battle system realism

[ihateregisteringeverywhere]

Foreword

It's been a long time since I started to search for a battle system mod realistic enough to suit my needs and durring this time I did find many that honestly tried. However due to the limitations of the engine itself and a mirriade of other hinderances I never found anything that would come atleast remotely close to what I've been searching for. After a time I figured that there's no such thing as a common idea to what this "realism" is and that most modders that attempted to do such a thing proceeded without much though working primarily on instinct.

This is the reason for this rather ambicious wall of text. What I'll be trying to do here is to set a sort of a foundation for this "common realism". So, let's move on, shall we?

 

Damage types

The very first thing I think we should consider are ways to get hurt on the battlefield. The main two categories would be physical damage and magical damage. Let's talk about physical damage first.

 

Those could be easily divided into several categories. Piercing which can then be divided into high powered and low powered, then slashing, a variation thereoff - cutting and last but not least - crushing. In layman terms theese types of damages would translate as such:

Low powered piercing would be damage inflicted by knife and sword stabs and arrows, possibly warrious throwing weapons.

High powered piercing would be x-bow bolts, spiked hammers and such and possibly spear thrusts.

Slashing and Cutting are again low and high powered versions of the same kind. Slashing would be the type of damage that only creates surface wounds - like sword and knife slashes, Cutting can naturaly go deeper and translates to things like axes and two handed swords.

Crushing is fairly simple and would be created by a truly blunt weapons (such that doesn't have sharp edges nor points).

 

Second is magical damage and the whole thing boils down to a simple question: "What is magic?". There are two basic possibilities. Let's take fire for instance. Your average normal fire is a jet of particles (atoms, molecules, whatever) that are so hot from reacting with oxide that they create light. The question is whether magic is when "You use magic to create a normal fire" or if "Magic IS the fire" (Sort of a brand new materia structure - not atoms, not molecules, although something extremely similar, just a bit less substantial). As far as the world of oblivion is concerned the second is true because otherwise no such thing as "magical resistance" or "reflecting magic" would be possible because even if the caster used magic to create fire - the fire would be as real as any other. As far as I can tell after reading one of the many books in the TES serries (Which was basicaly a story about cleverly forcing the enemy clerics to use reflective spells on the army which was later showered in burning arrows instead of fire based spells - loosing the battle because the clerics didn't have enough mana for healing) magic fires ARE magic. The only question is wheter elemental spells are subject to the limitations of their element counterparts. Meaning that magic fire won't burn steel armor, but magic lightning will roast the person inside of it for example. The vanila engine seems do disreggard such petty matters. However to increase the realism we're (I'm) striving for so much I think that it should be done otherwise.

 

Protection from harm

And this is the important part where vanila and *most* of the modders (atleast in my opinion) fail misserably.

 

Because one thing is certain. The only stats of an armor are NOT it's weight, protection and price. From what I've said earlier it should be clear that different armors differ in what types of damage they can block/resist, what elemental damage types they can block/resist and other things I didn't yet mention like mobility and flexibility - and when I say mobility I don't necesarily mean being encumbered by it's weight.

 

So let's break down a few armor types, shall we?

First off would be cloth. That is fairly simple - Zero protection against everything, unless woven out of special materials or exceedingly heavy. In which case it could resist some elements, magic and some basic slashes.

Leather armors can resist some basic slashes and possibly fire and lightning, Fur can have some basic resistance against cold, studded leather has better resistance against slashes but less resistance against electricity.

Chain Maile armors were originaly created to protect royalty from arrows, therefore saying that it could resist slashes and low powered piercing attacks sounds reasonable.

The scails of a Scaile Mail armor can't realy protect you against piercing attacks, but are better at deflecting slashes, but since it actualy covers your body a nice fire protection should be present.

And plate mail armor is just brutal, it can easily deflect most piercing, slashing and some cutting and even some blunt attacks. Great protection from fire but lightning could fry you with ease.

Naturaly materials matter. However no matter the armor, heavy piercing and blunt attacks can go trough pretty much anything, I've seen what a x-bow bolt can do to plate armor. The funny thing is that the historical exponate wasn't shown because of the hole in it, but because the story behind said that the man using it survived. And blunt attacks don't care much for armor as they're aimed at exhausting you and creating inner damage. However the precision and speed of such heavy attacks isn't exactly high. Also slashing is extremely ineffective, you might have heard the proverb: "Slash to wound, pierce to kill". Poison attacks... Well as they are right now in oblivion sounds atleast to me like utter nonsense. Poison - magical or not - should be either liquid that you can spray a short distance or a gas cloud. Theese magical blobs of exploding poison in oblivion are just vulking stupid.... (To be perfectly honest most AoE effects in oblivion are kinda stupid, but what is a man to do, I also think that oblivion lacks charging and chaneling for spells)

 

Flexibility and Mobility

Is basicaly what counterweights the protection each armor has to offer. Even the simplest of logic dictates that SNEAKING arround in a HUGE plate mail armor is impossible. No, not just unreasonably hard - Impossible. You just can't sneak arround when every step - no matter how lightly you step - sounds like a tool box falling down the stairs. It's also practicaly impossible to draw from a bow when a huge pauldron constricts your arm in a manner that won't let you to extend it propperly. Also a simple knife would be cripplingly hard to hold in hand that is encased in steel. Moving in such a colos can never actualy become all that simple either, even if you're fully used to wearing it. I also think that each armor should have a certain dodging rate. Evasion that's not player dependant as I'm certain that it's fairly simple to move your arm not to have it cut if you're wearing clothes, however the player himself doesn't realy controll his hero limb to limb, so it's one of the things your hero should do automaticaly. And the last thing to consider is casting magic. I personaly think that it should NOT be too dependant on how well you can "wear" a certain type of armor. If you're dressed as an heavy duty magic and fire resistant ebony clad it should prove realy hard to cast something efficiently. However I'm sure that certain materials could actualy work as amplifiers, so battlemage armorments aren't exactly a bad idea.

 

Stealth

One thing that I found realy mind oogling about vanila was the way stealth attacks worked. Huge amplification for small blades, close to none for the big ones. This strook me completely of guard. If you manage to stealthily "hit" someone with a supersized claimoore without giving away your intention by running arround having the clumsy thing unsheated and hitting things as you go or noisily unsheating it and raising it high, HIGH above your head before striking - then, THEN you ARE going to separate the left side of this person from his right side - no matter what. Big things should have the same multipliers, but should make it realy hard to stay unnoticed for long. Oh and the whole criticalness of sneak attacks comes from the fact that you can't defend your weak spot, right? After all it's a sneak attack. I still can't understand why can't you attack the very same weak spots in battle with either luck or high speed and precision? And I don't mean "deadly reflex" right now, a few slightly stronger hits *criticals* should be normal in almost every battle.

 

Conclusion/WTF is it that I'm actualy suggesting

The problem with Oblivion is that with every char you create you simply pick your favorite style of killing things and... Kill things. It's repentant, it's boring. why is that? Because everything is so damn uniform. The only thing that changes is the number of hits/arrows/mana points needed to score that kill. What this game lacks is variety - a chance to realy consider how to brutaly slaughter your oponent the best way.

 

What I'm aiming for is exactly that, no more daedric armors for everyone. Robes and magic armors for mages. High evasion stealth combat clothing for the childs of our beloweth nightmother. And so on and so forth. A real reason to create different armor sets, not just for the visuals.

 

"Ok, you've said all that nicely, now what". The new battle systems especialy those using OBSE sure got far. You might have noticed that theese things now check for the who's attacking what and where it got hit. Checking how and with what things get hit doesn't sound much harder than that. The rest... Well the rest is about effort. Let's look at what'd have to be done. First of - a method of flagging each item. With the type of it's damage, or defense, resistances, mobility, perhaps usability with different weapons etc etc, then a script that would take all that into consideration... That alone sounds like a herculean task. And after that... Practicaly flagging it. Perhaps creating some guidelines for other people so that they could create/edit their amors and weapons witht theese new standarts in mind.... Err yeah. An herculean effort indeed. Such a large scale project would suffer a high risk of crushing under it's own weight. But damn, wouldn't such a risk be worth it?

 

.

[talonboy93]

Damn straight it would

[jaysus]

damn closed the window be4 i posted my comment lol...

well without going into detail again: good aspects, but alot of errors imo regarding the actual properties of different armors and weapons irl making it even more unreallistic... but the ideas as outlined are very good (just check the details again... steel plate for example will become smoldering lava if you use fire on it... ever cooked a meal? a spiked hammer still crushes more than it pierces, etc)

[Stormrage]

Yes it would be worth it. When do you expect to have it finished? :P

[Vagrant0]

I hate to sound pessimistic, but what game are you playing? Even with OBSE half the crap you want to happen cannot happen within Oblivion. There is only bladed and blunt, and it is nearly impossible to detect the difference between them on hit. As all onhit based scripting happens after the weapon has made contact, and normal damage has been done, any method of filtering that damage based on what is worn would be rediculously complicated, and probably not work too well for what you're trying to do. And that is only the start of where things go wrong. There is just simply so many things you are trying to take into account that the game just doesn't have any support for, and trying to do it all through scripting would be rather ill advised.

 

Sorry, but alot of this sounds like the words of someone who took one look at some OBSE mods, and decided everything is possible, no matter how pointlessly complicated, or how little of it is actually possible. But atleast you took the time to write it, so props for that.

[jaysus]

well apart from the new damage system for the weapons and all these weapons itself (did anyone ever succesfully add a skill to the system?) it could be possible...

for example daedric armor could get a basic fire resistance by adding an "enchantment on equip script" to it...

same goes for the agility deficit of heavy armor...

making penalties higher for sneaking in heavy armor and magic in armor in general is possible too

 

piercing and all that could be achieved by making new animations but using the old system of damage delivery...

dunno what he wants to say with high and low power at all as every weapon has its own power anyway...

 

one could even create a damage health spell called "piercing damage" and add it to weapons as a scipted enchantment like with the armor... if we would be able to actually create new magic effects we could even add weaknesses to said weapons on armors and have our very own piercing damage/slashing/etc system without adding skills... dunno how far the extendedscriptinglibrarythingy is for that matter

 

but seeing as this would still do the same stuff the game does now just with different names and maybe better defined weaknesses i dont deem it very important... just use stuff like weakness/resistance to normal weapons...

 

maybe in tes5 or fallout2... :P

[Vagrant0]

for example daedric armor could get a basic fire resistance by adding an "enchantment on equip script" to it...

same goes for the agility deficit of heavy armor...

Except that sort of system only works with vanilla equipment. Anything which is added by mods would probably either be broken, or break the system. Which is just yet another one of those major issues with such a mod. Even if it was fully integrated into something like OOO (nevermind that doing so would make an already complicated project even more so), that method of applying stuff when worn only works reliably with the player (as the scripting doesn't get triggered if the NPC is already wearing the gear at spawn). Which means that you would end up with two seperate systems, one for player damage, another for NPC damage.

 

Even if you had the freedom of an engine which allowed all of this, getting good values which actually work in practice is an entirely seperate matter. Look at D&D (in all of its almost 40 year history), look at every single roleplaying or strategy game made, none of them have a system which really relates well with reality. For instance, cloth armor isn't useless, a cloak or loose fitting clothing can be used to evade attacks since your opponent won't be able to see where your body is. And something as simple as weaving a steel thread into areas of the garment can make it protect somewhat against slashing. Plate on the otherhand is only really effective against slashing and blunt attacks. anything that pierces can quite easily punch a hole in it. And as far as blunt damage goes, although the plate can resist it, the damage ends up deforming the armor, creating other issues in the process. Regardless, being smacked around by someone with a warhammer, mace, or longsword can quickly render you incapable to fight back as your body still has to absorb the strength of the impact.

 

And, as far as creatures go, there is no way to really differentiate between damage types as everything is the same, and is affected by hand to hand strength. Some creatures have both slashing, blunt, and piercing attacks. And a bear or mountain lion, nevermind trolls, ogres, and daedra, will rip you apart regardless of what you're wearing.

[macmert]

Wait a minute... There is no critical damage in the game?

 

How can there be an RPG game without critical hits????

 

:D

[Vagrant0]

Wait a minute... There is no critical damage in the game?

 

How can there be an RPG game without critical hits????

 

:D

Technically, power attacks when they land on someone not blocking, are critical damage.

[ihateregisteringeverywhere]

well without going into detail again: good aspects, but alot of errors imo regarding the actual properties of different armors and weapons irl making it even more unreallistic... but the ideas as outlined are very good (just check the details again... steel plate for example will become smoldering lava if you use fire on it... ever cooked a meal? a spiked hammer still crushes more than it pierces, etc)

Depends on how you use the fire - an explosion would hardly even heat it up, constant fire damage however would realy turn it into lava. But gradualy increasing fire damage seem like realy hard to code. (lol)Perhaps a heat counter? Depends on the length of a spike, Ever wondered why Halberds have that rather large spike to the oposite side of that small axe? Countrary to popular belief it's not the counterweight, the little axe is. The spikes were used to penetrate armor, leaving nasty drill holes in the heads of people it was used on - and to pull down riders from horses. The bottom line is that the points you have raised are perfectly valid, and that is the kind of discussion I'd like to spark.

Yes it would be worth it. When do you expect to have it finished? :P

Next milenium or so :biggrin:

...

Yes, realy a tad too pesimistic. Say you equipt a short sword. Upon equipting it the game enchants it with a dummy spell named... say "1hswrd" for example, which would trigger the damage calculation script on hit. Now, the script takes the enchantment it was called by, checks things like equipted items of the victim, stats, rolls for chances, substracts percentages for damage/armor type reductions, substracts the damage by armor value and then finaly substracts the number by the damage vanila engine did. If it's positive it adds the damage after the hit, if it's negative it heals up some of the damage vanila did. This leaves space for error with realy low life naturaly, but that's not that important. Another problem would be the stat list for each and every piece of equipment, if all of that was dumped into that damage calculation script it would be realy cumberstone and hard to orientate in, however some of the strain can be lowered by breaking the items up into classes giving each class but one dummy enchant and doing the rest with simple enchants like jaysus proposed. The problem with NPC's that are spawned with equipment could be worked arroud by removing them from combat uneqiupting and reequipting everything and forcing them to start combat again once they start combat. Creatures could have dummy greater powers.

...dunno what he wants to say with high and low power at all as every weapon has its own power anyway... but seeing as this would still do the same stuff the game does now just with different names and maybe better defined weaknesses i dont deem it very important... just use stuff like weakness/resistance to normal weapons... maybe in tes5 or fallout2... :P

Well yes, you're right, each weapon does have it's own power. However stabbing someone in full plate with a simple longsword would dent the armor at the very best, A simple arrow would ricochet as well (maybe with the exception of long bow arrows, those things were vulking nasty). I did it mostly for simplification. It's not precise, since stabbing someone in chainmail with the very same sword would leave the person impaled on it, but... meh...

Resistance to weapons? Yeah, Ima huw a hai levul robe, no sword hurt meh nao! And TES5 is going to be as unfinished as TES4. They're too preocupied with other things(money). Just look at Maiq, that smug male without a father: "Feet are for walking. Hands are for hitting. Or shaking. Or waving. Sometimes for clapping.". Such a load of bs.

 

As far as a crit/evasion system goes. I have said so previously. As long as you can't controll the PC's every movement hair to toe then such actions are in the jurisdiction of your PC, and a chance reliant system based on stats to acount for this seems fairly reasonable to me.