Author Topic: Alternative to "HP"  (Read 4477 times)

Offline Holy_Diver

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Re: Alternative to "HP"
« Reply #10 on: March 23, 2013, 01:08:52 pm »
Actually,

I was just looking at KF2 to see what kind of affinities the end game armors have.

It's quite difficult to actually see what affinities the equipments possess. And what makes it damn near impossible is when you actually break them down they don't follow any clear rhyme or reason. Even if you had a spreadsheet it would be difficult to make sense of.

For instance. If you compare the Ur armor with the Demon set. It's not obvious that they are that different as a whole, other than the demon set forces you to deal with bad status, and the Ur set may or may not be unique in granting poison resistance.

If you look at the body pieces. They both grant protection from all of the magic affinities. But the demon piece is lowest in the earth magic affinity. And the Ur piece is highest in earth magic affinity. But I am pretty sure the other pieces in the sets are not necessarily antagonistic in this way...

And the general rule usually is one of the affinities is quite high. So that its not until you equip all of the pieces in a set that all your bases are covered so to speak (I think this pattern even holds for the three physical affinities)

So in that sense, it may as well be as if each armor covers a part of your body. And it would certainly be easier to follow if that were simply the case, since the numbers would not be so noisy if so.

At any rate, I can't speak for everything here. Obviously HP is still HP. To make this work it seems to me you would have to only use the physical affinities for weapons. Monsters would only use physical affinities for defense.

And you would replace the magic affinities with body parts, and then monsters would only attack with body part affinities.

I think that would work especially well in a game that doesn't feature magic. You could still have limited magic in the form of armor that grants a little bit of defense to all parts of the body, like a magic shield, while mainly protecting its body part (then it would not seem so strange that all affinities are mentioned for all items. Plus there are coveralls. Weapons could hit all body parts uniformly or with slight bias, so if monsters had obvious armor they could get a defense bonus. Plus weakpoints)

Also you could use the physical affinities for your shield I guess. Since it doesn't really cover a body part. And grant monsters some damage to the shield affinities.

But I think this does cement for me, a gut feeling I've had for a while. That KF could be better served if the 3 physical affinities were the how, and the 5 elemental affinities are the what. In other words you'd need affinities in both sections to do actual damage...

With this calculus I think body part attacks could be a bit more complex. Ie. the armor would cover the part and have material properties to boot (other wise giving body part bonuses to weapons aside from magic swords doesn't really add up, plus monsters don't always have arms and legs)

Either way ultimately if people are not too proud to use Ex. It will definitely be capable of working this way without any need for special affinities with time. Some of the better Armored Core games have a part breaking system that I am very fond of that works just like this. And I'd like to see the same thing in King's Field games (it's based on where attacks actually hit. There will be a do_hit extension to turn on much more sophisticated hit detection when the time comes)

EDITED: Bottom line to me this sounds like a plausible way to make the player responsible for covering their whole body, and a good way to simplify stats, since it basically reduces to 1 defense stat for armor pieces. Simple is usually better.

PS: For you bad status ideas. Ex can nullify the effects, and provide the statuses in counters so you can do your own thing for each one. You'd want Evtcat to manage the global events (I really can't understand why you are not using Ex since you are presumably using x2mdl to make your custom models. It doesn't add up :ninja:)
« Last Edit: March 23, 2013, 01:35:32 pm by Holy Diver »

Offline Verdite

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Re: Alternative to "HP"
« Reply #11 on: March 23, 2013, 02:49:40 pm »
Im definately in favour of having an injured character, while that sounds mean. I think if your headgear broke through neglect, and you got hit on the head by a cyclops (example) with a bone club, you should suffer from concussion. One form could be either a blurry screen or a serious MP drain, or both.

A serious cut on your unprotected arm could lead to loss of HP, and a broken arm could be a major penalty to strength or having you unable to use your right hand until it healed.

Legs, dash speed.

Back stabbed? Equipment burden down.

For a few ideas.

Offline Holy_Diver

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Re: Alternative to "HP"
« Reply #12 on: March 23, 2013, 04:11:52 pm »
^Maybe this has been mentioned, but SOM's effects already map well to the body. Legs, slow. Arms, curse. Head, blind. Body, palsy. That's 4 affinities. So you have one more for poison. Accessories can protect from poison. You can also change the severity of poison based on the map (and the accessory itself using Ex) with a pretty simple event (the stat itself would be just an indicator of its resistance)

It would be a pretty good game if you used the weight limit system combined with one defense stat per body part. That way you must factor weight into the equipment you choose so its not just as simple as picking the one with the best stat. And you must build strength to equip better armor.
« Last Edit: March 23, 2013, 04:18:47 pm by Holy Diver »