Holla Forums, what is your idea RPG damage type setup? I'm not quite sure how to ask this question...

Holla Forums, what is your idea RPG damage type setup? I'm not quite sure how to ask this question, but do you prefer something like the "six axis" setup with Light/Dark, Fire/Water, Earth/Air damage types? Something as simple as just phyiscal/magical? Diablo's physical/fire/frost/shock/poison? Dredmor's bajillion types of damage? GURPS's strict simulationism?

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wiki.lostsouls.org/Hylocosmic_Model
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Light/Dark, Fire/Water, Earth/Air along with blunt/piercing/cutting is fine.

Anything that allows your armor to make hit a 0 dmg.
I am tired of walking in full plate and being harmed by a guy with walking cane.

I prefer each game having a different damage system that you learn as you play. The damage system should be balanced so that there is no one obvious best path.

I'm not asking about the mechanics per se, literally just the flavors of damage.

PURE RAW DAMAGE
WHAT'S THAT YOU HAVE HIGH DEFENSE
I DON'T FUCKING CARE I HAVE DAMAGE WATCH ME CASUALLY PUNCH THROUGH YOUR SHITTY PLATE
NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU HIDE I'LL YANK YOU OUT AND TURN YOU INTO A FINE COAT OF PAINT FOR THE SURROUNDING LANDSCAPE
YOU CAN'T FUCKING RUN EITHER BECAUSE BY GOD I'M GONNA CHUCK THAT GREATAXE RIGHT UP YOUR FUCKING ASSHOLE
MAGIC? WHO THE FUCK DO YOU TAKE ME FOR, SOME FAGGOT EFFEMINATE WIZARD?
NICE FUCKING THUNDER YOU PIECE OF SHIT NOW WATCH ME CAVE YOUR FACE IN WITH MY AXE
I CAN'T HEAR YOU OVER THE SOUND OF ME HITTING THE DAMAGE CAP

Percentage based armor

Vanilla ice cream will always taste better eaten from a glass.

Pretty much this. I see some systems try to go circular like Water > Fire > Wind > Earth > Water etc but that gets nonsensical fast.

I STILL DEAL MORE DAMAGE THAN YOUR SHITTY ASS DINKY KNIVES BECAUSE GUESS WHAT CUTTING TWENTY PERCENT OUT OF A THOUSAND STILL LEAVES EIGHT HUNDRED DAMAGE THAT IS GOING TO ENTER YOUR FUCKING FACE RIGHT FUCKING NOW

Any game that lets me deal lethal DOT damage and debuffs as my enemies try desperately to crawl towards me, falling apart as they do is the way to go

Physical, Non-elemental, earth, water, fire, air, dark, light. That's about all you need. If you want to get real DEEP, then split the damage type of every skill between magic/physical. Poison, paralysis, petrify, etc etc, are status effects. Debuffs are debuffs.

On a side note, damage numbers should, over the scale of the game, go from single digits, to double digits, to triple digits in late-game. Never exceed 999. Autistic fuckhuge numbers are retarded. Even the thousands are pushing it.

I once played a Mud where there was a cosmic model for damage where you could combine damage types(even from opposing elements) up to 6 times to get the final damage type.
There was the base damage types: fire, water, earth, air, chaos, order, holy, unholy, divine, entropy, extropy, force, crushing, piercing, slashing, psionic, temporal, magick, lightning, void, acidic, alkali, heat, cold, light, darkness, shadow, poison, disease, ooze, viral, radiation, plasma, magma, thunder, goetia and primal.
The most fucked up part is that practially every combination had it's own name and purpose in the cosmic model.
Chaos + Order + Holy + Unholy + Goetia = Henosis and was an anti-god damage which could pierce Godly resistances.
Temporal + Order + Chaos + Entropy + Slashing = Bureaucracy
Slashing + Fire + Heat +Lightning + Eskara + Chaos = Starknives
Or you could get something simple like pure slashing damage.

Megaman did it best. The types don't matter, what matters is enemies actually having weaknesses and the player having a choice in what they use. It doesn't matter what the types are if the player is stuck on your retarded linear exposition about an ancient evil awakening, with no options in combat.

Fuck now I'm depressed RPG is a dead genre. Even H-games that were the last bastion of them have moved on to cash-in phone games.

You forgot magic damage (holy bolts)
Just make it such that resistance over 100% does NOT heal you. Divine Divinity 2 made this mistake. XD

I like to see simple systems that are explored in creative ways. I think Panzer Dragoon Saga has a genius combat system despite being pretty easy. It's not really a game where you can make a wrong move in combat and die from it, it's usually pretty easy to undo your mistakes although the game punishes you based on performance with a combat ranking system. Ranking systems are really valuable and should also be put to good use.

For those who don't know, Panzer Dragoon Saga uses a positional based combat system with 3 types of attacks. You have your gun which targets a single enemy or location on an enemy, and it can be augmented with things like the sniper attachment which makes it do extreme damage on weak points, a rapid fire attachment which increases the number of shots fired, etc. You can only have one attachment at a time but it can be swapped for a single turn (of which you can have a total of 3 in a buffer)

Then there is your dragon's laser, which is an all purpose group/multi target/multi hit attack. If there's several things you can hit, all your shots may not go where you want them to, but depending on your dragons power it is also very useful, but can also be made totally useless depending on the form you give your dragon. For example you can have 200% defensive capability, but 0% damage capability, giving you a useless laser attack. This is something you're encouraged to switch on the fly in combat.

Then you have the berserks, which are pretty much magic and do not abide by the typical elements in RPGs. Instead, each enemy is balanced to be weak to one or two of the approaches, forcing you to strategize on a per-enemy basis.

Combine this with battles which have 4 possible positions on a radar in which you fly around on them to target or avoid the enemy in specific parts, finding weaknesses or avoiding danger zones. There's a sense of dynamism to it that is forcing you to constantly consider your positioning for optimized damage, evasion, defensiveness. Enemies also have phase style attacks very often and themselves move around the battlefield to force a change in positioning.

So you have several systems working on place. a 3 pronged way of attacking, a 4 point stat distribution system that you can change at any time which augments those 3 prongs of attack, a 3 turn buffer system where you spend your turn points to pull off small attacks, use items, or pull of major attacks or tap into hidden abilities which are only available with all turns available such as an auto regeneration, and you also have the positional combat system which enemies react to in various ways. It's a very interesting and unique combat system which I'd really like to see approached again in the future.

Ultimately I have no preference for elemental structures for weaknesses/strengths, but rather systems like this which force you to totally rethink how you approach combat in these kinds of games, priming you to have a 100% fresh approach to understand the system. Each combat encounter feels like a puzzle where your performance is judged. There's some leeway, but how much is hard to figure out the first time, but you're greatly rewarded for excellent execution, and a close call can result in a massive penalty.

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the cockblade, where you score an extra critical hit if you suck your sword's dick before attacking

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Magic users take 1000% more damage against melee and everything in general. Because fuck magic users.

that level 1 bedsheet ghost monster went and rolled around in red paint and now it's immune to physical damage wyd

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Everyone likes Sexcalibur.

All you need is
Physical damage which is reduced by defense
Magic damage which is reduced by magic defense
Elemental properties and junk can just show up as debuffs or other side effects

No, don't do that. Magic Resistance.

Fighters and Paladins and shit resist spells below a certain level, and damper them down as well. So magic-users get fucked by no-sells.

oh, mustve missed it
i did check it before posting that though

What about Light/Dark, Fire/Water, Earth/Air
And all possible combinations of them?

Away from here foul bandit! Lest mine fearsome weapon render you into naught but a pile of broken bones!

Nice Path of Exile clone
Get the fuck back to your containment thread

jk ilu keep working hard user

Fire/Ice, Earth/Lightning/Air, Holy/Dark for the magical. Things like poison can be a status effect instead of an element.

I'd keep it less complex for physical. Main thing I'd have is attacks that can breach or totally ignore defense ratings.

Fire consumes Air
Air evades Water
Water erodes Earth
Earth smothers Fire

It's logical, it works, but nobody will use it because it doesn't include water defeats fire.

I don't like that system because I don't like polar opposite system. The elements are all neutral to everything but its opposite. There is barely any interactions. Also let's say someone has ice armor, is it strong against fire or weak against it?
I dislike the idea of a magic class because these elements rarely play a role. Either make magic easily accessible like in SMT or make it some kind of end game ability.

What does this even mean.

Nah that's dumb, unless it's a fast paced action game, then it's awesome and how it should be.

RPG's are fundamentally found upon choice & consequence, so it'd make sense to have a design that has dynamic interactions between a number of variables like elements or what have you. Especially if some of them can outright nullify certain mechanics (provided the player and enemies have other means to play around with).

Personally, I love it when RPG's add more than the "normal" damage types. Shit like sound, acid, so on and so forth. On that note, what are some good "abnormal" damage types? Stuff aside from the trinity (Fire/Ice/Lightning), the quadrinity (Fire/Ice/Lightning/Poison). or holy/divine/"light" & dark. Even better if examples are provided.

I'd love to see more actual "Light". Not "GOOD DIVINE HOLY" light, but literal light, as in lasers and shit.

Physical
Special

You don't need more than that.

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I dunno, games with elements usually end up having some shit like Nigger Slime which is immune to all physical attacks, is healed by fire and ice attacks, reflects electric attacks, is immune to dark attacks, but takes 6000% damage from holy magic.
I'd rather just have a Nigger Slime that's immune to physical but takes 200% from special.

>Boy, Nigger Slime seems to be immune to one of my two avenues of attack?

What an amazingly shit game you are prescribing. Thank god devs have more sense than to make games for infantile retards like you.

It mean air doesn't have a shape that can be focused on, which liquids require to maintain their own shape and therefore their strength and/or purpose for being in that place in time. Therefore, air simple curves around water attacks as it moves, making it "evade" water.

If a core gameplay mechanic is trying to figure out which attack out of a dozen can actually deal damage to something that shows absolutely zero clues then it's a shit game. There's no challenge there outside of trial and error and/or rote memorization.
You're up against a red slime and if you don't kill it within three turns it'll use Fuck You and wipe your party. I'll give you three guesses as to what element it's weak to.

You also missed psionic damage which was right next to temporal.

Incorrectoly. Provide a scanning ability to discover it's strengths/weaknesses/hp/mp/etcetc and there done. Now its design is utterly irrelevant.

Furthermore, I disagree that every single enemy in [game] must have visible tells, abstract or no, as to its weaknesses. That limits design.

Air - Earth
Water - Fire
Metal - Wood
Blood - Spirit
Aether - Void
Light - Dark
With the eleventh "element" of numerology.

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Fire beats Air beats Water beats Fire

Earth is neutral

Fire consumes oxygen. Not air.

Earth absorbs Water
Earth smothers Fire
Earth is unaffected by Air

Air erodes Earth
Air blows out Fire
Air is unaffected by Water

Water douses Fire
Water traps Air (bubbles)
Water weakens Earth (mud)

Fire consumes Air
Fire evaporates Water
Fire burns Earth (wood)

All of these cycles are bullshit, just pick one and run with it.

I think it is easier to give each enemy their own weakness/strength and leave the elements without a set weak/strong against

Wrong. Pretzel cone.

Actually giving elements a weakness would make it easier for the assignment of the resist/weakness of a enemy, you just assign them a element and you would have it basically done. If you wanted a more complex enemy weakness you could also make enemy types with different weaknesses and assign them both a element and a type, which is still much quicker then just making each one have unique resistances.

For me it feels lazy, lazy for the player who doesn't need to learn anything about the monsters since he can only look at the element icon, and lazy for the devs because they just have to slap one icon per enemy.

It is lazy, I admit.
But this method, in theory would also make whatever code you are using more efficient. If you really REALLY needed something that didn't follow the rules (like a boss with a gimmick, for example) you would probably also be able to manually set the resists however you liked. You could also make some gimmicky skills that mess around with the elemental table and toss them to some monsters to toss a curveball at the players.

An idea I had for elements is that instead of only increasing damage it increases the chance of negative effects. A basic fire spell deals set damage, but it's RNG comes from the 15% chance of igniting targets. Once a target is set on fire not only do the flames burn the target over time, they can spread to other creatures and objects and set them on fire. Water always drenches targets, but it can cause targets to drown on land hindering their ability to breathe and thus cutting their stamina. Also drenched enemies are more vulnerable to freezing and shock (ice and lightning effects respectively). Disease keeps you from healing but increases the duration of poison, paralyzis, etc.

Ever farted in a tub?

Basic Magic
Fire > Nature > Water > Fire…

Advanced Magic
Light > Dark > Arcane > Light…

Ranged attacks
Bows > Thrown > Crossbows > Bows…

Melee
Light Weapons > Heavy Weapons > Polarms > Light Weapons…
(Light Weapons being Swords, Daggers and Heavy weapons being Maces and Axes)

Support
Healing, Crowd Control, Buff/Debuff

Knowing Dungeons of Dredmor's sense of humor, this was probably a tongue-in-cheek reference to some other system out there.

It actually worked reasonably well, though, in retrospect.

Localized damage. I want to be able to damage individual limbs. Bonus points if every limb can be individually armored too.

I dont like shooting someone in the foot or the asscheek being as effective as shooting him in the gut or the chest. Likewise, I dont like shooting someone in the thigh and having my damage be mitigated because his breastplate magically protects the rest of his body too. Deus Ex had great localized damage. Break a guy's arm and he either drops his gun and equips a sidearm or is left totally helpless. Break a guy's legs and he's next to immobile. Break his torso or head, and he's a goner. Note that it must be the head or torso in order to kill. No foot/hand related deaths like in other shooters. I also like games where getting shot makes me bleed out. Most games have bullets that function like Star Wars lasers that instantly cauterize the wound on impact so I dont bleed any more than the initial blood spurt. lods o gore is nice too

The same Mud I mentioned earlier also has a limb system. There are 3 states a limb can be, healthy, disabled and amputated. Healthy is anywhere from full health to 1 health, disabled is when it stops working but is still attached and is from 0 health to negative max health. Amputated is anything below that.
There are a few special cases, if all thinking limbs are disabled instant death occurs, if any vital limbs are disabled you start to bleed out and slowly lose health from that limb until death. Notice my vague use of language there? That's because there are a huge variety of body types, humanoid, quadruped, insectoid, abomination, and shoggoth which can spontaneously generate limbs.

I like Fallout/Underrail damage system where you get a few simple damage types with one being most used (physical) and armor having both Damage Reduction -% damage and Damage Threshold -damage if higher than %, can reduce to 0. Damage type depends on weapon type so you can only do physical with some they instead have multiple fire modes or other features and certain types with others with some types having different properties like bypassing shields or effectiveness against some shit. This way you won't have stupid bullshit like fire/water/wind/gimmickofchoice sword that has no difference other than paper beats rock/rock-colored-pokemon tier shit I really want to insert doge meme about how complex and entertaining this damage system is as well as armor system that actually protects it's really nice and not simply reduces damage and, as by logic and mechanics, can be penetrated by single high damage attack (12.7mm etc).

WHEN I FINALLY GET OVERTHERE YOU SIR ARE ROYALLY FUCKED. NOT BECAUSE I CAN KILL YOU QUICKLY, WHICH I MAY OR MAY NOT BE ABLE TO DO, BUT BECAUSE YOU CANNOT KILL ME. YOU MAY WOUND ME BUT IT IS FUTILE, IT WILL ALWAYS GROW BACK IN BUT AN INSTANT! YOUR DEATH IS INEVITABLE AND I SHALL FEAST ON THE CORPSE!

BUT I'M NOT DONE YET
CALL NOW AND I'LL TRIPLE YOUR ORDER AND BUNDLE IN THE EXTRA ARMOR AND COME BACK TO LIFE ON FIELD BULLSHIT IN CASE YOU WEREN'T COMFY ENOUGH

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!
IT'S HIGHLY LIKELY THAT I HAVE NO USEFUL WEAPONS, SO I'M LIABLE TO HAVE INVESTED IN GRAPPLE OF SOME KIND IN ORDER TO PIN YOU DOWN AND SQUISH YOU LIKE THE FILTHY INSECT YOU ARE!


top kek post. I also do this when possible without sacrificing the above.

Reminds me of this thing I picked up somewhere.


I've been staring at this for 10 minutes trying to make heads or tails of it. I'd have an easier time if I knew what Light/ Wind made or Dark/ Earth.
Light/ Water seems like it would be Illusion, but would that make Dark/ Fire Reality? Its icon would suggest something like Entropy, but that doesn't make sense.

bump

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Fire > Earth > Air > Water > Fire, each does 150% damage on the one after. Holy and Shadow both does 125% damage on each other. Ghosts doing 125% damage on itself and 75% on Neutral.
Neutral and Holy are the best elements for general usage. Caster with skills of 4 basic elements is very powerful when exploiting the elemental system. Ghost type is very niche but powerful when meets the requirement. A class that can endow the weapon of the party members with 1 of the 4 basic elements and the priest can endow party member with Holy element, making them indispensable for a well-rounded party composition.
Guess the game.

Never ever done this before.

Sauce, please.

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Boku no SURPRISE!

w h y

Mud name?

Valkyrie Drive. Anime and Game. Game is better.

I'm at the point when I think of elements I think of their properties rather than their advantages. Fire burns. So fire is good against flammable enemies with lots of HP and armor. Water soaks enemies automatically which makes them vulnerable to freezing, electricution, etc. So water is a support element. Electricity can shock and stun enemies during their actions when it hits. Ice can freeze, but freezing is done over time. As an enemy freezes his movement gets slower. Sure I'll throw in a light element with no special properties other than kill with lasers. And maybe a time/space element for manipulating the laws of physics and time.

Since you asked. It's called "Lost Soul".

Light/dark elec/plasma/nuclear/wind/fire/water/earth/chemical/ blunt/pierce/slash/bullet

The fire/water/earth/air quadripartite comes from Hermetism so we should stick to those.

wiki.lostsouls.org/Hylocosmic_Model

Confusing.

what?

And it doesn't even have stuff like Holy, Psionic or Magick.
Wait till you see how many skills are in the game.

Physical/kinetic, incendiary, electrical, acid/corrosive, biological/poison, plasma, cold.

Basically, Underrail

Has any RPG ever used pics related?

There was a chinese diablo-like RPG that did it but I can't remember the name or many of the systems. All I remenber is that every character had one of the fire elements.

I'm sorry, what?

Here you go

Please wake me up

Really, though, only one element matters in this whole graph.

This, I can't think of a single game improved by elemental systems.

I want to add a Megumin reference character, but im worried she won't be subtle enough

Don't go overboard. Just make a flat chested mage.

Physical : blunt, pierce, falling and slashing

Magical: fire, water, electric, earth, dark and light.

I prefer for light and dark to be mosifiers to not just physical damages but also magic.

Also water and earth when used against something not weak to water will only deal blunt damage or piercing or slashing depending on spell.

Light and dark are mostly buffers and debuffers save for light swords or something and dark having a sleep spell whereas light does not. Dark and light would cancel the other out depending on which one is acting on the other. So light and dark are mostly useless defensively speaking.
Dark and light would also act as buffs to other elemental spells.

So a water "natured" spell that restores life infused with light would heal more instantly but a dark infused water nature healing spell would heal a flat amount plus a slow regen over time.
This would be useful for if you are in a pinch (light) or you need health but dont want to trigger the enemies hard hitting move again that happens when you are above x amount of life.

Light would have the light sword technique but a later unlocked spell with be the Darklight blade or something gay like that that would have a high crit chance and blind chance but would be a bitch to unlock

what the fuck?

If I've got over 100% resist to a certain element I want to be gaining HP.

should 100% be immunity, and over that be healing?

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There would be spells that knock the opponent up and them falling dow would deal damage.
Or if you shoot a wing of a gargoyle it falls down and takes damage. That kinda thing.

Or yeah, if ita a 3d game then just knock em out of a window

Didn't you make this thread a few days ago?

In other words raw physical force. "Physics-based" damage that no armor can hep you with right?

Basically. Though i suppose water infused armor or a reactionary water spell that mitigates fall damage could be a thing

I thought I did too. Someone bumped it, didn't expect a 90 reply thread.

fire, air, mind, luck, chaos, girl power, fast fire, compound interest, napalm, dark fire, retard strength, nuclear fire, blue fire, urban, fire (alt), bully

NOT TODAY

I was thinking about anything with feather fall that slows your descent for falling (instead of changing the multiplier you alter the variables). For raw impact damage it might just be video game logic that reduces it overall. Though if you're going to get insta-killed by a giant moon falling on you then there isn't much unlogically you can do to change that.

True. There would be some spells that you would need armor, a buff spell and mitigation spell (feather fall) to fully reduce the damage

Well you can still have magic spells that do physical damage like slashing, piercing, or bludgeoning (possibly from conjouring other weapons/missiles or summoning monsters). Raw impact can be the physical damage type that bypasses armor. But impact is also a niche type of damage. You can define impact as "damaged based on momentum from a creature's body slamming into a floor, wall, or an object bigger than it." My theory is impact damage isn't samage outside the body as much as the damage inside from inertia during impact. So that means impact damage isn't affected by armor but the environment.

An attack that can cause indirect impact damage is telekinesis. You use telekinesis to lift the target in the air. Then you drop the target on the ground. The damage isn't from telekinesis, but from the fall.

For elemental damage I prefer keeping it separate from other damage types. There's no physical-fire damage. There is physical damage + fire damage. Two types of damage formulas as a result from one action.

Explosions are also mostly impact damage, unless thermobaric.

did she just steel ball run that bitch?

No, she just tossed one of her hairbuns at the bully.

SMT imagine had some oddity types like Mystic (raw magic), Nerve (bind, paralysis), Mind (Charm, Sleep), Suicide (self-explosion attacks.), Almighty (the expensive but powerful.) Melee was separated to three categories: Slash, Blunt, Thrust. Guns also had the same treatment: Shot, Spray, Penetrate.That game actually had about 18/19 attack types in total.

In sci-fi games I like there to be something like
Or any variations thereof. Maybe replace Light and Dark with Wind and Earth.

What would "dark" in a sci-fi setting be? Dark matter?

Light would be Plasma and Dark would be Antimatter or something or something like that.

Or it could just be dark. Worked for Phantasy Star, anyway.

I don't remember if dark was antimatter in Phantasy Star.


Technically fire and lightning is plasma. So is beam. But I get what you're saying. Going with the Phantasy Star theme, Light could be more spiritual that it's a manifestation of will power or bio-energy. AKA power that goes beyond the physical.

And meta speaking beam is an alternative weapon type to physical.

I think just as light is a manifestation of will power, darkness is basically malevolence. Looking to Phantasy Star, Dark Force was born out of hatred for all living things and a desire to destroy literally everything.

I like the way shadowrun does it.

A stun damage track and a physical damage track. A bullet proof vest will save your life but it still hurts like a bitch when getting shot, too many times and you are out.

Lightning could be considered plasma, but plasma could also be its own thing, at least if we are talking about hot plasma. Matter superheated to the state of breaking down stable atoms into electrons and ions has its own set of rules it follows.

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That is just blunt damage, but a high amount.
Or if you fall on spikes, piercing.