zero-sum resistances

With a +20 fire resist -20 ice resist you start creating sets of armor for different situations. I want to avoid that. I'll put out some imaginary numbers here that are intended to mean "high level gear".

Red Dragonscale boots
+30 damage
+20 Armor Class
+10 strength
+10 fire resistance (out of 100 maximum)

Boots covered in Fire Runes
+10 damage
+10 armor class
+3 strength
+20 fire resistance (out of 100 maximum)

we have head/chest/legs/arms/neck/2 fingers/hand for item locations In this system the most a good piece of equipment could get you in fire resistance is 80 - BUT, you'll never get 8 pieces of good equipment with 10 fire resist(it isn't in the game), the most you can find will be like 45. a piece of equipment that isn't nearly as effective could get you to max resist in 5 pieces. However, it's a big trade off.

so what you'll find is people mix and match resistance to give them a general level of around 20 resist in each school. We have a lot of different sources though so we might need to double up on resistances provided or a resist all.

What this type of thing does is people Can choose to dress up in full out resist, most of these people would be mid-level tackling specific things, fire elementals. Once you get high level you'll be just as effective wearing the top end gear instead of focusing on resistance for specific fights.

- This eliminates the multiple sets of armor for particular fights issue but does make resistance at some points in the game useful. You can also make resistance scale, so the difference between 0-30 is HUGE but going from 30-100 isn't as big of a difference in terms of damage mitigation. So people don't feel compelled to max it out.

 

Actually most metals are better conductors of heat than air or cloth. Most metals also have greater heat capacity than air or cloth, meaning it takes more energy to change the temperature of a chunk of iron than it does to change the temperature of an equal volume of air or wool. These are two reasons why metal pans are great for baking and poofy materials make for such great blankets. Metal absorbs radiant heat faster, meaning a metal baking dish will help remove excess heat from the oven's interior, and because it takes more heat to increase the pan's temperature, the bottoms of your cookies don't burn. Conversely, your poofy blanket both absorbs and releases heat slowly, which is quite nice because you're basically using it to keep your body heat in. Because the blanket has a low thermal capacity, too, when the blanket itself gets cold, it will still work as an insulator. Heat is quite interesting, as it happens.

But anyway, real rules of physics should not be used as bases for the protective properties of fantasy game armors. If we want to go that route, cloth armor should catch on fire or melt under fire, medium armors should chafe, and pretty much all armors should sink in water.

 

There are different types of worlds, Low Magic - where magic items are incredibly rare, especially something small like a ring. Very few people practice magic in these worlds usually (LoTR).

Then there are High Magic worlds - where magic items are common, magic is practiced regularly by many people. Dragon lance is a bit in the middle of these extremes. Xanth would be an extreme, everything everywhere is magic infused, nearly everything is magic.

It depends on the world they want to craft. For games I believe high magic is more fun than low/no magic. I don't care much for medieval games that aren't full of dragons and wizards and tons of magic items.

 

Any fantasy world will have dragons and wizards and magical items, the question is if magic should cease being special. Imo, when magic ceases being special, its boring. If Frodo and Samwise could cast magic, nobody would need Gandalf. High fantasy worlds, without any moderation, easily become cartoons. Xanth was pretty much a cartoon, it wouldn't have worked without the gimmick of puns etc.

Tolkein, even though his world was full of magic and wizards and dragons, was more towards the low fantasy end. I find Middle Earth much more satisfying than something like Xanth.

 

Having a +20 in fire resistance isn't best for all circumstances. You don't need a penalty to a resitence to off-set it to encourage people to swap different gear for different circumstances.

 

The world of middle earth isn't full of magic, wizards and dragons. His story was full of them, but the world itself, outside of his storyline had very little in it that was magical. In the LoTR there weren't even dragons. Only the 1 dragon in the Hobbit. (I didn't read any of the others so I don't know about the other books).

How many wizards were there? 5 in the world? If you were to walk into any city/village/town most of the time there would be nothing magical about it. Weapons/armor didn't have magic (other than Sting glowing blue when Orcs were around).

Here is a high magic world that I really liked and wasn't full of puns. Wheel of Time. Tons of magic and magical items going on everywhere. (Especially near the end of the series when they start making magic weapons again).

 

Sure, but there are enough of them that you run into them in the story ; and, in analogy to a RPG, enough of them that you would run into them into the game world.

Don't have a problem with some common magic, btw, I just think it has to have its limits to prevent the whole thing from getting bland. Where are the limits for magic armor? Well, for me, I think back to the old Ultima games and other DOS RPGs, where you'd eventually run into magic armor, but it would take a while to get there and it wouldn't be too common a loot. That made magic armor a type of prize. Its a bit difficult to recreate this sensibility in a MMO, because you expect that, at some time, everyone is down that point in the game that they find magic armor. But I hope they find a way to keep the special feeling of it. Even if it means you don't want to lose your magic armor (or damage it, wear down its durability) so you keep it in the bank most of the time... I don't necessarily agree with the "players should always be wearing their best gear" approach that some of the devs have taken up.

 

The world of Middle Earth has very little magic, except that which the Elves of old used to craft weapons like Sting and what which the wizards and Sauron wield. The wizards and Sauron, however, are not of Middle Earth. They come from a separate plane of existence, which itself is part of the Lord of the Rings lore overall but not part of Middle Earth.

The idea of magic in Middle Earth is rather complicated, though, as most magic displayed by the beings of Middle Earth isn't really magic but more innate ability, as with the ability of the High Elves to communicate by thought alone. Also, the world we find in the Lord of the Rings trilogy is stuffed with magic items, from magic swords to magic rings to magic broaches, but as to beings that could produce such items, we are given little to no hint except in the most general of terms, in that we know that many of the magical swords of the land were made by Elves and that the rings of power were also made by the Elves (though it is later revealed through The Silmarillion that Sauron himself deceived the creator of the rings and might actually be responsible for the bulk of the rings' power).

But magic in Middle Earth isn't magic, except that which is wielded by the Istari (the wizards), so much as it is a sort of transcendental power. The spirits that wield magic generally do so by siphoning power from other realms or dimensions, though you might say that spirits moving between realms in the first place is magic. The thing is, terms become conflated when talking about a lore system as deep as Tolkien's because what seems magical by external standards is actually quite mundane (though perhaps still spectacular) in the context of Tolkien's greater universe. The Ringwraiths, for example, are hardly creatures of magic so much as they are real, "living" creatures from another realm, and the dragon of The Hobbit is really not much more than a very large, very old, fire-breathing lizard.

It can be said with certainty, though, that mysticism in general can be made much more profound through careful integration. There's not a chance we'll see that in this game, obviously, but I imagine it would be quite difficult to pretend that rare and mysterious powers don't make for good storytelling, especially when talking about Tolkien's work. Despite the prevalence of the unusual in the world of Middle Earth, Tolkien did a fantastic job leveraging the less-than-unusual properties of his main characters to weave a series of tales all about the conflict between great power and great vulnerabilitym and obviously he could not have accomplished that if "great power" were the standard. Imagine if Frodo could create orcs to do his bidding, spy on nations far and near, and control the minds of ambitious souls. It wouldn't have been a very interesting story, then, would it?

 

Sure, like I said -- if Frodo and Sam had powerful magic, they wouldn't need Gandalf. But Hobbits had other qualities...

High fantasy worlds can be cool, too, but I find that they work best when they go full monty, and the idea that these worlds bear any resemblance to our reality is dropped entirely, or otherwise, are light and not intended to be serious. And there are ways to combine the two ideas, so theres some common magic but its limited, although there are a lot of in between approaches that don't work, either.

But this is getting a bit off-topic already. I just have had good experiences with RPGs where finding a magic item is like getting a prize, similar to Bilbo cherishing Sting and keeping it close to him, and passing it on to Frodo. The Ultima games were always a bit like that, and actually I sort of felt the games got a bit boring when everyone in your party had magic armor and magic axes. But that took a while, and in the mean time, you couldn't go to any blacksmith and buy a suit of magic armor. You had to find it, and that meant defeating powerful enemies or digging deep into dungeons. TES lets you buy magic items from your local blacksmith. Fire sword? No big deal, we carry that.

Its an interesting issue for an MMO to deal with.

 

Well aware of the physics of radiant heat, but we aren't talking about a spell that puts you in the oven at 350 for two hours. A spell that hurls a ball of fire at you will burn you LESS through a steel plate than it would striking you naked. A blast of cold will have a harder time penetrating full plate as well. I'm not claiming that metal is an insulator, I'm claiming that energy forms shouldn't get a free pass to go straight through armor just because it isn't enchanted to resist energy.

 

@Malak,

Sure, its a question is how enchantment works. Generally, in fantasy worlds, an enchantment is a type of aura which sits on top of the material, and doesn't change the materials basic nature. If that's how it works, theres a real question of how the aura is able to backfire and turn against the material. Its very easy to see how a fire elemental is harmed by water more, its not clear how a piece of armor is harmed by water more only because it has a fire resist aura.

 

This is similar to what others have mentioned. It shows the strategy of optimizing your build to have equal/max resistances. The developers should be aware that this is the mindset that gamers will take in a non-zero-sum system.

Yes, and in the endgame, everyone will have the same armor.

Whether or not resistance scales linearly, or in a diminishing returns fashion, it is functionally useless as a game feature if it is equivalent to a simple % damage reduction when optimized. As you've shown, the go-to 'optimal' build (esp. w/ diminishing returns or maxable resistance systems) is to acquire equal resistances to all elements. The main effect that having this gear would have is separating new from experienced players. New players would have no resist, old players would have lots. A player without full resist gear would be disadvantaged in duels with someone who has it. The game becomes more item-based, and characters have less diversity.

I would say that the system you describe adds less to the game than the system I proposed. It's possible to make resistance relevant, in the way you describe, without adding depth to the endgame. The system you describe has illusory depth though - there is no difference between making people grind in the midgame to get ice resistance, instead of having them grind to get a slightly better % damage reduction through upgrading their armor. It's superficial.

Note: I think an accelerating returns resistance system would be more interesting than a diminishing returns system - especially with near/zero-sum systems.

 

Resistances and weapon types (pierce/slash/blunt) really depend on what the daily adventuring life is like. If it is predictable where I will fight spear-using fire-throwing kobolds all day, then it is worth some fore-thought into preparing gear. But if the same region/zone/etc have equals chances of facing mace-wielding ice-summoners then the whole concept gets shot as you are not going to want to micro-manage your gear every fight. People will gravitate to the mundane, middle-of-the-road armor type for ease of play.

I myself encourage a more broad approach for players. Special cloaks, potions, rings, etc that provide a more focused benefit for conditions that will be more consistent in a given area. The terrain and weather being the more influential impact on elemental effects, such as heat, cold, storms, etc.

This serves a major purpose in that the environment is more than a back-drop. I need to have fur-lined cloak, etc. if I want to adventure in the mountains. I need to have a certain potion to help ward off the heat effects of the desert (potion of SPF1000). Regions known for massive storms require insulating boots and wooden weapons. Point being is an important, but minor change to my gear planned ahead of time to persist in a given area. The majority of my gear is not focused on elemental resistance, but a certain select few can help.

 

If I were designing the game items, Everything that you want for endgame is rare. Part of the rarity is luck (finding the rare-spawn ingredients), part of it is in difficulty(Long quest chains-difficult fights). So there would be 15-20 different end game boots with different properties for different builds and different resistance. So, if you start stacking too much of a stat or resistance the diminishing returns kicks in and now you have too much fire resist, or too much + str, not enough poison resist, not enough +dex. so you need to adjust your build, and change out the red dragonscale boots for emerald dragonscale boots... except they are rare so you'll need to find someone to trade with you. So people are wearing a different mix of equipment, the primary difference in what equipment they are looking for depends on their builds. Dexterity fighter, strength fighter(tank), thief, wizard, healer, cloth, leather, chain, plate, all have their different advantages.. hybrid builds. (swordsman + magic + stealth, who might stack defensive abilities since they have none, or stack str+int for maximum damage output). Giving people a lot of different options with no "best" is the idea here. and maximizing for all would be impossible, there simply isn't enough resist to go around.

Yes, you might swap out a couple pieces of equipment for specific fights/areas for resist, but you wouldn't want different sets of gear for different encounters, for the most part you wont want to change out your gear for specific resistance. -exceptions would be fire elemental fights and you have 0 fire resistance.