Now it is time for my weekly collection of words that could loosely be categorized as a blog post.

To follow up on last weeks post, I will be talking about the gear in my game, more specifically the armor and Accessories.

Like I gave my weapons types, I did the same for my armor.

They are Light , medium or heavy, with light giving 2 levels worth of magic defence, heavy giving 2 levels of physical defence, and medium being a medium between these. These bonusses are static, so late game gear wil give the same bonus as early gear. While the defence stat is split between mdf end regular def, that does not necessarily mean that all light armour is meant for mages, and all heavy armour is meant for fighters( not actual classes in my game). A fencers' armour is light armor, but is obviously better suited for a martial types, while the demonhide robes might be considered heavy armor, but better on a mage.

Why keep the bonuses so close you ask ? It is because you can choose what to attack with, but not what to defend with. If the mage gets splatered all over the dungeon wall by an attack that would only incovenience the tank of the team, then fights become either RNG based if the AI is random, or impossible as the mage eats all the attacks in the first round and dies, if the AI is semi-competent.

Warning : Short math break : When I say 2 level's worth of defence , I mean the characters defence is as if he were 2 levels higher. As all my base stats are equal to level^2, this raises the defence by 4*lvl +4, meaning the difference between light and heavy armor in damage taken is: lvl^2/(lvl^2+4*lvl+4). This is an equation that quickly trends towards 1 (or 100%) with increasing lvl.

So a 10th level character who dons heavy armour would have his defence rise from 100 (10^2) to 144 (14^2), meaning he takes about 70% of the damage he would have in the light armour, but at lvl 20 he would take 82 % of the light armored characters damage. This eventually tapers off, until he takes 96 % of the damage he would take in light armor at lvl 100.

This might seem counterproductive, but it just means that the higher the character goes, the smaller the difference, allowing me to really fine tune those late game bosses and enemies. As damage in % of a characters HP rises from 20 % at lvl 1 to 60 % at level 100, this is necessary, as at 60 % of a characters hp, having the mage take 42 % more damage than the tank is kind of a problem, as any crit will instadrop the mage from full HP, and even regular attacks will take out 84 % of the characters HP at that level, while the heavy will just fold to any spell cast in his direction. That is even assuming they have the same max HP, which they might not.

Math break over.

Now, why do I have my armours give an actual bonus to a stat, but not my weapons ? Because a bonus to a defence is an actual choice to be made. A stat bonus to attack will usually trump whatever other effects a weapon could give, but here I find it to be a meaningfull choice. The bonus also doesn't escalate as much, as atk is squared in the damage formula, but not defence.

After type, each weapon has an origin : Fantasy, Action or SciFi.

As a general rule, Fantasy armour aids resource generation (tp or mp), Action armour gives resistances to damage types, and SciFi generates a small barrier around the user, replenishing every turn.

On top of this, each non standard armor has a unique ability, such as the mech suit giving a nearly impenetrable physical defence and missile attacks, but giving glaring weaknesses to most elemental damage or the time-mage robe reducing cooldowns, but decreasing mp regeneration. Almost none of these are pure upside.

The only other equipment slots will be accesories. These fall into two categories : a neck slot and a hands slot.

The neck accessories are defensive and will take the form of amulets, cloaks, ...

Most of them will be both up and downside.

Some examples : The amulet that protects from silence, will also cause all spells to generate extra noise, thus making stealth harder. The cloack that grants immunity to poison also nullifies potions, and so on.

The other accessory slot, the hand slot, including rings and gloves, is focused on granting abilities. These are without downside, but as you are limited to one, it still presents the player with choices: "Do I want my fighter to be able to cast a cure spell every 3 turns or spend mp to cast a fireball ?". Most of these will either use a cooldown or warm up or consume the characters MP/TP, even if the base spell would not.

As for availabilty, each base type and origin has one armor that is available in reasonable quantities (a total of 9 options), but the special ones are all unique, as are all accesories. Seeing as you have to equip about 20 party members eventually for the multi party dungeons, choice is the name of the game.

Long story short : Options, not dictations.