Playing Rough

Well!

Just now finished with combat testing, from more or less beginning to more or less end:

• Rolled some COMPLETELY UNIQUE *cough* testing characters.

-Sybrian ‘Corvine’ Rooksfield (Melee-centric)

-Aidran Roia (Armor-centric)

-Dimitria ‘Dimmi’ LaMorte (Melee/Ranged balance)

-Nagant McMoon (Ranged-Centric)

• Mocked up a quick smash-and-grab on a small pirate treasure cache (with a few guards)
• Combat!
•  Assigned loot and bonus CP for completing the ‘mission’
• Bought new items and reequipped my practice toons with their ill-gotten gains in town.

And it all worked, more or less! Or at least I didn’t run into any showstoppers. The method I used (read: made up on the spot) for generating loot tables is workable, but could use a lot of refinement. Something that shouldn’t take too long once I sit down to do it.

But yeah, otherwise I’m real happy with how things went. :3  Going in I was a little worried about the balance between melee and ranged combat  styles, but I think it was more or less okay.  I’ll still be keeping an eye on it to make sure it couldn’t use some tweaking.

I guess I should mention; Ranged and Melee attacks use different systems to resolve themselves. Ranged attacks are more of a ‘hit or miss’ one-roll system (With a few modifiers and a ‘soft critical’ built in that rewards really good rolls with extra damage) where as Melee actually pits an attacker’s roll against the defender’s roll. Whichever is higher deals damage based on the difference between the rolls. So it’s entirely possible to initiate a melee attack and actually take damage yourself from it, if you’re unlucky or less skilled than your opponent.

So Ranged attacks are ‘safer’ in that you can attack without fear of reprisal, but tend to do a little less damage overall. Melee of course has the risk of you as an attacker getting cut instead of your target,  but the damage potential is a lot higher. A LOT higher. (Also it should be noted if you bum rush a defender with a number of attackers, their Defense rolls take a stacking negative modifier so it’s easier to bring them down.)

At present it’s possible to go a couple different ways with weapon use.. You can take a balanced approach and go Sword and Gun for flexibility, or double up on Swords for a bonus to your melee attack and defense modifiers, (at the cost of.. you know.. having to run at everything you want to hurt)

Out of the box, having 2 Guns doesn’t get you much except maybe a little extra time between having to reload, but if you take a certain Special Skill you can fire both for the price of one and get *BANGBANGBANGBANG* goodness. I did make a 2-Gun Ranged Twink for the testing and had such a fusillade take a poor generic baddie to parade rest in one combat round, basically. ..So…Working as intended. 😉 Bit rough on the ammo count, however.

Of course if you aren’t a fighter (it’s part of the game, but definitely not all of it) you can content yourself to 1 weapon, or maybe nothing at all if you’d prefer to set yourself up with other useful gadgets instead. Just.. You know.. You’ll want to stay near the back when things hit the fan.

Anyway. What that leaves me with is this:

• Review the Ship Construction system, since I’ve changed how stats work a little since I originally designed it.
• START WORK ON PLAYER’S GUIDE!
^—– That’s a landmark, right there. A big one.

We’re getting real close to something genuinely workable, and I’m very happy about that. 🙂