Gear & Stat Blocks: Something From Nothing.

Speaking gear wise: What is 0?

From a game design perspective, 0 is my favorite number. The fun response is that 0 is the absence of a number and not a number itself. 0 is actually a balanced yet infinite amount of -1s and +1s. With most numerically controlled systems, everything is a zero, and that means everything has infinite potential. A way to find inexhaustible design space on items (the most player-facing numerically based thing in video game design) is to start breaking apart the zeros that are everywhere and balancing negatives with positives.

Look at the following item:

Greatsword of Stabbing [Legendary]
Deals 2d6 + 8 damage
+1 Constitution to the bearer
+1 Strength to an attuned bearer
Roll an extra d6 when rolling damage if stabbing instead of slashing

So what is this item really? Well it's this:

Greatsword of Stabbing [Sells for a lot]
Deals 2d6 + 8 damage
+0 Damage on attacks
+1 Constitution
+0 Wisdom
+0 Intelligence
+1 Strength
+0 Charisma
+0 Spell regeneration
+0 Health regeneration
Roll an extra d6 when rolling damage if stabbing instead of slashing
Roll nothing extra when slashing, throwing, bashing or bonking with this weapon

So what is the potential? Well there's an infinite amount of combinations of -X and +Y you can balance in an item, and that destabilized balance means people can explore the space of items forever. Even if stat blocks are procedurally generated, the exponential complexity from new combinations is an emergent behaviour of sorts. How valuable is your Intelligence - would you trade 4 Intelligence for 2 Wisdom and 1 Charisma? Some players would, some classes should, and many would when they shouldn't because it's such an interesting space to explore.

Even in the extremes, would you still wear the sword if the item had a generated stat block of +19 strength but -19 constitution (50% more damage but 95% less health)? Maybe it's appealing before you realize that would function like giving your opponent a 20x increase in damage while you only gain a 1.5x increase in damage. If it's not obvious, think of it this way: If you have to do 100 damage to someone and you do 5 damage at a time, you have to hit them 20 times to kill them. If they wear that item, you only have to hit them once, which shows that it actually functions like giving your opponent a 20x increase in their damage output against you.

One place that rewards curious players is exploring high complexity item space. Non-video games get the luxury of highly interactive elements of systems like in Magic: The Gathering having each card affect the composition of a deck that could contain any other card. That complexity is further magnified by opponents having the same highly explorable space and potentially interacting with your choice of cards. In MMOs, although the interaction complexity is reduced substantially, providing a nonlinear improvement or 'perpetual sidegrade' system rewards curious players for exploring the item space. It also reduces the mundane 'best in slot' behaviour and the subsequent metaslaving that inevitably creeps up on MMOs. Although providing a highly explorable item space might not be a design decision that can be made, I wanted to leave my thoughts here regardless because the practice of creating negatives in numerical systems is a criminally underrated practice which has at least shown success in DND games I've DMed.

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Comments

Warth

TL/DR:

A lot of unnecessary rambling
Complex Items are Good
Items providing negative stats as a trade-off for high bonuses in other stats could make the item system more interesting
and finally the common misconception, that a more indepth/complex/wide system reduces the degree of meta-slaving, while it does exactly the opposite.

To elaborate further on the last bullet point: He brought up the example of magic the gathering, where the wide ranging amount of choices (complexity in deck building) for each card supposedly encourages a large degree of exploration/variance within the deck choices. Every experienced magic the gathering player, who follows the competitive meta (just a little bit) knows, that there is a clear meta in the highest level of gameplay, which slowly dribbles down towards the more casual players. To name a couple of examples: Decks like Mono Green Food, Esper Doom, Dimir Rogues and Gruul Adventures, that stomp through both the BO1 and BO3 Meta

maouw

Yep, doesn't stop meta from developing.

However, it does widen the space for exploration, and the resulting meta becomes more robust.
I'm just wary of introducing too much variation and then it goes full Hearthstone meta

Caeryl

Overly complex stat generation just makes it harder for a casual player to explore. You have to have rules in place before you can start to bend them.

I also highly dislike the idea of being even more reliant on favorable RNG to get gear that's useful to me. If I go out to earn a sword, I want that sword to be designed for a melee class.

Vhaeyne

I too like it when the small numbers become the big numbers...

I don't think AOC is going to win any "Most complex MMO stat system of the year" awards, but I do think it will allow for a sufficient amount of customization from the crafting system. We really don't have the details needed to really attempt any meaningful theory crafting.

I like that you used dnd in your examples.

McShave

What we know about stats is that you can customize the stats on any item. If your staff has some agility on it, and you want to turn that agility into intellect, then a crafter or enchanter can modify the current stat on the item to be a different stat. This also is applied when crafting an item. When making the item, the crafter decides which stats the item will have, which helps when a person needs specific stats for their build.

I think negative stats is an interesting idea. I personally don't like seeing -x stat, but it's not that important to me. I am a fan of simple stats, but not too simple. We'll have to see when Intrepid releases their updated stats, I am very excited for them to release it.

edit: an interesting question. At what point is it too complex?

What if they had one stat for all defense, is that too simple? What if they had a physical defense and magical defense? Well, what if the physical defense was split into more varied types of physical defense, like slashing, crushing, etc, and for magical defense you can split that into specific resistances to different pools of magic, fire, ice, holy, etc. Where is that line of too simple and too complex.

How do "secondary" stats play into this too, stuff like attack speed, spell haste, crit chance/ damage, movement speed?

Caeryl

McShave wrote: »

What we know about stats is that you can customize the stats on any item. If your staff has some agility on it, and you want to turn that agility into intellect, then a crafter or enchanter can modify the current stat on the item to be a different stat. This also is applied when crafting an item. When making the item, the crafter decides which stats the item will have, which helps when a person needs specific stats for their build.

I think negative stats is an interesting idea. I personally don't like seeing -x stat, but it's not that important to me. I am a fan of simple stats, but not too simple. We'll have to see when Intrepid releases their updated stats, I am very excited for them to release it.

edit: an interesting question. At what point is it too complex?

What if they had one stat for all defense, is that too simple? What if they had a physical defense and magical defense? Well, what if the physical defense was split into more varied types of physical defense, like slashing, crushing, etc, and for magical defense you can split that into specific resistances to different pools of magic, fire, ice, holy, etc. Where is that line of too simple and too complex.

How do "secondary" stats play into this too, stuff like attack speed, spell haste, crit chance/ damage, movement speed?

Perhaps complex wasn’t the right word. I dislike system which tries to present randomness as complexity. A sword should always benefit a melee playstyle more than a ranged playstyle. A spellbook should benefit a caster more than a blademaster.

General consistencies have to exist. Within those consistencies is where players can explore. A sword will always favor the melee, but the melee can be a spellblade, an assassin, or a berserker.

For crafting, well if players want to try making a ranged-caster sword, they can try, I just don’t think it’s a good idea. It’s their mats tho

McShave

Caeryl wrote: »

I dislike system which tries to present randomness as complexity. A sword should always benefit a melee playstyle more than a ranged playstyle. A spellbook should benefit a caster more than a blademaster.

The randomness of the stats doesn't matter because you are able to change the stats of any item in the game. I do agree that items should not have completely random stats, but to some extent it doesn't really matter.

Caeryl

McShave wrote: »

Caeryl wrote: »

I dislike system which tries to present randomness as complexity. A sword should always benefit a melee playstyle more than a ranged playstyle. A spellbook should benefit a caster more than a blademaster.

The randomness of the stats doesn't matter because you are able to change the stats of any item in the game. I do agree that items should not have completely random stats, but to some extent it doesn't really matter.

I don’t think you’re going to be able to completely alter the stats on existing items. So far we’ve only been told of changing damage types and adding enchantments.

Crafting from scratch is the only method I’ve seen if having total control over an item’s stats.

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