A Proposal Concerning the Balance of Magic and Weapons

[weltall]

sure little animals! those little buggers

http://img705.imageshack.us/img705/3401/snaily.png

[Bonifarzia]

At the moment spell casting is already interrupted. The interruption happens if the amount of damages dealt in a blow is equal or greater than 30% of max HP of the victim. We can tweak this value. Please note that the poll is about stopping spell casting with ANY AMOUNT of damage, even 1 hp. Does a 1 hp make a difference if you have 1000HP in your concentration?

That is the only reason why I did not vote yet. And thanks for the confirmation and clarification about my above comment. I would like to note that there is another value that can be tuned here: The already mentioned defense factor. If there was a state of casting spells that would yield a defense factor not equivalent to full defensive stance then it might be doable to actually deal those 30% of some 1700 HP --- wait, I have the feeling that even quality 300 reinforced battle axes with maxed skills and stats rarely ever deal 500 HP damage with a single hit. But it gets close at least.

[Mask]

In the current form, I am against it. Without taking into consideration how exactly concentration works, this is a good attempt but little more.

At the moment spell casting is already interrupted. The interruption happens if the amount of damages dealt in a blow is equal or greater than 30% of max HP of the victim. We can tweak this value.

If taken into consideration that mages can wear heavy armor (and even should be able to, unless there is a general objection against battlemages), 30% of HP in a single hit might be too much (but that depends on how the HP growth, Heavy Armor Skill of the Defender and the Weapon Skill and maximal Damage value of the Attacker behave as functions) to interrupt a caster in heavy armor and too less for casters with no to little armor as Boni said before.

Please note that the poll is about stopping spell casting with ANY AMOUNT of damage, even 1 hp. Does a 1 hp make a difference if you have 1000HP in your concentration?

Which is why I voted no.

How I would do it  (and why it would not work)

• Take into consideration how magic works in terms of settings: different ways, schools, spelltypes, glyphs, rituals, magical areas, spellcasting
• Take into consideration how spellcasting can be implemented in terms of engine
• Take into consideration how physical combat and combat moves work in terms of engine
• Take into consideration what combinations of skills, stats and equipment is possible or should be possible in accordance with point 1 and 2 on both the attackers and the defenders side
• Create a model with a lot of variables on how the interruption should work

Possible variables:

• Defender: Equipment used Armor skill, Way skill, Combat Stance, Combat Moves, special Skills, racial threads, applied effects, HP, Stamina, Concentration, kind of damage sustained
• Attacker: Equipment used, Weapon Skill, Combat Stance, Combat moves, special skills, racial threads, applied effects
• Environment: Area effects

Design imperatives: It always should be possible to counterattack, negate or negatively influence actions of the opponent with a good likelyhood given both combatants are within the same skill range, have the same access to items, sources of tria and pp and trainers. Compromises between offensive-defensive abilities should be possible to cover various character concepts like Battlemages, Monks etc.

Currently, the balance of items, stats and the likelyhood of getting a spell interrupted is unstable. I know that testing involves osicallating around the perfect solution at times, but I would like to suggest to use a good descriptive model before going from one imbalanced state into another.

[Talad]

If there was a state of casting spells that would yield a defense factor not equivalent to full defensive stance...

Spell casting is equivalent to "normal stance". So you do normal damages to someone spell casting. I also think 30% is too much, we can tweak it to 20% and then test it.

Mask, I don't understand why we need all those factors for the spell interruption. To me the most important factor is damage received. Sometimes keeping things simple helps.

[Caraick]

At the moment spell casting is already interrupted. The interruption happens if the amount of damages dealt in a blow is equal or greater than 30% of max HP of the victim. We can tweak this value. Please note that the poll is about stopping spell casting with ANY AMOUNT of damage, even 1 hp. Does a 1 hp make a difference if you have 1000HP in your concentration?

30 percent of 1600 is about 530 HP.  Your average PS character nowadays is packing exactly, or near to, the maximum amount of HP, 1600.  Under previous damage modifier conditions, the 30% cancellation value would be entirely appropriate, however, with the current damage modifier, I haven't seen anyone deal anything remotely close to this sort of damage. 

That being said, I agree with Talad's point.  Stopping casts for only 1 HP in damage would be nonsensical.  However, I do believe the value should be tweaked, as 30% is a bit high, considering how much damage characters are able to deal.  Bonifarzia has already done a better job than I could in addressing this particularity of the topic, especially with the consideration of defense modifiers. 

[bilbous]

I would suggest that gross damage rather than net damage might be the appropriate test. Just because your armor absorbed some of the damage doesn't mean the momentum of the hit was any the less. Same thing with dodge, getting out of position ought to have wonderful side effects on the spell.

[Mask]

Mask, I don't understand why we need all those factors for the spell interruption. To me the most important factor is damage received. Sometimes keeping things simple helps.

Unless expanding at the combat and magic system has been abandoned, you will need to do this all over again at least once in the future, which is why I suggested a more abstract approach. Bottom-up approaches only lead so far and can generate a lot of work because of their tendency to create methods/code that becomes irrelevant later on.

Why should damage received be the most important part of spell failure? Or as was pointed out:

I would suggest that gross damage rather than net damage might be the appropriate test. Just because your armor absorbed some of the damage doesn't mean the momentum of the hit was any the less. Same thing with dodge, getting out of position ought to have wonderful side effects on the spell.

Over here is a discussion concerning the connection between armor and magic - another influence people think of as important. And there are diverging opinions about that as well. I for one disagree at some points with bilbous here and won't even try to make a proper argument on the other thread because I do not have an appropriate overview of the settings, goals and the current status of this issue.

For a quick fix, the damage received is important and relatively easy. The issue of balancing is not solved entirely, however.

[Bonifarzia]

Spell casting is equivalent to "normal stance". So you do normal damages to someone spell casting.

Ah, that sounds already a lot better. Last time I played around with that, the attacked character was always forced automatically and instantly into fulldef stance while receiving the hit. This was quite a while ago, so it is good to hear this has been changed in the meanwhile.

[weltall]

Spell casting is equivalent to "normal stance". So you do normal damages to someone spell casting.

Ah, that sounds already a lot better. Last time I played around with that, the attacked character was always forced automatically and instantly into fulldef stance while receiving the hit. This was quite a while ago, so it is good to hear this has been changed in the meanwhile.

full defensive is applied only after the first hit. the first hit is not under that regime

[IkonRevisions]

I think my stance on this proposal is already widely documented. I do not think simply 1 damage should interrupt a spell being cast but something like 20-30%  of the current hit points needed in damage by a single blow to disrupt casting does nothing to improve the situation. In extensive testing with Irec and Kisoji it was found with the changes in combat damage by weapons that damage to a fully armoured opponent who has 200 HA never exceeds a value of around 90 damage when being hit by 300q reinforced axes by a character with 200 in the axes skill in bloody stance.

So in the time it would take to slowly bring down the opponent casters health to a point that this percentage of damage to come into play, the mage would have killed the martial combatant several times with its much larger damage output.

Of course if you throw a high rank in shield handling into the mix (130+) they would block 80-90% of the opponents hits on top of this. So I think such a implementation alone is not going to be able to balance the two forms of combat but also a concept of a spell failure chance based on the type of armour worn by the caster is likely a nice approach as well, pushing many mages to ditch heavy armour, thus being able to be hit for much higher amounts of damage by a martial combatant. We did similar tests with 200 LA and the amount of damage was in the 150-350 range with all else remaining the same, thus making this failure chance by damage much more interesting in the sake of balancing.

-Ikon

[bilbous]

That would be why you use gross damage instead of net damage.  The 90 or 150-350 range values are net after armor reduction (and whatever else,) the gross damages were likely the same all -- other factors than armor type being equal. This would serve to consider the shock of the blow instead of how much actual damage was done.

 Some consideration could be made for glancing blows whether due to armor or shield skill but these could be limited to the highest range of successes in those abilities or for or for situations where the success number of the defense is significantly greater than the success number of the attack.

[Phantomboy86]

I second Ikon's idea in its entirety.

[valentineaaron]

I would support the idea of maybe lowering the percentage so less damage can cause spell interruptions but only if they implement spells that affect other things then just health of an opponent.  Right now we can't lower chances of someone hitting, can't slow movement, or do much else to defend ourselves with magic.  If you add spells like blindness, fix ones like incredible weight, or maybe ones like haste then that would be helpful to mages and I would agree that it should be easier to disrupt their spells.  By the way there is supposed to be a spell that prevents a caster from speaking at all so they can't cast but that isn't in the game yet either.