Saturday, May 14, 2011

Refactoring Saving Throws and Resistances

I'm in the process of dropping all of the saving throws (Save vs Beguilement) in favour of the resistance modifiers, and refactoring the resistances to be basically the same as Wizardry 8.

I thought I was being clever way back when I designed it, but it turned out that I was wrong.

Some things just don't need to be changed.

Old Modifers New Modifiers

  • Resist Damage
  • Resist Fire
  • Resist Ice
  • Resist Poison
  • Resist Acid
  • Resist Lighting
  • Resist Psychic
  • Save vs Beguilement
  • Save vs Evocation
  • Save vs Illusion
  • Save vs Curses
  • Save vs Blessings
  • Save vs Transmutation
  • Save vs Conjuration

  • Resist Damage
  • Resist Fire
  • Resist Water
  • Resist Earth
  • Resist Air
  • Resist Mental
  • Resist Energy

Yes, Energy replaces Divine from Wizardy 8. It's still basically the same thing.

Resistances to damage from different types work the same way; i.e. reducing said damage by the resistance % modified by stuff like Power Cast. Saving throws against binary effects (blinded/not blinded) are now based on the same %, modified by more or less the same stuff.

This means all of the condition templates and items that grant bonuses to saves and resistances get an update. Effect types pretty much line up with Wizardry 8: poison is mostly an Air effect, acid is a Water effect, lightning is a Fire effect, etc. It also means that currently the spell school types (Beguilement, Illusion, etc) are not used for anything. Maybe one day they will be. Caster magic points are still just one big pool, perhaps in future they will be divided up into differnt pools as in the wizardry series.

This also means that for the first time I can go about balancing the class/race resistances and the foe resistances. Happy days, this is a long overdue change. With a bit of luck, the character statistics display screen will get an update too. Some nice colourful resistance bars to use the new screen space freed up by trashing all those confusing modifiers.

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