Shield reform

[KoboldLord]

Good weapons are better than bad weapons, and you can extend this to most classes of items. Why is having a type of good shields that is better than a type of bad shields necessarily a problem?

[Quazifuji]

I think the main question is, if shields have no penalty besides using a hand, how do we stop larger shields from being strictly better? I think maybe something like weapon mindelay is a good model here. Mindelay also has a problem with thresholds, so it's not the perfect model, obvious, but I think mindelay is good because it only inhibits your ability to use the weapon, rather than your ability to do other things while using the weapon. At lower level skills, larger weapons are a tradeoff of speed and damage per swing, but as you train weapon skill, they become faster until eventually they're strictly better. Maybe a similar model could work for shields. I'm not sure what the best way to do it from a clarity, non-spoilery standpoint, though.

Here's what you do. Make shields simply add to your weapon delay: reduce this penalty linearly with shields skill. Let's say it's reduced to a penalty of 0 at, say, 5 skill for bucklers, 15 for normal shields, and 25 for large shields...

Well, obviously I meant trying to find a system with a similar effect that avoids the various problems discussed in this thread. I think the tradeoff is something that the current system does effectively (aside from the fact that large shields are basically never considered worth the XP investment on non-large characters). It just has other issues, which is why this thread exists.

Good weapons are better than bad weapons, and you can extend this to most classes of items. Why is having a type of good shields that is better than a type of bad shields necessarily a problem?

Good weapons are better than bad weapons, but the gap increases significantly as you increase your weapon skill. At low skill, a double sword hits much harder than a falchion, but takes longer to swing. It might still be better in the end, but there's a tradeoff. At min-delay, a doublesword is just a strictly better version of a falchion. I think it would be good for shields to have a similar property. It's okay if large shields are better than bucklers overall, but I don't think they should just always be strictly better in every way no matter what your shields skill is.

[crate]

Actually in crawl what happens with weapons is there are weapons that are good but improve slowly (most 2h weapons), bad weapons which improve quickly (most 1h weapons) and then some rare good weapons that improve quickly (dire flail, lajatang, similar).

Most of the bad weapons don't actually get better quickly enough to be better than the good weapons (falchion is never worth using if you have any other long blade available barring things like elec or pain brand) but in theory you could make them worthwhile at certain skill levels.

[Quazifuji]

Another, unrelated idea on the topic of differentiating SH from EV: Maybe SH could have some sort of staggering mechanic? The easiest system could just be something like an enemy who gets their attack blocked loses some energy and has their next turn delayed. Shield could keep the penalty for multiple enemies, so then they'd be weaker than EV against groups of enemies but stronger against single enemies (since blocking an enemy would be better than dodging it). Don't know if this would work out in practice, just thought of it as something that makes sense flavorwise as a difference between blocking an attack with a shield and dodging it (also, I believe other RPGs have shield stagger mechanics).