ARENA: Skills Suggestion

From: hitz@cuhhca.hhmi.columbia.edu (Benjamin Hitz)

Date: Tue, 14 Sep 1993 18:14:04 +0000

Now, I haven't actually got to _play_ arena yet (my mail seems to have
been lost?!  Are you allowed to create 2 characters in 1 message?), but I
read the rules, and the posts, and here are my comments:

(BTW: I have been playing DM for almost 2 years, and have seen Blood Pit,
but never played)

While I'm not going to suggest turning Arena into Duelmasters, much of
this is borrowed from what I pretend to know about that game.

Skills:
Duelmasters has 6 skill arenas; Attack, Parry, Defense, Riposte,
Decisivness, and Initative.

Attack and Parry are obvious, Defense is really 'Dodge'; Riposte is the
'ability to take the initiative after you parry/dodge/opponent misses';
Decisivness is 'getting in the first blow', and Initative is the 'skill of
keeping the Initiative', or 'anti-riposte'.  Mind you, very little of that
is explained in the docs RSI gives you, but that's my experience.

Arena must have some mechanism for deciding who gets to swing, when.  This
would be covered by some sort of Decis/Init/Riposte.  This is very
specific on Scott's game design, so I won't mention it further, at least
until I see a few turns.

For Arena, I would split 'Attack' into 3 skills:  Chopping, Thrusting, and
Crushing (Impacting), corresponding to the 3 types of damage a weapon can
do.  These are, obviously, your ability with the those types of weapons.
The effect of these skill would be to improve your chance to hit, and
possibly increase damage, speed ('decisiveness'), or riposte ability.
If I used only these skills, I would keep 'Parry' a seperate and distinct
skill.

Alternatively, you could split it up into weapon skills!  This might be
alot of work, but you could instead have 'Hafted', 'Polearm', 'Sword',
'Knife', 'Spear', and I guess, 'Miscellaneous'.  These could affect
parrying and/or speed and/or riposte as well and % to hit.

Another possibility would be to have both classes of weapon, and classes
of damage, type skills!!  The possibilities are almost unlimitless!

As I see it, there are two ways you can handle the fighting 'styles':  Buy
each of them as a different skill, and they each have different (hidden?)
effects on the other skill areas, or just associate each style with
particular stats, weapons, and defensive skills (i.e.,
Speed+Agility+Spears(+thrusting)+Dodge == Wasp).  It's hard to comment
without knowing how you have the different strategies implemented, but I
assume you could give bonuses to particular skill areas depending on style
(i.e. strategy) specified.

I'm sure you can imagine the rest.  I would give characters a certain
number of points to spend on different skills upon character generation
(also 'experience points'), or else have it determined randomly (hidden,
perhaps) from your stats.  It all depends on how much control you want
players to have.  Total control is nice, but many times in games (all
types) 'a perfect setup' is found by someone, which upsets the balance a
little.

Whew!  That was awfully long winded!  Hope to see you all in the Arena!
And even though I havn't played, thanks, Scott!

Ben Hitz
hitz@cuhhca.hhmi.columbia.edu