Hey guys,
Here's a post from my old mud's design forum that I just happened to stumble upon that I thought might be valuable here. I've pasted it in it's entirety below even though it's a little out of context out of the hope that some of you may find it useful in thinking about how skills can be shaped/designed. The idea here is that a skill, spell, or affect does not just need to be purely about causing damage or reducing damage. There's a lot of areas that we can affect a player/mob in that will lead to increased tactics and more interesting gameplay.
As a way of trying to foster some ideas, why don't you guys post one or two skill or spell ideas in this thread that do something other than (or in addition to) increasing or decreasing damage? Winner after a week gets a silver token from me in game.
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Those of you that've heard my combat rants in the past may recall a particular one about "vectors of affect". This thread covers that initial concept as well as delving into a few possibilities for such a system. What I'm looking for in this thread is ideas on different affectables, as well as constructive criticism on ones that are suggested. I'd like to get as many ideas out first before we criticize though, that way we have a bigger well to draw from when we go to implement.
Affectables are pretty well what the name implies, things that may be affected in some way. These can be as basic as stats such as hitroll, damroll, strength, int, mana, etc. They can also be a bit more abstract such as range, movement speed, or even stationary descriptions.
Blind is a good example of an interesting affectable. Blind mostly affects stationary descriptions and interaction with objects. You can tell when someone does something often from the "Someone" message while blind or while they're invis, but you can't interact with it too easily (besides area attacks). This can be used in interesting ways and is really an intriguing affectable. But just blind on its own does not make a combat system.
What other affectables can you come up with? What other new things could we allow players/mobs to manipulate, or add onto weapon skills, magic, etc? These can be for both mobs and players. Here's a few of my own ideas:
Range
Movement Speed
Success in Movement
Ability to Wear/Remove
Ability to Target
Ability to Flee
Clearing of Foe's Command Queue (lagged commands)
Randomizing Foe's Command Queue (this could be interesting)
Ability to Modify Foe's Position (Sitting, Sleeping, etc)
Modifying Encumberance
Modifying Casting Percent
Modifying Casting Ability
Damage Over Time
Damage based on Actions (Hamstring someone and kicks could cause bonus damage to them too)
Limb Removal (removes use of a weapon or skill)
Skill Removal or Disincentives (think wounds opening from skill usage)
Complete Combat Halt (Currently Stunning)
Randomized Round Halts (Pixie Lights)
Occasional Casting Failure (Daze)
Randomizing Foe's Target
Affect Opponent's Scan distance
Affect Opponent's judgement of your HP%
Add a command to your Foe's Command Queue
Affect the amount of N/PC's your Foe can see. (Capped at 2, everything else would seem invisible, but he wouldn't even know)
Ability to see entrances/exits into a room
Ability to see the direction of a flee
Ability to fake the direction of a flee purposefully or randomly
Ability to fake HP%
Ability to affect usage of combat commands
Ability to affect usage of non-combat commands
Ability to send fake echos to Foe.
Ability to hit foe with fake attacks that send a fake prompt representing attacks
Ability to change foe's room
Ability to change the directions a foe walks
Ability to restrict Foe's movement.
Ability to restrict foe's ability to attack
Ability to restrict Foe's ability to command, or use communication such as grouptell, order, tell, say, etc.
Ability to disguise your long desc (message in room).
Ability to modify your foe's long desc. (Gadwin is here turns into the wandering thief's desc)
Ability to affect your foe's item usage.
Ability to affect your foe's usage of containers. (hmm, I like this one)
New affectable ideas:
Ability to disable an item's stats temporarily. (killing the damroll/ac of your gear)
Ability to make heals cause damage
Ability to make vitalize affect hp
Ability to modify mana/stamina.
Ability to turn followers on their master.
Ability to create "Displacements" or "Mirror Images" which take a certain number of hits before they fully disappear.
Ability to create a shield which takes a certain amount of damage before it disappears.
Ability to reverse regen (turn the positive negative)
Ability to deal fixed damage for each hit received (penalizing low damage speed).
