From Cryogen@unix.infoserve.net Wed Oct 16 11:32:06 1996 Return-Path: <Cryogen@unix.infoserve.net> Received: from beta.iceonline.com by sirius.UVic.CA (4.1/SMI-4.1-Engr.UVic.CA-M3) id AA11018; Wed, 16 Oct 96 11:31:46 PDT Received: from unix.infoserve.net (unix.infoserve.net [199.175.157.2]) by beta.iceonline.com (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id LAA29356 for <crimson2@beta.iceonline.com>; Wed, 16 Oct 1996 11:31:28 -0700 (PDT) Received: from LOCALNAME (d160.infoserve.net [199.175.157.160]) by unix.infoserve.net (8.6.5/8.6.5) with SMTP id LAA12909 for <crimson2@beta.iceonline.com>; Wed, 16 Oct 1996 11:34:15 -0700 Message-Id: <326529CE.2B9@unix.infoserve.net> Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 11:30:38 -0700 From: Ryan Haksi <Cryogen@unix.infoserve.net> Reply-To: Cryogen@unix.infoserve.net X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0 (Win16; I) Mime-Version: 1.0 To: crimson2@beta.iceonline.com Subject: Message 'o' the Day Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Lines: 125 Status: RO Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Length: 4894 Hi there, I was looking over Fanatics area, "TerrariumAlpha" and boy does it ever look cool, got mobs, objects and the whole deal. so being constitutionally unable to keep my big mouth shut, I thought I'd mention a few things I noticed when I was looking the zone over. Namely, that the armor type stuff in the zone is WAAAAYYYY too cool for low-level chars (of course Fanatic had no way of knowing this since the effects of resistances etc arent really written down anywhere) Anyways I thought this would be a good idea to tell you all how resistances/combat etc work. (PS Fanatic: one of the ape mobs has a description in the ldesc field by accident) First, skills are way to easy to practice currently and thats going to have to change. But I digress. Combat in Crimson2 is all based on a "open-ended" 100 sided dice (or percentages). The open ended thing is tough to explain but it basically means that every once in awhile you can roll really bad (ie -50) or really good (+150) even though for the most part you get a number between 1 and 100. Fanatic noticed this at work when one of his beetles got in a fluke 2 attacks per round once. For that matter (although its extremely unlikely) a beetle could roll +2000 on its #of attacks roll and end up with 20 attacks in one particularly lucky round, but again, that is REALLY unlikely. So what does this mean to armor, weapons skills, resists etc. For simplicity of example we're just gonna pretend the open-ended thing doesnt happen (its not that common anyway, just keep the fact that every once in awhile you can fluke out in the back of your mind) First a sample combat round: You have laser-weapon-accuracy 10 You have laser-pistol 20 You have laser-weapon-speed 30 You have laser-weapon-damage 40 You have speed 5 They have Resist-Laser 25 They have armor 35 They have Dex 50 First we determine how many attacks per round we get. We'll assume that the rate of fire of our laser is 1. So thats are base rate of fire. Now we get to see how many extra attacks we can make due to our speed etc. So we roll our base, a number between 1 and 100 and get 12, pretty lousy. add in our bonuses: +5 from speed = 17 +10 (laser-pistol/3) = 27 in a nifty table: number xtra attacks 0-50 0 51-150 1 151-250 2 251-350 3 etc Rats, we dont get any bonus attacks Okay now we roll to hit for each attack we get, a number between 1 and 100... hmm we get 63 not great, not bad. Okay then we get to add our bonuses: We're using a laser so: our roll is 63 + 10 (laseracc) + 20 (laserpistol) = 93 minus their armor 93 - 35 = 58 minus their dex/5 58 - 10 = 48 since 48 isnt >= 51 (the base chance to hit) we missed. jeez we suck..... Lets pretend we did hit though and our weapon does 1d6 damage. Okay we do a lousy 4 points of damage We dont get a strength bonus since we are using a laser pistol (we would if we were using a club say - equal to strength/20) We do +4 pts from laser-weapon-damage/10 = 8 we do +1 pts from laser-pistol/20 = 9 but wait the lucky SOB's have resist-laser 25 so we have to deduct (resist/10) or -2 = 7 had we hit we would have done 7 pts damage. The upshot of all this is that resistances are PRETTY DAMN COOL, if they had had a resist of 90 or more, they would have taken a measly 1 pt of damage (the minimum you can suffer when you are hit) Armor should only give you bonus resistances in maybe 3 categories at max, anything more is just being too nice. Also when assigning resistances to things keep in mind what the item is: * If it isnt metal (ie a lead shield) or electronic (some kind of jammer/shield) how can it protect you from EMR weapons (ie Electromagnetic Radiation e.g. radio, microwave etc). * Anything metal (unless reflective) should not be ResistLaser since lasers cut up metals really well (and conversely lasers arent all that good against organic things becuz water (and me and you are 98% water) can absorb so much heat * etc and so forth Area Writing Notes: The default speed, pursue, flee etc skills for mobs is equal to 2 (speed) or 3 (mostly everything else) times level depending on the skill in question. Default resistance is currently 0, but it will probably be equal to level/2 or something eventually, I just havent decided what would be reasonable yet. You can explicitly override the mobs defaults by assigning specific properties to the mob, generally starting with %: ie give the mob a property of "%Speed" that is equal to "200" and bingo you have a mob that has a lot of bonus attacks (leave out the " marks.... and its case insensitive so %SPEED, %speed, and %SpEeD all work) a quick list of this properties off the top of my head are: %speed %flee %pursue %RAcid %RLaser %REMR %RHead %RAcid %RConcussive etc all the resists... misc. stuff %security (give this to objects or rooms so they are harder to picklock etc) thats about it for this email, l8r all Cryogen