Melee System: RPG based suggestions

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

I know the following suggestions can take forever to code and some of them require to “touch” different parts of the game… That’s why I wish to share the ideas (and the reassonings behind) to see if there is enough room and support for them before actually consider taking further steps.

Some preliminary comments:

  • When commenting about “game experience” it comes from characters within “human ranges”. Characteristics of 14-, minimum of 50% less hp and with “survivor-like” gear (Nothing fancy that offers full immunity like heavy military gear or futuristic power armor… Most hits cause some form of damage). It also contains experience from the popular mod “Dino Mod”.

  • When possible the suggestions try to use magnitudes ALREADY existing on the game, instead of creating new ones.

  • The suggestions are aimed at key features the zombie/survival genre always portrait… I will offer examples when possible.

  • I haven’t explicitely connected any of the following rules to existing character stats… Obviously each rule can be affected fully by stats, traits, mutations & CBMs, but, for the sake of clarity… I have chosen to not add this links still.

  • The net effect of all changes together is offering viability to the entire ranged weapon gameplay EVEN when the enemy is not able to attack you at range by offering content creators the chance to create melee deadly scenarios that, in turn, encourage players to relay on ranged/Indirect attack methods.

Size Matters

You can’t really expect to knock down/away things the size of a small house. Same goes with interposing items to reduce damage.

  • If your enemy is bigger than you, its Size Advantage should offer a chance to neglect know down/away status effects by default. 1 step difference = 50% avoidance. 2 step difference = 90% avoidance. 3+ steps = immunity.

  • If your attacker is bigger than you, its Size Advantage should make your parries/blocks less effective against its attacks. 1 step = 50% less damage reduced. 2+ steps = 80% less damage reduced.

  • If your attacker is bigger than you, its size advantage should make its grab attacks harder to shake off. 1 step = 50% fail chance, 2+ steps = 80% fail chance. (This “resistance” mechanic could be better modeled if the monster class had a “strength” stat to compare against… So modders shouldn’t be forced to create “Huge” monsters that could hold players in place).

Melee Combat is tiresome

You can’t spend 4 hours meleeing a zombie horde and expect to survive the process… The Dead is relentless and tireless… You aren’t.

  • Tired status should reduce your dodge by 3 points and your melee skills by 2 points. If using the STF rule below it can, instead, reduce the max charges of the “melee pool” by half and increase the recovery period by 50%.

  • “Short Term Fatigue”. Performing too many melee attacks/dodges in a row should impose a gradual penalty like Pain. Could be called “Exhaustion” and its main effects should be (In decreasing importance): Penalty to Dodge, Penalty to Melee skills, triggering Pain. Internally could be modeled as a “melee charges” pool (of Max charges X) consumed on each attack/parry/dodge attempt that will be regained at a rate of 1 each Y seconds since the last charge was spent. After the charges are spent, each new charge used will trigger a level of “Exhaustion” that will inflict cummulative penalties to dodge/melee and after enough are accrued, translate directly to charges of Pain. I left intentionally the magnitudes generical so balance could be controlled altering them. As an initial model: X = 20, Y = 30 and the Exhaustion table could be each 3 levels should trigger a -1 to dodge, -1 to melee, cap itself at -10 dodge, -10 melee, moment at which Pain charges will be generated instead. It’s important to add that ONLY effective dodge/parry attempts should consume charges, if the dodge/melee skill is put at 0 then the character should only spend charges if it actively melees, this simmulates the case of heavily armored characters that stay there soaking all damage immobile… If the enemy can’t breach the character armor, Pain shouldn’t accumulate (Alternatively a “stance” toggle could be created so a character can voluntarily stop defending him/herself to focus all his/her physical stamina into attacks).

Numbers… Also matter

Been swarmed by a sea of Zombies grabbing, clawing and moaning at you usually marks the demise of most Characters in the zombie genre.

  • Each additional target after the 1st in melee range should impose a cummulative “Distraction” penalty to the player. This penalty should be managed internally and should reduce the Dodge/Parry skill of the character by 1 against all targets.

  • Moving away from an enemy in melee range, should entitle that enemy a “free attack” the player cannot defend against. (Those of you familiar with DnD PnP recent editions should recognize the “Attack of Opportunity” mechanic here). Not all enemies should be able to perform this (Could be controlled by a certain monster Flag… Or lack off, if it’s easier to supress this behaviour). Additionally, if the monster is able to GRAB and this attack is successfull, player movement attempt will be aborted. Monsters Stunned/Knocked Prone shouldn’t be able to perform this free attack.

This set of modifications will make melee combat a more complex decission, allow content creators to add monsters that are considerable harder to melee (or escape from) WITHOUT touching any of the game-wide used magnitudes like HP pools, damage output or Armor. I also have “conveniently” split them in “packs” that could come as in-game options to activate/deactivate based on player preference.

2

Hopefully, when the time comes, someone would also perhaps integrate martial arts to the new features in terms of affecting it, such as Zui Quan’s infinite dpt?
It would be nice if the size of the weapon and strength of the character should be significant. Highly skilled sledge wielding bear mutated hydraulic muscled character on meth? I feel should probably be able to inflict knockdowns of titans, even. So it probably should be strength based, eh.

3

Yeah, well… The way I thought the suggestions is to add some factors that, ATM, aren’t present but that are easily represented in the genre (particularly movies)… They also come from some desire to increase “realism” and certainly, if they appear on the game at some point, should be connected and scaled to player stats (Specially as, on this game, some characters can breach the limits of humanity in more than one way :wink: ).

MA are, in fact, one of the reassons that made me started to think on this suggestions… Reaching 3 on Unarmed to activate Brawl’s knockback is easily one of the most dramatic game difficulty alterations during a character’s progression, imho.

4

Huh. I may have to change Brawling up then. :-/

5
Huh. I may have to change Brawling up then. :-/

Why so? I meant it in the good sense… Brawling is just specialized training in close quarters combat. A lot of “hype” and mysticism surrounds Martial Arts (Specially Oriental ones) but… ALL of them at their core are just simply focused training in close quarter maneuvers and “recipes”, I don’t see a problem with a self taught character specialized into dispossing the Dead close and personal (In fact a lot of MA maneuvers/stances/defensive tactics simply fail when your enemy do not care about his/her safety nor feel pain… So new maneuvers and specialized training should be required to deal with this kind of special enemy).

The issue with brawling is its knockback+stun… Been able to push back reliabily enemies in melee is like day’n night regarding survival chances. In principle, a mindless husk shambling towards you should be easy to manage by some1 used to concepts like projections, luxations and moment shifts that’s why, instead of removing this, I suggested ways to deal with scenarios were this features are exploited distorsioning the “menace level” of certain situations a lot of ppl has put a lot of effort into bringing to the game:

  • The enemy is too big (Strength should be a better gauge, imo, as it would allow superhumans to trigger heroic feats naturally without growing themselves… Sadly this would require redefinition of the always increasing roster of monsters). A chance to fail is enough so, against big enemies, a melee specialist may have to consider ranged combat as a more reliable solution.

  • Fatigue… When enough penalties are accrued to reduce the controlling skill below the threshold of a given MA maneuver, that maneuver shouldn’t happen (That I have the impression isn’t happening ATM… But I never inspected closely the melee resolution code). The STF system is there to provide this penalties even to “Masters” able to avoid damage and anihilate an entire Horde knocking at their refuge door.

I have been reading this subforum and seems there are plans for melee “tuning” on the works… Regarding damage types, specially, that could solve some other “frictions” regarding melee with weapons… But I prefer to not add suggestions that may fall in the already under revission sections of the game on this topic.

6

Brawling is fine, it’s the 90% of other MAs that need buffs.

Compare just about anything with the new MA that just got added or even with just ninjutsu (or boxing, if we want pure unarmed).

I think it’s mostly because by early midgame, crits aren’t like D&D crits (good weapon + luck), but more like crits in LoL (happen more often than regular hits). This makes crit procs great and stuns useless (bashing crits already stun very reliably).

Plus, the bonuses on most MAs are minor. Arm/leg blocks barely matter when they can’t slow down special attacks, tiny boost to damage don’t change the game as much as 3 dex would (from not taking the trait and just bumping stats) and the best abilities are available on better MAs (the new one and brawling). Power creep killed old stuff.

7

Brawling is fine, it’s the 90% of other MAs that need buffs.

Compare just about anything with the new MA that just got added or even with just ninjutsu (or boxing, if we want pure unarmed).

I think it’s mostly because by early midgame, crits aren’t like D&D crits (good weapon + luck), but more like crits in LoL (happen more often than regular hits). This makes crit procs great and stuns useless (bashing crits already stun very reliably).

Plus, the bonuses on most MAs are minor. Arm/leg blocks barely matter when they can’t slow down special attacks, tiny boost to damage don’t change the game as much as 3 dex would (from not taking the trait and just bumping stats) and the best abilities are available on better MAs (the new one and brawling). Power creep killed old stuff.[/quote]

Hence my needing to nerf Brawling: kill the colonies and push back the creep. NIR only applies to either training weapons (shouldn’t be that much of a benefit) or fairly high-end ones, and its early power move is a bit of a liabiity if there’s more than one hostile around. (Flowing Water Cut takes twice as long as a standard one!)

Reshuffling crit/noncrit specials is probably worth considering, too.

As for the trait issue: we’re working on making the MA traits obsolete. All melee-weapon MAs can be found in-game now. I’m willing to axe the trait.

8

Axing the trait sounds OK, though I’d rather have it get rebalanced to have “weak MA” trait (1 point, most MAs at the moment would fit here) and “strong MA” trait for the few good ones.

On a side note: is the training wooden katana thing still rocking those 35 points of bashing damage? I seriously don’t think it is capable of hitting anywhere near as hard as a steel sledgehammer. Having a high-end bashing weapon sounds cool, but it shouldn’t be labeled a training weapon nor modeled after a sword.

9

[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:8, topic:8474”]Axing the trait sounds OK, though I’d rather have it get rebalanced to have “weak MA” trait (1 point, most MAs at the moment would fit here) and “strong MA” trait for the few good ones.

On a side note: is the training wooden katana thing still rocking those 35 points of bashing damage? I seriously don’t think it is capable of hitting anywhere near as hard as a steel sledgehammer. Having a high-end bashing weapon sounds cool, but it shouldn’t be labeled a training weapon nor modeled after a sword.[/quote]

Bokken still does the damage, and I don’t recall any objection to that damage output in the PR. I’ve held one and they’re not a joke.

10

Sorry I didn’t comment on the PR - I kinda missed it (catching up now).
Bokken may not be a joke, but neither are sledgehammers, medieval maces and quarterstaves, last two of which are explicitly made to be fought with (not to train with) and the first being used to knock down walls. And I’m certain that against an armored foe, a war hammer is more dangerous than a bokken.

11

If I wasn’t mergetesting I’d check that up. As is, throw something up quick and it can get reviewed for this merge.

12

Sorry to come along and play useless pundit, but I am just a little too weak right now to fight my urges…

Size Matters
This all sounds much more like weight than size, so I would advocate going all out trying to get strength working if it is vaguely possible. Size seems to be more of an issue of reach, vulnerability, and applicability. Big things can typically fight from further away, identical injuries are likely less significant(a cut that is effectively meaningless to a whale may well bisect an ant, the same stab that causes a wolf to bleed to death might just leave a moose breathless for a few days…), but a large opponent is probably going to have a difficult time focusing on specific points of a smaller one… Of course, actually applying force is an issue, if you hit a one-tonne child zed with a novelty oversized hammer with a blow that throws it clear across a street and halfway through a car, and then apply the same blow to a five metre tall zed hulk that also weighs a tonne for some reason then it will likely just drench the far side of the street with whatever was in front of the hammer and leave the rest of the hulk right where it was previously… Honestly, it sometimes seems as though the only difference between cutting and bashing damage is relative scales and velocities…

Honestly, if something is very large, but doesn’t have the strength to support its size, then it seems that, if anything, it would be less stable on its feet and in far more trouble if it did fall down, just look at beached whales. But it would be more difficult to apply the spread-out force necessary to push its centre of mass rather than just depress some portion of it into the rest…

Wow, and here I thought that I started vague and rambling… But yeah, large things would maybe be less likely to inflict injuries, with the same blow, but more likely to push something around. And blocking a fist the size of your whole body should be pretty easy, and should block just as much total force, but probably won’t do a thing about the body-sized fist pushing you through the wall behind you, except perhaps to give you a crumple-zone to mitigate the initial deceleration upon meeting the wall…

Melee Combat is tiresome
Lots of things are tiresome, I would prefer not to make combat special, and have other physical labours be mysteriously exempt from a bunch of special rules. I could see potential in differentiating intensive labour, when you are pushing yourself, and relaxed labour, where you are taking occasional breaks to rest your limbs and avoiding any extremes of exertion. But on the other hand, if I can push myself that much in combat then I would like to push myself that hard to avoid combat, such as desperately rushing to shore a barricade or dig a pit before the horde arrives… Perhaps tiredness could be split into fatigue from lack of sleep or energy, exertion from excessive activity or lack of air or mild cases of muscle stretching and such, and weariness from lack of mental activity and sleep. I have this strange feeling that this topic has been discussed at length elsewhere.

As much as I would love to be able to push myself to finish a strenuous project quickly, it might also be useful to engage in relaxed combat that could be sustained in much the same fashion as construction tasks can be…

Numbers… Also matter
One of the things about attacks of opportunity is that they are justified as being free because the victim stops defending themselves and also stops being a threat. Now, this is pretty much ignored before it leaves D&D as, from memory, even mindless opponents get attacks of opportunity, but a zed spontaneously lunging just because there is an opening doesn’t really sit well with the idea that they are just constantly groping and biting. Being able to fight zeds with relative safety, provided that you are able to maintain your distance, seems entirely plausible. Should they get the opportunity, having them take hold of you and stop you from keeping away also seems valid.
Treating each opponent separately with respect to this issues seems like an aesthetically preferable scenario to trying to get attacks of opportunity to cover everything. A universal system is great if you are doing it all by hand, but we have computers to fuss over tracking the specifics…
Triffids would seems to be similar to zeds, with vines accruing and slowing you down as you wrestle with them,
animals would likely just be fast, and pack animals would actively attempt to surround before engaging.
Fungus seems fine with just exploding, and survivors are, as a rule, never going to outrun an explosion.
Ants would be pretty cool if, after hit and running a few of them, you rile the whole colony and they will track you halfway across the world and you had better have a very capable fortress or very little need to sleep or be able to take down the whole colony without stopping…
Nether visitors are working to their own beat, and you cheating by exploiting rough terrain is just your way of being as alien to them as they are to you.
The blobs seems to be playing the long game, with little care to a few small setbacks here and there, but letting them spontaneously jump past, ooze under, divide around, drop from above, or otherwise take anything that earnestly tries to genocide them and immerse it utterly in the blob and aggressively incorporate it seems to be in character.
And mechanicals really ought to be flawed in accordance with their design parameters. Eyebots just observe, no physical menace intended, manhacks are just distractions, credible distraction, but not meant to be a threat by themselves, turrets are famed for their extensive time spent ensuring that they do not target friends and their obvious lack of mobility, tankbots should probably be too heavy for the sort of rapid motions necessary to engage fast targets at close range, but then again, they are probably one of the more refined machines. But exploiting the obvious weaknesses seems thematically appropriate for mechanicals.
…
Graboids trying to get grabberiffic before the victim knows what is up?

But yeah, as I said in the intro, I do not really expect to be all that helpful here, and apologise for my lack of discipline…

13
Sorry to come along and play useless pundit, but I am just a little too weak right now to fight my urges...

Well… You are concerned about realism, which afaik, is an important factor for a good portion of this game playerbase, reasson enough to always keep an eye on how rules are projected on the “Real” world.

I’m also concerned about realism, but I prefer to “cook” my suggestions to achieve a balance based on what the players do than what the actions means and ofc how feasible is to implement them.

Size Matters

Using Size is simply an economy decission… Lots of modders (and the base monsters) already come with the tags “Large” and “Huge” to label monsters that are massive and, in theory, a higher menace than regular Z’s at melee range… Coincidently this mobs are also capable of fast movement (To highlight it’s danger level by preventing easy kiting) meaning their muscular mass is considerably higher than the player’s. The whole thing means that a simple code triggered at the knockback maneuver that compares character size vs target size will accomplish this effect with minimum implementation time. The other complex relations in a melee fight (which is basically an interchange of momentum) are controlled by a: Melee Damage Dice & HP pools. As I said on my previous posts, this magnitudes are used in a lot of places in the game… So I prefer to offers suggestions that surgically mimic what I was trying to link with the “average joe” perception which is simply… You can’t expect to move a house by kicking it ;).

That’s why I link “size” to muscular mass on the parry modification… Which is needed to make this monsters to do any kind of damage based on how current melee block/parry system works so modders are not forced to make this monsters masters at melee themselves (They are usually defined with melee skill levels of 10+) to reduce to the max the chance of a dodge to happen. The current paradox is that, against this monsters, the way modders are forced to create them… The best defense is blocking (and been dressed in some armor… Not much) as, due to their impossibly high melee skill, dodges rarely happen. Again, drawing from the “average joe” perception, this time backed up by basic physics, what should happen is that bigger mobs should do more devastating hits but… Slower, which, translated to game terms, should make them EASIER to dodge but able to inflict considerable damage even after a block/parry. This way content creators would be free to unlink destructive potential from precission at triggering that destruction which, in turn, will offer more variety in the kind of enemies (And tactics needed to survive them).

Finnally, the “been grabbed” by a bigger target is required to work in coordination with the “free attack” rule below as, due to how grab works now, it’s just a minor nuissance easily neglected with average levels of player melee skill.

Melee Combat is tiresome

The approach I followed here was much simpler than your concerns… It’s a simple balance factor with ranged combat. Been able to project X ammount of damage at range on DDA is far… far… far more resource draining and bulkier than melee. That’s what STF system is for… In reality is just an “ammo system” for melee the player needs to care about and “reload” by not engaging too many targets at the same time or too frequently. This is my primary goal… Making Ranged combat set of drawbacks to be usefull (at the same skill levels) ALSO against melee-only targets or even explosives/traps to be a must to deal with hordes because the physical extertion barrier would simply prevent the player to keep on going.

As with the above changes… I’m allergic to link multiple subsystems together when offering suggestions, that’s why I contained the STF triggering & degrading effect ONLY to very basic set of melee actions and melee penalties… Easy to code and affecting ONLY melee performance.

Reallistically-wise, when unlinking long-term fatigue from short-term one… The 1st thing I asked myself is why a character in DDA can run at peak speed miles without having to slow-down… That’s why I ultimately linked Exhaustion to Pain (A well known and prentifully tested mechanic already existing on the game) because, atm, is the only way to slowdown a Player (and tbh, the reasson behind 90% of my deaths)… But notice how I’m not including “X movements in a row” in the STF triggers because I don’t want to alter that delicate balance needed for a ranged fighter… One change at a time.

Returning to the nature of fatigue… Indeed there are a lot of physical labor jobs able to trigger STF but there is a capital difference between ALL of them and melee…

…Your enemy actions control your fatigue (Specially if it’s a sapient one). You can’t “administer” your fatigue spenditures as with any other physical labor were you can take a “rest”… If you “rest” while defending yourself you are going to end dead (I don’t know if you have experience with Boxing tactics… But playing with/against muscular fatigue is a key factor, specially in higher weights. It’s just an IRL example of how important this effects are for some1 that doens’t have the luxury to ask for a “rest”). That’s why, everything considered, imo, melee is entitled to be treated in this special way as it’s the game activity were the stakes are higher and, atm, is simply too efficient damage and resource-wise.

One of the things about attacks of opportunity is that they are justified as being free because the victim stops defending themselves and also stops being a threat.

AOO may be justified with different “realisms arguments” under different games but, in my case… I just pay attention, again, to the effect they cause on players’ decissions which is simply to make them pay more attention to which enemies they get close to (There are plenty of flaws on the different PnP ruleset that use them… Most linked to the lack of real consequences, but that’s a discussion to be held somewhere else). That’s what I care about and what DDA melee lacks… Stand your ground, wait for your enemy to get close and then hit’n run is the safest approach to melee in DDA… The fact that a lot of “pseudoattack” rules have been implemented (like leaping enemies, grab or the “hit-on-the move” effect that happens with the attacks that are “cheap” enough) is a clue that there is a will to “spice up” this basic premise. Again, content creators have their hands tied when trying to make particularly troublesome targets that’s why adding a tag that clearly labels an enemy as a danger to kill/disable before trying to move away is needed.

You bring a set of in-game enemies that could be candidates but… You are just focusing them as single entities… Instead try to think in whole scenarios. What if that usually unremarkable Feral Hunter is able to grab, leap & free attack you… By itself is just another easy to kill zombie but… What happens if it decides to leap to establish contact while you are ALREADY in melee range of a Hulk? Mmmm… A carefull character will hesitate into going melee with a combo like this around and would have to take decissions (Like swaping to less damaging, but potentially incapacitating attacks to prevent the Hunter to keep him in place while the Hulk smashes him/her or… Simply swap to ranged combat to take down the enemies even if they can’t retaliate at range)… What if the Hulk himself is able to grab and free attack? Wouldn’t its size advantage be a lethal combo? I prefer to keep things simple… A content creator doesn’t have to care about tweaking different magnitudes, with this 2 (optionally 3) tags can clearly label a monster as “Watch what you do when close to this baddie” ;).

Regarding my own personal preference on how to justify AOO with “realism”… Observe how most land-based predators take down their preys (Specially when they are of similar mass)… They are always reluctant to go full out when their enemy is facing them, is precissely the exact moment their prey tuns back and initiate its flee attempt when they lunge forward to bite/claw it on the back.

14

I like all those suggestions. I always thought that meele combat was way to overpowered.
Not only can we fight restlessly but also with average strength signifficantly harm Huge enemies barehanded.

15

using a black belt profession and some nice stats (high dex) + more in dodge and unarmed combat, I have no problem diasabling dozens of normal zombjes provided they come through a window. that leaves me pretty much to concentrate on looting on foot.

I would like the melee combat system to be eventually separated from the movement system.
that would be, after initial cost of coding time, offer a lot of different options (fast strike with a spear to zombies eye, hard punch with sledgehammer on zombies head, swinging around mace in accurate fashion and so on) with size being a conisderation than mainly in grabbing and dodging attacks.

a much smaller enemy should fall faster to the lunch of a bigger one though. think of the hit of a hulk sending you flying into a wall, breaking your leg or even your back in the impact. would make for some fun :slight_smile: