Diversify Melee Weapon Skills Discussion

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@kevin.granade

Throwing a concept out there, what if instead of categorizing weapons, we add attack techniques to weapons, and the attack techniques are what skills are based on. For example an axe would probably just have a “swing” attack, which exercises the “swing” skill. Meanwhile a sword would have, “swing”, “draw cut” and “jab”. A spear would have just “jab”, a bat or club would have… “swing”. As you can see, this isn’t very different from how it works now, but it focuses on the attacks instead of the weapon damage types.

@Sanehatter

This looks really similar to the current system, with attack types instead of damage types.

Yeah, sounds more like a renaming of the current skills. Which, fair, makes migration of old characters much easier.

@kevin.granade

• it is probably ok to add new tags to just these items.
• we want a player to be able to specialize in a particular type of weapon, and trade up to new weapons of that type without resetting their skill leveling progress.

What if, throwing the idea out there, instead of or in addition of every single weapon having it’s own ‘skill’ (or perhaps it’s own ‘adjust rate’ that multiplies your base skill and reduces it until you’re familiar) that is trained up, you had a series of “weapon groups”.
A weapon can belong to none, one, or many weapon groups. Training a weapon not only makes you more familiar with the weapon, but makes you familiar with every weapon from weapon groups the weapon is part of.

For example, a spear could be part of the spear group, the polearm group, and even perhaps the two-handed group.

How many weapon groups would there be? As many as defined in a JSON. Easily expanded, easily adjusted, easily modded to add mod weapons, increase complexity, or reduce complexity at heart’s content.

Each weapon group list could also be, rather than a list, a “weapon”: “how alike this group is” pair. So a zweihander could be “sword”-like and help with all your swords, could be very “long, swinging two-handed weapon”-like, so it’d help more with those, and extremely “zeihander”-like, so your zweihander would train your zweihander-on-fire exceedingly well.