RPG Maker Forums

So, in my project I'm pretty sure I want to have two different physical defense stats:  "defense" and "armor."

The reason for this is..."Defense" would represent a person's combat prowess, quickness, and overall skill at avoiding / mitigating any incoming physical attacks.    I feel like I need to distinguish between these because if someone is stunned, or inflicted with some kind of negative state, their "defense" would be lowered...or a skill like "backstab" would ignore part or all of a person's defense.   However, ARMOR would always protect you.  If you're wearing platemail, even if you're stunned, that's going to protect you.   So I want this stat to be separate, so I can make my damage and skill formulas accordingly.

Bear in my mind that in my game, there is very little RNG in terms of hit/miss...everyone is 100% hit rate and 0% eva rate, except in rare cases where someone has a particular strong point (really fast chars might have a small chance to evade) or a particular weakness (really slow chars might have a small chance to miss).     So this gives even more reason for me to have a separate "defense' stat representing defensive evasion as damage mitigation.

Which brings me to my question/issue, regarding shields.   I was thinking of having shields give a small bonus to eva, instead of adding to defense or armor.  So like the worst shield in the game might give +15% eva, and it would scale in very small increments where the best shield in the game might give +30% eva.    

What do you think?  I feel like it adds a little bit of spice in one specific area of combat, making things a bit less predictable.  Bear in mind that not everyone will even get to use shields, it will only be knights and maybe one or two other classes.

Clearly, the downside would be that this introduces the possibility for the outcome of a fight to be determined by RNG (particularly against bosses, where evading or not evading one attack, in a very close fight, could be significant).   On the upside, I feel like just having some RNG in this particular case could add some excitement to combats and make things less predictable, in a good way.

I think the alternative would be to just have shields simply add to the "defense" stat.   I'm leaning toward this to be honest, but wanted to generate some discussion about it.