Stu's Rusty Bucket

Items redux

Items have now three vs attributes.

vs Generic Type
vs Specific Type
vs Chance

vs Master Type is for such things as to refer to all “Humanoids” for all Orcs, Kobolds, Gnolls, People, etc.
vs Sub Type is for things like “Orc” but not “Kobold”
vs Chance is just chance, so a stoneblade has a 10% chance of stoning, or heart seeker has 10% critical hit, etc

I was originally going to have different skills for different weapons, eg: sword/blades skill, hammer skill, axe skill, bow skill. The problem is that swords are an easy to have since there are so many kinds, but how many kinds of axe are there? Not very many. This leaves me back where I originally stated with the skill tree in having only short range / melee weapons or long range / ballistic weapons.

I’m debating cursed items. They are a real pain in the neck and if your a fighter without some way of doing a remove curse you can get royally screwed. I find them to be more of a nuisance than a good gameplay mechanic.

Im going to test my combat system by instigating an attack against king in Castle Lexington There is no super “Lord British” ego in this game, so yes, it will be possible to go in and wipe out various player characters. The question then becomes, can the game remain winnable if ALL characters in all towns were killed off? No. So what do we do.. a conundrum.  Do we reset the town every time you enter? I can see resetting the guards, but what of important one off characters…

The flipside is we can make the game end if you kill them. Kind of… pointless? We could remove the attack option when in a town… but that is boring and an easy way out!  The question then becomes, if the player makes the game unwinnable, how do we inform them of that and where do we draw the line.

Hey, been keeping an eye on your work. Good stuff!

Yeah, I have weapon skills in my game… and I had a heck of a time coming up with a bunch of different names for “ax”.

Cursed items are indeed a problem. The end result is players won’t use items that are unknown until they can verify they’re not cursed. And if you have random loot generation, they seem to come up more often than you want. Avernum seems to suffer from that; after awhile I didn’t dare just try using something.

How are you storing the data for NPC’s on a given map? Is that data part of the saved game? Or do you “instance” all the data from a master source?

For important NPC’s, you could add a “respawn” flag, that indicates that the NPC should reappear every time the map loads, even if he was killed, as he’s too important. That lets players have their fun slaughtering a town’s inhabitants without making their objectives impossible.