Dungeon Master
Posts: 1051
Joined: Thursday, 12th June 2014, 05:19
Shield reform
random pictures of shields are here to break up a huge pile of text.
From a design perspective, the primary goal of shields (as I see it) is to provide an alternative to two-handed weapons; a strategic tradeoff of offense for defense. At present, certain characters care more about this tradeoff than others. Primary-melee characters care a great deal about the loss of offensive power; unarmed characters are induced to care by losing both their off-hand aux attack, and getting additional shield penalties specific to unarmed combat. Primary-casters and enchanters tend to not care a great deal about this tradeoff - though they do care about the skill investment of larger shields, and so often stick to bucklers. It's possible for a new, breakpoint-less system to preserve this dynamic (where " " " fighters " " " are less likely to use shields than " " " casters " " "), though I'm not convinced that it's desirable.
The obvious model - and I suspect the correct one - for removing breakpoints from shields is to do with them what was done with body armour; give them, effectively, EVP and AEVP. A penalty that isn't subtracted from by skill, but divided by. The problem with this is balancing; without changing anything else, buckler penalties are now halved at (some armour skill), rather than eliminated entirely at 3/5/9 skill. If that halving point is very low, the penalties are essentially meaningless; if not, it's a very significant nerf to bucklers (and other shields), which are already marginal equipment for many character types!
My approach to dealing with this is to again steal from body armour: mitigate shield penalties with strength. That makes it more feasible for many character types to wear shields, since the penalties will come significantly pre-mitigated for them.
It will also shift the dynamic of shield-type choice from “how much am I willing to invest in shields skill?” to “how much in the way of shield penalties will I accept?” Again, more similar to body armour. This is not ideal, since it’s nice to have different decision-making dynamics in the game, but has certain advantages - among other things, I suspect it would make large shields significantly more viable, since they’d be usable (with enough str) without needing 20+ skill investment for most races.
It would also change the dynamic of investing in Shields skill; rather than being about reaching breakpoints to eliminate penalties, it would be about gaining SH, with reduction of shield penalty as a largely secondary effect - again, rather like armour skill and AC.
What do to about the interaction of different species with shields? Many shield types are forbidden to various species - e.g., spriggans can’t use anything larger than a buckler, ogres & trolls can’t use bucklers at all. To compensate for this, currently, larger species require a smaller amount of shield skill to remove penalties - since otherwise they’d be unlikely to use shields at all. It would be easy to translate this as a multiplier to shield skill in the new system (for penalty-reduction purposes), but that’s a hidden multiplier, which I don’t like at all.
One answer would be to remove this system entirely - since str reduces penalties, and large races have large str, it seems fairly redundant. Any further adjustments could probably be done by tweaking Shields aptitudes.
Large races also get penalties to sh values, based on difference between their size and the size of the shield (similarly, small races get bonuses) - this... is quite small, seems very silly, and can probably be safely dropped in the transition.
A last question, on which I’m undecided, is the contribution of stats (str and dex) to SH *values*. Currently, both add to SH - bucklers get a large bonus from dex, medium & large shields get a much smaller bonus, plus a small bonus from strength. It’s not exceptionally intuitive or unintuitive; slightly opaque, but not extremely; neither especially necessary nor astonishingly undesirable. I really don’t know what I think of it at all, and would appreciate feedback on that.
Summary:
- Shields serve a valuable game role.
- Shield skill breakpoints are bad.
- My proposed fix is to give shields a body-armour-like encumbrance system, with penalties divided by skill and str.
- Thoughts?
There are certainly other problems with shields - their relative weakness in extended, the opacity of the “less useful against sequential attacks” system - but I’d prefer to leave that for another topic, since this is quite big enough as it is.
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