individual ideas we've had for equipment. They have never been present in the game simultaneously, nor have any one of them been in the game by itself, for we keep trying to mix and match everything in hopeless attempts to find balance.
1. Dividing armor into tiers. Seven tiers, each made from a different material. What changes between materials is either the way damage dealt to the wearer is reduced, how many hits the material can take, or both.
2. Since fixed "damage reduction" values throw subtraction into the mix, making things more complicated than they need to be, we considered making plate halve the damage the wearer takes, while cloth offers no damage reduction in favor of enchantments and evasion. We couldn't decide on a simple function for mail.
3. When an armored creature takes a hit, some damage is dealt to both the creature and the armor. How much is usually determined by the armor's damage reduction.
4. Rather than giving armor pieces "hit points" that rise with material tier, they simply have a number of hits they can take before breaking. This number will always go down by 1 when struck, regardless of the source.
5. If Equipment HP is used, the character's "Equipment HP" value will be equal to that of the strongest armor piece. Usually, this is the torso armor. When this value is depleted, a roll is made to randomly determine which armor piece breaks (head, arms, legs, etc.). Once done, the equipment hp value resets to that of the next highest armor piece (which will likely be the torso's again if it wasn't randomly chosen to break).
6. To increase the longevity of armor, certain types are resistant or vulnerable to various damage types. For example, Cloth is immune to bludgeoning, but susceptible to slashing, piercing, and fire. However, it is never both resistant and vulnerable at the same time. If we're using resistance rules, their resistant element is the only thing that cannot damage the armor, whilst everything else can by the same increments. If using the vulnerable rules, their vulnerable elements are the only things that CAN damage the armor, while everything else does nothing.
7. High HP or low HP? Having low HP means at least one piece of armor will break every battle, which appeals to my friend, but it's not realistic and would require constant trips back to town. Not to mention, it would make dungeon-crawling near impossible. Having high HP compromises the usefulness of found armor, or the equipment-fixing abilities of one of the game's classes.
Other games feel that it's far more simple to leave equipment degradation to rust monsters and the like, but my friend really wants equipment breakage to be a constant threat. With everything said in mind, is there an easy, balanced way to handle all this without drowning the players with overcomplication?
My friend has this vision of what he wants the game to be like, and one of those visions involves balanced equipment usage. The idea is that a character's armor will degrade with time and wear, which will make all the armor found on dead bodies while adventuring far more useful, rather than them just being loot to sell. It's also necessary to make one of the game's classes more useful, in that it will be coveted for its ability to repair items mid-battle.
As far as my knowledge extends, armor in tabletop games tends to attribute to Armor Class, which is the threshold that attack rolls need to meet in order to hit. My friend wants to do away with that, and has implemented a new feature called Evasion, where the target makes the roll instead. The lighter your armor, the easier it is to evade.
Right now, there are three types of armor: Cloth (light), Mail (medium), and Plate (heavy). Cloth offers the least protection, but grants the largest bonus to evasion (the same as being naked, actually) as well as the ability to have two enchantments on at once (as opposed to mail or plate which can only have one). Plate offers the best protection, but slows movement slightly and makes you unable to evade. As for mail, we haven't come up with anything that makes it unique.
With all that out of the way, our problem is this: how do we handle equipment breaking? At first, it was simple, but it just ended up getting more and more complicated, until eventually it just stopped making sense. The idea is that each piece of armor can take a certain number of hits before it's destroyed, but determining this number has proven incredibly challenging.
The following is a list of individual ideas we've had for equipment. They have never been present in the game simultaneously, nor have any one of them been in the game by itself, for we keep trying to mix and match everything in hopeless attempts to find balance.
1. Dividing armor into tiers. Seven tiers, each made from a different material. What changes between materials is either the way damage dealt to the wearer is reduced, how many hits the material can take, or both.
2. Since fixed "damage reduction" values throw subtraction into the mix, making things more complicated than they need to be, we considered making plate halve the damage the wearer takes, while cloth offers no damage reduction in favor of enchantments and evasion. We couldn't decide on a simple function for mail.
3. When an armored creature takes a hit, some damage is dealt to both the creature and the armor. How much is usually determined by the armor's damage reduction.
4. Rather than giving armor pieces "hit points" that rise with material tier, they simply have a number of hits they can take before breaking. This number will always go down by 1 when struck, regardless of the source.
5. If Equipment HP is used, the character's "Equipment HP" value will be equal to that of the strongest armor piece. Usually, this is the torso armor. When this value is depleted, a roll is made to randomly determine which armor piece breaks (head, arms, legs, etc.). Once done, the equipment hp value resets to that of the next highest armor piece (which will likely be the torso's again if it wasn't randomly chosen to break).
6. To increase the longevity of armor, certain types are resistant or vulnerable to various damage types. For example, Cloth is immune to bludgeoning, but susceptible to slashing, piercing, and fire. However, it is never both resistant and vulnerable at the same time. If we're using resistance rules, their resistant element is the only thing that cannot damage the armor, whilst everything else can by the same increments. If using the vulnerable rules, their vulnerable elements are the only things that CAN damage the armor, while everything else does nothing.
7. High HP or low HP? Having low HP means at least one piece of armor will break every battle, which appeals to my friend, but it's not realistic and would require constant trips back to town. Not to mention, it would make dungeon-crawling near impossible. Having high HP compromises the usefulness of found armor, or the equipment-fixing abilities of one of the game's classes.
Other games feel that it's far more simple to leave equipment degradation to rust monsters and the like, but my friend really wants equipment breakage to be a constant threat. With everything said in mind, is there an easy, balanced way to handle all this without drowning the players with overcomplication?