New weapon stats

[ektemple]

I'm wondering what this new way of phrasing weapon stats means, and if we can find a way to word it more clearly?

can be parried for 2; can parry for 4; can be dodged for 2.

Is that a +4 to parry and a -2 to the opponent's defense when dodging and parrying?

[VictorGijsbers]

It means that:

• if someone parries against this weapon, you get a -2 penalty on your attack;
• the maximum parry bonus you can get when using this weapon to parry is 4;
• if someone dodges against this weapon, you get a -2 penalty on your attack.

To be precise, parrying gives a defensive bonus which is equal to LOWEST("can be parried" of attacking weapon, "can parry" of defensive weapon).

[ektemple]

I've given this a little thought, but still haven't come up with anything. But I still feel that this wording isn't as clear as it could be. I'll continue to think about it as barrel along toward release 9. Although I suppose I most need to shift gears back to monster drawings...

[VictorGijsbers]

I'm thinking of redesigning parrying in ATTACK to work in a way more consistent with other stuff. In the current system, weapons have:

• a passive parry max (how easily a weapon can be parried)
• an active parry max (how good a weapon is at parrying)

The defence bonus given by parrying is the lower of passive parry max of attacker's weapon, and active parry max of defender's weapon.

In the proposed new system, weapons still have to stats:

• parriability
• parry bonus

The defence bonus will simply be equal to parriability of attacker's weapon + parry bonus of defender's weapon. These two values would be shows separately in the attack roll. I think this makes it much easier to see what weapons do. The sword gives a +1 parry bonus? Good, that means you'll always have a +1 on your defence if you use them to parry.

What do you think?

If we do this, I'm wondering whether there should be "unparriable" weapons; things that you just can't parry, and thus cannot get a parry bonus against. (A fireball, for instance. Bodmall's lightning attack. A huge boulder thrown at you.) If we choose to implement that, we might even want to disallow parrying agaisnt such attacks -- that is, give the player a message "You can't parry against [the global attacker weapon]" which takes no time.

[curiousdannii]

Those changes sound good.

There are already a few unparriable weapons, such as lightning and the knives. It would make sense to handle that in one place rather than everywhere.

I'd just like to remind everyone that in i7/ATTACK#2 we began discussing whether parry should affect initiative more. I'd like initiative to become more significant again.

[ektemple]

I would suggest that we not implement pure unparryability. For now we
might want the lightning to be unparryable, but later we might want to add
a lightning rod which, while a very weak weapon generally, is good at
absorbing electricity. Now we have a weapon that* *could plausibly parry
lightning, and we'd want a way to check for it. I'm not familiar enough
with ATTACK's internals to know what makes the most sense, but off the top
of my head I'd suggest that "generally unparryable" weapons trigger a
rulebook that determines whether there is something that would override
this ability.

There are probably better implementations, though!

On Mon, Jul 8, 2013 at 8:30 PM, Dannii Willis [email protected]:

Those changes sound good.

There are already a few unparriable weapons, such as lightning and the
knives. It would make sense to handle that in one place rather than
everywhere.

I'd just like to remind everyone that in i7/ATTACK#2https://github.com/i7/ATTACK/issues/2we began discussing whether parry should affect initiative more. I'd like
initiative to become more significant again.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/66#issuecomment-20648128
.

[curiousdannii]

Rulebooks to handle parrying and dodging in general might be good.

[rvdpluijm]

Sounds like a good plan to have rulebooks for parrying and dodging.. Should this be in ATTACK or in Kerkerkruip ATTACK additions?

[VictorGijsbers]

I've implemented the new weapon stat system, as a first step towards the combat overhaul we discuss in #107.