Incline Fallout 2 Mechanics Overhaul Mod Discussion

[Jim the Dinosaur]

1. Going around with heavy armor, ammo and weapons will be less straining.

Yeah, especially heavy armor is actually a really big problem here. But then again, armor weight always was too little of a problem to begin with: how come there's a minimum effective weapon strength, but not for armor? What I could do is make armor have two different min strengths: can't equip (relatively low value, e.g. min ST 2 or 3 for metal armor) and encumbered (AG penalty, possibly on top of the original one)...

3. Small Frame was always the best trait in Fallout because unless you were playing solo, you could simply use your NPCs as mules until you get the car. Gotta consider how to nerf it in this context.

Had to do that anyway, especially when you mentioned your build of "a big muscle-bound high-end melee character", with a small frame a few posts back. It's a stupid trait.

2. What happens with the NPCs inventories?

Nothing, really, so it doesn't affect the Vault City smuggling either unfortunately. You just won't be using them as pack mules anymore.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Excidium

I've finally figured out a way to limit what you can do while inside inventory. I can now make it so that once you've done one thing in the inventory (whether it's taking a stim or reloading) it forces an exit from the screen, which in turn allows me to boost reload AP up to 4. About the limit of what I can do because I still can't change the inven AP cost though.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

In related news, I can now also force an exit from the steal screen, meaning I can put up a hurdle before the actual stealing (which can't really be modded) and avoid I-have-no-steal-skill-but-will-savescum-my-way-to-glory syndrome.

Here's what I'm thinking:

-raise steal success cap from 95% to 100%
-immediately exit steal screen (with mark saying "what are you looking at" or whatever) if steal skill doesn't exceed some combo of the mark's perception and facing, the player's sneak skill if it's high enough and he's sneaking, lighting levels, and a team mate of his is standing close enough and facing you. Maybe charisma could also play a role...

Might actually make sneak a bit more of a useful skill too. If this works out good, I might shift a lot of stuff that's now in unguarded compartments to people's inventories... though that might overpower sneak, so unless I can factor in something else into the formula, that might not be such a good idea.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Excidium

I've finally figured out a way to limit what you can do while inside inventory. I can now make it so that once you've done one thing in the inventory (whether it's taking a stim or reloading) it forces an exit from the screen, which in turn allows me to boost reload AP up to 4. About the limit of what I can do because I still can't change the inven AP cost though.

So no more inventory exploit?
Its gonna make Quick Pockets mostly useless, through, except for changing bullet type.

In related news, I can now also force an exit from the steal screen, meaning I can put up a hurdle before the actual stealing (which can't really be modded) and avoid I-have-no-steal-skill-but-will-savescum-my-way-to-glory syndrome.

Here's what I'm thinking:

-raise steal success cap from 95% to 100%
-immediately exit steal screen (with mark saying "what are you looking at" or whatever) if steal skill doesn't exceed some combo of the mark's perception and facing, the player's sneak skill if it's high enough and he's sneaking, lighting levels, and a team mate of his is standing close enough and facing you. Maybe charisma could also play a role...

Might actually make sneak a bit more of a useful skill too. If this works out good, I might shift a lot of stuff that's now in unguarded compartments to people's inventories... though that might overpower sneak, so unless I can factor in something else into the formula, that might not be such a good idea.

I like this idea.
So essentially player can either suceed or fail in a less random way rather than the mess it was once?

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

So no more inventory exploit?

You mean the exploit of waiting till you're half dead and then injecting 5 stims (already risky of course now), some psycho and reload all your guns for 4 AP in total? Yeah, no more.

Its gonna make Quick Pockets mostly useless, through, except for changing bullet type.

Why would it? It effectively halves your reload time as well now (which is why I'll just half it in practice at well; going to inven every time just to reload for 2 AP'd be silly.

In related news, I can now also force an exit from the steal screen, meaning I can put up a hurdle before the actual stealing (which can't really be modded) and avoid I-have-no-steal-skill-but-will-savescum-my-way-to-glory syndrome.

Here's what I'm thinking:

-raise steal success cap from 95% to 100%
-immediately exit steal screen (with mark saying "what are you looking at" or whatever) if steal skill doesn't exceed some combo of the mark's perception and facing, the player's sneak skill if it's high enough and he's sneaking, lighting levels, and a team mate of his is standing close enough and facing you. Maybe charisma could also play a role...

Might actually make sneak a bit more of a useful skill too. If this works out good, I might shift a lot of stuff that's now in unguarded compartments to people's inventories... though that might overpower sneak, so unless I can factor in something else into the formula, that might not be such a good idea.

I like this idea.
So essentially player can either suceed or fail in a less random way rather than the mess it was once?

Yeah, so first threshold to actually see someone's inventory is now a non-random one: no roll involved, so no savescumming either. The second one for actual stealing is the same as always: checking for size of item you're trying to steal etc.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

I've now finally found out how to generalize the "watcher" scripts (the people who say "don't touch that" if you touch their "private" containers). Because the devs had to manually assign these individually, they're more the exception than the rule, as anybody waltzing through Klamath stealing people's stuff from under their noses know. Not anymore! Might actually make sneaking (especially early on) a bit more viable.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

To continue talking to myself, I'm working on a solution to what I think breaks the entire concept of sequence: surprise turns.

Right now sequence works like this: the combat initiator gets the first "surprise" attack, then the others, and for the following turn, the one with the highest sequence gets the first attack.

What this means, is that in a fight between someone with awesome reflexes (dude A), who initiates combat, and someone with crappy reflexes (dude B), combat turns progress like this: A, B, B, A, B, A, B, etc. Who has the advantage in this situation? Clearly depends on the chance of killing someone in the first round (A has the advantage) or in two rounds (B has the advantage), but on the whole this is about even, which defeats the entire purpose of having awesome sequence: what most matters is who starts combat with a "surprise" attack, even if it isn't actually a surprise.

I want to fix this by making a "surprise" attack, an actual surprise: if your target (the one you're aiming your weapon at in the first turn) doesn't see you, then everything works as normal and you get your surprise advantage. If, additionally, you have higher sequence than the opponent, you also keep your second turn advantage, so turns progress A, A, B, A, B, A, etc. If you have lower sequence, then you lose your second turn advantage, but now so does the enemy (in practice this means that his sequence gets lowered to 0), which means that turns progress A, B, A, B, A, B, A, etc.

However, if he does see you, then one of two things can happen:

(1) you have higher sequence than the enemy, which means you "keep" your first turn, but "lose" your advantage in the second, so turns progress A, B, A, B, A, B, etc.

(2) you have lower sequence than the enemy, which means you lose your first turn, but the enemy loses his advantage in the second, so turns progress B, A, B, A, B, A, B, etc.

Long story short: who initiates combat won't be important anymore, unless it's a sneak attack that the enemy (and his team mates) don't see coming.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Also, do people go hostile if you start laying traps near them?

Yeah, sneaking's getting a lot of extra uses.

Do you know which quests have a "Stealth Boy" solution? I remember, from top of my mind, the Temple of Trials test (steal the key lol), Rescue Torr (sneak past the robot, tell Torr to bolt), discovering and destroying Becky's still (sneak + lockpick), tracking Lloyd in New Reno using nseak

No clue, never played as one. Sneaking into Navarro really should have been a must, you basically just run past those guards after the tunnel.

I like this idea, might make sneak definitively useful. Also Sequence is going to be a saviour in ironman games, FINALLY making it into something useful: Its gonna be a saviour in random encounters, especially in the most dangerous (Bounty Hunters, Remants of the Master's Army, Claim Jumpers, Robbers and Highwaymen in earlygame). How sequence is going to be handled now?

What do you want to know exactly? Like I said, if I implement it right, sequence'll do what it's meant to do: decide the order in a fight, regardless of who starts it. The double turn thing only happens now if you sneak up on someone + have better sequence.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

I'm working on another idea which I'm still not totally sure about. It's mainly meant as a "fix" for the peek-around-the-corner-jump-back exploit, but it has a pretty big impact which might be cool or not.

What it does is check at the beginning of everyone's turn who they can "see" (this is a built in feature of fallout, which checks for facing (can't see anything right behind), perception and blocking tiles); it then lists these visible targets, and then if you want to attack one of them later in the turn everything works as normal. If, however, you want to attack someone who wasn't visible at the beginning of your turn, then you get a to hit penalty.

So, what this means is that if you're hiding behind a wall, and jump out for a shot, you get a penalty. But it also means that if you shoot at someone who was behind you at the beginning of the turn, you get a penalty, same if someone was beyond your visual range. I'm still not sure if these side affects are a net positive or a net negative.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

I've decided to make my own ammo formula, because I wasn't totally happy with the Glovz and YAAM formulas. You can find an excel sheet with all the damage outputs compared with those of YAAM and the Vanilla formula here. Just flick through the tabs for the different types of ammo. If you could check it out and give some feedback I'd appreciate it.

The reason I didn't like the original formula speaks for itself (it's a broken mess). The primary reason I don't like YAAM (which had the Ammo mod substract first from the DT, and then, if the DT was "gone", from the DR) is that good ammo turns armor into butter: wearing combat armor or nothing, it literally doesn't matter if your enemy is packing gauss or AP rocket ammo. Even if I'd liked this principle, it can't possibly work in FO which effectively has two seperate ammo formulas: one for "normal" ammo, and one for energy weapons. Normal ammo has different modifiers to differentiate them, energy weapons have damage types. The thing is that plasma, laser and electricity always have certain relative advantages against certain types of armor, it never absolutely blows it away. Second big reason I don't like it is that it has certain weird effects. For instance, using 10mm ammo against combat armor, you're better of with AP with low damage ranges; but with high damage ranges you're better off with JHP. Glovz's formula generally has better outcomes than YAAM, but it's really complex, and I want something that allows people to change around values easily if they don't like something.

What I came up with is something that basically brings "normal" ammo more in line with the different damage types by making the modifiers relative. The damage multipliers still work the same as always, but now it has a modifier that adds or substracts a certain percentage from both the DT and DR. So, for instance, if you have 10mm AP against combat armor, then it has a modifier of -20% which gets substracted from the DT and DR (so the DT becomes 5*0.8 = 4 and the DR becomes 40*0.8=32). In choosing the new ammo values I've tried mostly to make sure that if there's both AP and non-AP ammo, AP starts getting better against from combat armor upwards (the only exception is AP rockets, which are (a lot) better from PA onward).

The Brazilian Slaughter

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Interesting way to fight the in this game.

Some implications:
1. How it interacts with the other mechanics of the game? I'm thinking Sneak and Perception, perhaps Agility and Luck as well.

Just sneak and perception (I'm forced to use the standard "can_see_object" function, so can't change anything about that).

2. Ins't a bit weird if the player hides behind a wall, then AI NPCs
walk up to the player and get a shooting penalty and vice-versa? Or does it makes sense (because he just found a person and is now swinging his aim towards him/her)?

I think it makes sense in that way, yeah. Hard to say with TB of course. Due to its limitations, the AI of course wouldn't suffer because of this: if he can't see you at the beginning of the turn, he just keeps running towards you. So this evens the odds a bit.

3. What's the penalty and how it works? Soft penalty? Hard penalty?

Not sure yet, was thinking in terms of flat 10% penalty. Enough factors complicate ranged combat already.

Regarding the ammo formula, I'm not good with math but I don't like YAAM's formula either. Magnus' one used to be good, unsure if it still is. Does your mod randomizes ammo type too? I'm gonna look at the excel file tomorrow to see what I can say.

YAAM's great in theory, but it's just way, way too aggressive. Relative values all the way. Magnus didn't have a formula, just changed weapon values. It randomizes that, yeah. I'm gonna see at some point if I can make the AI smarter about which type of ammo it uses. But not yet this version, it's bloated enough as it is.

Say, did you take a look at the whole dimishing sold gun prices thing?

Gonna see first how this new economy works. I've been spending way too much time on it already.

Say Jim, how are other players faring at the end-game against Remants of the Master's Army, Deathclaws and Enclave patrols using your mod? I ask this because I wonder how certain mechancs work in end-game. For example, I was really doubting my unarmed char would survive the end-game on Leather Armor MKII + Implants + Perks + Drugs only.

No clue, apparently people keep downloading the mod, but maybe they're immediately scared away by the fleeing/crit failures.

You changed the Dodge system so Metal Armor and beyond only gives dodge penalty if you're low ST, right? Power Armor IMHO should have dodging penalty through, its a bulky suit of Power Armor, player should be able to choose dodging (and go Combat Armor MKII/Brotherhood Armor at the end game) or resistance (in which case he goes Power Armor>>Hardened Power Armor>>>APA)

Nah, what I want to do is give armor that's too heavy for you a stamina penalty. agility penalty still work purely on basis of bulkiness for the reason you mention.

Regarding the doctor skill and the fact you can only enhance effects of drugs if the NPC has a certain number of doctor... can't you make it so that once you USE a item on a NPC, the Doctor skill levels intantly rises and falls to become equal as that of yours for a few seconds, just enough to apply drug? I really like the idea of being a Doctor that lives better through chemistry because it makes a Doctor character really useful, it could also make First Aid useful AND make Cassidy a bit less overpowered.

Could do that, yeah. Might be a good idea.

When is the new version coming out?

Thursday. This fucking thing is gonna take a while, sorry. Working on it a lot though, but problem is I keep thinking of new stuff to add, which I really have to stop doing and just finish what I've got planned.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

DraQ, with this new formula I've been looking at shotguns again, and I think I've found an interesting possibility with 10 pellets, 1-5 damage each, with a bit increased damage and very heavy armor penetration (60%, of course it won't be very armor penetrating in practice). The effect, if all pellets hit the same target, is an avarage 32 damage against unarmored (though a very wide possible range of 10-60), an avarage of 8 damage (0-30) against metal armor, and avarage 6 against combat armor (0-20), none against PA.

Now for the problems: (1) you can only burst when the burst animation plays, and that animation doesn't look very shotgun-y, (2) I can't make different types of ammo (slugs/bukshot) because I can't change the clipsize of one type of weapon on the fly, (3) you can't have two different burst types on a weapon, so combat shotguns etc. would become burst only, which I don't like.

I could work around 2 and 3 by making two general types of shotguns: (1) regular shotgun and sawed of, shoot bukshot in 10 pellet bursts, (2) slugs in single fire and burst for the combat shotguns. If the latter are sabot slugs you might even have a reason for the divide in shotguns (at least, not sure, but the advanced shotguns look like they have rifled barrels).

Would this be a worthwhile change?

edit: probably would be a bit better without the slight added damage: that'd put unarmored at a bit more modest 30 avarage with a 10-50 range.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Nevermind, forgot that the idea won't work that way because the burst system is predicated on consecutively fired rounds (THC drops slightly after each round, which'd make no sense with shotgun pellets).

But, BUT, that all doesn't matter because I've finally found my very own spiffy way for simulating burst cones. That'll let me do all sorts of nifty things like (varying) shotgun spreads, and the bozar aimed bursts.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

So will Metal Armor and Combat Armor still have Dodge/AG penalties no matter what? Kinda sucked knowing that my unarmed dodger kung-fu dude was going to have to wear Leather Armor MKII for the rest of the game, kinda scared of the end-game, FO2's endgame is pretty much deathland for anyone without a PA and I hoped to use my l33t dodging to dodge bullets and shit and then go in for teh kill.

What were you thinking of that'd impact that? Bulky armor always constricts your movement, right?

So how are you going to simulate shotgun spread?

Well, I've found a way to make a cone, and check for targets on its path, which doesn't allow me to do anything with bursts ironically (that's pretty much hardwired), but does allow me to do all sorts of stuff with "single" shots: shotgun pellet spreads, (aimed) mini-bursts for Bozar and XL7023 (or whatever it's called). In fact, I can make a better cone than the one used for burst, which isn't really a cone in the first place:

As you can sort of see here, the burst "cone" is actually three parallel streams of bullets meeting up in front of the shooter: it's really on a cone at very close distances, over far distances it looks more like a 3 hex thick beam. My cone's actually cone-shaped, and I can make it as broad or narrow as I want. Plus, I can change the amount of bullets/pellets per "stream", which is always 1/3 per stream in regular bursts.

BTW, what about giving shotguns (at least the stronger ones) knockdown perk? IMHO Shotguns could become THE gun for dispatching melee foes, with the bonus damage + spread + knockdown, I can see a shotgun as the go-to weapon for killing close-combat enemies less tougher than deathclaws.

Yeah, was planning on doing that, though I'm still not sure whether knockdowns work with ranged weapons, have to test that.

Also, it would make a shotgun something to watch out for a Unarmed/Melee player, being knocked back and forced to run again more is bad for them, and having to kill the shotgun guy first might add another tactical factor for combat. Do you get knocked back if the weapon bounces entirely on your armor? Having Power Armor dudes being thrown backwards by 0-damage shotguns is a little ridiculous.

Not sure how it works by default, but I'll be overriding that effect with the damage formula, and yeah, if it doesn't pierce the armor, it won't knock you back.

So, are you going to finally make your "official" new damage stats for two-handed long-arms or going to keep vanilla weapon damages? I could send you my weapons file if you want some ideas.

If you want, you can play around with some values in the ammo excel sheet and see how raised damage ranges (the sheet just lists vanilla values, so if you want to raise them just raise the first damage value), work out. For instance, I've made 7.62 somewhat armor piercing, which makes FNFAL's more effective than in the other damage formulas. Also, all my values seem a bit lower than the original and YAAM ones, but that's because for some weird reason YAAM rounded his formulas up, while they should round down... I'll have a new version up where I change his values to reflect that, because right now the comparison is pretty off.

to give the player some further advantage vs random encounters. Essentially, traps and items can be used to (automatically) create traps and alerts in the player's camp, which depending on levels of trap skills in both parties, could do some funky things to hostile critters before combat begins, for example:

Some ideas on how it would work on the window:
- You made a basic alarm system using ropes, and the [encounter's name here] failed to sneak through your basic traps, giving you more initiative in combat. (Bonus sequence and perhaps bonus %dodge chance for a turn or two - to reward the high sequence player who already gets first-turn initiative?)
- While attempting to ambush you, [encounter's name here] hostiles tripped on your traps [describe type of trap tripped on here for X damage on enemy Y, witty Falloutish comment here] .
- You were suddently surprised by a enemy ambush, despite your alarms and traps. (sequence and AC penalty)

Interesting ideas, might actually make outdoorsman (and traps) more useful. I'll see what I can do.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Updated ammo excel sheet (same link as before)

My cone's actually cone-shaped

To expand on this a bit:

Red is shooter, green target. Left one is the regular burst "cone" with three streams. Right one is my own, "proper" cone with five streams (max, I think; only when using shotguns with birdshot or something, and even then the outer streams will probably only get 1 or 2 pellets).

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Took a long while, but finally got the burst cone running, here's an example of it in action (pistols represent the cone, herp):

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Very cool, Jim! Wonder what interesting new applications of it I could do with shotguns...

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Very cool, Jim! Wonder what interesting new applications of it I could do with shotguns... Shotguns as the ultimate crowd control against numerous melee enemies?

Now that you have done the different shotgun burst, what remains?

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Very cool, Jim! Wonder what interesting new applications of it I could do with shotguns... Shotguns as the ultimate crowd control against numerous melee enemies?

Sawed offs (half the range) might be best for that; just tested it out and it has a very nice fat spread for lots of close range enemies (except if they're right on top of you).

Now that you have done the different shotgun burst, what remains?

Well, I still have to see what I can do with the aimed bursts for the bozar and XL7053; unlike shotguns the burst cone there should depend on THC (and should be thinner ofcourse), and maybe not balloon towards the max range, but the target location (or something in between, not sure yet).

Also, I want to see what I can do with your idea (I think) for roundhouse kicks: kick special attacks shouldn't be for armor piercing but area attacks. Not sure what to do with special punches; remember you saying something about unarmed bursts, how did you imagine that working?

edit: right now this is what I'm thinking for the secondary unarmed attacks:

kicks become area attacks, the farther away from the primary target the secondary targets are, the harder they are to hit:
level 1: two front side flanking hexes become secondary targets (7AP)
level 2: two back side flanking hexes become secondary targets (8AP)
level 3: back hex becomes secondary target (purest of all roundhouse kicks) (8AP)

punches become "flurry" attacks like in kotor, with each subsequent punch becoming harder to hit:
level 1: 3 punch flurry (6AP)
level 2: 4 punch flurry (7AP)
level 3: 5 punch flurry (8AP)

I don't think enemies every used secondary unarmed attacks in the original, so I should also rectify that.

Not totally sure what to do with aimed secondary attacks, roundhouse kick to everyone's eyes?

 

[dunno lah]

Is it possible for a "Disarm" for unarmed?

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Yeah, but that'd be covered by an attack on the arms, not secondary/primary.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Finally figured out what I'm going to with radiation:

random radiation zones on the world map (not on towns): these zones are circular shaped (noticed that Timeslip has added stuff like sine and tan, which gave me nightmares during math class, but I managed to figure out hex geometry to some degree, so should work out), and varying in size. Bigger zones have small bigger radiation zones within them. With a geiger counter, you get the geiger counter sound when you enter one of the zones, which means you either change direction, possibly adding days worth of dangerous encounters to your travel time, or slog on and hope for the best. In my head it's really cool yo.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Clockwork Knight The Brazilian Slaughter

I've been thinking about the combat stats. Two things I think most people consider problems: (1) throwing: you want to be able to toss a grenade once in a while, but don't feel like investing in a skill, (2) hth vs. firearms: I think Sawyer made the point somewhere that it's weird how hth is a question of pick one and stick with it till the end, while with firearms you have to go with small arms, and then maybe branch out if you don't like gauss rifles.

Because I'd like to keep any changes as straightforward as possible, I thought I'd just do everything based on animation type:

Small Arms => Pistols/SMG's (pistol & smg anims)
Big Guns => Big Guns (minigun, big gun & rocket launcher anims)
Energy Weapons => Rifles (rifle anim)
Unarmed => Unarmed (no anim, so unarmed + grenades/rocks)
Melee => Light Melee (spear & knife anims, so including throwing knives and spears)
Throwing => Heavy Melee (club & sledge anims)

This approach is attractive for me because it makes a large number of calculations easier/more straightforward, especially in the to hit script (e.g. I can't check for attack type there, so I have to use an inexact workaround when checking whether you're throwing or thrusting a spear, but I can of course check for animations).

One problem is that it brings some issues with the animation types to the fore: why is a laser rifle, which looks exactly like a sniper rifle, not a rifle but a big gun? Just giving it a rifle animation creates incompatibility issues with Super Muties (though no problem results with the projectiles, thankfully).

Here's what I could do though: make all rifles (including plasma and laser) into rifle animations, and simply copy a whole lot of super mutie big gun animation frames and rename them to rifle animations; problem solved at the cost of a bit bigger download.

edit: Incidentally, I could take the same approach to Vic & Cassidy etc. so they can also use more types of weapons.

edit 2: now that I think about it, I shouldn't overpower rifles too much... maybe the laser rifle should become a rifle, but pulse & plasma should stay big guns... not sure.

edit 3: Light melee might be a bit underpowered too... while I'm not that big a fan of defensive skills, a blocking skill might be an idea. This'd work on top of the agility-based evasion check against melee and unarmed attacks (and at a penalty when carrying a two handed weapon). The alternative scheme would then be:

Small Arms => Pistols/SMG's (pistol & smg anims)
Big Guns => Big Guns (minigun, big gun & rocket launcher anims)
Energy Weapons => Rifles (rifle anim)
Unarmed => Unarmed (no anim, so unarmed + grenades/rocks)
Melee => Melee (club, spear, sledge & knife anims, so including throwing knives and spears)
Throwing => Blocking

edit 4: While someone over at NMA has pointed out that you tend to think of Melee as being offensive+defensive, I'm still starting to lean more towards the blocking stat idea: (1) I already have a defensive mechanic against hth attacks in the to hit formula, but I'm never sure when to use unarmed or melee (2) more importantly, giving melee characters a "free" defensive advantage over firearms characters would seem to throw everything off balance.

edit 6718: I have to start thinking about the blocking mechanic more seriously whether I go the second route or not: while unused AP's no longer affect your dodge (if anything you should be more evasive while on the move), it does make sense that spending time to anticipate an attack would aid you in blocking it. Also, strength should play a role: blocking an attack by someone three times your size shouldn't be that effective (though it might still do something like raise your DT/DR slightly). Of course, to avoid bruisers getting too much of an advantage over nimble characters, heavy, strength based, weapons should be easier to dodge.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Latest spamming update:

I've come to the conclusion that I really don't want to go the defensive skill route and so I'll almost certainly stick with the first setup (with Light Melee included), unless someone has a better idea.

As for the blocking mechanic, I want to do something more or less like the dodge/block mechanic in Age of Decadence, meaning that they're mutually exclusive: either you try to block or you try to dodge. The issues I have with the way it works in AoD are (1) the player has no control over whether he tries to block or dodge, making it a lot less interesting for me, (2) again, don't like that it's skill-bound; defensive skills, especially when working automatically are just dull "make combat go better" boosts.

So I'm thinking along the lines of being able to toggle whether you try to block or dodge when attacked in hth. Both take into account reflexes (agility, perception and facing), and unspent AP (so not just blocking; unspent AP still doesn't play a roll in evading gunfire), but with the difference that blocking is somewhat easier to accomplish, but allows the opponent to "override" the block by simply being stronger. Such an override could either entirely remove the block, or simply weaken it into raising DT/DR by some value.

Also, I think different types of hth attacks are differently blockable/dodgeable:

Clubs/sledges: easy to dodge, hard to block
spears/knives: medium to dodge, medium to block
unarmed: hard to dodge, easy to block

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Well, making circles turned out to be easy enough. So, this is what I'm planning for radiation: at the beginning of the game variously sized elipses are created for the world map, with the bigger ones having a chance of getting a higher radiation zone within them, which, in turn, also have a chance of getting a higher radiation zone within them (so up to three levels). Towns (with the exception of Gecko and Broken Hills) won't possibly overlap with radiation zones.

If you have a geiger counter in your inven while travelling the world map, and you hit a radiation zone, you get to hear this sound (the first pattern for low, second for medium, third for high; I won't use the last pattern which sounds too xtreme for my taste).

So, here's an example of how the radiation map might turn out:

They turned out looking like eggs, but you get the idea.