CotFO - Loot and Equipment Planning for Large-Scale Mod Adventure

[LordThauron]

Hello all,

 

Mostly looking to hear some outside opinions concerning my next mod project, "Chronicles of the Fallen Order" (a.k.a.: "CotFO", as per the topic title). The scale of the mod I'm planning is a fair bit bigger than a generic quest/adventure mod, comprising of a total of 35 dungeons with several bosses and mini-bosses each; and to keep it both fresh (and respectably challenging), the equipment/loot found within will be entirely unique(ly enchanted) items which is intended to be of a calibre higher than most items found in the vanilla game. So far, I have a total of 25 full armour sets (the usual four pieces, plus a ring for each) planned out; so a minimum of 125 items, not counting pieces of equipment which aren't apart of a set, weapons, magic books, and other various goodies.

 

The main question is how to distribute them:

 

Do I go with fixed non-random drops or completely random ones?

Should I use a crafting system; and if so, how important should new and unique components for the crafting be?

Or should I go for some combination of those, and in which proportions?

 

Furthermore, there's another question of how to weight the "drop value" of each item. Should chest/torso pieces be worth more than gauntlets, helm, and boots? How much so? This will also have a proportional effect on the strength for the enchanted effects the items will have. A careful touch on this subject will almost certainly be necessary, as I don't want the power of the items to scale out of control like they did in "Sanctum of the Fallen" (a rebuild of that location is planned for CotFO); and as a side note, I've figured out how to make items to be exempt from disenchanting (keyword: "DisallowMagicDisenchanting", or something along those lines).

 

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Fixed drops have a good advantage, as that particular approach allows for near total control of loot distribution. However, they can make for a "boring" progression curve due to it being fixed. Random drops would spice it up a fair bit, making the progression more interesting simply by not being fixed. However, in my experience is that this can be an easy source of frustration; obtaining a full set can be unnecessarily difficult if you have to clear the same location (or locations) repeatedly for the one item which only has a CHANCE of dropping. As of right now, certain items will be restricted to specific bosses; items which belong to specific bosses, to be claimed from their hands after you defeat them. The question is whether or not to make these guaranteed drops or not, though I'm leaning towards yes (due to them being an easy source of frustration otherwise). There's a good chance these items will be used against you in battle, by the bosses who will drop them.

 

Anyhow, the random drops (if used) will be mostly concerning the armour sets mentioned earlier. These can be thrown around fairly easily, and it should be easy enough to control which random drops go where (for example, a particular boss will always drop a random chest piece and random pair of boots). This brings up the possibility of non-boss enemies having a chance to drop these items (rarely), so I'll have to look into random items and "death-items" in the CK.

 

There's also the matter of non-equipment drops, ranging from spell tomes to lore books to crafting recipes (see below).

Whether or not these should be random is quite debatable, and if they should be craftable either.

 

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As for the crafting system, because I consider it an absolute necessity if random drops are used in any measure; if going with entirely fixed drops, I will likely forgo this element.

Simply, any piece of equipment which is considered a random drop will be craftable; simply to avoid unnecessary frustration, by allowing an option to obtain set pieces with more certainty.

 

The first question is how to allow access to them, because I don't plan on going with the standard approach of tying it to an existing smithing perk. I may opt to bypass item or set-specific crafting recipes, but some variant of that (with new perks/spells/whatever to access them) with a wider net may be used. Access to the armour sets will likely be given fairly early, to the point the second dungeon of the central adventure is an armoury with an impressive forge; I may or may not give full access the craftable armour sets at this point, but I think partial access would be best.

 

Next up is the use of new/unique components, which will almost certainly be drops (random or fixed) from the enemies included. Making them is simple enough, but how important they should be to crafting recipes isn't. How many mod-added components should be required? Should it be entirely mod-added components or should some vanilla components be included as well? What proportion should be needed? And of course, how rare should the mod-added components be?

 

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The final topic is loot-power progression, which more or less comes down to whether or not my crazy plan works.

 

I'm going with a "stacking" enchantment bonus, a la Deathbrand set from the Dragonborn DLC. However, I'm aiming for a non-linear progression; a squared one to be specific. That means 1 base unit of the effect for one item, 4 times for two items, and 25 times for all five (capped at five, of course). This applies to "class" bonuses and set-specific bonuses, none of which are intended to be direct damage boosts (one class bonus is for attack speed, but that's it); these are more passive and/or defensive ones. The sets won't be without damage boosts however, but they'll be restricted to more linear patterns. There will be a bonus for a full set (probably on the ring), which could be just about anything (haven't planned those out yet). The intent is for no item to become obsolete (which can happen quite easily when you start toying with power progression), simply for them to work better together to create that sense of progression.

 

Still, I want both a sense of power progression without it completely breaking the game. SotF's drops were more than a little insane; while required for the bosses within the dungeon, outside of it anything had a tendency to die in a single blow; the explosive strikes didn't help much either. I plan for the flashy attacks return, to an extent, but keeping it all in line but not stupidly overpowered is a must. If anyone has some more experience with power progression, I'm all ears on the subject.

 

Another side note, I'll be keeping boss health bars to a more manageable state. No more "so much health that it won't move until it drops below 30k" (a few bosses in SotF exceeded this, greatly so in some cases), as it was both misleading and ridiculous; not to mention SkyRe had some perks which did damage in proportion to an enemy's maximum health, which would end up being a tad too effective due to the over-inflated health bars. However, I plan for some bosses to have the ability to heal; controlled of course, between cooldowns and healing-over-time effects. I'm also looking into certain passive abilities (including increased defensive power) being triggered by the enemy being below certain health values, which could make for some interesting battles. Scripting will largely be avoided, limited to stuff I can reverse-engineer from the effects in the base game.

 

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Thanks for reading.

 

If anyone has some comments, particularly about any of the plan above which won't work, please say so.