Strength and dexterity in RPGs

[DraQ]

Again, very good points. However, let's not forget we are talking about a cRPG that's supposed to be fun. I don't know about you, but ground fighting in a cRPG not only does not seem fun, but also pretty dumb when you consider that if you go down on the ground, the other enemies will just attack you while you're occupied. So what..is that like an automatic hit from two or three surrounding enemies because you're busy trying to arm bar the other guy?

What about your friends?

Anyway, fun is what you make of the system, not something inherent to it (though I guess there are systems that are inherently unfun, pretty widespread too ).

 

[Mustawd]

Hey, if someone can make a grappling system in a cRPG fun then I'll play it. But to me it still seems weird to include it. It'd be like someone included realistic grappling in a kung fu movie or something. I want to see good kung fu choreography. I don't want to see a 10 minute jui-jitsu ground match just because it's more realistic.

 

[Jrpgfan]

There's a problem with comparing MMA to real fighting for obvious reasons. In MMA there are rules, and those rules change everything. In a real fight you can bite, poke the eye, grab the nuts and all sorts of nasty things. That makes grappling very dangerous and unpredictable, so you'd be better avoiding it at all costs.

I'm a brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt myself but I'd never use it on a real fight situation unless I had no alternative or unless I'm sure I'm fighting only one opponent and he doesn't know what he's doing. That's what my instructor always taught me too.

I think stuff like Krav Maga is much more effective for uncontrolled environments.

 

[Ninjerk]

 

[DraQ]

Not to mention that you can extrapolate this whole discussion about weight class in RL fighting sports to creatures 20 times your size and mass you regularly face in fantasy RPGs like dragons and giants. I mean If any RL laws applied how much of a dumbfuck you'd have to be to engage a reptilian creature the size of a house in melee? Unless you're suicidal, you'd use siege weaponry and the like.

Not to mention that if it's a standard fantasy dragon it may likely be smarter than you AND has likely survived centuries of people trying to kill it and/or take its stuff using pretty much every trick they could come up with. This probably included potentially viable combat tactics.

TL;DR:
Leg it or, if you have to, parley, seriously.

 

[DraQ]

Hey, if someone can make a grappling system in a cRPG fun

Fixed.
Baby steps first.

 

[TheEntitledOne]

DEX+PER for ranged to hit chance. Minimum STR value for effective use of said weapons, otherwise you get a -.

Higher than normal STR allows you to put some extra power behind it, to use a special attack, no need to scale regular attack damage to STR.
Problem solved.

Petition to rename dexterity/agility to in games.

 

[Beastro]

Not to mention that you can extrapolate this whole discussion about weight class in RL fighting sports to creatures 20 times your size and mass you regularly face in fantasy RPGs like dragons and giants.

Some games are able to present those fights in a semi-convincing way, but two that outright don't are Icewind Dale and Skyrim. Both have good enough scale, and the latters combat, really shows you how silly it would be trying to run up to giant creatures to poke them with swords.

IWD is the worst of the two though. Seeing your guys run up to these massive giants and whack at their ankles as they drop hammer fists on you until they fall over and die shows too much that the abstraction is too divorced from the verisimilitude it's trying to convey.

IMO, giants should be considered as rare and as epic a fight as dragons are in RPG etiquette. To encounter any giant is to essentially have a "Balrog" moment when you realize your party is absolutely ill-equipped to fight the encounter (and you should have brought a balista or two with you).

 

[Damned Registrations]

To be fair, a level 20 dnd warrior doesn't resemble a human so much as he does a terminator. I don't really have a problem with one being able to fight something like a dinosaur or a stupid hill giant. Same idea as a human losing a fight to something smaller like a chimp or a badger. A badger is technically small enough that you could punt it like a football if it let you- but it would latch onto your leg and start chewing through it (or more likely your nuts) while you fell over in agony if you tried. Pretty much how I imagine a human fighting anything large like a dragon or giant in melee. The whole 'whack at their ankles' thing is just the stupid shit people talk about because of the abstraction. Why not bitch about him waiting his turn to attack while you decide how to move your party while you're at it?

 

[Mustawd]

Why not bitch about him waiting his turn to attack while you decide how to move your party while you're at it?

Dunno why but this made me chuckle. I imagine a 14 year old German kid screaming at his screen, "Move damn you! What are you doing!!?? He's right in front of you!? Why are you waiting??!! God this game sucks!!"

 

[Jrpgfan]

Damn that video is old. From the time when the internet was still fun.

 

[Telengard]

The draw does affect penetration at a same distance though, which is not absurd to say would equal to damage in a game(the greater the penetration, the higher the chance to kill or wound the opponent).

Trouble is, penetration is one of those things that most rpgs don't factor in their rules, which is what I was saying. Sure very old d&d did (on a table nobody used - weapon v. class of armor), and Millenium's End builds a core part of their combat around it, but these are rarities in the rpg world.

However, be that as it may, penetration is normally bad for damage. It's good for piercing armor and getting hits where you otherwise wouldn't, but it's bad for dishing out the big damage because the things that cause good penetration tend to narrow the wound, thus making less of a chance of hitting something vital, while also causing much less of a chance of the head stopping inside the body where it can do increased damage. Thus, penetration targets armor, not body health. Unless your rpg has wearing armors add to hp (and such rpgs do exist, believe it or not), then having penetration cause bonus damage runs counter to the purpose of adding in that much detail. It should be making it easier to hit, but harder to damage. Just like a modern armor-piercing round. And thus the reason for the by-weapon table in ancient d&d where each weapon's to hit was adjusted based on the class of armor it was targeting - a direct reduction in armor value based on the penetration of the weapon in question.

What you want for doing damage is something big, preferably fragmentary, with low penetration, so it gets into the body and stays there and fucks lots of shit up.

 

[Jrpgfan]

Hmm that's true. I was saying that taking into account the target was wearing armor, since if you can't get the arrow through the armor, you can't do any damage at all. But yea, barbed arrows with "thicker" arrowheads tend to be more fatal/do more damage, assuming it penetrates the flesh.

M&B has both types of arrows but I can't remember now if they had different properties. Damn, this thread is really making me wanna reinstall that game and play it again.

 

[Ninjerk]

I've had this dream for about a year or two now of making an RPG wherein your strength is compared to some real-world figure (e.g. how fast can the fastest professional baseball players swing a baseball bat) and then applying some configuration of said figure (e.g. momentum generated at the end of a lever arm and using e.g. shearing tests against armor/flesh) to determine effects.

 

[Wulfric Pinewood]

Being without strength makes You to combine, search, think and be better crpg nerd anyway, less muscles the better.
Characters in cprg without strength at all, can only be compared to ones without intelligence, they are both most fun to play and most rewarding.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

That's because they keep old stuff that's retarded and replace the rest with freshly invented retardation, rather than the other way around.
We still have HP pools, HP inflation on level ups, nonsensical effects of attributes, often AC conflated with dodge and so on.

Yeah, I think I've bitched separately about each of these in various threads here.

As you pointed out, strength has almost nothing to do with melee combat.

It has, but sure as fuck not for "hurr I strong I swing moar DAMAGE!!!1".
Once you start binding each other blades, grappling, etc. you'll find yourself in a rather helpless position if the other guy is similarly skilled but stronger.

Well, sword "binding" is a bit on the Hollywood side of things, if you watch Lindybeige or Scholagladitoria type videos on youtube or better yet, watch actual sword fighting on youtube, you really don't see much of that. Not saying it can't happen ever, but in a fight where it's all about lightning fast and lethal strikes, you don't really want to commit yourself to some relatively pointless pushing movement that your opponent could easy exploit.

Grappling's importance is also overstated. For most of the Dark Ages/Medieval Times period on which typical fantasy is based on, people did not use plate armor, which only became common in late Medieval Times. And with lighter armor and sharp weapons, grappling would be suicidal. Sure, it might be useful occasionally under certain circumstances, but a very niche thing. And even once plate armor came into play, one, only very wealthy combatants could afford it, so it was fairly rare, and two, much like Brasilian Jui Jitsu today, you really don't want to put yourself into a position where you are rolling on the ground with someone or entwined with them, because their friend could come up to you and easily kill you. So a much more practical response to plate armor was using weapons like maces and warhammers. Finally, while grappling does require some strength, it is much more about technique, as the skinny Gracies winning against massive muscle bound dudes in the early MMA showed.

Just because they didn't lift weights, doesn't mean they still weren't freakishly strong (Cus D'amato for example built Tyson's punching power by making him use heavier than norm punching bags since early teens).

It's not strength you are talking about. Tyson was a great puncher because he could put his entire stocky frame into every punch, a very complicated coordination of total body movement that most people can't do as well. To illustrate this point, if Tyson in his prime entered a bench press contest, he might have put up some pretty shitty numbers, but that in no way prevented him from throwing amazingly hard punches.

Small guys beating up on people thrice their size and weight (who've had similar training) with super technique is the domain of anime and Holywood (and well maybe early days UFC when no one knew how to defend against BJJ). In reality, weight classes exists for a reason, a run of the mill heavyweighter would crush Mayweather (one of the best in history) in the ring, let alone outside it. The difference in height, reach and mass would be just too big to compensate with speed, footwork and technique. I mean, Ali certainly wasn't known for his plant feet punching power but put him in lower weight class division and he would have knocked them around silly.

Weight classes aren't based on strength, they are based on weight, as the name implies. Using technique, heavier fighters can put more mass behind their punch, but they could actually very well be physically weaker in the sense of having worse bench presses or arm wrestling for example. How many times do you see a larger fighter with a beer belly against a smaller fighter with massive biceps? The latter is most likely stronger, but the former can throw a harder punch if they are both similarly skilled, because mass > strength in striking, as long as the guy is not a complete fatso.

Now granted, things could be very different with medieval weaponry involved but I imagine there's a good chance that two heavily armored combatants would eventually start grappling/wrestling each other.

See my reply to Draq above, about the prevalence of grappling, but even aside from that, that is not how RPGs model strength. They don't give you a damage bonus during grappling, or part of the time, higher strength gives you a constant damage bonus, implying it's related to the strikes themselves.

 

[DraQ]

Well, sword "binding" is a bit on the Hollywood side of things

I was thinking more along the lines of Talhoffer, actually.
Lindybeige is quite cool and can be pretty fresh and insightful at times, but I wouldn't compare him to an actual XV century master swordsman and mercenary, and Talhoffer's fighting manual features an awful lot of grappling, hooking and binds (typically followed by people getting brutally stabbed in all sorts of places).


Also, a few words regarding grappling and RPG combat in general:
cRPGs typically don't simulate historical reality. They borrow a lot of elements but their settings are also very different in some regards no matter how much realism and meticulous worldbuilding they involve. cRPG settings involve things without RL counterparts, like strange races and beasts, magic, weird materials, strange environments and so on and that puts a lot of mechanics in a different context. For example no matter how common grappling was in real life melee combat, if you're facing a magician who has rendered himself pretty much impervious to any sort of damage you may inflict by the means of Stoneskin or somesuch and is about to incinerate you with a well aimed fireball, dogpiling him may be a surprisingly effective tactics.

 

[Infinitum]

Assuming of course that Talhoffer wasn't the Charles Atlas of ye late medieval europe. After all, if it doesn't feature Your cool and evocative images of super secret patented techniques success guaranteed I-swear-on-me-mum (tm), why would distinguished sons of noblemen bother with Your painstakingly hand crafted manual of swordfighting and not the next mercenary scums?

 

[Azarkon]

The bigger problem is intelligence. How do dumb players play intelligent characters?

 

[mutonizer]

The bigger problem is intelligence. How do dumb players play intelligent characters?

By making intelligent characters only able to do retarded things, just like a retarded character.

 

[DraQ]

The bigger problem is intelligence. How do dumb players play intelligent characters?

And how do intelligent players play dumb characters other than LARPing all the way through?
That's why I would drop intelligence stat in cRPGs - there is no way to enforce it mechanically.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Eh, it works well enough as an abstraction for things like access to skills and tactics (int requirement to use things like disarming, tripping, etc.), discerning/disarming traps, all sorts of shit. There's also no way to enforce charisma, alignment, character relationships, etc. They're still interesting because of the gameplay options they add. Hell, there's no way to even enforce basic knowledge of the setting any dumbass should have, like who the local ruler is or whether or not trolls are real.

 

[mutonizer]

And how do intelligent players play dumb characters other than LARPing all the way through?
That's why I would drop intelligence stat in cRPGs - there is no way to enforce it mechanically.

1) Ignore any player you'd consider dumb when you cook up the design. Keep your standards as high as possible. Fuck tutorials fuck all that retardo shit. Anyone not able to RTFM is by default: out.
2) Only allow the player to indicate the will to do something, without any say in the actual resolution.

For example, don't present a puzzle as an actual puzzle, but as an astract that the character needs to solve (not the player). The player can only indicate various options on how his character can proceed such ask around, take time to do some research in the library, kill someone and steal their solution, torture puzzle maker or simply have his character attempt to solve the puzzle (which is dictated by character stats/skill/attributes/etc).
For dialogues, never allow the player to select dialogs lines directly and destroy the "you/me" bullshit dialogs are usually and instead only allow "topics", narrowed down by only what the character knows and comprehend, what the character wants to know about and what he doesn't want to talk about, etc. Then mix this with what the NPC wants to know about. Then resolve this as a pure test of skill/stats between PC and NPC.

 

[Damned Registrations]

But Draq is concerned dumb characters can still do smart things like attack the healer first or protect his squishy allies.

 

[mutonizer]

But Draq is concerned dumb characters can still do smart things like attack the healer first or protect his squishy allies.

Hmm, that's not really dictated by "dumbness factors" though. Unless you allow mental retardation levels (which is a mistake in itself I think), these things are not an issue.

An interesting "dumb" mechanic though could be to link mental stats to some kind of awareness factor of self and others, or how fast information is processed by the character.
For example, a dumb character might only perceive plainly enemies and allies right in front of him and just not able to distinguish the rest unless he really tries (which could take time, checks etc). In the heat of the battle, a "dumb" character might be completely oblivious to the massive rumbling behind him caused by a giant running to him. Translate this by just not giving any visual/audio queue to the player or distorted and confused ones, or just allies yelling at him about it, and you got your problem solved.

(Edit for clarity: In the example given, it would take the dumb character a lot of focus and therefore time/checks/actions to identify the healer or even the squishy ally as he'd need to not fight, but concentrate on finding them.)

Of course on the other side you got hyper aware characters, able to know position and whatnot of everyone all the time in combat and identify exactly who made what sound and whatnot.


It's really not that's it not doable, just that it hasn't been done yet is all.