When a roof has insufficient support, currently it crashes and makes some noise but doesn’t do a whole lot more. I’m working on more interesting roof cave-ins, including piles of rubble and most importantly, damage application. I have a system in mind for player character effects, but I’m looking for feedback. So here’s the current system:
When a cave-in occurs, rubble has a chance of falling into that tile and any adjacent tile. If a pile of rubble falls in your current tile, then the following occurs:
If your dodge skill is greater than a roll from 0 to a constant hit chance and you do not roll a critical failure, then you successfully dodge the rubble. Otherwise, the rubble hits you.
If you are hit, then there is a random number of rolls ranging from 0 to the number of your body parts (currently 6). Each roll will apply from 0 to 10 damage to a random body part. The same body part can be hit multiple times, so at worst you could take 60 damage to a single body part, though the odds of this happening should be something like 1 in several million.
In addition to damage, there is a chance of being knocked prone equal to 1 divided by your dexterity. There is also a chance of being stunned equal to 1 divided by your strength. Before the mathematicians point out this could involve division by zero, the implementation of this does not involve division.
If you are missed, there is still a chance that you tripped while successfully dodging the rubble, so there is a chance of being knocked prone equal to 1 divided by your dexterity, identical to the one above.
So… thoughts? Is this too generous? Too harsh? Am I overlooking something? Do you have a better formula for the damage or effect probabilities?
Re: balance, I think what you’re proposing is good, I’d put “building collapse” in the “barely survivable” category of dangers, so that sounds about right.
Good point about load-bearing-ness of walls and such, there’s definitely room to make the building collapse system more sophisticated, currently all building structures count as load-bearing, in that destroying any tile of terrain in a building has a chance of pulling down adjacent building sections. The only distinction we make right now is terrain that “provides support” like walls, vs “requires support” like “floor” ties. Both can have collapses chain through them, but walls are significantly more robust than open areas like floor or furniture.
In the future, yea we could have specific wall sections that are considered supports, and others that aren’t so you could smash through them without pulling down wall and roof sections along with them.
Also when we do multi-level buildings, we’ll need to put some thought into how that works… 0_0
I’d like to make sure that damage from these fields isn’t dealt to players if they are in a structure, such as a vehicle, that has a ceiling of it’s own (or that such damage is greatly reduced) unless that ceiling is destroyed first. I don’t know how it works right now, but if crashing into a wall with a car causes lethal damage from the rubble (and most accidents would probably involve several collapses and opportunities for damage), or even requires a dodge roll, I think that’s a bad thing. And the dodge roll while in a vehicle would be weird anyway.
Also it would be nice if the rubble could break, say, windows/winshields, and have a chance of passing through or something. Which would obviously reduce the protection offered to the person behind it.
Heheh, I’ve actually been deliberately avoiding vehicles to this point since they’re multi-tile entities and not something I’m especially familiar with. Since I’m pretty happy with the implementation of damage to PCs and NPCs now, maybe handling rubble falling on vehicles will be the next thing I look at.
Assuming a 2D map, is there a case outside vehicles in which a ceiling would be between the player and a collapsing ceiling?
Corner case: Someone pitches a Tent inside a greenhouse-segment* of a Mansion. Roof collapses. Tent shouldn’t provide much protection but since the roof is made out of glass, might slow down the shards. In practice, probably not significant but thought it worth mentioning.
*The sections with grassy floor, shrubbery, and trees. Since the perimeter is still walled, there’s an argument for them being inside; I haven’t tried standing in one during rain to check though.