Equipment list

[orius]

In this thread, I'm going to get into the equipment in the game. Nearly everything I need here has been finished. There's only three main things to finish with items. First I need to set prices, prices are pretty much going to be connected to how much money is dropped by enemies, if I even decide to have enemies drop money. Having monsters of any sort just drop gold is unrealistic, and sometimes gets silly in RPGs, but it's also the easiest way of doing things. If I make money dependant on enemy drops, and these drops aren't at 100%, this means monsters won't always drop items which the players may be depending on for money, and this gets worse if the RNG gets ornery. Having all drops at 100 percent can really clog up the inventory though, and it can unbalance things is the drops are more than just items meant to be sold. I know this firsthand, because I tried to avoid having monsters drop money in my first game but realized quickly that money was getting scarce for the party.

Second is how much HP/MP restoration items restore. That's not too hard, all I need to do there is figure out the approximate party level when the items become available, and then have them restore whatever percentage of HP/MP I want at that level.

Third is how much of a bonus accessories will provide. Again, this will be based on an assumed level, and I need to figure out how much I want the accessories to boost stats.

Anyway, the stats for stuff like weapons and armor I've finished. I based the stats on advice I read several years back on an older version of the Pavilion, when there several articles that gave advice on game balance (this includes the 35 point rule, which I've also used in the game like I said over in the character thread.

[orius]

Weapons

The items list starts with weapons, so I'll start there. Weapons are a fairly significant chunk of items in the game, and the game has 76 different weapons on the item list.

The basic rule I'm using for balacing weapons is that a new weapon increases the character's attack power by 15%. I'm giving new weapons out roughly every 5 levels of experience to level 25. Or I suppose it's more accurate to say that the weapon stats are based on the character's stats for every 5 levels until level 25. Combining this with the 35-point rule gives me an average value for a weapon's power at the various levels. Each weapon also has an ultimate weapon balanced for level 35; these are special weapons that be found in hidden areas of the game world near the end. The average attack for each weapon level is as follows:

Level 1: +1
Level 6: +6
Level 10: +16
Level 15: +31
Level 20: +52
Level 25: +80
Level 35: +120

To give an example, a weapon I intend for a character to have at around level 15 will have an attack bonus of around 31.

There are 9 different types of weapons in the game: swords, hammers, axes, knives, flails, bows, rods, staves, and shuriken. Each of these weapons adjust the average bonus to mix things up a bit, because if they all had the same bonus, it'd be boring. Plus, what would be the point of having different weapons? The only reason to have seperate weapons would be to give a unique set of weapons to each character, but that would feel a bit artificial IMO. Each type of weapons adds or subtracts a bonus or penalty from the base attack.

Swords: +5
Hammers: +3
Axes: +2
Flails: +1
Daggers: 0
Bows: -1
Rods: -2
Staves: -3
Shuriken: -5

So to give an example, the level 10 sword, the Iron Sword, is a +21 attack.

In additions, some weapons have double or group attacks which further modify the bonus. Doube attack weapons include axes, bows, and staves. The attack bonus on a double weapon is halved after the weapon type bonus is added to balance out the weapons' two attacks. So again for level 10, the Long Bow has an attack bonus of +8 (16-1/2 = 7.5, rounded up).

Group attack weapns have an attack power of 40% of normal. This was based on how many monsters can appear on the screen at once. I assumed an average monster group to have 3 monsters, and based the number on that. Naturally, group attack weapons will be less effective against large and very large size monsters, but be more useful against small monsters. Flails and shuriken are group attack weapons. So the Iron Flail, at level 10 has an attack bonus of +7 ((16+1) * 0.4 = 6.8, rounded up).

Rods and staves are pretty weak as they're meant to be mage oriented weapons. However, they can be used as an item in battle to cast non-elemental magic, but there is a chance for breakage. There is no ultimate rod. This is the same thing I did with them in my first game, Demonslayers, so if anyone's curious about how this will work, check it out.

In addition, there are elemental weapons for swords, daggers, and hammers. These weapons have a bonus halfway between two different levels. They can be found, and I'm also planning a simple crafting/alchemy system where the player will be able to make these weapons.

[Ωbright]

Re: Equipment list

Sounds good, man. GO!

[orius]

Re: Equipment list

Now for armor.

The rule I followed for armor is that the character's total defense from armor should be equal to 27% of the character's HP at a given level. This was taken from the same article I followed for weapon balancing. The article then advised to take that total amount and give 55% to body armor, 30% to the helmet, and 15% to the shield. Instead, I switched helemt and shield. First, shields are usually bigger than helmets, so it makes some sense that they offer more protection. More importantly, I'm taking dual-wielding into account here. I didn't turn it off in the game, so making the shield count for much more might make having a shield more important. If that doesn't work as well as I hoped, I could just tweak the numbers a bit more. I'm using the same levels for new armor that I used for weapons, and here's the base values:

Level       Total Armor        Body   Shield   Helm
1		19		5	3	2
5		27		14	10	4
10		49		25	17	7
15		77		38	27	12
20		112		56	39	17
25		154		77	54	23
35		204		105	73	31

There are three categories of armor: mail and plate, leather, and robes. Each set has its own body armor, shields, and helmets. Mail and plate has two seperate body armors which surprisingly are mail and plate. This category also includes the generic helmets and shields. Leather has leather armor, hoods, and bucklers. Robes has capes (which act as a shield) and hats. The different categories have limitations on which characters can use them, and the main characer can use any of them.

The different categories adjust the base value above as follows:

Plate armor: x 1.2
Mail, shield, and helmets: x1
Leather: x 0.9
Robes: x 0.75

This system was designed so that the warrior type characters would generally have the best defense, while casters have the poorest, as is typical for most RPGs.

For weapons and armor that are metallic in composition, the equipment follows this standard progression from worst to second best:

Copper -> bronze -> iron -> steel -> mithril -> adamant

The best items have thier own unique names. Again, the exact same thing I did with Demonslayers. Though the best weapons have some different names, the best sword is now the Vorpal Sword rather than (the extremely overused Public Domain Artifact) Excalibur.

If you guys want the full armor and weapon list, let me know and I'll post it.

[orius]

Equipment list part 3: Accessories

Now for the accessories. They boost a character's stats, and there's basically 3 in each category. I'm thinking of setting them for levels 5, 15, and 35, and having a stat boost of about 10% for each item. I haven't finished the bonuses on them yet. The first two in each category will be buyable, while the last one will have either limited qunatities or be a monster drop or something. Most of the accessories have the same names I used in the last game.

Bracers boost Strength. The three bracers are Leather, Brass, and Gold.

Rings boost Defense. They are Protect Ring, Magic Ring, and Force Ring.

Shoes boost Speed. The shoes are Elf Boots, Speed Shoes and Talaria.

Charms boost Evade and include Clover, Rabbit Foot, and Lover's Scarf. The names are based on good luck charms, because the stat is called Luck by default, but I changed it to Evade because that's what it's supposed to do in the game.

The last two groups of accessories work a little differently.

The prayer beads affect status resistance. Going by Draygone's recent information on how this stat works I have set values for these items. Clay Beads increase Resist by 2500, Wooden Beads by 5000, and Jade Beads by 9999. That should be equivalent to 25%, 50% and almost 100% respectively.

There are also some elemental resistance items, one of each element, and I'm going with the standard Fire/Lightning/Ice crap here (I'm going to try to think something different up for the next game). There are three sets of items which offer different levels of protection for each element. Earrings give 25% resistance, Amulets 37% resistance and Torcs 50% resistance.