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Items - Official Ideas

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Post  Stairc -Dan Felder Tue Sep 25, 2012 1:39 pm

Hey folks, your friendly neighborhood DM Stairc here. I've been talking to some people and working out ideas for how items could work. Here's what we've been going over so far.


Why Items?
Before I start any game design task, I feel it helps a lot to articulate exactly why we're doing it in the first place. I feel game design is simply choosing what effect you want to produce in the players and then figuring out a great way to produce that effect. So, why items?

Several reasons. First, items can give adventurers a second tier of rewards and personal goals. If you're just leveling up and following your normal story goals, that's often enough, but if you also get to get excited about gaining cool items and hunting down legendary artifacts... Well, that's all the better. Suddenly you can gain different kinds of rewards and pursue different kinds of personal objectives.

Second, items give currency more meaning. It's fine to simply us treasure to pay for services and get around places - but it's a lot more exciting to strike it rich when you know you can look forward to going shopping for your character.

Third, items can add new elements of customization to the game design. As items aren't an inherent part of character building they can be used to accessorize, supplementing your current strategies and breaking some of the strict rules that the current design philosophy enforces. For example, it's pretty well known that combat bonuses and non-combat bonuses don't mix in this system; as we don't want people to have to choose between building a roleplaying character concept they love and building the cool combat fighter they love. Delightfully, since items are simply accessories to the real character and also under the control of the DM - we can certainly make items that not only mirror any existing element of game design (items could easily mirror utility talents, combat talents, racial traits, combat traits, boons and more) they can also brave new worlds. Furthermore, items are balanced in different ways from other game elements. Every utility talent needs to be roughly as useful as the others, except in a few exceptions, as does every combat talent and every race. However, some items can be artifacts of world-shaking power while others can be the magical equivalent of cuff-links; just flashy accessories.


So, those seem like good reasons to add items. Now, we need to figure out how exactly they work.


Please Insert Your Equipment Into The Slot
Many RPGs use a slot-based system to manage what items you can have empowering your character. The reasoning behind this is two-fold; both flavorful and mechanical. Flavor-wise, it doesn't make sense for you to be able to wear two helmets; so you can only have one, "Head Slot Item" at a time. Mechanics-wise, if there was no limit to the amount of items you could deck out with - players could gather every magical item in the cosmos and become... Just silly. Also a royal pain to try to keep track of all those items.

However, slots don't quite work perfectly for us. First, this system is supposed to be easily reflavorable - so forcing items to go to certain slots is less important from a flavor perspective. It'd still be silly for an adventurer to wear two helmets, but such limitations can be applied from a DM perspective. We'll come back to that later.

Mechanics-wise, there are definitely more elegant ways to limit how many items you have accessible than slots. Why not simply say, "you can have up to 5 items equiped, any 5?" Seems to work well for talents.

Well, there is a reason. The major items players pay attention to are their Weapons and their Armor. Those should be more significant than trinkets that give them small bonuses. With that in mind, if we created all items to go into the same 5 universal slots... We'd have people just strapping on 3 swords and 2 armor sets. And that'd be silly.

In order to make weapons and armor more useful, we currently like the idea of a simple Weapon Slot, an Armor Slot and three Trinket Slots (treasure slots? We can rename it later if anyone has some good suggestions). Weapons and Armor would be powerful items that influence your strategy, allowing additional customization of your combat build. Your 3 Trinket Slots could be equipped with any 3 trinkets, whether magical rings, amulets, whatever. These trinkets will give you much smaller bonuses in combat, but still a significant part of your build. If we break things down into percentages, perhaps 35% of your combat item value would be contributed by your weapon, 35% by your armor and 10% by each Trinket. We'll probably fiddle with these numbers later on, but that gives you the basic idea of their relative values. Trinkets are meant to be easily swappable minor treasures to flesh out your build while your Weapon and Armor are the big, cool things that you tend to hang onto for a while.

Tools of the Trade
Tempting as it is to just jump in and start designing items, I find it’s helpful when designing any game element to take a step back and think about the role it is supposed to serve. Items should be designed to both make playing the game more interesting and the process of building your character more enjoyable. This leads us to two quick things to remember.

Items Shouldn’t be Boring
Let’s avoid the +1, +2, +3 generic weapon systems that many games have used in the past. Ideally, each item should make the player-type it’s designed for go, “Cool!” when they see it. Heck, we made, “Create Food and Water” interesting by designing it as, “Instant Party”. If cooking can be cool, blades and armor should definitely be doable too.

Items Should be Designed for the Item-Selection Process
Players get items one of two ways in games. They either get specific items handed to them by the DM (well, by an NPC or found in a treasure chest – possibly by random generation from a pre-set list) or, more commonly, they buy the items from an item-list with their hard-won gold. Either way, at some point some person goes shopping – whether the DM shopping for items to put in his or her campaign or the players shopping directly for their characters. Thus, items should be designed to make the process of choosing items as pleasant as possible. Pleasant, of course means hassle-free and the items in question looking cool – and it also means designing for the two ways people shop for items.

“I’m Looking for a Sword that’s 3.5 feet long, was crafted in the forges of the sun, was wielded by a paladin and has slain at least two liches. Do you have any of those in blue?”
Sometimes when you go to the store, you’re going to buy a specific kind of item. You might know exactly what you want, or you might just have a specific idea of what kind of item you’re looking for (I’m a defender, I could really use some armor to up my defense as much as possible).

With this in mind, we should not just seek to design cool items – we need to design items to serve specific purposes. Try making items that would help players play tough characters for those that love being the knight with an impenetrable defense. Try making items that help players that love to heal their allies. Try making items that would appeal to players whom love applying (save ends) effects to enemies. When building items, try to think of a specific build the item is being built for and how you can best serve that build in cool ways. If we design items with specific player and DM needs in mind from the start, when players and DMs head out to find items to fill those needs they should be able to find what they’re looking for. One trick I do is to write down exactly what need I’m trying to fill when making an item before I ever start designing the item’s properties. Try it, it helps a lot.


“I think I’d just like to browse”
Sometimes players or DMs don’t have a specific need in mind they want to fill. They just want to look through our item list for cool ideas. Often players will hit the jackpot, get a ton of gold, and go browsing through all the cool stuff they could get. To make this browsing as enjoyable as possible, we should keep items both as cool-looking as possible to excite the players while also being relatively simple, so the players can read them easily and instantly grasp their uses. It’s a tricky task to do both of these at once, but that’s the challenge of game design. “Derp” pulls this kind of design off really well. It tends to at least give players a chuckle when they see it, is extremely simple and flavorful and also has clearly a huge, exciting upside. That’s a lot for two simple sentences.

Important!
While we don’t have an exact relative power level from items to combat talents or traits – we do know that we’re going to want your items to not overshadow your normal abilities. They should support your normal abilities or supplement them – but your character should still be defined by its inherent powers. A player shouldn’t be defined by its blade, but by the strength of the character wielding it.


The Power of Items
A big question to be answered when designing items is how powerful they should be compared to utility talents, combat talents, traits and so on. Here are our current thoughts on this.

WARNING... I'm afraid we'll need to use...

MATH



Only if you want to try making fully-polished items though. If you want to just come up with ideas without balancing, that's fine too - we can do the heavy lifting. Cool

Items Should Not Overshadow Characters
Characters are the stars of the show. Batman might have a huge utility belt, but even Batman isn’t made by his utility belt. It’s understood that a random joe off the street couldn’t strap on the utility belt and suddenly take the place of Batman. Even Tony Stark doesn’t play second act to his armor, he’s the genius that made it and continues to improve it – plus uses it with wicked skill. If even Batman and Ironman are the stars, not their items, then we don’t want to overshadow our characters until players start referring to their characters as, “the guy that wielded the Sword of Ultimate Awesomeness”.

With that in mind, a characters’ combined benefits from their combat items should – in general – only be 60% as powerful as their combined benefits from all their combat talents and traits. With roughly 1/3 of that contributed by your weapon and roughly 1/3 of that contributed by your armor, with 1/9 contributed by each of your 3 trinkets.

That makes a weapon equivalent to about 1/5 of your total combat benefits from your inherent bonuses (combat talent and traits). And, since you bring 5 combat talents into battle – it could be easy to have a level 1 weapon simply provide access to a new combat talent you can use while wielding it… One approximately equal to the other combat talents already in the system. Thus, the following would make a perfectly fine level 1 weapon.


Wand of Fireballs:

But just binding combat talents to weapons would be a pretty boring thing. Let’s try spicing this up. Unlike normal combat talents, items can have limited x/day or x/encounter abilities – just like traits. Since combat usually lasts 5 rounds, you should be using 5 combat talents at least in each battle. So, getting a combat talent that’s twice as effective as normal combat talents from an item effectively gives you an extra action in combat… Meaning you could balance the power by making it usable only once per encounter. Let’s take a look at our wand this way.


Wand of Fireballs:

This makes the item meaningfully different than just providing you with an extra combat talent. Weapons shouldn’t just be extra combat talent slots, they should be a bit different – even if it’s just doubling the power and making them usable once per battle.

On the other hand, how about passive benefits on weapons? Again, you can get a pretty good idea of how things function. The standard 0-pip-power for single target damage on a combat talent is 1d12 damage (we avoid 0 pip powers to encourage variety of power uses and changing pip counts, but that’s the baseline we still go off). [+3] means effectively skipping your turn, and [-3] should therefore be about as good as two 0 pip powers. [-6] and [-9] continue along this scale.

With this in mind, a player should generate about 5d12 damage to a single target over 5 rounds of combat from talents alone. Thus, you could easily build an item that deals 1d12 damage extra over the course of the encounter. That averages out to 6.5 damage… Divided by 5 that’s a little more than 1 extra damage. So this is a fair weapon, if a boring one.

Boring Blade:

This is a fair weapon (under the curve on damage, but that’s to factor in for interrupt/reaction attacks and similar) but also a boring one. How about we up the damage but make it more conditional – so it’s cool for a specific build?

Jagged Knife:

The fact that a player needs to spend a turn putting ongoing damage on the target pretty much balances out the extra damage. But just extra damage can get boring. Let’s make things a bit more exciting.

Heartseeker:

Notice that Heartseeker’s power is less than ½ that of using the Kindle Pain talent, but that it also doesn’t take an action to use. This is a huge advantage.


For higher level items, you can start factoring in the fact players will have traits available to them and make the items more powerful with those extra advantages in mind.


Those are our current ideas at least. Now I've got to get to class. Cool


Last edited by Stairc -Dan Felder on Tue Sep 25, 2012 11:17 pm; edited 4 times in total
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Post  Xel Unknown Tue Sep 25, 2012 2:06 pm

I"m just wondering, would my weird and silly Magic Chests Item count as a Trinket or what?
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Post  Stairc -Dan Felder Tue Sep 25, 2012 2:39 pm

Xel Unknown wrote:I"m just wondering, would my weird and silly Magic Chests Item count as a Trinket or what?

If it's meant to have in-combat abilities and isn't a weapon or armor piece (you can make almost anything a weapon if you want them to be more powerful, heck look at the crazy weapons of the final fantasy series).


There will also be Utility Items (perhaps called Wondrous Items) that provide out-of-combat benefits and don't take up slots.
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Post  Xel Unknown Tue Sep 25, 2012 2:52 pm

Well I was building them to have both combat and out of combat skills... Cause I thought that was how Items were going to be built like. They'd be odd items... Most likely just allowed only one per party limit type of thing. It's more or less a chest that also while in combat can be entered to either hide for a bit or something like that. If something like what I've been making wouldn't get in or is too odd... I'd be fine with that and just try to rework new stuff more fitting with the guildlines you've put out here.
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Post  Stairc -Dan Felder Tue Sep 25, 2012 3:38 pm

Xel Unknown wrote:Well I was building them to have both combat and out of combat skills... Cause I thought that was how Items were going to be built like.

You definitely can have both. But if they do have in-combat properties, they still need to fit into one of the slots. You can have a sword that can whack people in combat and also cast ressurection outside of combat once a day, but it's still considered a weapon.
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Post  A1C Bronymous Tue Sep 25, 2012 4:00 pm

Stairc -Dan Felder wrote:but if you also get to get excited about gaining cool items and hunting down legendary artifacts

Oh the irony...

I suppose Horseshoes count as trinkets, then, as opposed to armor? I only bring this up because in my games I've requested a set of special horseshoes with a unique function from the DMs, and I wouldn't want that function to be overridden by strapping on some platemail or something.
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Post  Stairc -Dan Felder Tue Sep 25, 2012 4:06 pm

Bronymous wrote:
Stairc -Dan Felder wrote:but if you also get to get excited about gaining cool items and hunting down legendary artifacts

Oh the irony...

I suppose Horseshoes count as trinkets, then, as opposed to armor? I only bring this up because in my games I've requested a set of special horseshoes with a unique function from the DMs, and I wouldn't want that function to be overridden by strapping on some platemail or something.

Yep, almost certainly.

And why's there irony?
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Post  Xel Unknown Tue Sep 25, 2012 4:48 pm

Stairc -Dan Felder wrote:
Xel Unknown wrote:Well I was building them to have both combat and out of combat skills... Cause I thought that was how Items were going to be built like.

You definitely can have both. But if they do have in-combat properties, they still need to fit into one of the slots. You can have a sword that can whack people in combat and also cast ressurection outside of combat once a day, but it's still considered a weapon.
Well I guess I should first work on finishing my item's topic fully... Then figure out just what they'd count as.
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Post  A1C Bronymous Tue Sep 25, 2012 7:23 pm

Stairc -Dan Felder wrote:And why's there irony?

Because in our campaign, we're already collecting homebrew artifacts, and because my character is completely uninterested in actually doing that.
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Post  Stairc -Dan Felder Tue Sep 25, 2012 7:57 pm

*laughs*
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Post  Stairc -Dan Felder Tue Sep 25, 2012 10:06 pm

New and Improved Item Guide

After spending 2 hours (1.3 of that in class, sorry professor) working out the game economies and going over it with Carson and Chad – we’ve managed to simplify the design process a lot for items. Things should be a lot easier for us now and a lot more practical. There was a huge amount of math done behind the scenes, but no need to make you read a text book. Here’s what you need to know to design items.

The most design-friendly and user-friendly way to design items is to balance them by price tag. That way we can easily set how much gold players should each have by a specific level and DMs can know how much gold to provide via treasure to their party and us game designers can know what price tag to put on our items. Everyone’s a winner.

So, here’s how much gold we expect players to have at each level. Again, there’s lots of math behind it – we didn’t pull the numbers out of the sky – but we’ll get into that later. For now, here’s the table.

Expected Player Gold By Level
1 ) 3000 Gold
2 ) 4000 Gold
3 ) 5500 Gold
4 ) 6000 Gold
5 ) 6500 Gold
6 ) 8000 Gold
7 ) 8500 Gold
8 ) 9000 Gold
9 ) 10,000 Gold
10 ) 15,000 Gold


The deep, dark explanation behind these numbers:

Every thousand gold you spend on items should roughly buy you a little less than one additional standard action [-1] combat talent over the course of an encounter. (reason behind this in the spoiler).

This means that whatever effect you’re thinking of having the item provide – find a [-1] standard action combat talent to serve as a baseline. If one doesn’t exist, try balancing it against some more or less expensive combat talents. Remember, [+3] powers are just a little better than skipping your turn, thus [-3] powers are worth about two [0] powers… And so on. Powers with costs inbetween have effects that fall inbetween. Shouldn’t be too hard to get a feel for what a proper [-1] standard action talent effect should be.

There’s two main ways to add [-1] standard action’s worth of effect to a player over 5 rounds. You can either have the item provide a 1/battle spike (a unique combat talent you can use once a battle) or provide a passive bonus that, over 5 rounds, should add up to the same amount. For the sake of easy numbers in an example, imagine if a [-1] talent dealt 10 damage (it doesn’t, just the example). You could either….

1) Have the item provide a 1/battle free action combat talent to deal 10 damage to a single creature

2) Have the item grant a passive +2 damage on each attack. Over 5 rounds, that should add up to 10 damage.

This is simplified for the example (you have to adjust for multi-target attacks and interrupt/reaction attacks and the numbers are wrong) but that’s the core of how balancing works. So just find the REAL baseline for a [-1] standard action power as mentioned above, multiply it by the item’s intended effectiveness in relation to its price tag (a 1000 gold item should add a [-1] standard action while a 1500 gold weapon should add 1.5x a [-1] standard action) and then unleash upon the world.

And… Voila! Your combat item will be balanced.


Last edited by Stairc -Dan Felder on Wed Sep 26, 2012 2:25 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Post  Xel Unknown Tue Sep 25, 2012 10:58 pm

I try to read words.. I see math... I like math... Yet I get confused... And I don't know why?
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Post  A1C Bronymous Tue Sep 25, 2012 11:00 pm

And now I no longer have any desire to design items. Thanks for that.

Fuckin' math.
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Post  AProcrastinatingWriter Tue Sep 25, 2012 11:05 pm

Yeah I think I'm just gonna...

...give out a lot less gold and not let players buy weapons as much as earn them...
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Post  Stairc -Dan Felder Tue Sep 25, 2012 11:11 pm

*laughs*

Don't worry, this is only a workspace for the lead design team. This is the kind of work we do behind the scenes when we polish the combat talents and traits you folks submit. If you all just keep submitting ideas, we can do the hard balancing work for you. =)
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Post  Lazyboy21350 Tue Sep 25, 2012 11:13 pm

I have no complaints with what you are coming up with here, it all seems pretty solid and appropriate for this system.

But while you're still in the planning stage of item creation, remember that some players are gonna be creative and MacGyver their own items for way less money than you would think. For example, anyone can just walk into a store and, say, buy a rag (Worth 3 gold, making these prices up generally), a glass bottle drink (5 gold), a lighter (8 gold), and some sort of flammable liquid if the drink isnt already booze (Varies). Then all they have to do is fill the bottle with a flammable liquid (Or just leave it be if its alcohol), stick the rag in, and keep the lighter handy and presto, they have an extremely dangerous molotov cocktail all for a bit more than 20 gold or less.

Now the DM would have to make stats up for it on the fly, lets say that it can only be used once as its hard to recover a molotov cocktail after its already been exploded but more can easily be made even on the go. Now you have to start thinking realistically about molotovs to get damage and other effects down, for one, fire hurts A LOT so a 1d12 definitely, 2d12 might be pushing it, after the initial flames you are on fire so ongoing damage, and also when molotovs explode the fire tends to go EVERYWHERE so it should hit adjacent enemies, if not all, for less damage, perhaps a d6 for that. So in stat block terms:

[+1] Molotov Cocktail
Uses: Only once each
1d12 damage on main target and 3(4?) ongoing damage
1d6 damage to adjacent targets and 2 ongoing damage

Now is that balanced? Perhaps not particularly as its about as powerful as a -4 pip move. You could increase its pip cost to use but that wouldnt make much sense as something like that is very easy to use, just light and throw. It could take up a trinket slot to bring into battle but they can still make more easily, meaning a determined group can have everyone bring one into battle and win pretty easily if the dice dont all come up ones or if the monster(s) have a resistance to fire (Though elemental resistances ain't much of a thing at the moment). Most things that can be done to nerf this item wouldn't make much sense is what im saying which is what part of what item creation is. The item has to be creative, be useful, but also make sense, sillier DMs can break the third rule, of course.

Now back to my previous point, the players have made an item with their own hands thats a bit too heavy on the scales. What to do about it? It can be discouraged to avoid something like this, but is that fair to the players? No it isn't. Players should be praised for this kind of creativeness and ingenuity and DMs should be encouraged to reward players and groups who come up with it, even more so when it's something even greater than a simple molotov cocktail. Which is that something missing from this system, not only encouraging the players to be creative with their actions but the freedom to do it. But thats probably a thought for another time.

And this is just on items when I haven't actually played this tabletop system yet.
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Post  Stairc -Dan Felder Tue Sep 25, 2012 11:29 pm

Lazyboy21350 wrote:I have no complaints with what you are coming up with here, it all seems pretty solid and appropriate for this system.

Sweet, glad to hear.

Lazyboy21350 wrote:But while you're still in the planning stage of item creation, remember that some players are gonna be creative and MacGyver their own items for way less money than you would think.

Oh, definitely. And your example works well. In general, a DM can deal with that easily by just making the improvised item significantly worse than the power of an adventurer's combat talent. It doesn't matter how many molotov cocktails a player might make, if each one of them is strictly worse than a normal combat talent (say, it costs [0] to use but it's only as effective as a [+2] power) - which actually makes sense for non-professionally made improvised weapons *and* serves to emphasize how cool the characters are on their own... Players quickly learn that it's not actually worth trying to make all these items except in specialized circumstances where you need the effect so much it's worth over-paying for it in efficiency.

At least, that's an easy way for DMs to deal with such antics. I try to reward such creativity when possible, but sense still needs to be maintained. Cool
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Post  AProcrastinatingWriter Tue Sep 25, 2012 11:44 pm

Stairc -Dan Felder wrote:...but sense still needs to be maintained.



...I'll just...show myself out.
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Post  Xel Unknown Tue Sep 25, 2012 11:59 pm

I think we keep him around for stuff like this, right?
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Post  Stairc -Dan Felder Wed Sep 26, 2012 12:00 am

Yes. Yes we do.
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Post  Cardbo Sun Nov 04, 2012 6:02 am

Hat of Disguise
Grants the Utility Talent, "Art of the Dress", but with the limitation that it only works for the user.

Nightvision Goggles
Grants the Utility Talent "NightWatch"
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Post  Fury of the Tempest Fri Nov 16, 2012 12:27 pm

Cardbo wrote:Hat of Disguise
Grants the Utility Talent, "Art of the Dress", but with the limitation that it only works for the user.

Nightvision Goggles
Grants the Utility Talent "NightWatch"

I thought items and trinkets were currently restricted to combat bonuses only?
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Post  Xel Unknown Fri Nov 16, 2012 12:55 pm

That's how they are right now, but there are future plans for them to also have non-combat bonus as well.
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Post  Fury of the Tempest Fri Nov 16, 2012 2:28 pm

I see... well that makes sense and I guess giving talents like that works fine.
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Post  Whiteeyes Mon Dec 03, 2012 11:49 pm

I see mathematic equations, and I love it with all my blackened accountant soul.
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