Damage types for weapons

[jwgz]

Hello. I'm looking to make a game with RMMV. I've dabbled with RPG Makers in the past, but have never completed anything past a small demo. I do know basic eventing and can make small vanilla games, but that's it.

While creating my classes and weapons for my current game, I realized that all my weapons were the same thing, with the only difference being their physical damage stats. I didn't have a huge problem with this at first (low-dmg for staffs, mid-dmg for swords, high for axes, etc.) until I realized that all my weapons were virtually indistinguishable from one another and were making my classes seem borderline interchangeable.

What I'm looking to do is create something like... different weapons cause more or less damage to different enemies.

Examples:
-Projectile and piercing weapons will do massive damage to flying enemies, but negligible damage to armored foes
-Swords will be good against humanoids and animals, but won't hit (or will deal little damage) to flying foes
-Hammers will wreck armored foes and machines and will deal respectable damage elsewhere, but the classes wielding them will get wrecked easily by magic

Sounded pretty good, but what I'm running into now are issues of balance. Would it be better to create "elements" for Pierce/Slash/Blunt damage and delete Physical altogether, or leave Physical but make all enemies at least somewhat resistant to it?

I'm not sure if I'm making sense. Basically I want every weapon type to be useful against different types of enemies, with some trade-offs. Is there a way to either simplify such a system or make it less dependent on chance? Then there's the issue of character and weapon stats vs. elemental (or in this case damage type) weaknesses.

I toyed around with the idea of just making it into a simple rock-paper-scissors thing (like the FE series) but then I realized most of my enemies wouldn't necessarily fall under such categories in a way that's immediately intuitve.

 

[kovak]

Actually it's better like this, you can even relate some types of damage with debuffs and other traits to make things more interesting.

• Piercing type has bonus critical rate and increases your speed when equipped
• Blunt type has chance to reduce Defense for a few turns and reduces your speed when equipped
• Cutting has chance to apply Bleeding and reduce healing rate

You can keep listing things, bonus counter rate, chance to apply blind, chance to reduce evasion, etc.
Do not think about the element as a matter of dealing increased damage but also think about how the weapon itself woul work in combat.

 

[Andar]

keep in mind that the damage elements are one-directional. An enemy canhave as many element rates as you can think of, but all weapons only have one element assigned to them.

So you can make as many different elements as you want, and give them names however you want.
This can go down to each weapon having its own damage element and thereby doing different damage to different enemies.

However, as said above you should combine this mechanic with something else to prevent it from becoming pure number crunching. You can for example assign different states to different weapon types, and then make sure that those states are added as part of the attack (the effect "add normal attack state" on a skill makes that skill add the states on the weapon in addition to any states the skill adds directly)

or you can assign different skills to different weapon types, making them available only with those weapons.

 

[jwgz]

Thanks for the comments!

@kovak, I've thought about this and I already have features like state applications implemented (not many, but enough given the length of the game I'm shooting for). I want to make the weapon types (and thus the classes) even more distinctive than that. I will try to take your advice to fiddle with evasion rates and such--not sure if my own skill is quite there, but I'll try. Will be lots of trial and error!

@Andar. Restricting skills to particular weapon types is an awesome idea, but it wouldn't necessarily benefit my current project since most of my classes can only wield 1 type of weapon anyway (some can wield 2). I had no idea that weapons were restricted to one element type though... always assumed you could customize and add several. That's a bummer!

You've given me some good stuff to munch on. Much appreciated.

 

[Andar]

there are plugins that allow multiple elements on weapons, but when using them you'll have to be carefull about how the final damage is calculated (for example if a weapon has both fire and piercing elements, what happens with an enemy that is resistant against fire but weak against piercing?).

can be done, but requires some extra planning and configuration in the plugins.