AL Theorycraft

Theorycrafting page for miscelanious notes/brain dumps

Basic Design Concept

Work everything around the rule of 3x3. So for example 3 broad categories of weapons, 3 super categories categories, and 3 sub categories. This is NOT HARD AND FAST, meaning a 4th category could be added later at any level. This is both for organizational purposes as well as to provide design depth.

Example: category bladed, super-category swords, sub-category longswords - thats where the longsword is. Getting into perks and other concepts, bonuses can be applies anywhere along the chain denoting areas of specialization.

This kind of 3-deep mentality adds a lot of dimension.

To hit system

Screw it all, just going to design it.

Everything in the game, be it an attack, a spell, etc, has a base to-hit chance, and everything else modifies that.

For an example, let's begin with the most basic melee attack. This has a base to-hit of 50% against a normal target. It should not be difficult to get this attack up to 100%, and melee-speced characters should be able to hit 70-80% fresh off the character build screen and in the starting zone.

Of course, there are multiple different melee attacks, each tih progressively lower to-hit potentials, that can be chained together into combos for maximimum damage. You improve the to-hit of these attacks using perks and by building up weapon-skill. This makes combat more of a tactical design/build-based effort than pure "grind for higher levels to make numbers higher" approach.

A very simple combo might look like: base attack(50%)-->feint(20%)-->overhand(30%). If all three attacks hit, the target receives an instant crit.

A normal attack deals damage based on the weapon Critical hits are a different story.

Critical Hits

This is going to need to be based on a different system than the base attacks. Going with the 3-deep philosphy you have "power" based on weapon skill, "crit chance", and "crit multiplier"

A crit deals regular damage based on the weapon, plus bonus damage based on a random roll x weapon skill.

Every weapon has a "crit chance" and "crit multiplier" stat to it. These are added to chance+multipliers that the character has. So for example a generic longsword might have +2 crit chance and 1x multiplier. With no other bonuses, that translates to 2% critical chance and 1x multiplier, so 2% of the time on a successful hit, your skill with longswords times 1 is added to the damage.

A dedicated melee character might have their own bonuses to crit and multiplier, increasing that dramatically. The multiplier will be the hardest/rarest thing to increase. As mentioned above, crits can also be "Triggered" by combo attacks which preform a critical hit automatically if all 3 attacks hit.

Building combos

Maybe the combo needs to be less "preform these three actions" and more based around an attack cycle? So on the character page, my cycle of attacks is "base attack-->feint-->overhand-->base attack again" with special moves down on my hotbar. So I move in and start swinging, the first attack will be basic, the second a feint, and so on. I can add in special moves that do or don't break the cycle.

I like this idea better because it puts more emphasis on "build" and less on "how fast/accurately can I manipulate the controls?" - the latter appeals to younger players because they can feel "better" simply by being younger, but shuts out the older players who don't want that stress. Meanwhile the former appeals to everyone.

Don't know how I plan to apply all this to ranged combat or magic, though.

Magic

What if spells are generic but casting "styles" are the combo/cycle? So I can make a fireball simply by knowing the fireball spell, and I can cast it either somatically(gestures), verbally(shouting "FIREBALL!") or mentally(thinking really hard) - each of those could be an individual skill that can be built up. Unlike combat there is no "to hit" with magic, but this ties into the crit system above.

Skills System

Skills are independent from race, class, or level. They are "leveled up" by using them and have no maximum, but do eventually hit a point of diminishing returns.

Skills will include everything from weapons handling to other basics. They are universal and all characters have them, its simply a matter of leveling them up.

The idea here is to provide more lateral expansion as well as adding more versitility. A dedicated mage, for example, could also do a fair bit of damage with a sword simply by having trained up the requisite skill. They will never do as much as a dedicated swordsmen, but they won't be wasting their time.