Differentiation of physical damage types

There were some ideas floating around about making the three types of physical damage (blunt, piercing and slashing) somewhat different. What if we made the weapons using different damage types distinct through different damage ranges?

Right now, each weapon has a base damage calculated from its stats and can do from 75% to 125% base damage, which is the displayed damage range. We could tweak this:

* slash damage could remain as now (75% - 125% base),
* pierce damage could do from 50% to 150% base (it can hit a vital organ, or pierce only muscle, doing less damage than normal),
* blunt damage could be consistent, always doing base damage, no range.

This way, weapons using different damage types would feel more distinct, but we would not need (much) rebalancing, as the base (and average over many hits) damage would remain the same.

What do you think? Do you have other ideas about physical damage types?

I always wondered if it could be paper scissors rock between the three damage types and three types of armour. I haven't got any ideas though.

Izzy?

Why would anyone want to use a spear? The chance to insta-kill an orc is not worth the chance of dealing half damage three hits in a row while fighting an iron golem. This would probably just serve to make blunt weapons a more popular choice, and piercing a less popular one. Consistent damage is almost always worth more than a chance for higher damage.

If you want to go this route, I would bump the upper bounds on the damage ranges. Give slashing 75%-135%, and piercing 50%-200%. I still feel like this will mostly serve to make maces more common in victory games, but the proposed bounds are too low, IMO. I mean, with proper balance it could work, probably; I just don't see it with the proposed ranges.

Aside from that, differentiating damage types is something that has been tossed around for years and years and years, but no satisfactory solution was ever arrived at. Personally, I think the simplest way would be to make some monsters resist certain damage types - hammers aren't too effective against slimes, spears don't really work against undead, swords tend to glance off of metal golems, etc...

I think this is the best approach and requires a LOT less of a balancing act to get right.
Currently the only damage bonus in the game for weapon types is scythes and sickles versus plants, which do 50% extra damage. I think an approach like that would work fine.

e.g.

Skeletons resist anything except blunt damage
Golems resist based on material
Humanoids should resist depending on their armor but the penalties should be much smaller since most of the enemies it would matter for are already really goddamn beefy

We should also think about elemental damage bonus/malus for enemies because it'd make magic much more interesting than "which of these damage wands still has charges left"

Any way we go about this should be good though because it would encourage players to try using more than one weapon type the whole way through the game. Oh that's a skeleton? Let me swap to my hammer.

I was thinking about this, between classes today. We could take a page from Dwarf Fortress' book (and real life) and have the material of the armor matter for more than just "how much AC does it give". For blunt damage it probably shouldn't matter, but an additional modifier of

Ah = hardness of armor material
Aw = hardness of weapon material
n = some weighting factor for how strong this effect should be
matFac = (Ah/Aw)^n
damage = damage * matFac

might be applied to (say) slashing damage vs chain mail, slashing/piercing damage vs plate armor.

This might add an additional consideration for deciding which weapon to use: a high-hardness, low-mass sword might deal less listed damage than a lower-hardness, higher-mass sword, but it would actually end up being more effective against chain and plate armor.

Can we build a model in Python to test it out? It'd be faster and give us more of an overview.

I believe that was the original intent and this has somewhat been discussed in relation to balancing armour.

I remember that thread and I was wondering whether it would come up, thanks for finding it chao. It was also quite recent, suggesting that it's still something people fancy improving.

The status quo is functional but still half-baked. I'd love to see IVAN's weapon system be more nuanced.

I like Izzy's suggestion to include a material factor in the damage calc.

I'll see what I can whip up tomorrow morning before work. (I would do it now but the beer is already out.)

Enjoy the beer!

So here's a simple plot, using Iron as a test armor material. I ran with weights 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, and 1. (I don't recommend a weight above 1; the effects get a little extreme.) In my mind this would be best applied as a modifier to existing AC - so an iron plate VS a copper sword at 0.25 weighting would gain ~20% AC.

This sort of effect would also make metal armor substantially more potent against wooden weapons, bone (which I figure would include most bite-type attacks), and leather (e.g. whips).

One possible implementation could use different weights for different types of armor against different attack types. Blunt would, perhaps, have no modifier. Slashing might use a 0.25 modifier against chain and plate armor. Piercing might use a 0.5~0.75 modifier against plate only.

Hmm. Doing it in that particular way - with plate being less vulnerable to piercing damage - seems a little counter-intuitive from a gamer's point of view. Most games are designed such that piercing damage is the go-to way to hurt heavily armored opponents.