Slime Squisher
Posts: 332
Joined: Friday, 4th February 2011, 18:04
Location: The South, US
Player Stats, Skills, and Weapon Effectiveness
I guess I'm thinking of 3 related problems.
- The dominant boost to Weapon Effectiveness (W.E.) is non-obvious (Weapon Skill -> Delay reduction).
- There are many things that affect W.E. negligibly (Fighting Skill).
- STR and DEX affect W.E. negligibly, which is also not intuitive.
Therefore, I suggest that STR and DEX become greater factors in W.E., and reducing the dominance of the weapon skill. The easiest way to do that might be to give Weapon skill diminishing returns in delay reduction, and make STR and DEX factors in weapon delay (not independent of weapon skill, but rather enhancers of weapon skill, so that a skill-less player can't use short swords at min delay just because of high DEX).
Another way to make STR and DEX important to W.E. might be to give weapons STR and DEX requirements. Not binary you can wield it or you can't, but instead like armor has a STR requirement for being without additional penalty.
Whatever negligible bonuses are left over after Weapon Effectiveness has been changed should be removed or buffed (Fighting, Weapons skill (past min. delay), Str/Dex Weight, EW1, etc). Players making choices that significantly affect the game is one of the appeals of a game. Negligible bonuses, particularly where powerfully significant bonuses are available, do not involve player choice, but player whimsy or coincidence.
STR in Crawl is currently most like Constitution in other games; it lets you wear heavy armor and carry more stuff without getting tired. If STR is unchanged or the negligible damage component removed, then I would rename Strength to Constitution.
TSE