I know it's been over a year, but it's good to be back again. Apparently having a full-time jobs cuts into your Blog and Game making time, who knew ?





Today I want to talk about the gear in my game, more specifically weapons and armor, and why I chose to trim it all the way back.





Now that I've been away from my game and had some time to think, I wondered, why does my game need heaps and heaps of weapons and armour?

It is not the focus of my game, it will lead to endless menu micro-managment because of all the splitting up and regrouping of parties, endless shopping trips and grinding, because every character (up to 20) needs to be kept up to date on gear, it affects balance if they are under or over equipped, …

The list goes on and on and on. So I made a seemingly radical choice. I dumped weapon and armor upgrades. Now don't get me wrong, there is still gear to be found, but no piece of equipment is “strictly better” then any other.

To illuminate : strictly better is a term that I first heard about in Magic the gathering. It means “Identical in every way except the numbers are better”.

Applied to RPGs, this would mean tossing your dagger for a mythril dagger because it is identical to the dagger, but has a higher attack stat. There is no reason to use the dagger over the mythril dagger.

In some games, this is part of the fun, and it certainly has it's place in games, but not in mine, not with the character focus I wanted to have.

So I did away with the endless mill of +1 swords and chose a different path : Incomparables. Meaning I wanted no weapon to be mathematically better then any other, but unique and different.

As people who may have read my Elements ands skills blog post might remember, all of my elements are intrinsically different. For example, fire raises the users magic attack, lightning is luck based , … Now what if I did the same for my weapons and armour.

This necessitated my split of physical damage into 3 categories to allow for variety : Piercing , Slashing an Crushing. Each of these types has its own damage formula. Piercing ignores part of the targets defense, Crushing deals more if the targets hp is low, and Slashing deals more if the users hp are high. A weapon can have more than one damage type, for example, a morningstar is both piercing and crushing. Some skills require the use of the correct type of weapon.

Next, I divided my weapons into 9 weapon types, with each type getting about 3 weapons :

Sword, Dagger, Axe, Hammer, Spear, Peasant, Bow, Gun and Artillery. Each of these categories has an additional effect:



Swords are Skillfull, which means that they generate more TP when used. Daggers are Fast, which means they raise the users agility. ( I use a ctb battle system, so agility is very important) Axes are Punishing which means more damage on debuffed opponents. Spears have Reach, which gives the users a big bonus on counterattacks Hammers are Pulverizing, dealing more damage on a crit. Peasant Weapons have Underdog, which means that when the users has a stat buf, the effect is greatly increased Guns have Penetrate which means they ignore physical defence, and just deal damage equal to a.atk stat instead of a.atk²/b.def. Bows are Silent, generating way less noise, therefore not raising the alert level as much. Artillery has Unavoidable, meaning they negate block, and deal unresistable (Almighty) damage.

On top of that is the small, medium, large system.

Small weapons can be dualwielded.

Medium weapons are the standard, and allow a shield or small weapon in the off-hand.

Large weapons deal splash damage.

Each weapon also adds a skill unique to that weapon.

So to bring it all together, some examples :

The longsword is a Medium Slashing and Piercing Sword, so it can be wielded with a shield or small weapon in the off hand, it deals more damage if the user is at high hp, generates more TP, ignores part of the targets defence and allows the users to use Slashing and Piercing Skills. It has the ability to let the user enter a parry mode as a special ability.

The Quarterstaff ( different from a mage's staff) is a Large Bludgeoning Peasant weapon. So it deals Bludgeoning damage, deals more damage if the target's hp is low, raises the users attack when buffed with something, deals damage to multiple enemies when attacking and allows the use of Bludgeoning skills. As a special ability, it raises the users block, and counts as a shield.

Most of this is realised by using Yanfly's Weapon Unleash system, to give every weapon an different attack skill, instead of filling up the formula bar with 200 if-statements.