VictorGijsbers
commented
11 years ago There are parts of this post which I strongly agree, and parts of it with which I strongly disagree. Let me explain.
First, the facts about the weapons. Yes, I agree that several of them are far too alike, and I agree this should be changed. These are not just the tormentor's sword and the defender's sword, but also Fafhrd's sword and Mouser's sword. The nunchucks are wooden, which makes them slightly different, and I believe they have a slightly different parry stat, but it could use more differentiation as well. (A bonus to stunning?)
The adamantine blade, however, is very different: its stats are determined at random, and it can have surprising strengths and weaknesses. It might be worth making it more interesting, but it's certainly not identical to other weapons.
The demon assassin's blade has two big differences: hotness (which gives extra damage and a chance of the weapon being destroyed when hit), and it attacks the player 60% of the time when wielded. I think this might differentiate it enough from other weapons -- basically, it is a "wield me and you'll die" present sent to you by Malygris.
These specific cases aside, I'm all for making the weapons -- many of the weapons -- more interesting. Now the idea of having a faculty requirement ("this weapon requires 10 willpower") is something I am absolutely against. This has always struck me as the kind of badly thought out pushing-the-player-down-a-predetermined-path design that infects far too many RPGs. Often, it comes down to "this weapon requires high strength, so only a [insert class] can use it, because that's the only class for which it makes sense to have high strength". Nothing could be more boring: you make one choice at the beginning of the game, and this determines the path you'll have to walk from that point onwards.
Of course, Kerkerkruip doesn't have classes, so the problem wouldn't take that form and wouldn't be quite that big. But this kind of design still needlessly takes away choices from the player. Instead of having a choice every turn of combat about which weapon to use, you only have a couple of choices about which faculties to increase -- and this then sets you on a path you cannot step away from.
That said, I really like the idea of weapons where having a certain body/mind/spirit score unlocks new abilities. Really, really like it. If the specials are not too absurdly powerful, they'll never take away the question which weapon is the best to use at this moment; but they do add nice variety and make it much more important to think strategically about the allocation of faculty points. Plus, unlocking new abilities is cool. Plus, the scroll of skill and faculty-increasing items become more fun. I'm totally in favour of this.
(By the way, I have a bigger goal of going through the entire Items file and removing or changing anything that isn't cool enough.)
ektemple
There are a bunch of weapons that are statistically the same, though they may have other properties. I count all of the following as mathematically equivalent (not sure if it's an exhaustive list):
All of these are 1d6 + 0, good at parrying, and hard to parry. Kind of dull!
I propose that we make a few of these more interesting by linking them to faculties. There are at least three potential models for this:
Specific proposals (Victor, you have a much better intuition for where the stats should be; these are just examples):