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Ritual Workshop - Arcane Armor
Topic Started: Nov 24 2015, 05:53 PM (77 Views)
MaxIrons
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So Arcane Armor serves as a replacement for physical armor, this is a given. I'm not going to go into the argument of physical armor vs arcane armor as that's a topic for a different thread. So let's examine it through the lens of the goals I stated in the Setup thread.

1. Be all that you can't be. - Arcane Armor actually excels at this, some people can't handle wearing heavy armor for physical or financial limitations. Arcane armor is a perfect replacement for this. Good on you AA!

2. Alliance is a team game. - Here we come to what I typically ding AA for. The ability for a ritualist to gain armor equivalent to a fighting class just by measure of being a ritualist. It's not the most egregious example on the list (those will come later) but it is in that same camp. The easiest fix would be to remove the ability for extra armor from ritual levels. Let a scholar max out at 15 armor unless they purchase wear extra armor, period, end of story. It reinforces the role of a fighter in being a damage sponge. ;)

3. . The rules should be accessible to new players, while still having depth through progression. - Arcane Amor isn't bad here either. It refits (mostly) like regular armor without too many wonky rules.

2 out of 3 ain't bad I guess. Thoughts? Other ideas on changing it?
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Muir
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Honestly, I'd be fully comfortable with replacing Arcane Armor as a ritual with Enchant Armor, while leaving Arcane as a formalist-only ability.

Enchant Armor would be a ritual effect that requires a tagged armor rep as the target. It would simply increase the level of material a rep counted as by a number of levels, to a maximum of 3, with all the benefits of being that level of armor, including waylay protection. I'd want to add scaling cost-wise to allow things like enchanting a regular hat to count as if it were a metal helm (because I hate people wearing real helms, the hearing and vision limitations are terrible for safety in our game) and to make it easier to make a larger suit a little stronger than to make clothes count as platemail, but that's all in the details.

This would mean that armor reps would not need to be so punishingly expensive for high values, while still requiring an armor rep of some kind that would encourage costuming standards.
Edited by Muir, Nov 28 2015, 01:12 PM.
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MaxIrons
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Muir
Nov 28 2015, 01:11 PM
Honestly, I'd be fully comfortable with replacing Arcane Armor as a ritual with Enchant Armor, while leaving Arcane as a formalist-only ability.

Enchant Armor would be a ritual effect that requires a tagged armor rep as the target. It would simply increase the level of material a rep counted as by a number of levels, to a maximum of 3, with all the benefits of being that level of armor, including waylay protection. I'd want to add scaling cost-wise to allow things like enchanting a regular hat to count as if it were a metal helm (because I hate people wearing real helms, the hearing and vision limitations are terrible for safety in our game) and to make it easier to make a larger suit a little stronger than to make clothes count as platemail, but that's all in the details.

This would mean that armor reps would not need to be so punishingly expensive for high values, while still requiring an armor rep of some kind that would encourage costuming standards.
The problem is that we don't place armor values on individual pieces, instead armor is done as a full suit that can have various different values in different locations. Unless the armor system was reworked just making an Enchant Armor scroll wouldn't be able to be done. I can see how to do it by making all armor pieces tagged individually by location, but then we have to rework the blacksmith system of armor creation. In addition we'd have to have some way of tagging the armor bonus from master crafted and in genre.

None of these are insurmountable, but would the end product be worth all that, and the time it takes to move that many things through the owner voting system?

Ultimately the removal of one piece of text in the ritual scroll would be an easier pill to swallow. I'd prefer your system once implemented though.
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Avaran
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One drawback I've run into over the years (both as someone who wore heavy physical armor, and then swapped to AA), is that the thicker the armor, and the more coverage you have, the harder it is to feel and take hits - which is especially true for big(ish) NPC's that requires more than 2 or 3 people to quickly defeat.

Thicker armor leads indirectly to the types of combat swings that we explicitly disallow, and potentially opens up wearers to hits (purposeful or not) in illegal spots, or spots that are closer to illegal targets.

We play a "touch combat" game, and real armor just doesn't fit with that play paradigm in practice. I've been on the receiving end of an armor-wearing NPC where I was covered in bruises and welts afterward because I couldn't feel most of the lighter hits, so people just naturally swing harder (or get discouraged and walk away to do something else).

I feel like it's just better to give everyone AA based on class (reduce max armor values to baseline outside of buying WEA; I hate the fact that all caster classes basically now have 30 points of armor, negating what is supposed to be a Martial Class advantage) and encourage better costuming via a supportive, friendly, and creative player-base. Or change armor material requirements based on look rather than actual strength/thickness, or some combination of the two.
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