Considering armour types / varities

[Sol Fury]

In the process of creating my game, I've run up against a couple of stumbling blocks, one of which is deciding on the types of armour to give my characters.

I am going with largely fixed parties - so for a good portion of the story, you have one specific crew of guys with you (occasionally swapping members as the plot demands, but mostly fixed so you don't spend too lon developing the guest characters).

What I initially thought was to base the armour on the character types - so you have skirmishers and archers in light armours like padded coats and mail vests, while the tank classes wear heavy armours, and mages tend to wear robes. Half of this is also based on how the characters are designed i.e. I'm not assigning heavy armour to the guy who runs about in a tatty coat with no shirt underneath.

I quickly realised a problem with this - I had far more light armour users than anything else. For example, one group of characters are pirates - so three of them wear light gear to complement their style of stealing / quick moves. The fourth is a healer, who is dead set against war so would refuse to using anything more than robes and a staff. Now arguably, I could change one of the light guys, but it makes close to no sense to do so - and I could just as easily balance the gameplay for characters with lighter armour in this section anyway.

(The other parties have similar issues)

The way I see it, I've got a bunch of options:

1) Keep the armour classes. While there's only a few characters wearing the heavy armours and robes, that just contributes to making them unique. It means when you have the third type of armour from the fourth dungeon's treasure chests, your heavy armoured guys have a few more points in defence than the others.

2) I rethink my concept of heavy and light armour into a "cloaks / robes" and a "medium to heavy" group, so half my light armour guys share an armour type with the heavier guys, and the rest go for a lighter approach. (The ones who are meant to be really tough get  some kind of passive / base stat boost). Or I make two light armour groups and divy up the light armour guys between the chainmail wearers and the wearers of the armour referred to ambiguously as "guard" or "protector".

3) Switch to one type of armour for everyone, since 80% of the cast are already wearing light armour. Compensate by making those wearing heavy armour have a +2% passive boost to their DEF stat and a higher base DEF to represent that they wear tougher stuff. Advantage here is simplifying things, though I'm not keen on the "lazy" approach of giving them all the same armour.

4) I keep the armour categories and rethink how the characters work. Not so keen on this idea, since it would mean reworking the character's fighting styles to match too.

Entirely possible I'm overthinking it, and "just do what feels right" is the right option.

 

[bgillisp]

I like 1. It fits into your current approach. And, nothing says you can't have most people in the same armor, with a couple that are unique.

 

[Banquo]

I'd stick with 1).

Actually I don't see a problem with the mayority using light armor. What matters is that your characters have different fighting styles, and armor type is just one thing.

You can also try to make different types of light armor, e.g. leather, padded and lamellar. All share the same armor type, but have different effects on your stats, which could support different light fighting styles.

For example, leather would improve your speed the most. Lamellar not so much, but it has higher defense. Still they all count as light armor.

Or if you include the typical attack elements, "slash" "crush" "pierce", you could give leather armor resistance to pierce, padded resistance to crush, and lamellar resistance to slash. Just a quick example.

Also this way, heavy armor remains something special. Perhaps let your tanks wear light armor as well and make heavy armor rare or very expensive (as it should be).

 

[Wavelength]

I would recommend allowing the "heavy armor" guys to equip any type of armor (including light armor, robes, etc.) and just make most of the armor in the game different types of light armor/robes with different strengths and weaknesses, with several heavy-armor items for the characters that can use them.

 

[TheHonorableRyu]

I'd go with 1, since a party doesn't really need more than one tank at a time.

My question is: is there enough to make the three light armor users different? Do all the light armor user fight the same way, or are there big enough differences to justify having three of them at a time? If there aren't notable differences, you could change a character or two. If there are, then you have differences besides armor to differentiate your characters and it's less likely to feel like a single type of character (light armor users) are being stacked against the other (the heavy armor user). 

 

[Sol Fury]

Thanks all! Definitely liking the idea of making it a bit less defined, and letting the heavies where the lighter armour too (might have to see if I can have them in battle in their non-armoured looks when they are out of armour).

Re. the light armour guys: yes, I'm trying to make all the characters have some unique skillsets. For example, the team I had in mind with this post includes an archer, whose skills have a couple of trick shot arrows (careful aiming, two arrows at once for a chance at 2x hits, that sort of thing), but he's also got an alter-ego who you can call into battle to use powerful fire magic, and both forms should have strengths and weaknesses, so you really need to pick which of his two forms is needed for a given encounter. One of the others is also an archer, who can debuff and inflict states with different types of arrows, aiming at body parts, etc. Then the third one is a woman who grew up on the streets, so she's able to pickpocket her foes, and she's got some elemental attacks in the forms of various powders she throws at enemies. Her elemental moves are a jack of all trades thing - she's got variety, but there's others who possess stronger attacks in one field. Truth be told, the elemental powders came about due to a lack of a combat mage in that group. (It's also given me a running joke of "we need to recruit a mage sometime")

In any event, I think I have a slightly better idea of what to do for the heavier armour types. And much reassured to know I'm on what might be considered the right track - I've spent a whole lot of time trying to think things through before building too much.