Diversify Melee Weapon Skills Discussion

[John_Candlebury]

People interested in debating this should read this thread.

Getting rid of some of the ranged skills

Currently we have the following ranged skills: [ul][li]Marksmanship[/li] [li]Pistol[/li] [li]SMG[/li] [li]Rifle[/li] [li]Shotgun[/li] [li]Launchers[/li] [li]Archery[/li] [li]Throwing (not exactly a ranged weapon skill, but shares a role)[/li][/ul] 8 ranged skills is way too many. This results in the following problems: [ul][li]Pigeonholing, like with the crossbows or miniguns, is more jarring than if the categories weren’t so strict.[/li] [li]Total separation of most firearm learning…

Basically this kind of fine grained detail brings a lot of bad stuff, for example more dificulty rebalancing stuff agains each other, and endless discussions of were weapon belong, which you can also observe here.

Imo this is just not feasible, it will take lots of work and time to mantain and will end up causing yet another series of back and forth changes, consuming developer time that would be more valuable somewhere else.

[darktoes]

A training sword is also sufficiently club-like that you could apply what you learn with one with the club, say, with a baseball bat, to some extent.

I guess, but most clubs are weighted for bashing things whereas I imagine most training swords would be weighted like, well, a sword.

Macuahuitls are also relatively sword-like, given that they are flat.

Yeah they’re probably more like a sword than a club.

Halligan bars can be used club-like like a crowbar, but they are also axe-like, that’s the whole point of them in fact, mixing up different rescue tools into one package.

I’d still call them a club. They’re weird and have all kinds of pointy stabby cutty bits, but you’re still basically hitting things with a stick.

Actually maybe an axe, if you count a pickaxe as an axe.

Basically this kind of fine grained detail brings a lot of ad stuff, for example more dificulty rebalancing stuff agains each other, and endless discussions of were weapon belong, which you can also observe here.

Imo this is just not feasible, it will take lots of work and time to mantain and will end up causing yet another series of back and forth changes, consuming developer time that would be more valuable somewhere else.

I didn’t read through it all, but from what you say and what I did read, it sounds like we should just go with my other suggestion and compress ranged weapons into a handful of skills to keep consistency between ranged and melee.

[Aabbcc]

I guess, but most clubs are weighted for bashing things whereas I imagine most training swords would be weighted like, well, a sword.

That varies a lot with what we have ingame, actually. You have ‘balanced’ ones like tonfas and canes, and you have the unbalanced ones like bats and cudgels.

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Imo this is just not feasible, it will take lots of work and time to mantain and will end up causing yet another series of back and forth changes, consuming developer time that would be more valuable somewhere else.

Speaking of developer time, changes on this would affect the melee part of the code rather heavily, tweak json item reading, and more time-consumingly, every melee weapon in both base game jsons and mods, plus any issues with older save games. Not exactly small, but not completely terrible either.

[Litppunk]

Ok so first thing first. Kevin has said already, that he has no interest in minimizing the number of skills, and would like to expand on it at some point.

To do that, without overly complicating the workload on devs would be the ultimate goal.

So this

Melee weapons be moved into a set of melee skills based on the actual type of weapon, rather than just their damage type. I.E something along the lines of daggers, swords, axes, polearms, hammers, and clubs. You could also diversify by handedness and have two-handed hammers, two-handed clubs, two-handed swords and two-handed axes, or perhaps just a two-handed melee subskill (but that’s a bit excessive).

is too much. And backwards isn’t an option.

Yeah I see your point, it’s not a bad idea. Perhaps an “EXOTIC” tag for weapons that halves its damage until you’ve swung it 50 times or had some training, something along those lines.

This seems like a wonderful edition. maybe change it up but the idea of the “exotic” tag strikes me as spot on. Something that prevents you from picking up a brand new weapon and using it perfectly because you have used a butter knife, which is “basically” a katana. But doing this strictly by item ID in game memory would run you into things like ‘but its still a bat! I just added pointy nails to it!’ or 'but a stone hammer is basically a hammer, its just better.

So a ‘new weapon’ very minor debuf would be nice, but anything aproaching 1/2 damage is too much, unless a way to categorize melee weapons is found. The best way would probably be to go by how similar volume/weight of weapons you have used inside that category.

Add a Json spot for what vol/weight a weapon ACTS like it has, so weapons can be individually modified where their in game similar weapons are of a different weight area, though of the top of my head I can’t think of anything.

The ‘unfamiliar weapon’ tag would describe this well, and could be modified or originally installed to be negated with general melee/ relevent weapons skill.

The weapon classes by damage is clearly flawed itself, but anything here would be a total overhaul of melee weapons. So I can’t justify even approaching saying something like “well it should just be done this way”

That said a possibility would be to classify weapons by the attack style. Many weapons have multiple attack styles, and would need to be toggle-able between them. So a sword could have a ‘thrusting, slashing’ styles while an ax would have ‘chopping, slashing’ styles to choose from. Halberd like weapons would have something like ‘cleaving, thrusting, blade sweeping’ You would choose between them similar to fire modes, although it would need a different button because of reach attacks…

Something this massive would probably have to stay in a beta option even in experimentals like z-levels until it was finished, but while it was there damages could be normalized by doing the same with damages, and weapon speeds regarding weight/ volume. defaulting to actual weight/volume unless an acting vol/weight is defined. Weapons could then be adjusted individually with modifiers. Such as straight +/- damage, and special effects similar to the throwing suggestion I made. Some could even be default by weapon style/type.

The implementation would be a serious pain in the ass, but once fully installed should make moding/ dev work easier AND more enjoyable…?

Eh… I think the normalizing damage by vol/weight might have already been done to some extent now that I think about it, might have even been where I got the idea from…hmm

[Aabbcc]

An alternative way of handling the EXOTIC/DIFFICULT weapon flag is to adjust the skill level with a formula when it is encountered:

Having a skill of 5 using a sword would be with the effective skill of 5, but doing so with a whip would be having the effective skill of, say, 1~3. The formula would eventually normalize the value as you reach skill 10, where you are presumably so good at melee that it doesn’t matter if the weapon is exotic or not.

The advantage of such an implementation is that it is very easy to do: 1 change on the item builder, a couple lines on melee.cpp, and then cherry pick the 3~5 exotic weapons in the game and give them the flag.

[kevin.granade]

In the broadest possible terms, I support changing and expanding weapon skills. I don’t have a good candidate for what the new skills should be though.
The existing categories provide a pretty reasonable breakdown since damage types tend to be related to attack techniques, but theres a lot of “false sharing” where for example an axe and a sword are categorized as “cutting” despite having very little in common in terms of how they are handled.
I don’t follow the argument that melee skills should be the same as ranged skills in any way, the breakdown of melee skills and ranged skills should each reflect how their respective weapons are handled.
I’m mildly in favor of the concept of weapon-specific “familiarity” or “proficiency”, but I think that needs to be discussed separately from reorganizing melee weapon skills, otherwise it risks being a distraction.

Revisiting the tradeoffs of melee weapon skills:

• every item is a melee weapon.
• we don’t want the new scheme to require new tags added to every item.
• some items are “effective melee weapons”.
• 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.
• we must support migrating characters to the new system in a way that doesn’t lose all their progress.

In short, this is a really hard thing to do, which is a big part of the reason it’s still like it is.

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]

I don’t follow the argument that melee skills should be the same as ranged skills in any way, the breakdown of melee skills and ranged skills should each reflect how their respective weapons are handled.

The argument is that ranged weapons skills were also said to be based in gun handling, rather than their proprieties.

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.

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

[Aabbcc]

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.

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.

• 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.

[kevin.granade]

The argument is that ranged weapons skills were also said to be based in gun handling, rather than their proprieties.

That’s not an argument, it’s an observation. It doesn’t make a case for why they should be the same.

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.

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

Yes, that’s what I said.

[kevin.granade]

The big difference if we pivot to attack types is we can use those as a meaningful part of the weapon instead of it just being a label for what skill gets used.
For example different attack types might come with adjustments to attack speed, damage, damage type, etc

[Litppunk]

The existing categories provide a pretty reasonable breakdown since damage types tend to be related to attack techniques, but theres a lot of “false sharing” where for example an axe and a sword are categorized as “cutting” despite having very little in common in terms of how they are handled.

Agreed, I figured doing it by the forms the weapon would use, the movement techniques that best utilize the weapon, and organizing them by that, would help with visualization and understanding of what the characters are doing. I figured doing it that way, the weapons would more naturally find their associated weapons groups… more on that in a sec.

I don’t follow the argument that melee skills should be the same as ranged skills in any way, the breakdown of melee skills and ranged skills should each reflect how their respective weapons are handled.

Hmm. May have stepped to far, I figured they felt a little TOO different as is, and the proposed changes to throwing would only enhance that…too much. Like they belonged to separate games, one of the areas where the mishmash nature of so many different ideas and people working on this project surfaced, and figured they should get a little closer in feeling to one another, but they definitely shouldn’t feel identical, that would make the game less fun overall. I meant my comparison to throwing/ranged to be a reminder where that might be going, and not to split it too far, but I guess I might well have run with that too far and tried to push them into the same mold if you hadn’t said anything.

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”.

This is…basically what I was suggesting, figuring that each weapon having options representing the various techniques/styles reasonable to use with that weapon. The sword for example can be used in a chopping/swing, slicing/draw cut, or stabbing/jab motion, while the axe can be used in a chopping/swing, and maybe… slicing/draw cut styles/techniques.

Spear would have jab and a underwhelming bash type attack. Perhaps a swing attack again, but with bash damage instead of cutting damage?

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.

How best to carry over from the current system without overly upsetting current leveling bothers me now. Lets see… currently

• Piercing -> Jab

• slashing -> Swing

• bashing -> also swing?

• melee -> melee
  It is important that all melee fighting has *some carryover. So this definitely stays.

Though maybe this skill can have its level given directly to any new skills/ attack types that would otherwise not have a straight trasnfer from the old system? Giving extra levels in previously unused areas based on experience in melee in general would be preferable to completely wiping experience gained with a weapon specialty that falls through the cracks, although hopefully we can avoid even that.

[Sanehatter]

I’d personally prefer using the same system as ranged skills do since that’s closer to how those abilities work IRL. People train/trained themselves to master a single weapon group (be it swords, knives, spears), rather than how to jab or slash with different weapons, but I guess this might be good as well.

[RogerWilco]

I wrote this in another thread:

Not specific to this game, but in general my experience with games has been that more skills is bad for several reasons:

• It adds clutter
• It adds complexity
• It makes it more likely that there are skills that have a very small niche and not worth the time to invest in
• It often makes some things oddly specific compared to the rest of the game
• It’s often biassed towards the expertise of the game’s designers
• Often it makes the game more tedious
• It often ends up in a boring simulationist experience, instead of being a fun game
  You do need a minimum set of skills, which does depend somewhat on the setting and game design goals. But in general I think the fewer you can get away with, the better the experience.

All of which seem to be valid arguments for this game as well. I haven’t played this game enough to have a deep insight into it’s specific skills design.

The problem is that our society is so specialized that we have a near infinite amount of skills, which would take many lifetimes to master. It’s very easy to get lost in that.

I would suggest an alternative to your suggestion:

• Simplify the skills into just melee and ranged. (Or make that just STR and DEX based?)
• Make the cutting and bashing just matter for damage and protection, that’s what they really seem to be about.
• Start tracking some kind of proficiency or experience per weapon (and possibly weapon category or group). You could even have this increase at different rates. This then provides a bonus similar to what the current skills do.

You could then make it something that can be turned on or off in the settings, it would not clutter up the skills system and would be a conscious choice to simulate weapons in a lot more detail than other parts of the game.

The big question is if you want to have a game where a character is really good with 1-2 weapons, say a katana and a AR15, reasonable with similar weapons, like other swords and assault riffles, but really just a beginner at most other things.

I don’t really like games where you’re mostly unskilled/low skill in many things, even though that is a good simulation of real life. It’s a fundamental game decision, and usually limiting choices and creativity of the players a lot.

In reality most things take years of practice and you can only be competent at a few things. It’s why we have “microwave antenna designer”, not “electronics”, and “Boeing 747-400 pilot”, not “driving”. But that does not make a game fun usually.

What is this game about? I think it’s about surviving, exploring and finding resources. and maybe some building and a few other things. I’m not sure if expanding the combat system really adds to that.