Breakable items, is it ever a good idea?

[laclongquan]

A damaged sword can be repair, like, re-sharpened, or repair the guard or something. Swords need daily maintainance, esp if it's low quality iron/steel.

A broken sword, now, can only be reforged into a dagger or a spear. Other than that, made into a kitchen knife.

Every RPGs dealing with swords ignores the sharpen stones, or the need to have a sharpener, or a weaponsmith who can do the same thing. Unsharpened swords became dull, lower in damage and balance (to hit). An adventure group NEED a smith, or a fixit guy. Not just weapons but other stuffs too, like horseshoes, making a raft to cross the river, etc...

 

[denizsi]

I agree about having sharpeners etc. ie. maintenance equipment, as I already mentioned, but I don't think a party needs any smiths or fixit guys more than they need characters who are worth their shit and can, as they should, do the basic maintenance of items they are trained to use in the first place. A trained swordsman ought to how to look after his sword. But if his sword breaks/becomes terribly damaged anyway, he can't do shit until he can find a smith or access to a smithy's tools. Or if your leather armor keeps getting punctured and torn left and right and you do nothing to keep it together, it will eventually become completely useless, unwearable even. Which brings me to:

I'm leaning towards stat-tied degradation and maintenance and further maintenance equipment, while also the ability to repair certain FUBAR items as well. A broken sword is one thing. A pierced and cut leather armor is another.

I think you have it backwards, a broken sword has to be melted down (Might as well just make a new one, your only reusing it's metal) and reforged. Is leather armor made all at once, or in piece?

Read my above reply. A sword that's broken/too damaged to be of further practical use during your travels/adventures is a sword gone FUBAR. Reforging a new one using the material is irrelevant because I was arguing stat-tied "degradation and maintenance and using maintenance equipment", ie. stuff that you do while adventuring, while all you have access to is all that you've got on you while out there. Obviously, if you're at the point where you need an armada of smithing tools to reforge or even repair something, it can hardly be called maintenance, don't you agree?

Leather armour and the like, on the hand, can be more flexible. Unless a hellhound 3 times your size claws you, completely ripping that armor, there will always be some bare minimum stuff you can do to keep it together and useful. It should also be fairly easy to carry some basic sewing/hunting tools with you to attend to damages in armour.

 

[mondblut]

Every RPGs dealing with swords ignores the sharpen stones

Newfag detected.

 

[Martin]

Personally I dont think adding a new layer of complexity with fully degradable items is a good choice for an rpg, even a heavy combat oriented one.

Having items completely degrade until they are unrepairable/disappear sucks imho.
There are plenty of other things you can do to create money sinks or balance the economy, besides in the case of dungeon crawling for example is forcing the player back to the nearest trader/smith very often a good design decision? Does it add depth and challenge or just extra work?

It all depends on the specific game, plus you're making very generalist assumptions. Forcing the player revisit the repairmen very often sure doesn't sound good, but does this how it has to be with all games, or even how it has always been?

I think, regardless of how often the game sends you to Mr. Repairman, there should be other factors to create a conflict of interest and challenge for maintaining and repairing your equipment. You must be balancing up something else by keeping your equipment at moderate condition.

Take my model suggestion and put it in a game where time is almost always of essence. Everything you do when you're travelling means it takes you longer to reach where you're going. If you're short on time, you'll need to balance how often and how well you eat, rest, how safe you travel and whether you'll have time left to do anything else like maintaining your equipment when you're camping. Maybe some of your equipment are in so bad a condition, you need to make a trip to a town with a Mr. Repairman but since you also need to be fast because you're short on time, taking that route might be risky plus can you trust to get your equipment back when come back for it later? (in Daggerfall, you can't. Repairs have deadlines. Miss it by a day or two and your repaired items go *poof*); or maybe you need to travel hidden and keep a low profile, and visiting the local Mr. Repairmen might not be the best way of maintaining that. It's an ever-present conflict and challenge. You must prioritize and plan ahead or you're screwed.

So as long as there are other factors that can take precedence to maintenance/repairing and vice versa, I think it's all good. With the exception of Daggerfall ( I've had enough "emergent" challenges due to my own negligence in Daggerfall to feel that it was always natural. Plus, as I said, the game had a very reasonable threshold for items breaking down ), I've always felt that items degrading just because they can, is a chore.

I think its a bad design decision, this is why I also tend to support unlimited or very large inventory space and encumbrance only being tied to equipment worn.

Because it's bad to send the player back to repairmen very often, you want to have unlimited/very large inventories. Do items degrade and break in your model? Judging by what you said, I guess not, but then what's the point of having the ability to pick up and store every piece of anything you can ever find? I'm not making the connection.

edit: fixed some wording.

Sorry missed your reply to my post before.

First about my opinion on inventory space it is mainly my view on what works better in an rpg in general, not necessarily tied to to the item degradation issue. But in this context of item degradation being in the game I firmly believe that just reinforces the benefits of that kind of inventory setup.

Also being pressed for time is an interesting variable as long as you can implement it in a way where it cant be twisted around by the player loading/reloading very often, that is you would probably have to find a way to limit the player's save slots to maybe 1 plus a game system autosave to give him an incentive to "stick with his decisions" so to speak. Or restrict the process of saving/loading by other means the player cannot exploit by just quiting.

The saving/reload problem always pops up when adding alot of negative restrictions.

I believe this is because when rpg players start finding alot of negative aspects that hinder their success they will be tempted to just fall back to a previous save several times until they have all the information required to not ....fail or better to not end up with mediocre peformance or in a weak position

This is not so much a matter of rpg players not being able to handle frustration or difficulty, I think for example alot of rpg players appreciate difficult combat and tricky special encounters for example, the issue is most rpg players are perfectionists when it comes to their character's performance in the game among other things.

So a scenario in your system where the player fails, due to for example not being able to complete a certain quest/task in time or not being able to finish it because although you have enough time your equipment is nearly useless might intrigue the player the first couple of times and maybe a minority will enjoy the system and try to endure the consequences and progress without redoing a quest 10 times....but in my humble opinion the majority will try to find faults in the system to exploit and if that is not possible they will redo the different steps in said quest over and over until they achieve a nearly flawless ingame performance.

Im assuming alot here I know, but this what my "rpg gamer common sense" tells me at least.

About my "model" allowing degradation or not like I said in my other post if I were to implement degradation it would be limited degradation something like:

- Perfect condition
- Reasonable condition
- Damaged condition

With no further degradation from "damaged condition".
Also I would attribute to "damaged condition" something like 65-70% efficiency, so basically my take on degradation is if you are to implement it go very easy on the penalties and do not allow for an item to become unusable or drop bellow 60% efficiency.

I do not consider degradable items as being a crucial feature of a good rpg and having the constant secondary but nagging concern to keep your items in shape in the case of systems that allow for full weapon degradation just subtracts from the enjoyment of the other aspects of an rpg in my opinion.

Just my two cents.

 

[shihonage]

One aspect of Diablo games (yeah, yeah, not RPG, blah blah) that I enjoyed, was that when you were done slaughtering endless hordes, you came back to town and had to repair your (presumably dulled in the intense battles you just experienced) swords and (presumably blood-stained and punctured) armor.

It somehow made the experience feel more weighty.

Also, carrying spare (lesser) equipment in case your main stuff breaks was enjoyable to me... it added to the adventure.

 

[Martin]

In diablo you single handedly killed ........well....alot of enemies. And that was the game.
The "town" was just a plot advancing device alongside a stashing place and a place to trade. There were smiths yes but..

In the case of Diablo the only reasons they implemented it was a money sink, and overall an unecessary one since the game revolved around loot and there was basically nothing else to do in the " chapter X headquarters town" besides trading and stashing.
The repairing aspect doesnt even count as a necessary incentive to return to "home base", since the trading aspect was always more important.