While talking to various people over the last few months, a couple of fundamental combat related ideas have come up. Today I'm going to talk about thieves.
In a lot of fantasy/D&D style games, thieves are really just another fighter class, with different fighter skills and less armor. Alter Aeon has traditionally not been much different, and I find that less than ideal. Consider:
Mages - damage casters, inflicting damage from afar using spells.
Clerics - healers and miscellaneous support for fighters.
Warriors - tanks and heavy hitters.
Thieves - light hitters and occasional backstabbing.
It seems to me that thieves really get the short end of the stick here. Not that they can't fight, but pretty much the only thing that sets them apart in combat is the use of backstab as an opening attack.
This seems contrary to the whole premise of thieves - that they use cunning, agility, and other weirdness to accomplish tasks in unusual ways. Yet Alter Aeon is in large part constructed to have only a single track for accomplishing tasks: kill the mob. The option to just steal or 'liberate' a particular goal isn't even available in most scenarios.
This isn't to say that AA is alone in this area. Most games fall into this trap, because it is the easiest way to do things, and because coming up with general ways to handle specific scenarios is difficult or very time consuming.
I don't intend to address all of this inequality in this post, but I believe that I can address one aspect of it: how thieves handle combat. Mages blast, fighters fight, clerics heal. All these tasks are pretty straight forward. But what should a thief do to be different from 'just another fighter'? One answer I've come up with is this: thieves spoil the fight.
A good example of this would be the 'trip' skill. Tripping something small is no big deal, but suppose you and your group are fighting a twenty foot giant. Casters are doing their thing, fighters are doing their thing, but all of this is really setup for the thieves to get in place: suddenly the giant goes down face first, making things much easier for the fighters and casters.
Trip is the most obvious 'spoiler' skill, but plenty of others could be found. There may also be special defensive skills for thieves to allow them to temporarily be in danger - perhaps an enhanced dodge that can give a thief a very good chance of getting alive out of a sticky situation - but only effective for a handful of hits or a very short period of time.
With this in mind, I may be adjusting the various thief and warrior skills to push things slightly in this direction in the future. Ideas?
Monday, November 24, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
11 comments:
Well, I may have come up with a solution for one of these issues. It may seem a little ripped from Naruto, but I have seen it many other places. A Shadow clone. It doesn't have to be called that, but say it could be called Substitute or substitution. It would create an image of you and take x amount of hp to kill or something. We could say 10 per thief level. Sounds pretty reasonable if you think about it. Coming out to a max of 320 hp per level 32 thief. Now that may be too strong, but you are free to change the hp per level you could gain on its strength. That would be one of the only thief skills that kind of does better per level.
I also have a few more ideas. It could be called camouflauge. It might have some severe lag, but it would enable you to backstab a mob while it is already in combat. This skill can not be used while you are in battle, but if you are in a group. This might be too powerful so I am not highly suggesting this skill. Another thief skill, I actually didn't make this one up, I saw it online, is called, "Double stab" It could take a nice bit of mana to manage to get two stabs in simultaneously. Lets say 100, 200, or 300, something ridiculous. This may not be reasonable as well, because stabs are strong. Another idea is possibly having thieves know some sort of healing skill. I know, I know, they are thieves, and that's what clerics are for; but maybe they have the ability to mix some herbs to heal low amounts of damage, like the healing salves. Maybe thieves can create healing salves for some mana. Or they can just "tend %1" or something, to tend to wounds. Another skill thieves could have of course is to create some sort of explosive throwing weapon or something for some mana. Like holy weapon, but it creates throwing weapons instead. The damage could depend on your thief level. There could be like you said, some sort of advanced dodge. I could just imagine this to be the super fast dash like in naruto or bleach where they like disappear for a second and appear like 20 feet farther than they were. Like a "flash step" or something. It could have an increased percentage of dodge, but would be hard to get, and could only be gotten from a strong guildmaster that could only be gotten to from a special quest or something. I am planning to try to become a building whenever Dentin lets me anyway, so I have plenty of ideas about skills, areas, pretty much anything about Alter Aeon. Post back buddies,
-Vivi
What about some sort of martial art's tree for thief as i consider this to be a fitting skill for that kind of class.
There are plenty of names out there for moves and different martial arts to do them.
Maybe working like the new taunt, intimidate and roar tree but with a mixture of defensive and offensive skills maybe available at different set levels and open to improvement through use, or even only basic skill learned and have to improve all way to full.
Maybe have to be unarmed to use them and certain delays time wise for re-use on different skills, not usable in berserk or dependant on mana and movement, plenty of choices.
This is basically melee damage but delivered in a different way.
The double backstab sounds nice, but as vivi said its already rather powerful.
Thieves have steal, bribe, poison tree and dodge / parry. Poison (cloud / choking / blade) is very combat-useful.
I guess I am not seeing the disparity as being as large as your post seems to indicate, although any additional skills are more than welcome :-)
Speaking of choking cloud, how about a choke skill? Initiates combat, similar saves vs something like turn (ie level 40 undead laughs at level 20 cleric turning attempt) + stab (so sneak, dex, str and unarmed combat dieroll).
The whole point of the post was intended to be along the lines of "I don't just want thieves to be yet another fighter class with slightly different skills". Most of what you guys have proposed so far is exactly that: yet another fighter class with slightly different skills.
What I was really thinking about is what Myst touched on - things like poison, which are unusual and downright non-fightery. Trip and other 'spoiler' skills put thieves in the category of not being a direct fighter, but almost as a 'special forces' team. While the main force of marines are on the ground fighting, special forces is off doing equally important but very different stuff to help out.
In that case. We could have a smokescreen skill. Which would increase dodge percentage. Maybe it could be callde "Smoke Bomb" or something of the sort. Another skill, for which I can not come up with a name as of yet, could be like choking cloud, but drain mana. It couldn't be at some ridiculous speed, but it would do enough damage to be a useful skill. I know we have mana damage or whatever already, but that isn't a thief skill, and pretty much it is non-existant on the mud. It is only on like 1 or 2 wands, and noone uses it. Another skill could be sort of like a Pokemon rip off. "Sand attack" or something like that. Where you would throw sand at the enemy or whatever, splash it into their eyes, and since you can't make their accuracy fall. (Or can you) your dodge percentage would rise. Another skill could be called Safe haven. It would take a ridiculous amount of mana, or hp,(THIS IS NOT REALLY A SPOILER SKILL) but it would create an antimagic flag on the room for like 5 ticks, or something, enough to regen. (for a thief) This may just be some stupid idea, but it might be a pretty good one. (It could actually be a spoiler skill because casters couldn't cast on you while in the safe haven)(Keep in mind that the antimagic wouldn't dispel all your spells, it would just make no more castable.) While I am at it. I want to throw one more non-spoiling skill out there. Some sort of "ice wall-ish" skill that thieves could do. It could do various things, but the coolest thing I could think of, is if it would create a container in the room, that isn't gettable, and only 1 person may enter it and it closes for a certain amount of ticks. So you can regen safely.
Back to the spoilers. Last one for now until I can get some feedback. It would be really sweet if thieves had some sort of lethargy technique. This might be too strong because lethargy takes tons of mana and always fails, but maybe someone could help me out on the consequences we could add to make it not ridiculously awesome.
Please give me some feedback guys.
-Vivi
Boomerang Throwing: PreReq Knife Throwing Level 22-24ish
Requires a boomerang flagged weapon similar to throw, but on a hit or miss, you get a chance have weapon return to inventory.
Poke: Dex and hitroll based melee skill to do some damage and blind opponent.
I love the way you're thinking about us thieves, this new direction could end up being something interesting.
I'm thinking of fun stuff like throwing a bunch of petards at the feet of mobs not to cause damage but to disorient and confuse them heh, maybe even lowering their dodge and parry abilities for a while.
Maybe setting traps too (I think maybe something similar was made but never finished? I'm not sure) where you could trap a mob's feet when it walks into the room so it cannot flee reliably, along with some small amount of damage per round...I don't know, I'll think of some stuff and post it here.
I would go for a utility type skill, maybe called 'bewilder', useable in groups against groups of agressive mobs, and acting like a bridge to the tank. The thief uses their speech abilities to keep the second aggressive mob from attacking weaker party members giving maybe two or three seconds lag on their ability to attack while the tank(s) rescues the rest of the party members. This could maybe only be useable against humanoid/intelligent creatures. Might only be of minor utility, but it would add the strategic element you're talking about.
I like the idea of a smokescreen skill, again in support of a tank group, maybe increasing the chance that the tanks retreat works, or prevents mobs that move from following for a period of time.
I think making trap disarming more useful would be awesome, at the moment, its not a particularly useful skill, but this would require a major rewrite of the game so I guess its out (I've been playing too much ddo recently as a trapmonkey ;))
I like the idea of all of the above skills that use stat/hitroll/damroll damage against mobs, I don't think that makes it "just another fighter" role, it allows different tactics to be used against particular mobs, however it would have to be limited, if you've heard of WoPs you know how dumb stat damage can get.
Thats all my thoughts for now. Nice to be back, been away for too long. Shame my char was deleted :(
1 - Some kind of auto knife throw, that takes advantage of their weakness. This might need a crazy over haul, but if you had some sort of 'quiver' and when the opponent was susceptible you have a chance of throwing something from the quiver. When they're tripped is an example.
2 - Assassinate - kind of lame, but it's like a backstab that tries to OHKO, and if it fails, it does nothing or very little damage. Would take a long time to prepare and obviously have a lot of lag on a fail, but would be a fun way to get rid of lower level mobs.
3 - I know this isn't what you want (just fighting skills) but howabout a passive skill that takes attacks of opportunity? again a lot like the auto knife throwing thing, though.
Non-fighting ideas:
Pick extension: set traps and trap detection / disarm. Potentially lots of usefulness there but understood the implementation could be long-winded.
Bribe / Durham spell extension called Interrogate - extracts info about / from a mob, like its hp or saves, or eq that loads in the area, which mobs load eq, etc.
Hide extension: burrow / camouflage - by digging into the ground / walls / foliage. Can't (quickly) attack from there but can hide more effectively. Relies on consistent room type settings.
Extended sight / farsee spell modification - a more successful / discrete farsee for looking 1 or 2 rooms away.
Case skill extension - hear through doors / eavesdrop. So if there's a mob on the other side of a door, you can hear them talk or walk / move and garner info about them - eg height, weight, speed, etc. Ability to hear (player / mob) conversations from a room or more away.
Speed walk / Run - like a hasted walk but for movement only - changes movement cost perhaps, but does not change casting or fighting speed.
Charm spell modification - charm skill. Allows you to sweet "talk" your way out of an aggro situation. Like a horse whisperer. You don't charm the mob like the spell, just gives you a chance to set up a "turn" like sphere of "charm" influence. If the throw works, you can get past an aggro mob, otherwise normal behaviour ensues. Only lasts a few rounds, so you move on asap. Like pumping up your charisma momentarily, plus an alignment hide effect.
As a further extension of this, how about a mortal puppet skill - low level mobs can be made to do 1 or 2 things by a highly skilled thief. It's basically a possession spell modified to a (very short term) skill, and would last all of a couple of prompts, so you'd have to stack commands for the mob to do anything useful.
Set trap could be like a reverse forage. And if someone forages or searches in a room it triggers the trap.
Post a Comment