I actually love how in New Vegas there's no defense from high powered equipment. Realistically, nothing you can wear will stop a armor piercing .50 round. And it means certain enemies are always a challenge, regardless of you're position in the game. Explosives could maybe be handled more like shotguns, with multiple pellets imitating shrapnel. That would be easier to absorb via armor without changing the system as a whole.
Technically there are ballistic vests IRL that can completely stop a .50 BMG, and I imagine that power armor with the same tech would be able to remove the majority of the resultant concussion force. However, any sort of articulated armor would absolutely get obliterated by anything with that level of kinetic force and headshots would still be absolutely fatal. I feel that always having enemies either relevant damage/weapons is essential, but it's also incredibly immersion breaking if every joe schmoe you come across has a .50 cal or missile launcher. I feel that a good balance is that elite enemies always have relevant weapons but basic grunts need to have better tactics or get lucky to be a notable threat.
Explosives can be multi-modal damage. A shock wave (armor does not protect) component, heat component (certain armor protects), and shrapnel (thick armor protects), for example
@@OverlordIntecris I agree with your perspective. From a realism perspective, as important or unimportant as realism may subjectively be, that sounds right. Right now body armor typically consists of a plate carrier that may have some ballistic protection from layered polymer weave (i.e. "soft" armor), with a purpose-built compartment at the front and the back to carry a rifle plate ("hard" armor). Rifle plates are typically only just large enough to cover the vitals in the torso, because for practical purposes they're too heavy to provide more coverage than that. However, the technological idea of power armor that appears often in sci-fi is to have a servomotor-assisted armature that allows the wearer/occupant to carry much more weight, so conceivably the same composition and thickness of armor can be extended to the rest of the body. The powered armor could also provide *some* additional resistance to the concussive backface effects, though absolutely not in entirety. Even with power armor, at some point, the only way to make a more resistant infantryman would to be to make a more resistant human, and that's beyond the scope of the "armor" discussion. As you mentioned, coverage would not be absolute, due to the necessity of articulation, and the head is particularly vulnerable to concussion. A wearer would still want to avoid taking hits from incoming fire with tactical positioning and movement, the armor simply providing a much more reliable last line of defense. More to the point, within the last few years rifle plates have indeed been developed that can prevent penetration from .50 BMG. Again, of course, preventing penetration doesn't mean preventing all harm.
If you wanted semi-realism, explosives would need to deal damage in two components - one part that is affected by armor, in whatever means, and another that completely bypasses all armor and mitigation. An explosion can kill even if you aren't close enough to be burned/broken by it. It's why throwing an explosive in a pond will kill a whole lot of fish, even if they aren't directly hit by the explosion. The pressure wave ruptures internal organs (up to and including the brain, spinal cord, etc.)
I really like the approach of armor giving a separate health pool that interacts differently with things. It's fairly intuitive that it's a coating on top and gives another lever to make armor categories feel very different.
@@gooseneck5433 Yeah. That is one example of it. There is also "The last spell" which does... Damage threshold, Damage reduction AND armor health. (but they don't have a separate split for "magic armor")
If you look further into the DS3/Elden Ring's 'Defense'(not negation/absorption) you will see even weirder completely unintuitive math that no player would ever have figured out normally without in-depth fan testing/data-mining: - First and foremost it was already weird as it only went up from leveling up instead of being affected by armor(tho in ds3 you needed to have all armor slots filled for full benefit, armor type/quality didnt matter, helmets and hoods gave the same amount) - Then for the math itself, many initially assumed it was a flat damage threshold type of system(and many still think this is how it works) but rather its a % dmg reduction that is determined by the ratio of the incoming dmg and Defense which then gets applied together with the OTHER % dmg reduction present in Absorption/Negation which is just... baffling
Yup, it was flat damage in Dark Souls 1, but after that its been percentage. Limit Breakers i know did a video for DS3 showcasing just how little damage is reduced even with high defense numbers.
Japanese devs don't like players directly engage with the hidden mechanics but rather have the player use heuristics (rule of thumbs) See also Pokemon and EV IVs
@@idunno402maybe 2 decades ago Japanese devs were like that (and from soft is also 2 decades behind the industry in any areas) But monster hunter and a bunch of Japanese game series that used to be ootuse are now super trsnsparant with their mechanics and they are better for it.
This might come off as strange. But I'm a French/American Ubisoft Director here in Montpellier. Really love your talks and wish there was something I could do to give back. If you ever want to come take a trip in the south of France (Montpellier) you and yours will always be welcome at my house.
I actually like what he calls the "false dichotomy" for the purposes of immersion. Nothing annoys me more in games than when my heavily-armored fighter's method of avoiding damage is gracefully dodging blows rather than using the shield in their hand or occasionally having a blow glance off their full suit of articulated steel plate. If they're both the same it just kind of pulls me out of it.
I think he's talking about AC systems, like Fallout 2 for example - really heavy bulky power armor actually makes you harder to hit because it has such a huge AC bonus. It's rare that abstracted combat systems actually bother to differentiate between misses and hits that do no damage unfortunately
@@christianchiakulas852 Yeah, I've seen a few systems like the latter and I prefer them. It's just really immersion-breaking having characters decked out in super-heavy armor and possibly even a shield and the game reflects everything that doesn't hit as a miss... often complete with these nimble dodge animations to accompany it. I'm playing Pillars 2 right now and it's this sort of offender, though to be fair it implements the idea of a Graze system I guess.
I think that's more a matter of the visual depiction being implemented while lacking of that last bit of conceptual understanding of the system. Going back to D20 systems (which are no doubt the most popular system to use the concept)... an increase in AC means that it's harder for the opponent to land a telling blow, even if your fighter is not necessarily harder to hit. For example, let's say your character otherwise had an AC of 10, had an effective Dexterity bonus of +2, and was wearing plate that granted +8 for a total of AC 20. - An attacker that scored from 1-9 (a very poor strike) missed entirely. - Scoring 10-11 means that he would have hit, but your character moved in response, causing the strike to miss. - Now, importantly here, if the attacker got between 12-19, it means that he hit your character, but your plate armor negated the attack in some way. The strike was stopped dead, or deflected off, the surface of the plate, or any of a number of other possibilities. But the point is, it's the armor that stopped the attack. Note that all of the above give the same mechanical result (the enemy's attack is nullified), but conceptually, it's for different reasons. I feel that it would be more satisfying if the visual/audio in a game had distinct portrayals of the three different reasons an attack is nullified, and that this would alleviate the concern that you had. However, perhaps the additional animation work required might not usually be considered worth the payoff.
@@cykeok3525 I personally would consider it very much worthwhile and it would greatly enhance my immersion... but maybe I'm not the target audience. It's interesting you respond with this now, however, as recently I've started playing Pathfinder Kingmaker's Enhanced Edition and it has differing visual representations of missed attacks from any other media I've seen. For instance, I've seen arrows and crossbow bolts miss their mark and get stuck in a nearby wagon model, remaining there for the remainder of the encounter. An attack aimed at a heavily-armored fighter isn't nimbly dodged 100% of the time but rather caught on their shield or glances off their armor with the sound to match. It is a small thing but very satisfying in practice!
damage threshold is a really good system to translate the effectiveness of different types of armor against different types of damage. I like it a lot.
Big agree. I've always used it as the gold standard of how armor should work, and I think the best systems emulate it in some aspect or other. I also like systems that do not have a passive "chance to avoid an attack" stat, at least not for normal creatures (like yeah, maybe if you're shooting at a tank you'd need some means of modeling the impacts of sloped plates, reactive armor, etc) and instead use an opposed roll. Enemy takes a swing at you, do you want to use a AP/whatever to focus on deflecting or avoiding it? Okay, roll your relevant defensive skill (which may be impacted by your armor or other equipment) and compare it to their attack roll. This would be unnecessarily cumbersome for pen and paper, but for a CRPG where everything is done for you on the fly, it adds a bit of granularity and control that I enjoy. I suppose you'd just have it be a stance or something the character enters - while in this stance, AP regenerates more slowly or attacking costs more AP, but you will automatically use your defensive abilities to try and avoid incoming attacks.
As purely a player in these systems this was a great talk to make me step back and think about why certain games/armors in games were my favorite. Thanks for doing this!
Totally agree that D&D (including 5e) has subpar weapons and armors that players do not use or avoid. Fans get use to it and tend to defend what they know, but in terms of encouraging players to create the character they want and yet be at least viable, it is a bad design. So game balance is often misconstrued as just kindhearted desire to make everyone equal, but it is important so that role-playing or conceptual character choices work. Otherwise, people get funneled into what is more efficient (and we see it clearly in games). - nb: I created a new weapons table for 5e on the Dungeon Master's Guild (look for Baraz). It does not significantly change the table, but gives fun perks to weaker weapons and also adds some fun perks (not damage) to big 2H weapons. For example, it gives a player a reason to use a dagger to backstab instead of a stronger weapon, etc. - But I have not done a new armor table, which is also needed. I think fans of medieval armor are often, like me, taken aback by the 5e table.
When I played Deadfire, I went through the exact response you talked about - I hated it, then loved it as soon as I understood it. That in itself can be especially frustrating in a game where you can't change your build, and have to start over (fortunately, this was easy in Deadfire). On my next playthrough, I rolled a devoted/assassin who specialized in a morningstar, and started exploding everything.
Just played through Deadfire for probably the 6th time and I love that armor system. The damage reduction as one element, and the Deflection, Reflex etc. as the other makes for a dynamic system. Not to mention recovery time, action speed, etc. It’s always nice to play a game that doesn’t just hand you your new uniform every few hours. Choice and expression is a huge part of why I love RPGs, so great job!
One thing about reduction modifiers like DR is that they really incentivize stacking them. Going from 0 to 5 DR is almost meaningless. Going from 90 to 95 DR *halves* all damage. Mana cost reduction for spells? Again, stack them sky high and spam fireballs everywhere. Instead of diminishing returns, you get intensifying returns.
Well thats only if your damage reduction system operates on percentages and not integers. Which doesnt make any logical sense why it would be percentages, since lets say Fire DR 30 means you reduce 30% of ANY fire damage, including some ancient megadragon or a bandit with a torch. Literally doesnt make any sense, immersion or logic wise. So if youre making a game with DR (and some kind of Dodge stat like AC I imagine), then make it with integers. Fire DR 5 would mean all fire damage gets reduced by 5. Enough to completely negate a bandit's torch attacks, but that megadragon is still going to turn you into beef jerky. For example, in Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous the DR system works on integers, not percentages. And it works fine because of it, just that it sadly uses the stupid archaic AC system in place of proper armor system, so DR builds just arent really a thing. Worn armor should give like physical damage DR, not AC. It should reduce AC.
@@onodera3964 Doesnt matter what you call it. I never played Fallout 1 & 2 so I call it DR since Pathfinder introduced me to it. How about you address my point instead of literal semantics
@@rykehuss3435 Dude, almost the whole video is about the difference between DT (fixed values) and DR (percentages). Of course they are different, I was specifically talking about DR.
@@onodera3964 Ok. And I explained why the percentage system is stupid, illogical and immersion breaking. Unless its gained from some mythic feat or legendary gear etc The percentage resists only work in ARPG's like Diablo, where to mitigate number creep you can just have 0 to 80 % resistances to various damage sources as one layer of defenses.
When dealing with a damage threshold system, the problem of very heavy attacks breaking through could be solved by converting some of those heavy attacks into multi-hitting attacks, such that the target's armor reduces the incoming damage multiple times. Then the enemy threat level goes from "monster with weak attacks" to "monster with strong attacks that come in bursts of multiple hits" to "monster with strong attacks that come in a single hit."
Number soup…. That’s exactly the vibe I’ve been getting from a lot of modern games. It’s just so hard to actually test stuff sometimes. It feels almost intentional. Like we’re being forced to play way more or interact with forms/videos just to understand.
You could maybe differentiate between mitigation and avoidance this way: make it so the more enemies you engage, the less effective your avoidance stat will be but mitigation will work regardless. So if your character is a nimble rogue with a high dodge stat, it will be easier for them to fight one on one against any enemy, but if they're surrounded but an increasing number of enemies they have less space to move and become easier to hit and thus easier to kill, so no tanking groups with dodge. A heavy armored character on the other hand will be easier to hit in all situations but will have a much better chance of survival against groups of enemies. Something along those lines. 🤔
2 years I have wait 2 years for lectures from You sir. My RPG guru Now I will my progress towards my ongoing development project will boost by your words
I liked deadfire but the pen system never felt that satisfying to me. It seemed to more tuned as a punitive mechanic rather than a rewarding one. It was so rare to get overpen (excepting upgraded enchanted rapiers) that i honestly didn't remember that as a mechanic, I did remember my weapons bouncing off of golems with a small 'no pen' text floating on the screen. For that last case it definitely worked as intended, and honestly that what made the stat feel meaningful. But it was a requirement, a checkbox, not a lovely bigger number make the bad guys explode. I wanna add to this comment but I'm tired, there's actually some more interesting analysis to be made here Edit: After sleeping i think I realised what felt wrong. Gaining pen doesn't feel good it feels correctional and the jump at 2x pen is too dissonant. Having multiple stats affecting damage is fine, and I think alot of what makes dr&dt 'click' is just that players are allready familiar with how they work. An improvement in pen might be you get bonus damage for pen being higher than required. Maybe a linear scaling upto 30% bonus damage. Then getting bonus pen feels like a damage buff and the mechanic includes some rewarding that doesn't require a large amount of min-maxing to be achieved.
Many systems using some vague 'armor' stat do some variation of 'damage taken = base damage * (armor / (constant + armor))'. This ends up working similarly to a damage reduction system, but each armor point grants an identical amount of additional effective health such that it doesn't suffer from the same capping issues as traditional damage reduction. Often the system can still be less intuitive, but setting the constant to 100 means that every point of armor lets you take 1% more damage before dying. Of course, very few of the games that use such a system never actually explain how it works so you pretty much need to use theorycrafting to figure it out- since often games will just as often do something entirely different.
@@benl2140 Yeah, the formula you presented is correct. For a given incoming DPS and pool of hitpoints, the Effective Hitpoints/Time-to-Kill scales linearly with the armor stat. The old Warcraft 3 strategy game used this formula for armor (grandfathered into DotA).. League of Legends also uses the same type of formula for physical armor and magic resistance. So to my limited knowledge, it's mainly RTS and MOBAs that use this system, although I reckon it would work well in RPGs/ARPGs too.
Loved this talk a bunch, thanks for doing it! For any future armor system designers: as a huge Deadfire player and Ultimate challenge completer, I generally enjoyed the Armor/PEN system, but my main criticism was that it didn't feel right with spells. Unlike weapons, there aren't a lot of ways to interact with your spells' penetration value (e.g. weapons frequently had modals that let you trade-off action recovery for extra penetration; nothing existed for spells). And if you came across an enemy with high fire armor, you wouldn't try to pick a fire spell with a higher penetration, you'd just pick a different element element (whereas with weapons you might switch from a low-pen sword to a high-pen stilletto). So, the approach discussed in the QA of having armor for weapons and maybe just a simple DR or keyword-based resistance system for spells sounds like a huge win to me: keeps most of the benefits the armor vs pen system while also making magic much easier to reason about.
I always find it abysmal when the look and stats don't fit together and there are a lot of games that do this, sadly. basically all games with random loot that I know of.
Yeah that was one thing that disappointed me about Starfield vs. Bethesda's other games. In their old games, it was easy to find a cool looking armor set whose stats matched your character and the armors appearance. Combat armor was always combat armor. In Skyrim, hide was always hide. In Starfield my badass space marine armor covered in balistic shielding plates with a closed armored visor might be worse than the next marshmallow man space trucker suit I find on a random spacer. I love those marshmallow man space suits, it's a cool aesthetic choice, but they should be useful for space truckers stats wise, not better than modified special ops military armor
One issue with DT vs. DR is that while DT is intuitive from the armor side, it makes calculations harder from the weapon side because it destroys the concept of dps. If you have a shotgun that shoots once for 100 points of damage every five seconds vs. a pistol that shoots ten times for 10 damage every 0.5 seconds, they have an identical dps of 20, and a DR of 25% affects both equally, but a DT of 5 will reduce the dps of the pistol to 10 but leave the shotgun at 19. Which might be logical and realistic, but if the goal is not making the players do percentage math in their head, it's not great.
I do generally agree with your false dichotomy analysis of dodging vs armor, however I do understand them when it comes down to class-based systems using keywords for certain perks and abilities affecting specifically avoiding attacks and specifically taking them.
I was always curious why armor rolls are not used more often (similar to damage rolls). It could give a lot of flexibility to armor systems and allow to differentiate between various types of armor better. Metal armor would get better "dice" than leather, armor giving more coverage could have lower range of randomness, etc. I am also a big fan of location-based armor, if hitting various body parts is implemented in the system. Sadly, this is a rare occurence.
The randomness of incoming damage could be really frustrating in many games. Understanding your survivability is essential to making informed decisions about the risks you take. This is also why I don't tend to like location based systems, I feel that having separate armour values on separate limbs rarely has any meaningful effect except making damage much harder to predict.
I wanted to add too sum more info on Souls games. It's definitely a tale of Poise. Which instead of being about taking damage per say, its stagger prevention. There's actually two types of 'poise' used in the series, Hyper Armor and Passive Poise. Hyper Armor is only active during an attack animation, protecting you from not getting staggered out of it. Passive poise prevents you from getting stagger at all times, not just attacking. Here's the history; Demon's Souls - Hyperarmor Dark Souls - Passive Poise Dark Souls 2 - Passive Poise (?) Bloodborne - Hyperarmor DS3 - Hyperarmor Elden Ring - Passive Poise AND Hyper Armor The games with only hyperarmor, well you only get a benefit if your aggressively attacking. And DS1's passive poise is so strong that it became a running gag in PvP ( ninja flipping in havels armor ). Elden Ring has the right idea having both, but the calculations are all over the place and stuff is glitched out so it's gonna need some patches before it's consistent. Just thought it'd be interesting to note all this. Since its a system i think that manifests from the action oriented nature of the series.
Playing a Jsawyer hardcore New Vegas run gave me a new appreciation for DT in the game. I liked the system before but as you said trade offs became less relevant when I could just wear heavy armor and carry all the ammo I would ever need. In my run I found myself switching between ammo types more often depending on ammo weight/cost, enemy types, and so on. My load out became more meaningful and my play through that much richer for it.
One of the best Armor systems I've seen comes from Terraria. It's intuitive, allows for a vanity slot to have your visuals look independent from the stat gear and there's vertical progression (Terraria's biggest strength as a game) as well as statistical tradeoffs even outside damage mitigation. I don't understand why other games don't allow you to do this. Just allow for reskinning your stat gear into the thing you want it to look like. Grim Dawn got that right even though it's Armor system is dogshit.
I think because in some games the look of the armor has a tie in with the lore and theme For example, there's this armor in Elden ring that looks like a mushroom which reduced poison damage and has a lore description
Here's the thing about damage reduction AND percentage based damage reduction. Both of them have increasing returns. It's kind of like the old armor penetration mechanic from World of Warcraft. It had an enormous breakpoint once you started getting closer to 100% arpen. And the reason actually goes into why World of Warcraft had such an opaque and confusing armor system. It was in fact percentage based, but it was NOT linear. There was a diminishing returns formula to armor specifically because there is an inherent curve of increasing returns. If you take incoming damage, and reduce 99% of it, you're taking 1 damage. if you reduce 98% of it, you're taking 2 damage. In other words, by increasing 1% of damage mitigation, you're cutting your damage intake by half. WoW deals with this by making the percentage of damage reduction scale nonlinearly, both so you can't hit 100% and so that you need progressively more armor for each percentage point. Integer damage reduction has a similar problem, and for the same reasons. Usually games will have something like, you can reduce damage, but not to less than one. But it still has the problem you mentioned of the curve. This is also part of why WoW has both mitigation and avoidance. It isn't either-or. They designed it so that tanks should have similar damage intake. Some tanks mechanically favor avoidance over flat damage reduction, resulting in "spikier" damage, but overall and with careful design, it often, but not always, roughly evens out due to all tanks having some degree of both mitigation and avoidance.. There are always better tanks than others, just like there are always better DPS than others. This system actually works better than most....if you compare that to D&D's system, for example, it's full of hard breakpoints and limits on stacking, Armor class type nonsense and so on. But yes, it still requires careful tuning. What I would suggest is to prioritize avoiding hard breakpoints. Those are annoying. Softer curves closer to linear values, at least to start, are more appealing. But linearly scaling systems, as described above, still eventually reach breakpoints. The solution isn't to dumb down your system; I think it's actually something closer to the way that WoW models their base armor system, with a non-linear curve function with diminishing returns baked in to the formula that becomes more aggressive the higher that the numbers go. As far as that system being harder to understand than a linear scaling system, it doesn't matter - don't underestimate the intelligence of your audience. WoW is full of theorycrafters and those who follow theorycrafters, and it's one of the most popular and enduring games on planet earth - the system works. Don't reinvent the wheel, just look up WoW's armor integer to damage reduction % formula, and copy it. The only problem is that they don't explain it within the user interface. Just explain your progression curve in a way that makes sense and provide the relevant information and tools that people need to make a decision within the UI. A simple example is DPS - just giving a simple DPS value on the gear tooltip explains everything you need to know between two weapons, without having to bust out a calculator or a whiteboard. A stat comparison window to compare two pieces of gear - something like that for armor showing your % reduction on each piece of armor. Boom. All of a sudden you have everything you need as a player, at a glance.
I would be glad if you get acquainted with the protection system in the indie game Underrail, where in addition to the usual protection from clothing, it is possible to use energy shields. *The amount absorbed varies depending on the impact speed of an attack* and the quality of the components used.Certain weapons do damage at different impact speeds. So if you've got a high frequency emitter, your shield will have higher numbers ranging through the medium to very high. But virtually no absorbtion ability in the very low and low. The opposite is true as well.
I personally really like this system, because it makes the game more tactical and forces you to diversify your damage. You can be a hammer bro, but if an enemy uses low frequency shield, what are you gonna do? You need to think about additional sources of damage: use electrical psi attacks or grenades. Additionally, if you are having a tough encounter, you can go back and buy/craft yourself a shield, and you actually need to think about what kind of shield you are acquiring. Use two modulators of different frequences to get protection from more damage types or dump everything into just one frequency to be more shielded against that one particular damage type? Install converter to make shield absorb more damage before getting disabled or opt for amplifier to turn it into a more tanky but energy inefficient kind of shield? There are a lot of possibilities.
For player-friendly system, I like the Attack Power vs Defense Power system. Have the players think it's just "Damage = Attack Power - Defense Power." Then you sprinkle some balance like diminishing return and/or catch-up mechanic that average players don't need to worry about. It's basically Damage vs DT, but it's abstracted so you can sneak in whatever complexity you need to make the system play better.
Yall wanna hear something wild? Breath of the Wild has ADDITIVE armor. You can reduce all dmg to 1 heart slice. Once piece of armor can remove 4 slices off of damage. It's insane for an RPG.
This was always one of the big challenges as a player: I have an armor with 50 points and it has some buff that I like (+1 strength or something). I find an armor with 60 points and no buff. Which is better? I don't have any way to really know except by intuition. I've noticed that one of the ways developers work around the DR cliff is by making armor scale non-linearly. Like the first 50 points of armor will mitigate 30% but the next 50 points will only mitigate an extra 15%. Solves the cliff but has the calculation problem. I like the idea of protection against damage types, but as a player I don't want to carry around different armors and weapons, and switch them every battle. For a boss battle it makes sense to switch into specialized gear and buff, but for the most part I want to stay in the same armor and switch between a primary/secondary/ranged weapon in any specific battle.
Armor number soup hate is so valid. I hate that stuff. Great talk but i wish shields and their tradeoffs would have been included. I know they are different gameply wise in actiony games but in crpgs / ttrpgs it gets intresting.
Stuff like this is what I love youtube for. Just free access to knowledge and information. I don't think people appreciate it as well as they probably should.
Please keep it up Josh! Your passion is still felt today, even by today's generation. I hope you keep that passion! Its honestly an inspiration... I don't mean to rant, but you look at any of the other devs of note.. instant corporate. I hope you continue to be an inspiration to RPGs, and even gaming, as a whole!
10:18 I'm going to point out that it can be both balanced, equally effective and still play differently. In Path of Exile for example, there's armor and dodge, armor mitigate every phys damage proportionally to the amount dealt in one blow ( small hit = high reduction, big hit = small reduction) and dodge is a % chance of not getting hit that increases every time you're getting hit. On first glance you can dismiss it as being more or less the same but when you take into account the many different builds that use different types of "health" (low health with super high regen, big health pool that only regenerates when not being hit for x second, etc etc) both stats become very distinct and the choice is meaningful.
Payday 2 had this discussion as well. Though granted payday 2’a makes it have a secondary role. A high dodge/concealment setup probably could do stealth better than the guy with a m60, and starts by yelling “ITS SHOWTIIIIIME” before rushing in.
Kingdoms come deliverance had the best combat I thought. No matter how high your level was, some dude with some armor and a sword could kill you as long as you didn’t have your game up and were parrying and really fighting. It made it real like, even at a low level fight, if you let your attention slip, a noob can get the better of you. Woah. Literally as I wrote this he jsut went to the kingdom come slide. Wtf
Skyrims armour system is the worst in videogames RPGs in a bunch of ways. First up armour is an arbitrary rating with no in game information ever explaining what the value does. Second the system runs out of runway extremely quickly, heavy armour wearers cap out armour before midgame and all three armour types (heavy, light, and mage armour) cap out meaning heavy armour is no more protective than any other type and armour rapidly becomes a dead stat. Third the system is a vertical progression % reduction system where the % goes up at a flat if not accelerating rate. This leads to a weird balancing nightmare because +10% damage reduction has substantially different effects depending on how much armour you already have. if you have 70% armour and go up to 80% you will have a 1/3rd damage reduction from your previous armour value which is really substantial. But going from 10% to 20% is honestly barely noticeable. This leads to weird stuff where the game becomes trivially easy once you're approaching the end of the armour curve as even small upgrades substantially reduce damage taken. Then it takes a looooong time for enemies to hit hard enough to harm you again because 85% damage reduction is massive. A nice alternative for % damage reduction is to have that % determined by dividing the damage by (X+Armour Value)/X. You'll need to teach players but its pretty intuitive once they learn. If X is 10 than each armour point is the equivalent to a 10% increase in your health. This gives you infinite runway, 10 armour effectively doubles your hp at 50% DR, 20 armour effectively triples your hp at 66% DR, 30 armour = 75% DR. You can make X higher for more gradation or lower for less.
One of the things that was IMO kind of interesting about the old WH40k RPG systems from Fantasy Flight Games is that they didn't really have a "dichotomy" between avoidance-driven & soak-driven defensive styles. There were distinct mechanics/statistics governing both (agility/dodge rating, parrying & occasionally force-fields for avoidance; and toughness/armor class for soak), but neither one of them was necessarily in conflict with the other & you absolutely could build a character that was both extremely good at both avoiding hits & soaking damage, and consequently just be a nightmare to deal with for anybody without "spellcasting" (that is to say psyker powers).
I've got to agree with the naming in Pillars. It IS damage reduction, it's an amount by which damage is reduced. A "threshold" implies a value above or below which something happens, like, say "sturdy" in D&D (I think?), where all damage below 10 is ignored. In this case, there's a threshold, 10, below which no damage is caused but above which damage is applied normally.
24:13 majestic! Maybe damage reduction could rise/drop by some % for every level the weapon/attack is above its item level, so you get more runway back to improve as enemies get stronger.
I was hoping you might mention that DR can go above 100% in the IE games, allowing you to be healed from dragon's breath :) Rimworld (which has combat very similar to IE games) uses a system much like Deadfire but a little simpler and easier to explain imo. Every instance of damage is either pierce, blunt, or energy, and rolls 1-100 against the corresponding defense. If the attack roll is higher, it does full damage; if it's lower it gets reduced by half, and if the roll is less than half the armor it gets reduced to nothing. Every weapon also has an Armor Piercing value that gives a flat bonus to the roll, usually proportional to the caliber and rate of fire. In addition, every body part can have outer, middle, and inner layers of armor, and they resist in sequence. The problem I have with these pure-chance systems is that it can feel very punishing when the enemy gets a lucky hit. With DT you at least have a guaranteed level of protection. Rimworld compounds this with highly detailed body part simulation and different levels of coverage, so your uber-decked-out hero can still die from a single pistol shot to their chin if they don't have a full face helmet.
My takeaway is the confirmation what I have been thinking for a long time: Vertical scaling has no intrinsic value and causes more problems than it is worth. What's the poing with "number goes up", when you end up being equally strong to enemies of your own level? This system has obvious flaws and the more math you involve to make the system more "elegant", the worse it gets for making informed decisions. You can scale numerically just by adjusting attack/health but leave the interesting part of progression to passive and active abilities.
The solution is simple IMO. You did a very good job in fallout NV. Heavy armour should have higher damage thresholds bellow which NO DAMAGE IS TAKEN. This is the only change I would make to fallouts DT system, getting rid of DR altogether. The trade off being, expensive or difficult to buy/attain and maintain along with de-buffs to skills related to movement speed, spring speed and duration, and stealth. In the case of power armour you need specific training to use it as well as all of these things. Light armours should have lower damage thresholds but allow for or even improve skills related to mobility and stealth. Chinese stealth armour was the panicle of this. Also giving the player perks or skills that can only function when light armour is worn. I am not referring to a simple "dodge" stat, if you are going to implement this it needs to be a skill unlocked by light armour (when you use it) that the player can use. Just like how Power armour unlocks abilities like increased melee damage and increased throw distance etc. Medium armour should be in the middle. For melee copy Vermintide/Darktides system of different melee weapons having different attack patterns with different damage types. I.e. a thrust will always be armour piecing, a slash will usually be cleave. Simple.
i think the problem with elden ring's armor design is that they removed the ability to upgrade it, and what it SHOULD be giving the player is not on the armor everybody has a harder time playing elden ring than they should because they underlevelled vigor. nobody wants to level vigor because leveling up is expensive and they want to put their points towards either unlocking the ability to use new gear/spells they've acquired, or towards making their character hit harder so they can get closer to/maintain their breakpoints, and because every level is more expensive than the last every time you choose to increase your damage instead of your vigor you decrease the likelihood that you will feel vigor is a good point investment in the future because it wasn't worth it when it was cheaper, and now that it's more expensive but provide the same benefit as it would have before it will be less worth it. the math doesnt add up in players' heads, and the only people who escape this cycle is people who just bite the bullet & look up a leveling guide. also the problem as you mention that nobody knows what the heck armor does in From games there's a very easy fix for all of this; return item upgrading to armor pieces (was a mechanic in DS1), but instead of the armor doing anything damage mitigation related, your health value is determined by your armor instead of a character stat and that's ALL armor does for defense. why? well for one, + to health is a number players can make decisions about because health is a bar that's always on-screen. they can SEE it, it's visualized, it makes sense to them. also upgrading health that way means, if you spend half your currency on leveling up your STR so you can wield a new club, now you don't have enough currency to level up because the price of leveling up increases every time you do it, so all of the leftover currency you have is now effectively "free" to use on upgrading your armor, because upgrades are far cheaper than levels (similar to how vespene gas in starcraft means marines/zealots/zerglings are effectively free). sprinkle in the same upgrade resource system the summons have where each upgrade requires a specific type of stone that's only used for that tier of upgrade so that upgrading a +20 armor doesn't reduce in any way your ability to upgrade a +1 armor you just found that's cool, and you wind up negating most if not all of the player expression the armor upgrading system had edit: oh yeah and if your game has the weight limit/fatrolling system, upgrading a piece of armor should very slightly decrease its weight, as well as increase the defensive benefits it gives you. that way upgrading armor pushes it closer towards breakpoints that allows you to combine it with other pieces to have an outfit that you can lightroll in, instead of just having armor pieces forever locked off from being viable because you should never fatroll & a fatroll armor never ceases to be fatroll armor. IMO players with all maxed out armor pieces and their character sitting at the higher band of the soft-cap on the stat that increases your weight limit should be able to light roll in basically every combination of armor. there are other, far more interesting ways to make choice of armor feel impactful (the Elden Ring Convergence overhaul mod puts passive buffs on armor, similar to how staves in vanilla Elden Ring will give a passive bonus to certain schools of magic. you could give those to many/most/all armors, and/or make those bonuses neither active nor even visible for which armor has which bonus until you level it up significantly/to the max. the passive magic damage buff on staves in vanilla is kind of boring (if you're using blood magic you just equip the blood magic staff), but if that choice were spread out across 5+ pieces of armor it becomes a far more interesting system purely because of the player's capacity to combine them) PS, as i'm watching this i am currently modding armor in KOTOR2.... yeah, it's a better system than AC in straight D&D ripoffs like Pathfinder lol
you mention Kingdom Come having a system for different types of weapons piercing different armor's resistances. technically From games have this too but the mechanic is so under-utilized that most players never realize it's a thing even tho it's one of the only mechanics whose numerical values are laid out in a straight-forward way. which is quite funny, but largely the reason it means nothing to players is bc it circles back around to the numbers soup problem; you're told what damage type a weapon has, but how effective it is versus certain kinds of armor is actually information stored in the enemy's armor values, which the player NEVER sees or gets to interact with in a sensible way. Kingdom Come is relevant here bc one of its competitors in the medieval combat sim genre, Chivalry 2, solves this problem; the game has a class system, archer vanguard knight & footman. none of the armor is shared between classes, & nobody in those classes can have exactly the same combination of weapons even tho they can get close (knight can have heavy metal shield and a fancy spear, footman can have a medium wooden shield and a cheap spear, but they are visually distinct at a glance), and each of those classes has a class-specific special attack and a class-specific ability that distinguishes where they fit in the match -- footmen heal & get charge stabs, vanguards throw bombs & get sprinting swings to cleave many undefended, knights buff their team & get an overhead swing to overpower a single enemy's defense, ect. so, part of the gameplay loop is learning to intuit at a glance what class an enemy is so you can predict, is he gonna throw a molotov in your face, is he gonna back off to apply a healing-over-time on himself and then heal his team while it ticks, is he gonna try to come over your shield. why this matters; Chivalry 2 does a clever trick and takes all of that baked in encouragement for players to learn to identify enemy class at a glance, and then piggybacks weapon bonuses off of that. the mace does +25% damage against knights, the scimitar does +40% to footmen and archers. it takes all of the information problems ER has, and fixes them by attacking the importance to the information a player sees during a fight instead of to a stat only the enemy can see before a fight. and it doesn't systemitize this information at all -- it doesn't ask you to memorize which kinds of weapons count as slashing versus cutting damage -- it just says who a specific weapon does bonus damage against on that item's description. its so smart
Isn't Kingdom Come Delivernance's system pretty different? I don't know that they fully achieved their aims, but the idea was that full plate armour actually protects against ALL damage (except blunt I think), but being hit enough will drain your stamina. Once you lose enough stamina you then take damage. It's supposed to simulate real life, once you lose enough stamina you would not be able to stop your oppenent slipping a dagger in between the gaps.
I know I'm two years too late, but it's interesting that you think medium armor should be a little bit better, statistically, than light or heavy. Because the same thing happens in MOBAs, where bruisers usually just have 'more' stats according to however it's appropriate to add up all the numbers than pure tanks, supports or carries. I think it's the same reason; you aren't going to be the best at one specific thing so you have to be at least a little better than mediocre across the board.
I feel like the lower mobility penalty of fallout nvs lighter armor is basically how to do AC in a first person shooter. The player is doing the dodging themselves. I wish we got to hear your opinion on enemy armor. DT really seems like the best option because of how easy it is to understand. Tank needs big attack to hurt. But I could see dr having uses.
The DR system in PoE is still one of my favorites. If a 20-meter-tall iron giant hits me in the face, having a helmet should not matter. You can still design high-level enemies who deal damage in multiple instances so armor doesn't become irrelevant in the late game.
What if instead of the master below doing 180 damage in a single blast he did six ticks for 30 damage each in which DT then comes into play for each tick?
i feel like the idea of "quality" you mention around 41:00 tends to serve only to overly complicate and bore players. i like the idea of being able to craft sidegrades, a bit like fallout 4's weapon mods system, though i hesitate to say the whole "upgrade it to be better" or "legendary effects" stuff is good for a similar reason. i like the idea to have a weapon you love maintain use through some means though, but it should be that same item and not a random legendary of the same type you find, sentimentality like that engages players and encourages some degree of roleplay imo
I know I don’t like pen system from Deadfire, but I never quite managed to figure out why. My feeling is like it doesn’t quite feel like a choice, or combat consideration. It just feels like a thing one need to manage, rather then finding enemies weakness: “look through each newly and make sure that pen value is sufficient”. That is a weird line of thought thought, as I don’t think it is any different that what PoE1 does - perhaps it being so straightforward to see, made it feel more like a box to tick rather then a tactical consideration?
Very informative. I've been playing games long enough to remember Darklands! One of, if not the biggest turnoff to many/most rpgs is their weird armor/damage systems and mechanics. In fact I hate most of them, which is super annoying because I passed on most major rpgs in the last 20 years! I tried them and stopped playing and feel cheated on having missed out on those experiences. The fallout series is the first one that made sense (ES to a lesser extend, but still more than other rpgs). This obession with pen and paper systems seems to have infected the industry for decades, since there is no need for all this unnecessary complexity. They're fantasy worlds, realism does not have to be mathematically coded into the mechanics. It just has to make sense and be accessable.
I've loved RPGs for a long time but never understood their mechanical side until hearing your lectures on the topic. The theoretical side of creating a tabletop system is so fascinating Ive probably rewatched this four or five times now.
Some observations. First of all, one of the most important implementations of armour from the early TTRPG days, namely Rolemaster, was missed out. RM was a crit-based system and heavier armour generally reduced the number and severity of crits that a character would face. As secondary effects, heavier armour typically required more training, reduced movement and slightly increased the number of (non-critical) hits. Now I have actually played computer games with RM combat mechanics and, frankly, they tend to work very poorly, since crit-based systems end up making things way too random when a character is killing hundreds or thousands of enemies. In considering different forms of implementation though, this feels like it deserved a mention. So onward to your penetration (AP) idea. The most intuitive way of implementing AP is for it to provide a direct opposition to enemy DR. This immediately solves the runway problem, since AR above 100% becomes useful. There are a number of games that use this approach, either directly or indirectly (ie working against a mitigation stat that acts a proxy for AR), and it surely must be better than the arbitrary numbers used in the Deadfire AP system. You can still use DT in this type of system, which then effectively becomes armour immune to AP. Of course, every AP system suffers from a serious issue. Either all enemies of a given level have roughly equal AR values, meaning that characters basically need to have a specific amount of AP for their level (reducing real choice) or enemies have quite different AR values, meaning that characters have to adjust their equipment constantly to react to different enemies. While many will see the matter as providing good strategic combat opportunities, my feeling is that most players fine having to switch their equipment about for EVERY fight to be tiresome and not good gameplay. In the end, sometimes simpler does actually end up better, at least in terms of the fun-factor, which is surely the most important concept for a game.
In WoW theorycrafting, back in the day, we had this term called "effective health". Effective health would be the amount of incoming you can take before dying with all the armor reductions. Essentially if you have 100hp and a 50% damage reduction then your effective health would be 200. The way to make damage reduction percentage scale indefinitely is to think in terms of effective health instead of flat out reduction, let's say 1 point of armor would give you 10% more effective health. In practice, when damaging a target with an armor of 1, you'd divide the damage by 1.1 instead of just reducing 10% (which in essence would be multiplying by 0.9). If you add a DT to that armor, let's say 1 DT per point of armor, you'll have a solid armor system that can scale indefinitely upwards and is really easy to understand and balance. You'd probably want to calculate DT first and DR second, otherwise armor would get really powerful really fast (first reduce DT from incoming damage and then divide that value with your armor reduction instead of first dividing and then reducing the DT). Essentially: DamageTaken = (IncomingDamage - Armor)/(1 + Armor*0.1) Let's have a couple examples to clarify. An attack that does 100 damage lands on a target with 5 armor would result in (100-5)/(1+0.5) = 63.33... damage taken The same attack lands on a target with 10 armor would only deal (100-10)/(1+1) = 45 damage taken An attack that does 10 damage lands on a target with 5 armor would result in (10-5)/(1+0.5) = 2.5 damage taken The same attack landing on a target with 10 armor would obviously do no damage at all unless there's a minimum damage of 1 for example. The math is simple and easy to balance and would be relatively easy to explain as well.
I like this talk, but I would take a peek at the original Alternity system for armour: each armour had damage ratings for three damage types (low impact, high impact, energy) and then quality, and those were matched with the weapons - so weapons and armour were marginal, ordinary, good, and amazing quality, and if your armour was a quality better than the weapon, it would drop the weapon's damage down a step, and vice versa. So, if you have a good-quality energy rifle, it would hit the energy stat of your armour, and if it was good quality armour, it would even out, but if it was ordinary armour, the damage would be bumped up to amazing damage. One could play with that, too - mismatched armour quality could be an auto-crit, or do 20% more damage, or something like that.
I loved learning the systems in Deadfire and it works for the kind of game it is. Sure readability is rough at times but that's where the Real Time with Pause comes into play. I can take my time to analyze the encounter and pick the right tool for the job.
I started playing Pillars of Eternity 1 - as a backer - hadn't enough time before. And oh boy...is the combat a chore. So much so that I am in doubt if I will finish the game. Every time doing the same with thousands of enemy encounters - how could the dev team think this is fun?
I think a pure DR system can work as long as the DR values of different armor pieces combine multiplicatively,rather than additively (i.e. if you have 2 pieces of armor with 20% DR each, the overall DR is 36%, not 40%). As long as the DR values of individual pieces aren't too high, the overall DR won't get crazy, and you won't "run out of runway".
I personally quite liked the way Pillars does damage reduction (and calling it that made it clear to me, coming from Neverwinter Nights/KoTORs where that's what DR is) the most part, but the Master Below's opening breath salvo that usually wipes 4 or 5 of my party members before I have time to place them out of the way was honestly bullshit I never had the patience to wade through. I've played through the game twice, and on both playthroughs I've made my way down there, tried fighting him/her a few times, and left. I'm also now trying to replay New Vegas with your mod, and while on paper DT and DR make sense, I can't really understand what happens in combat a lot of the time. Admittedly I'm not even 10 hours in yet, but most of the time combat feels like I'm doing absolutely no damage whatsoever and firefights are either me and my enemies shooting ridiculous amounts of bullets into each other with peashooters or the enemies one-shot me. I don't understand why that happens, especially when I'm supposed to have something like 7 or 8 DT against a weapon that does 11 damage and my max health is 120. Maybe I'll figure the game out as I play it more, but I feel much more like I'm rolling dice when fighting than in games actually based on dice rolls.
Armor in WoW has for at least a decade been only a vessel carrying stats. Nobody cares at all about armor rating. The only meaningful question is how much primary stat (strenght etc) and which secondary stats (haste, critical chance, etc) are present on the piece. So for the topic of this talk damage mitigation, WoW takes the aproach of nobody cares what it does.
Apart from the mechanical aspect of armour systems, I really appreciate how you designed the amours in Pillars of Eternity, visually. No unrealistic female armours, no unnecessary decorative spikes or strangely lacking gorgets. Danke schön!
I actually love how in New Vegas there's no defense from high powered equipment. Realistically, nothing you can wear will stop a armor piercing .50 round. And it means certain enemies are always a challenge, regardless of you're position in the game.
Explosives could maybe be handled more like shotguns, with multiple pellets imitating shrapnel. That would be easier to absorb via armor without changing the system as a whole.
Technically there are ballistic vests IRL that can completely stop a .50 BMG, and I imagine that power armor with the same tech would be able to remove the majority of the resultant concussion force. However, any sort of articulated armor would absolutely get obliterated by anything with that level of kinetic force and headshots would still be absolutely fatal. I feel that always having enemies either relevant damage/weapons is essential, but it's also incredibly immersion breaking if every joe schmoe you come across has a .50 cal or missile launcher. I feel that a good balance is that elite enemies always have relevant weapons but basic grunts need to have better tactics or get lucky to be a notable threat.
Explosives can be multi-modal damage. A shock wave (armor does not protect) component, heat component (certain armor protects), and shrapnel (thick armor protects), for example
@@OverlordIntecris I agree with your perspective. From a realism perspective, as important or unimportant as realism may subjectively be, that sounds right.
Right now body armor typically consists of a plate carrier that may have some ballistic protection from layered polymer weave (i.e. "soft" armor), with a purpose-built compartment at the front and the back to carry a rifle plate ("hard" armor).
Rifle plates are typically only just large enough to cover the vitals in the torso, because for practical purposes they're too heavy to provide more coverage than that.
However, the technological idea of power armor that appears often in sci-fi is to have a servomotor-assisted armature that allows the wearer/occupant to carry much more weight, so conceivably the same composition and thickness of armor can be extended to the rest of the body.
The powered armor could also provide *some* additional resistance to the concussive backface effects, though absolutely not in entirety. Even with power armor, at some point, the only way to make a more resistant infantryman would to be to make a more resistant human, and that's beyond the scope of the "armor" discussion.
As you mentioned, coverage would not be absolute, due to the necessity of articulation, and the head is particularly vulnerable to concussion. A wearer would still want to avoid taking hits from incoming fire with tactical positioning and movement, the armor simply providing a much more reliable last line of defense.
More to the point, within the last few years rifle plates have indeed been developed that can prevent penetration from .50 BMG. Again, of course, preventing penetration doesn't mean preventing all harm.
If you wanted semi-realism, explosives would need to deal damage in two components - one part that is affected by armor, in whatever means, and another that completely bypasses all armor and mitigation. An explosion can kill even if you aren't close enough to be burned/broken by it. It's why throwing an explosive in a pond will kill a whole lot of fish, even if they aren't directly hit by the explosion. The pressure wave ruptures internal organs (up to and including the brain, spinal cord, etc.)
I wish more game designers and devs would talk about other games like this, atleast in a more open way.
I really like the approach of armor giving a separate health pool that interacts differently with things. It's fairly intuitive that it's a coating on top and gives another lever to make armor categories feel very different.
It’s very clear and thematically appropriate. It really feels like armour is protecting you.
So in the same way Divinity has armor pools from your set and magic defense pools separate from your total health?
@@gooseneck5433 Yeah. That is one example of it. There is also "The last spell" which does... Damage threshold, Damage reduction AND armor health. (but they don't have a separate split for "magic armor")
@@Adalore That doesn’t get overly tedious to work with and it’s pretty intuitive? If so that sounds pretty good.
@@gooseneck5433 Yep.
If you look further into the DS3/Elden Ring's 'Defense'(not negation/absorption) you will see even weirder completely unintuitive math that no player would ever have figured out normally without in-depth fan testing/data-mining:
- First and foremost it was already weird as it only went up from leveling up instead of being affected by armor(tho in ds3 you needed to have all armor slots filled for full benefit, armor type/quality didnt matter, helmets and hoods gave the same amount)
- Then for the math itself, many initially assumed it was a flat damage threshold type of system(and many still think this is how it works) but rather its a % dmg reduction that is determined by the ratio of the incoming dmg and Defense which then gets applied together with the OTHER % dmg reduction present in Absorption/Negation which is just... baffling
Yup, it was flat damage in Dark Souls 1, but after that its been percentage.
Limit Breakers i know did a video for DS3 showcasing just how little damage is reduced even with high defense numbers.
Japanese devs don't like players directly engage with the hidden mechanics but rather have the player use heuristics (rule of thumbs)
See also Pokemon and EV IVs
@@idunno402maybe 2 decades ago Japanese devs were like that (and from soft is also 2 decades behind the industry in any areas)
But monster hunter and a bunch of Japanese game series that used to be ootuse are now super trsnsparant with their mechanics and they are better for it.
@@idunno402 Crazy how long the Pokemon devs have held on the secrets of EVs and IVs until they finally gave up decades later
This might come off as strange. But I'm a French/American Ubisoft Director here in Montpellier. Really love your talks and wish there was something I could do to give back. If you ever want to come take a trip in the south of France (Montpellier) you and yours will always be welcome at my house.
It does come off as strange
I actually like what he calls the "false dichotomy" for the purposes of immersion. Nothing annoys me more in games than when my heavily-armored fighter's method of avoiding damage is gracefully dodging blows rather than using the shield in their hand or occasionally having a blow glance off their full suit of articulated steel plate. If they're both the same it just kind of pulls me out of it.
I think he's talking about AC systems, like Fallout 2 for example - really heavy bulky power armor actually makes you harder to hit because it has such a huge AC bonus. It's rare that abstracted combat systems actually bother to differentiate between misses and hits that do no damage unfortunately
@@christianchiakulas852 Yeah, I've seen a few systems like the latter and I prefer them.
It's just really immersion-breaking having characters decked out in super-heavy armor and possibly even a shield and the game reflects everything that doesn't hit as a miss... often complete with these nimble dodge animations to accompany it. I'm playing Pillars 2 right now and it's this sort of offender, though to be fair it implements the idea of a Graze system I guess.
@@SaftonYT Fallout 2 is the same way. You dodge attacks in PA
I think that's more a matter of the visual depiction being implemented while lacking of that last bit of conceptual understanding of the system.
Going back to D20 systems (which are no doubt the most popular system to use the concept)... an increase in AC means that it's harder for the opponent to land a telling blow, even if your fighter is not necessarily harder to hit.
For example, let's say your character otherwise had an AC of 10, had an effective Dexterity bonus of +2, and was wearing plate that granted +8 for a total of AC 20.
- An attacker that scored from 1-9 (a very poor strike) missed entirely.
- Scoring 10-11 means that he would have hit, but your character moved in response, causing the strike to miss.
- Now, importantly here, if the attacker got between 12-19, it means that he hit your character, but your plate armor negated the attack in some way. The strike was stopped dead, or deflected off, the surface of the plate, or any of a number of other possibilities. But the point is, it's the armor that stopped the attack.
Note that all of the above give the same mechanical result (the enemy's attack is nullified), but conceptually, it's for different reasons.
I feel that it would be more satisfying if the visual/audio in a game had distinct portrayals of the three different reasons an attack is nullified, and that this would alleviate the concern that you had.
However, perhaps the additional animation work required might not usually be considered worth the payoff.
@@cykeok3525 I personally would consider it very much worthwhile and it would greatly enhance my immersion... but maybe I'm not the target audience.
It's interesting you respond with this now, however, as recently I've started playing Pathfinder Kingmaker's Enhanced Edition and it has differing visual representations of missed attacks from any other media I've seen. For instance, I've seen arrows and crossbow bolts miss their mark and get stuck in a nearby wagon model, remaining there for the remainder of the encounter. An attack aimed at a heavily-armored fighter isn't nimbly dodged 100% of the time but rather caught on their shield or glances off their armor with the sound to match. It is a small thing but very satisfying in practice!
Love these talks you do Josh. Super helpful and insightful.
damage threshold is a really good system to translate the effectiveness of different types of armor against different types of damage. I like it a lot.
Big agree. I've always used it as the gold standard of how armor should work, and I think the best systems emulate it in some aspect or other. I also like systems that do not have a passive "chance to avoid an attack" stat, at least not for normal creatures (like yeah, maybe if you're shooting at a tank you'd need some means of modeling the impacts of sloped plates, reactive armor, etc) and instead use an opposed roll. Enemy takes a swing at you, do you want to use a AP/whatever to focus on deflecting or avoiding it? Okay, roll your relevant defensive skill (which may be impacted by your armor or other equipment) and compare it to their attack roll. This would be unnecessarily cumbersome for pen and paper, but for a CRPG where everything is done for you on the fly, it adds a bit of granularity and control that I enjoy. I suppose you'd just have it be a stance or something the character enters - while in this stance, AP regenerates more slowly or attacking costs more AP, but you will automatically use your defensive abilities to try and avoid incoming attacks.
As purely a player in these systems this was a great talk to make me step back and think about why certain games/armors in games were my favorite. Thanks for doing this!
To devs/designers of the future. This is PURE GOLD. FOR FREE. Savour it.
Totally agree that D&D (including 5e) has subpar weapons and armors that players do not use or avoid. Fans get use to it and tend to defend what they know, but in terms of encouraging players to create the character they want and yet be at least viable, it is a bad design. So game balance is often misconstrued as just kindhearted desire to make everyone equal, but it is important so that role-playing or conceptual character choices work. Otherwise, people get funneled into what is more efficient (and we see it clearly in games).
- nb: I created a new weapons table for 5e on the Dungeon Master's Guild (look for Baraz). It does not significantly change the table, but gives fun perks to weaker weapons and also adds some fun perks (not damage) to big 2H weapons. For example, it gives a player a reason to use a dagger to backstab instead of a stronger weapon, etc.
- But I have not done a new armor table, which is also needed. I think fans of medieval armor are often, like me, taken aback by the 5e table.
When I played Deadfire, I went through the exact response you talked about - I hated it, then loved it as soon as I understood it. That in itself can be especially frustrating in a game where you can't change your build, and have to start over (fortunately, this was easy in Deadfire). On my next playthrough, I rolled a devoted/assassin who specialized in a morningstar, and started exploding everything.
Just played through Deadfire for probably the 6th time and I love that armor system. The damage reduction as one element, and the Deflection, Reflex etc. as the other makes for a dynamic system. Not to mention recovery time, action speed, etc.
It’s always nice to play a game that doesn’t just hand you your new uniform every few hours. Choice and expression is a huge part of why I love RPGs, so great job!
Miscreant Leathers + Fair Favor = Ahoy mates!
One thing about reduction modifiers like DR is that they really incentivize stacking them. Going from 0 to 5 DR is almost meaningless. Going from 90 to 95 DR *halves* all damage. Mana cost reduction for spells? Again, stack them sky high and spam fireballs everywhere. Instead of diminishing returns, you get intensifying returns.
Well thats only if your damage reduction system operates on percentages and not integers. Which doesnt make any logical sense why it would be percentages, since lets say Fire DR 30 means you reduce 30% of ANY fire damage, including some ancient megadragon or a bandit with a torch. Literally doesnt make any sense, immersion or logic wise.
So if youre making a game with DR (and some kind of Dodge stat like AC I imagine), then make it with integers. Fire DR 5 would mean all fire damage gets reduced by 5. Enough to completely negate a bandit's torch attacks, but that megadragon is still going to turn you into beef jerky.
For example, in Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous the DR system works on integers, not percentages. And it works fine because of it, just that it sadly uses the stupid archaic AC system in place of proper armor system, so DR builds just arent really a thing. Worn armor should give like physical damage DR, not AC. It should reduce AC.
@@rykehuss3435 That'd be DT, not DR then
@@onodera3964 Doesnt matter what you call it. I never played Fallout 1 & 2 so I call it DR since Pathfinder introduced me to it.
How about you address my point instead of literal semantics
@@rykehuss3435 Dude, almost the whole video is about the difference between DT (fixed values) and DR (percentages). Of course they are different, I was specifically talking about DR.
@@onodera3964 Ok. And I explained why the percentage system is stupid, illogical and immersion breaking. Unless its gained from some mythic feat or legendary gear etc
The percentage resists only work in ARPG's like Diablo, where to mitigate number creep you can just have 0 to 80 % resistances to various damage sources as one layer of defenses.
When dealing with a damage threshold system, the problem of very heavy attacks breaking through could be solved by converting some of those heavy attacks into multi-hitting attacks, such that the target's armor reduces the incoming damage multiple times.
Then the enemy threat level goes from "monster with weak attacks" to "monster with strong attacks that come in bursts of multiple hits" to "monster with strong attacks that come in a single hit."
Number soup…. That’s exactly the vibe I’ve been getting from a lot of modern games. It’s just so hard to actually test stuff sometimes. It feels almost intentional. Like we’re being forced to play way more or interact with forms/videos just to understand.
18:00 - DT & DR
38:46 - Thoughts for the future
You could maybe differentiate between mitigation and avoidance this way: make it so the more enemies you engage, the less effective your avoidance stat will be but mitigation will work regardless. So if your character is a nimble rogue with a high dodge stat, it will be easier for them to fight one on one against any enemy, but if they're surrounded but an increasing number of enemies they have less space to move and become easier to hit and thus easier to kill, so no tanking groups with dodge. A heavy armored character on the other hand will be easier to hit in all situations but will have a much better chance of survival against groups of enemies. Something along those lines. 🤔
Good idea.
2 years
I have wait 2 years for lectures from You sir. My RPG guru
Now I will my progress towards my ongoing development project will boost by your words
I liked deadfire but the pen system never felt that satisfying to me.
It seemed to more tuned as a punitive mechanic rather than a rewarding one. It was so rare to get overpen (excepting upgraded enchanted rapiers) that i honestly didn't remember that as a mechanic, I did remember my weapons bouncing off of golems with a small 'no pen' text floating on the screen.
For that last case it definitely worked as intended, and honestly that what made the stat feel meaningful. But it was a requirement, a checkbox, not a lovely bigger number make the bad guys explode.
I wanna add to this comment but I'm tired, there's actually some more interesting analysis to be made here
Edit: After sleeping i think I realised what felt wrong. Gaining pen doesn't feel good it feels correctional and the jump at 2x pen is too dissonant. Having multiple stats affecting damage is fine, and I think alot of what makes dr&dt 'click' is just that players are allready familiar with how they work.
An improvement in pen might be you get bonus damage for pen being higher than required. Maybe a linear scaling upto 30% bonus damage. Then getting bonus pen feels like a damage buff and the mechanic includes some rewarding that doesn't require a large amount of min-maxing to be achieved.
Many systems using some vague 'armor' stat do some variation of 'damage taken = base damage * (armor / (constant + armor))'. This ends up working similarly to a damage reduction system, but each armor point grants an identical amount of additional effective health such that it doesn't suffer from the same capping issues as traditional damage reduction. Often the system can still be less intuitive, but setting the constant to 100 means that every point of armor lets you take 1% more damage before dying.
Of course, very few of the games that use such a system never actually explain how it works so you pretty much need to use theorycrafting to figure it out- since often games will just as often do something entirely different.
That actually sounds like a really good system. Although, shouldn't it be "base damage * (constant / (constant + armor))"?
@@benl2140 Yeah, the formula you presented is correct.
For a given incoming DPS and pool of hitpoints, the Effective Hitpoints/Time-to-Kill scales linearly with the armor stat.
The old Warcraft 3 strategy game used this formula for armor (grandfathered into DotA).. League of Legends also uses the same type of formula for physical armor and magic resistance.
So to my limited knowledge, it's mainly RTS and MOBAs that use this system, although I reckon it would work well in RPGs/ARPGs too.
i absolutely love that he's just using the default preset powerpoint templates
Loved this talk a bunch, thanks for doing it!
For any future armor system designers: as a huge Deadfire player and Ultimate challenge completer, I generally enjoyed the Armor/PEN system, but my main criticism was that it didn't feel right with spells. Unlike weapons, there aren't a lot of ways to interact with your spells' penetration value (e.g. weapons frequently had modals that let you trade-off action recovery for extra penetration; nothing existed for spells). And if you came across an enemy with high fire armor, you wouldn't try to pick a fire spell with a higher penetration, you'd just pick a different element element (whereas with weapons you might switch from a low-pen sword to a high-pen stilletto). So, the approach discussed in the QA of having armor for weapons and maybe just a simple DR or keyword-based resistance system for spells sounds like a huge win to me: keeps most of the benefits the armor vs pen system while also making magic much easier to reason about.
Yes, my thoughts exactly, thank you
I always find it abysmal when the look and stats don't fit together and there are a lot of games that do this, sadly. basically all games with random loot that I know of.
Yeah that was one thing that disappointed me about Starfield vs. Bethesda's other games. In their old games, it was easy to find a cool looking armor set whose stats matched your character and the armors appearance. Combat armor was always combat armor. In Skyrim, hide was always hide. In Starfield my badass space marine armor covered in balistic shielding plates with a closed armored visor might be worse than the next marshmallow man space trucker suit I find on a random spacer. I love those marshmallow man space suits, it's a cool aesthetic choice, but they should be useful for space truckers stats wise, not better than modified special ops military armor
One issue with DT vs. DR is that while DT is intuitive from the armor side, it makes calculations harder from the weapon side because it destroys the concept of dps.
If you have a shotgun that shoots once for 100 points of damage every five seconds vs. a pistol that shoots ten times for 10 damage every 0.5 seconds, they have an identical dps of 20, and a DR of 25% affects both equally, but a DT of 5 will reduce the dps of the pistol to 10 but leave the shotgun at 19.
Which might be logical and realistic, but if the goal is not making the players do percentage math in their head, it's not great.
I do generally agree with your false dichotomy analysis of dodging vs armor, however I do understand them when it comes down to class-based systems using keywords for certain perks and abilities affecting specifically avoiding attacks and specifically taking them.
I was always curious why armor rolls are not used more often (similar to damage rolls). It could give a lot of flexibility to armor systems and allow to differentiate between various types of armor better. Metal armor would get better "dice" than leather, armor giving more coverage could have lower range of randomness, etc.
I am also a big fan of location-based armor, if hitting various body parts is implemented in the system. Sadly, this is a rare occurence.
The randomness of incoming damage could be really frustrating in many games. Understanding your survivability is essential to making informed decisions about the risks you take. This is also why I don't tend to like location based systems, I feel that having separate armour values on separate limbs rarely has any meaningful effect except making damage much harder to predict.
Kings om come deliverance has the best armor systems but maces are also op
I wanted to add too sum more info on Souls games. It's definitely a tale of Poise. Which instead of being about taking damage per say, its stagger prevention.
There's actually two types of 'poise' used in the series, Hyper Armor and Passive Poise.
Hyper Armor is only active during an attack animation, protecting you from not getting staggered out of it.
Passive poise prevents you from getting stagger at all times, not just attacking.
Here's the history;
Demon's Souls - Hyperarmor
Dark Souls - Passive Poise
Dark Souls 2 - Passive Poise (?)
Bloodborne - Hyperarmor
DS3 - Hyperarmor
Elden Ring - Passive Poise AND Hyper Armor
The games with only hyperarmor, well you only get a benefit if your aggressively attacking. And DS1's passive poise is so strong that it became a running gag in PvP ( ninja flipping in havels armor ).
Elden Ring has the right idea having both, but the calculations are all over the place and stuff is glitched out so it's gonna need some patches before it's consistent.
Just thought it'd be interesting to note all this. Since its a system i think that manifests from the action oriented nature of the series.
Playing a Jsawyer hardcore New Vegas run gave me a new appreciation for DT in the game. I liked the system before but as you said trade offs became less relevant when I could just wear heavy armor and carry all the ammo I would ever need. In my run I found myself switching between ammo types more often depending on ammo weight/cost, enemy types, and so on. My load out became more meaningful and my play through that much richer for it.
I could listen to you talk about anything game related, your passion and expertise shines through.
One of the best Armor systems I've seen comes from Terraria. It's intuitive, allows for a vanity slot to have your visuals look independent from the stat gear and there's vertical progression (Terraria's biggest strength as a game) as well as statistical tradeoffs even outside damage mitigation.
I don't understand why other games don't allow you to do this. Just allow for reskinning your stat gear into the thing you want it to look like. Grim Dawn got that right even though it's Armor system is dogshit.
I think because in some games the look of the armor has a tie in with the lore and theme
For example, there's this armor in Elden ring that looks like a mushroom which reduced poison damage and has a lore description
Yes, give me some of that sweet, sweet knowledge straight to my brainpan.
⁽ᵀʰᵃⁿᵏ ʸᵒᵘ⁾
Here's the thing about damage reduction AND percentage based damage reduction. Both of them have increasing returns. It's kind of like the old armor penetration mechanic from World of Warcraft. It had an enormous breakpoint once you started getting closer to 100% arpen. And the reason actually goes into why World of Warcraft had such an opaque and confusing armor system. It was in fact percentage based, but it was NOT linear. There was a diminishing returns formula to armor specifically because there is an inherent curve of increasing returns. If you take incoming damage, and reduce 99% of it, you're taking 1 damage. if you reduce 98% of it, you're taking 2 damage. In other words, by increasing 1% of damage mitigation, you're cutting your damage intake by half. WoW deals with this by making the percentage of damage reduction scale nonlinearly, both so you can't hit 100% and so that you need progressively more armor for each percentage point.
Integer damage reduction has a similar problem, and for the same reasons. Usually games will have something like, you can reduce damage, but not to less than one. But it still has the problem you mentioned of the curve. This is also part of why WoW has both mitigation and avoidance. It isn't either-or. They designed it so that tanks should have similar damage intake. Some tanks mechanically favor avoidance over flat damage reduction, resulting in "spikier" damage, but overall and with careful design, it often, but not always, roughly evens out due to all tanks having some degree of both mitigation and avoidance.. There are always better tanks than others, just like there are always better DPS than others.
This system actually works better than most....if you compare that to D&D's system, for example, it's full of hard breakpoints and limits on stacking, Armor class type nonsense and so on. But yes, it still requires careful tuning.
What I would suggest is to prioritize avoiding hard breakpoints. Those are annoying. Softer curves closer to linear values, at least to start, are more appealing. But linearly scaling systems, as described above, still eventually reach breakpoints. The solution isn't to dumb down your system; I think it's actually something closer to the way that WoW models their base armor system, with a non-linear curve function with diminishing returns baked in to the formula that becomes more aggressive the higher that the numbers go. As far as that system being harder to understand than a linear scaling system, it doesn't matter - don't underestimate the intelligence of your audience. WoW is full of theorycrafters and those who follow theorycrafters, and it's one of the most popular and enduring games on planet earth - the system works. Don't reinvent the wheel, just look up WoW's armor integer to damage reduction % formula, and copy it.
The only problem is that they don't explain it within the user interface. Just explain your progression curve in a way that makes sense and provide the relevant information and tools that people need to make a decision within the UI. A simple example is DPS - just giving a simple DPS value on the gear tooltip explains everything you need to know between two weapons, without having to bust out a calculator or a whiteboard. A stat comparison window to compare two pieces of gear - something like that for armor showing your % reduction on each piece of armor. Boom. All of a sudden you have everything you need as a player, at a glance.
So happy to see another talk from you! Thank you for doing these.
I would be glad if you get acquainted with the protection system in the indie game Underrail, where in addition to the usual protection from clothing, it is possible to use energy shields.
*The amount absorbed varies depending on the impact speed of an attack* and the quality of the components used.Certain weapons do damage at different impact speeds.
So if you've got a high frequency emitter, your shield will have higher numbers ranging through the medium to very high. But virtually no absorbtion ability in the very low and low.
The opposite is true as well.
I personally really like this system, because it makes the game more tactical and forces you to diversify your damage. You can be a hammer bro, but if an enemy uses low frequency shield, what are you gonna do? You need to think about additional sources of damage: use electrical psi attacks or grenades.
Additionally, if you are having a tough encounter, you can go back and buy/craft yourself a shield, and you actually need to think about what kind of shield you are acquiring. Use two modulators of different frequences to get protection from more damage types or dump everything into just one frequency to be more shielded against that one particular damage type? Install converter to make shield absorb more damage before getting disabled or opt for amplifier to turn it into a more tanky but energy inefficient kind of shield?
There are a lot of possibilities.
For player-friendly system, I like the Attack Power vs Defense Power system.
Have the players think it's just "Damage = Attack Power - Defense Power."
Then you sprinkle some balance like diminishing return and/or catch-up mechanic that average players don't need to worry about.
It's basically Damage vs DT, but it's abstracted so you can sneak in whatever complexity you need to make the system play better.
What is your handle name for twitch? TY
Let's fucking GO
Yall wanna hear something wild? Breath of the Wild has ADDITIVE armor. You can reduce all dmg to 1 heart slice. Once piece of armor can remove 4 slices off of damage. It's insane for an RPG.
This was always one of the big challenges as a player: I have an armor with 50 points and it has some buff that I like (+1 strength or something). I find an armor with 60 points and no buff. Which is better? I don't have any way to really know except by intuition.
I've noticed that one of the ways developers work around the DR cliff is by making armor scale non-linearly. Like the first 50 points of armor will mitigate 30% but the next 50 points will only mitigate an extra 15%. Solves the cliff but has the calculation problem.
I like the idea of protection against damage types, but as a player I don't want to carry around different armors and weapons, and switch them every battle. For a boss battle it makes sense to switch into specialized gear and buff, but for the most part I want to stay in the same armor and switch between a primary/secondary/ranged weapon in any specific battle.
Armor number soup hate is so valid. I hate that stuff.
Great talk but i wish shields and their tradeoffs would have been included. I know they are different gameply wise in actiony games but in crpgs / ttrpgs it gets intresting.
Stuff like this is what I love youtube for. Just free access to knowledge and information. I don't think people appreciate it as well as they probably should.
Where do I get that god damn glorious shirt?
Josh references Darklands. Take a shot.
Please keep it up Josh! Your passion is still felt today, even by today's generation. I hope you keep that passion! Its honestly an inspiration... I don't mean to rant, but you look at any of the other devs of note.. instant corporate. I hope you continue to be an inspiration to RPGs, and even gaming, as a whole!
10:18 I'm going to point out that it can be both balanced, equally effective and still play differently. In Path of Exile for example, there's armor and dodge, armor mitigate every phys damage proportionally to the amount dealt in one blow ( small hit = high reduction, big hit = small reduction) and dodge is a % chance of not getting hit that increases every time you're getting hit. On first glance you can dismiss it as being more or less the same but when you take into account the many different builds that use different types of "health" (low health with super high regen, big health pool that only regenerates when not being hit for x second, etc etc) both stats become very distinct and the choice is meaningful.
Payday 2 had this discussion as well. Though granted payday 2’a makes it have a secondary role. A high dodge/concealment setup probably could do stealth better than the guy with a m60, and starts by yelling “ITS SHOWTIIIIIME” before rushing in.
Can't wait to watch this
Kingdoms come deliverance had the best combat I thought. No matter how high your level was, some dude with some armor and a sword could kill you as long as you didn’t have your game up and were parrying and really fighting. It made it real like, even at a low level fight, if you let your attention slip, a noob can get the better of you. Woah. Literally as I wrote this he jsut went to the kingdom come slide. Wtf
Skyrims armour system is the worst in videogames RPGs in a bunch of ways.
First up armour is an arbitrary rating with no in game information ever explaining what the value does.
Second the system runs out of runway extremely quickly, heavy armour wearers cap out armour before midgame and all three armour types (heavy, light, and mage armour) cap out meaning heavy armour is no more protective than any other type and armour rapidly becomes a dead stat.
Third the system is a vertical progression % reduction system where the % goes up at a flat if not accelerating rate. This leads to a weird balancing nightmare because +10% damage reduction has substantially different effects depending on how much armour you already have. if you have 70% armour and go up to 80% you will have a 1/3rd damage reduction from your previous armour value which is really substantial. But going from 10% to 20% is honestly barely noticeable. This leads to weird stuff where the game becomes trivially easy once you're approaching the end of the armour curve as even small upgrades substantially reduce damage taken. Then it takes a looooong time for enemies to hit hard enough to harm you again because 85% damage reduction is massive.
A nice alternative for % damage reduction is to have that % determined by dividing the damage by (X+Armour Value)/X. You'll need to teach players but its pretty intuitive once they learn. If X is 10 than each armour point is the equivalent to a 10% increase in your health. This gives you infinite runway, 10 armour effectively doubles your hp at 50% DR, 20 armour effectively triples your hp at 66% DR, 30 armour = 75% DR. You can make X higher for more gradation or lower for less.
Nothing better then a J. Sawyer upload, been try'na catch your cyberpunk streams but always working at the time.
DR doesn't have to run out of runway. In Elden Ring, DR is multiplicative, so two sources of 60% DR would total 84% DR.
One of the things that was IMO kind of interesting about the old WH40k RPG systems from Fantasy Flight Games is that they didn't really have a "dichotomy" between avoidance-driven & soak-driven defensive styles.
There were distinct mechanics/statistics governing both (agility/dodge rating, parrying & occasionally force-fields for avoidance; and toughness/armor class for soak), but neither one of them was necessarily in conflict with the other & you absolutely could build a character that was both extremely good at both avoiding hits & soaking damage, and consequently just be a nightmare to deal with for anybody without "spellcasting" (that is to say psyker powers).
I've got to agree with the naming in Pillars. It IS damage reduction, it's an amount by which damage is reduced. A "threshold" implies a value above or below which something happens, like, say "sturdy" in D&D (I think?), where all damage below 10 is ignored. In this case, there's a threshold, 10, below which no damage is caused but above which damage is applied normally.
24:13 majestic!
Maybe damage reduction could rise/drop by some % for every level the weapon/attack is above its item level, so you get more runway back to improve as enemies get stronger.
I was hoping you might mention that DR can go above 100% in the IE games, allowing you to be healed from dragon's breath :)
Rimworld (which has combat very similar to IE games) uses a system much like Deadfire but a little simpler and easier to explain imo. Every instance of damage is either pierce, blunt, or energy, and rolls 1-100 against the corresponding defense. If the attack roll is higher, it does full damage; if it's lower it gets reduced by half, and if the roll is less than half the armor it gets reduced to nothing. Every weapon also has an Armor Piercing value that gives a flat bonus to the roll, usually proportional to the caliber and rate of fire. In addition, every body part can have outer, middle, and inner layers of armor, and they resist in sequence.
The problem I have with these pure-chance systems is that it can feel very punishing when the enemy gets a lucky hit. With DT you at least have a guaranteed level of protection. Rimworld compounds this with highly detailed body part simulation and different levels of coverage, so your uber-decked-out hero can still die from a single pistol shot to their chin if they don't have a full face helmet.
My takeaway is the confirmation what I have been thinking for a long time: Vertical scaling has no intrinsic value and causes more problems than it is worth.
What's the poing with "number goes up", when you end up being equally strong to enemies of your own level?
This system has obvious flaws and the more math you involve to make the system more "elegant", the worse it gets for making informed decisions.
You can scale numerically just by adjusting attack/health but leave the interesting part of progression to passive and active abilities.
The solution is simple IMO. You did a very good job in fallout NV. Heavy armour should have higher damage thresholds bellow which NO DAMAGE IS TAKEN. This is the only change I would make to fallouts DT system, getting rid of DR altogether. The trade off being, expensive or difficult to buy/attain and maintain along with de-buffs to skills related to movement speed, spring speed and duration, and stealth. In the case of power armour you need specific training to use it as well as all of these things. Light armours should have lower damage thresholds but allow for or even improve skills related to mobility and stealth. Chinese stealth armour was the panicle of this. Also giving the player perks or skills that can only function when light armour is worn. I am not referring to a simple "dodge" stat, if you are going to implement this it needs to be a skill unlocked by light armour (when you use it) that the player can use. Just like how Power armour unlocks abilities like increased melee damage and increased throw distance etc. Medium armour should be in the middle. For melee copy Vermintide/Darktides system of different melee weapons having different attack patterns with different damage types. I.e. a thrust will always be armour piecing, a slash will usually be cleave.
Simple.
i think the problem with elden ring's armor design is that they removed the ability to upgrade it, and what it SHOULD be giving the player is not on the armor
everybody has a harder time playing elden ring than they should because they underlevelled vigor. nobody wants to level vigor because leveling up is expensive and they want to put their points towards either unlocking the ability to use new gear/spells they've acquired, or towards making their character hit harder so they can get closer to/maintain their breakpoints, and because every level is more expensive than the last every time you choose to increase your damage instead of your vigor you decrease the likelihood that you will feel vigor is a good point investment in the future because it wasn't worth it when it was cheaper, and now that it's more expensive but provide the same benefit as it would have before it will be less worth it. the math doesnt add up in players' heads, and the only people who escape this cycle is people who just bite the bullet & look up a leveling guide.
also the problem as you mention that nobody knows what the heck armor does in From games
there's a very easy fix for all of this; return item upgrading to armor pieces (was a mechanic in DS1), but instead of the armor doing anything damage mitigation related, your health value is determined by your armor instead of a character stat and that's ALL armor does for defense. why? well for one, + to health is a number players can make decisions about because health is a bar that's always on-screen. they can SEE it, it's visualized, it makes sense to them. also upgrading health that way means, if you spend half your currency on leveling up your STR so you can wield a new club, now you don't have enough currency to level up because the price of leveling up increases every time you do it, so all of the leftover currency you have is now effectively "free" to use on upgrading your armor, because upgrades are far cheaper than levels (similar to how vespene gas in starcraft means marines/zealots/zerglings are effectively free). sprinkle in the same upgrade resource system the summons have where each upgrade requires a specific type of stone that's only used for that tier of upgrade so that upgrading a +20 armor doesn't reduce in any way your ability to upgrade a +1 armor you just found that's cool, and you wind up negating most if not all of the player expression the armor upgrading system had
edit: oh yeah and if your game has the weight limit/fatrolling system, upgrading a piece of armor should very slightly decrease its weight, as well as increase the defensive benefits it gives you. that way upgrading armor pushes it closer towards breakpoints that allows you to combine it with other pieces to have an outfit that you can lightroll in, instead of just having armor pieces forever locked off from being viable because you should never fatroll & a fatroll armor never ceases to be fatroll armor. IMO players with all maxed out armor pieces and their character sitting at the higher band of the soft-cap on the stat that increases your weight limit should be able to light roll in basically every combination of armor. there are other, far more interesting ways to make choice of armor feel impactful (the Elden Ring Convergence overhaul mod puts passive buffs on armor, similar to how staves in vanilla Elden Ring will give a passive bonus to certain schools of magic. you could give those to many/most/all armors, and/or make those bonuses neither active nor even visible for which armor has which bonus until you level it up significantly/to the max. the passive magic damage buff on staves in vanilla is kind of boring (if you're using blood magic you just equip the blood magic staff), but if that choice were spread out across 5+ pieces of armor it becomes a far more interesting system purely because of the player's capacity to combine them)
PS, as i'm watching this i am currently modding armor in KOTOR2.... yeah, it's a better system than AC in straight D&D ripoffs like Pathfinder lol
you mention Kingdom Come having a system for different types of weapons piercing different armor's resistances. technically From games have this too but the mechanic is so under-utilized that most players never realize it's a thing even tho it's one of the only mechanics whose numerical values are laid out in a straight-forward way. which is quite funny, but largely the reason it means nothing to players is bc it circles back around to the numbers soup problem; you're told what damage type a weapon has, but how effective it is versus certain kinds of armor is actually information stored in the enemy's armor values, which the player NEVER sees or gets to interact with in a sensible way.
Kingdom Come is relevant here bc one of its competitors in the medieval combat sim genre, Chivalry 2, solves this problem; the game has a class system, archer vanguard knight & footman. none of the armor is shared between classes, & nobody in those classes can have exactly the same combination of weapons even tho they can get close (knight can have heavy metal shield and a fancy spear, footman can have a medium wooden shield and a cheap spear, but they are visually distinct at a glance), and each of those classes has a class-specific special attack and a class-specific ability that distinguishes where they fit in the match -- footmen heal & get charge stabs, vanguards throw bombs & get sprinting swings to cleave many undefended, knights buff their team & get an overhead swing to overpower a single enemy's defense, ect. so, part of the gameplay loop is learning to intuit at a glance what class an enemy is so you can predict, is he gonna throw a molotov in your face, is he gonna back off to apply a healing-over-time on himself and then heal his team while it ticks, is he gonna try to come over your shield.
why this matters; Chivalry 2 does a clever trick and takes all of that baked in encouragement for players to learn to identify enemy class at a glance, and then piggybacks weapon bonuses off of that. the mace does +25% damage against knights, the scimitar does +40% to footmen and archers. it takes all of the information problems ER has, and fixes them by attacking the importance to the information a player sees during a fight instead of to a stat only the enemy can see before a fight. and it doesn't systemitize this information at all -- it doesn't ask you to memorize which kinds of weapons count as slashing versus cutting damage -- it just says who a specific weapon does bonus damage against on that item's description. its so smart
Isn't Kingdom Come Delivernance's system pretty different? I don't know that they fully achieved their aims, but the idea was that full plate armour actually protects against ALL damage (except blunt I think), but being hit enough will drain your stamina. Once you lose enough stamina you then take damage. It's supposed to simulate real life, once you lose enough stamina you would not be able to stop your oppenent slipping a dagger in between the gaps.
Best Armor/DMG system I've ever had the pleasure to experience was in Gothic 1
I know I'm two years too late, but it's interesting that you think medium armor should be a little bit better, statistically, than light or heavy. Because the same thing happens in MOBAs, where bruisers usually just have 'more' stats according to however it's appropriate to add up all the numbers than pure tanks, supports or carries. I think it's the same reason; you aren't going to be the best at one specific thing so you have to be at least a little better than mediocre across the board.
AC is a form of DR, spread out over a combat or a career.
Its runway equals the runway of accuracy progression.
It is harder to balance than DR.
Comment for the Algorithm
I feel like the lower mobility penalty of fallout nvs lighter armor is basically how to do AC in a first person shooter. The player is doing the dodging themselves.
I wish we got to hear your opinion on enemy armor. DT really seems like the best option because of how easy it is to understand. Tank needs big attack to hurt. But I could see dr having uses.
The DR system in PoE is still one of my favorites. If a 20-meter-tall iron giant hits me in the face, having a helmet should not matter. You can still design high-level enemies who deal damage in multiple instances so armor doesn't become irrelevant in the late game.
What if instead of the master below doing 180 damage in a single blast he did six ticks for 30 damage each in which DT then comes into play for each tick?
I can't tell if you don't understand Elden Ring's armor system or just simplified it to fit in the talk
i feel like the idea of "quality" you mention around 41:00 tends to serve only to overly complicate and bore players. i like the idea of being able to craft sidegrades, a bit like fallout 4's weapon mods system, though i hesitate to say the whole "upgrade it to be better" or "legendary effects" stuff is good for a similar reason. i like the idea to have a weapon you love maintain use through some means though, but it should be that same item and not a random legendary of the same type you find, sentimentality like that engages players and encourages some degree of roleplay imo
Man, if only you looked at SWG you could have learned how to do it right over 20 years ago
I know I don’t like pen system from Deadfire, but I never quite managed to figure out why. My feeling is like it doesn’t quite feel like a choice, or combat consideration. It just feels like a thing one need to manage, rather then finding enemies weakness: “look through each newly and make sure that pen value is sufficient”. That is a weird line of thought thought, as I don’t think it is any different that what PoE1 does - perhaps it being so straightforward to see, made it feel more like a box to tick rather then a tactical consideration?
Any chance on another New Vegas stream soon?
اتمناه لو الفيديوهات مترجمه
This is so awesome. Where does Joshua stream, if at all? I'd definitely like to see more
PENTIMENT
Really calling DT (subtracted damage) damage threshold is not intuitive.
Subtracted damage: Damage Deduction / Protection Amount
Percentage reduced: Protection Percentage
And adding HP and %% to the end of the stat to make it more clear
Very informative. I've been playing games long enough to remember Darklands! One of, if not the biggest turnoff to many/most rpgs is their weird armor/damage systems and mechanics. In fact I hate most of them, which is super annoying because I passed on most major rpgs in the last 20 years! I tried them and stopped playing and feel cheated on having missed out on those experiences. The fallout series is the first one that made sense (ES to a lesser extend, but still more than other rpgs). This obession with pen and paper systems seems to have infected the industry for decades, since there is no need for all this unnecessary complexity. They're fantasy worlds, realism does not have to be mathematically coded into the mechanics. It just has to make sense and be accessable.
How does armor work in dark lands?
Edith: ahh nevermind josh talked about it in the video
Thanks for this! I never realized the difference with DT and DR in fallout 1 and 2 cus i was just a kid. Makes sense now what was going on there.
I've loved RPGs for a long time but never understood their mechanical side until hearing your lectures on the topic. The theoretical side of creating a tabletop system is so fascinating Ive probably rewatched this four or five times now.
Subbed just because of that glorious shirt
The new Batman armor has high DT, but low DR.
why do boomers and gen x men saying "ultimately" and "it comes down to" all the time? what is the source of these idioms?
just a difference in dialect between generations just like how we have certain words and phrases we say also heavily influenced by media now
If some love it and some hate it,
Then it's perfect!
You can't please everyone,
but you can make a thing that's good.
Some observations. First of all, one of the most important implementations of armour from the early TTRPG days, namely Rolemaster, was missed out. RM was a crit-based system and heavier armour generally reduced the number and severity of crits that a character would face. As secondary effects, heavier armour typically required more training, reduced movement and slightly increased the number of (non-critical) hits. Now I have actually played computer games with RM combat mechanics and, frankly, they tend to work very poorly, since crit-based systems end up making things way too random when a character is killing hundreds or thousands of enemies. In considering different forms of implementation though, this feels like it deserved a mention.
So onward to your penetration (AP) idea. The most intuitive way of implementing AP is for it to provide a direct opposition to enemy DR. This immediately solves the runway problem, since AR above 100% becomes useful. There are a number of games that use this approach, either directly or indirectly (ie working against a mitigation stat that acts a proxy for AR), and it surely must be better than the arbitrary numbers used in the Deadfire AP system. You can still use DT in this type of system, which then effectively becomes armour immune to AP.
Of course, every AP system suffers from a serious issue. Either all enemies of a given level have roughly equal AR values, meaning that characters basically need to have a specific amount of AP for their level (reducing real choice) or enemies have quite different AR values, meaning that characters have to adjust their equipment constantly to react to different enemies. While many will see the matter as providing good strategic combat opportunities, my feeling is that most players fine having to switch their equipment about for EVERY fight to be tiresome and not good gameplay. In the end, sometimes simpler does actually end up better, at least in terms of the fun-factor, which is surely the most important concept for a game.
Josh's talks are always a pleasure. ❤
In WoW theorycrafting, back in the day, we had this term called "effective health". Effective health would be the amount of incoming you can take before dying with all the armor reductions. Essentially if you have 100hp and a 50% damage reduction then your effective health would be 200. The way to make damage reduction percentage scale indefinitely is to think in terms of effective health instead of flat out reduction, let's say 1 point of armor would give you 10% more effective health. In practice, when damaging a target with an armor of 1, you'd divide the damage by 1.1 instead of just reducing 10% (which in essence would be multiplying by 0.9). If you add a DT to that armor, let's say 1 DT per point of armor, you'll have a solid armor system that can scale indefinitely upwards and is really easy to understand and balance. You'd probably want to calculate DT first and DR second, otherwise armor would get really powerful really fast (first reduce DT from incoming damage and then divide that value with your armor reduction instead of first dividing and then reducing the DT).
Essentially:
DamageTaken = (IncomingDamage - Armor)/(1 + Armor*0.1)
Let's have a couple examples to clarify.
An attack that does 100 damage lands on a target with 5 armor would result in (100-5)/(1+0.5) = 63.33... damage taken
The same attack lands on a target with 10 armor would only deal (100-10)/(1+1) = 45 damage taken
An attack that does 10 damage lands on a target with 5 armor would result in (10-5)/(1+0.5) = 2.5 damage taken
The same attack landing on a target with 10 armor would obviously do no damage at all unless there's a minimum damage of 1 for example.
The math is simple and easy to balance and would be relatively easy to explain as well.
Josh what happened to your beard?!
I like this talk, but I would take a peek at the original Alternity system for armour: each armour had damage ratings for three damage types (low impact, high impact, energy) and then quality, and those were matched with the weapons - so weapons and armour were marginal, ordinary, good, and amazing quality, and if your armour was a quality better than the weapon, it would drop the weapon's damage down a step, and vice versa. So, if you have a good-quality energy rifle, it would hit the energy stat of your armour, and if it was good quality armour, it would even out, but if it was ordinary armour, the damage would be bumped up to amazing damage. One could play with that, too - mismatched armour quality could be an auto-crit, or do 20% more damage, or something like that.
I loved learning the systems in Deadfire and it works for the kind of game it is. Sure readability is rough at times but that's where the Real Time with Pause comes into play. I can take my time to analyze the encounter and pick the right tool for the job.
I started playing Pillars of Eternity 1 - as a backer - hadn't enough time before. And oh boy...is the combat a chore. So much so that I am in doubt if I will finish the game. Every time doing the same with thousands of enemy encounters - how could the dev team think this is fun?
I think a pure DR system can work as long as the DR values of different armor pieces combine multiplicatively,rather than additively (i.e. if you have 2 pieces of armor with 20% DR each, the overall DR is 36%, not 40%). As long as the DR values of individual pieces aren't too high, the overall DR won't get crazy, and you won't "run out of runway".
When I wear armors in games i decide what to wear 100% by what looks cool... Never going to wear anything thats not Desert Ranger Combat Armor lmao
Always appreciate the insight behind design choices in your talks, thanks for this. Also, happy I finally understand Deadfire's armor system lol
I personally quite liked the way Pillars does damage reduction (and calling it that made it clear to me, coming from Neverwinter Nights/KoTORs where that's what DR is) the most part, but the Master Below's opening breath salvo that usually wipes 4 or 5 of my party members before I have time to place them out of the way was honestly bullshit I never had the patience to wade through. I've played through the game twice, and on both playthroughs I've made my way down there, tried fighting him/her a few times, and left.
I'm also now trying to replay New Vegas with your mod, and while on paper DT and DR make sense, I can't really understand what happens in combat a lot of the time. Admittedly I'm not even 10 hours in yet, but most of the time combat feels like I'm doing absolutely no damage whatsoever and firefights are either me and my enemies shooting ridiculous amounts of bullets into each other with peashooters or the enemies one-shot me. I don't understand why that happens, especially when I'm supposed to have something like 7 or 8 DT against a weapon that does 11 damage and my max health is 120. Maybe I'll figure the game out as I play it more, but I feel much more like I'm rolling dice when fighting than in games actually based on dice rolls.
Wisco pride! Love the flag, Josh. I'm from GB originally
Armor in WoW has for at least a decade been only a vessel carrying stats. Nobody cares at all about armor rating. The only meaningful question is how much primary stat (strenght etc) and which secondary stats (haste, critical chance, etc) are present on the piece.
So for the topic of this talk damage mitigation, WoW takes the aproach of nobody cares what it does.
DR/DT system in "Secret Jsawyer RPG project" confirmed? Announcement/release not far off now!
Apart from the mechanical aspect of armour systems, I really appreciate how you designed the amours in Pillars of Eternity, visually. No unrealistic female armours, no unnecessary decorative spikes or strangely lacking gorgets. Danke schön!
welcome back ! too bad i missed the stream so funny those head armors from elder ring... head slots are always problematic visually....
When POE3? :) Loved the games, and your work in general!