What are you playing?

[bobby 55]

Gah! I thought the problem with my PC was solved. I got 25 minutes into ME 2 before it rebooted, 15 minutes more than usual.

[AEmer]

Actually, Jonas, in D&D 1.0, gold _was_ experience. That's not to say that all your skills were determined by your net worth, but it would be determined by all worth you'd ever collected.

I still think that connection is pretty elegant.

[Hassat Hunter]

Gah! I thought the problem with my PC was solved. I got 25 minutes into ME 2 before it rebooted, 15 minutes more than usual.

Could be the game. I also got a Blue Screen of death and reboot after Shephard was re-made.
Not sure how I fixed that, I tried a lot of stuff. Got real tired of seeing Shephard dying, since there is no way to skip all that stuff and get to the game

[bobby 55]

Gah! I thought the problem with my PC was solved. I got 25 minutes into ME 2 before it rebooted, 15 minutes more than usual.

Could be the game. I also got a Blue Screen of death and reboot after Shephard was re-made.
Not sure how I fixed that, I tried a lot of stuff. Got real tired of seeing Shephard dying, since there is no way to skip all that stuff and get to the game

Sorry, I shoulda said I played it for 25 minutes. I get Freedom's Progress done then it reboots. I don't get a BSOD or anything in the minidump files. I just opened the PC and found a third stick of 2 gig RAM that had different timing to the other 4 gig, it's now removed. I still suspect a dodgy psu, the bro-inlaw put a cheap brand in the rig.

[Jetsetlemming]

Let me ask you guys something. It's hypothetical, but it's not... entirely hypothetical, if you get my drift.

What would you think about a system where any equipment you loot is essentially given a score which is added to your "Equipment" score when you acquire it. Say that you have a party of 6 adventurers, and your starting equipment score is 10. You get to assign those 10 points to your adventurers (for example 4 adventurers get 2 points each and the last 2 adventurers get 1 point). This score will be added to their combat statistics as a bonus of a sort. If you defeat a group of enemies, you may loot 2 points worth of equipment that you can use to bring the last two guys in your party up to speed, or you can dump both points in a guy you want to use as a frontline fighter of a sort.

Does that seem compelling to you? Making loot essentially a resource? Especially powerful items could still exist, you could still get a magical sword that you assign to one character, which gives him a +3 bonus or even gives him a special ability like fire damage. Would it still take the fun out of getting shiny new shit?

It wouldn't take the fun out of getting new shinies as much as just completely replace it. What you've proposed is translated in my mind as like "energy" or something, kinda like powering up your guns in Cave Story. Typically there's very little to no strategy with getting equipment typically in RPGS- you pick a stat (or have a stat/class picked for you) that is a focus for a character, and filter drops by that. When I pick up armor in the Elder Scrolls for example, I'm solely looking for the highest AC value within the confines of my focused armor skill. Enchanted gear changes that up but it's non-typical, and frequently custom-made: I'm picking the highest AC value within the confines of my armor skill, and then making it better.
But undefined upgrade points that you can put on any character to make them generally better would make it more strategic and customizable, while losing the verisimilitude, reading exercise, and developer control of balance of finding concrete loot with different values and requirements.

[AEmer]

I should also add that it is possible to give numerical value meaning.

Having an equipment score of 3 loaded onto a character could be especially worthwhile, for example. I'm reminded of shmups in general and Tyrian in particular: When you upgrade your rear weapon pulse gun, for instance, you can upgrade it to various tiers. Tier 1 shoots a bullet alternating left and right, while tier two simultaneously shoots a bullet in each direction. Then it increases with additional bullets as you buy additional tiers, and then at tier 5, it changes to an alternating bomb that detonates and sprays out bullets, and at tier 6 it shoots two bombs.

Going from tier 4 to 6 is especially meaningful, because it allows you to play in a distinct fashion.

The mechanic is set up such that you can buy various different rear and front weapons, and you buy and sell the upgrades from tier to tier free of charge. So what you do is, you run with heavy rear missiles for a while, then when you get enough money, you could switch over to a tier six pulse weapon, which would be a specific thing.

The numerical value, in other words, needs to have specific and non-uniform effects, while being part of a seemingly uniform system, to be memorable and meaningful.

Sometimes this will occur during normal linear improvement, sometimes you need to introduce artificial bumps to encourage experimentation, choice and strategy.

It should also be noted that equipment scores can be meaningful if they can be specialized. In King Arthur 2 it's possible to send out trade missions and equip some of your units with extra tough armoring, providing an armor bonus. This _does_ have the "ooh shiny" effect; it's a stat that means something to you, you want it improved, buying it isn't free, so you do it under the right circumstances and you appreciate it.

Another example to illustrate how a dumb number can feel good is league of legends: Within the game, there's an armor system. you reduce the damage taken to 100 / (armor + 100). In other words, 10 armor will reduce it to about 90%, 100 armor to about 50%, and 1000 armor to about 9%. Ok, so everything has a base armor of around 20-30. If you stack runes, which is basically stat specialization that everybody does in one way or another, then you can get 20 armor penetration. That means that anybody with 20 armor or less will take 100% damage, but if someone has 25 armor, he'll only take 95% damage - those 5 armor, while being a miniscule amount of either penetration or armor bonus, will suddenly make a big difference....orders of magnitude bigger than they would, going from 100 to 105.

If there's a specific meaning to achieving a specific number, and if it has some type os special strategic importance, then the number becomes outright sexy.

[Hassat Hunter]

A downside to such a system would be (as demonstated in Divinity 2) that higher values mean a lot less.
Divinity 2 uses diminishing returns on armor, with a cap.
So while getting +2 armor is nice, in the later game +10 is meaningless since it would only add about 0.02% of resistance against a type of attack for example.

Which is less thrilling then...

[Jonas]

All right, so... if this were a tactical RPG, it'd be good if you could unlock new moves or attacks with certain characters depending on what their equipment rating was. I mean we could make it a little more complicated so it's not just one value per character - say... split it into three "scores": armour, melee weapon, ranged weapon.

Not only would a character's armour score contribute to their overall defence (and change their appearance), it'd also unlock certain special abilities on certain levels, ie. if a character's armour score is 5, he gets Shield Bash, or if his ranged weapon score is 3 he gets Aimed Shot. That way it really would replace skill points (though that isn't to say they couldn't have an actual character level that contributed towards other things, perhaps in other parts of the game).

I'd really like to give a system like that a shot. I think a good way to go about it would be to implement the most basic version first (ie. one Equipment value per character, no special attacks unlocked) and then try it out and see how much more complexity seems to be needed to make it suitably engaging.

[AEmer]

yup. The abilities granted by the equipment scores can be put within completely linear progression. Ideally, there would be a few categories of equipment, the 3 you mention is good. Then it won't feel like a linear progression, it'll feel like it's the equipment points you find and the way you place them that gives the results you want.

It's simple, but there's a level of precedence that shows it to work.

You should consider playing binding of isaac, or watching a playthrough, simply to get an understanding of the loot system. It's, as I said, very good.

[bobby 55]

Not only would a character's armour score contribute to their overall defence (and change their appearance), it'd also unlock certain special abilities on certain levels, ie. if a character's armour score is 5, he gets Shield Bash, or if his ranged weapon score is 3 he gets Aimed Shot. That way it really would replace skill points (though that isn't to say they couldn't have an actual character level that contributed towards other things, perhaps in other parts of the game).

Say if you found a special piece of equipment, *The Golden Gauntlets of the Lizard King, maybe you could have a choice of which of three gets the point. Armor...coz they're protection, melee... coz they add grip to your battle-axe/sword, or aim coz your hands would be steadier (it's a game, forget how hard it would be to use a bow while wearing gauntlets ).

*This is an example, not a suggestion.

[Jetsetlemming]

This might not look like much, but it's taken me DOZENS of hours of research to get to this point. Especially that white circle with the 1 in it. I want the circle to have a black border, but that'll have to wait until tomorrow. At least, however, I've finally got to the point where I can actually have character MOVE! And soon the game will be playable! woooooooo

[Jonas]

What did you make it in?

[Jaedar]

As someone who tried to program a simple gui in java a few weeks ago and failed miserably, I find your accomplishment quite impressive.

[EER]

Looks like .net framework at least, but you can't tell the language from a screenshot. I expected the button 'draw card' to be called 'throw dice' but then again I have no idea what you're going for here

[bobby 55]

The double blocks of the same colour is intriguing me. Like EER I've no idea, the six colours made me think of Trivial Pursuit.