Thursday, 19th July 2012, 01:28 by Wereox
I'm not a big fan of the actual implemention of GDR, largely because it's complex and there's no in-game indication that it exists.
I do think something like this needs to exist to reduce damage variance for heavy armor. But I really don't like the mechanic where 30 AC from wearing GDA is different from 30 AC from wearing robes and rings of protection, and you'd never know this without looking it up online. And now that we've brought it up, I don't like that they are the same for arrows but aren't the same for swords and that you would never guess this.
First, damage from different sources that check AC should work the same way. Not having that be the case is strange and confusing, and I'm not just saying that because I put my foot in my mouth earlier.
Second, whatever the mechanic is, it needs to either just depend on total AC and nothing else (ie, so more AC is more better, period), or be shown in-game. And if it's shown in game it is going to have to be something more clear than it is now.
Just throwing out a few ideas:
Ditch armor-type-based GDR, make heavier armors just have more AC, and make AC use a somewhat more normalized distribution. For example, instead of -1d(AC), have it be -(AC/10)d10-1d(remainder[AC,10]), so AC 44 is -4d10-4 rather than -1d44. Or something like this.
List armor explicitly as a range. So you don't have AC 15, you have AC 7-22 or whatever, where the actual amount is randomly generated between the lower and upper range. Then have items just show what they give and stack, so if you have a Ring +2-4 and Armor +6-15, you have 8-19 AC. This adds a bunch of rebalancing, but it does allow for more interesting options, eg, do you wear the +5-5 Ring of Protection or the +1-12 Ring of Protection?
Just add damage shaving on AC-checking attacks to heavier armors, list it, and call it a day. This is functionally equivalent to the second option, but "looks" different.
- For this message the author Wereox has received thanks:
- Bloax