RE: Cementing: the story so far

From: Bruce Ferrie <bruce_at_...>
Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2001 15:51:35 +0100


On Thursday, October 25, 2001 1:25 PM, Benedict Adamson [SMTP:badamson_at_...] wrote:
>

> PROBLEM WITH INTERPRETATION A
> Interpretation A does not scale to more powerful games. For example,
> imagine all the characters were at Argrath level and decided to
> embark on a long story arc to gain Arkat's Unbreakable Sword. It
> would be silly for the results of their immense efforts and risks to
> be an ability of 'Arkat's Unbreakable Sword 12'. This problem applies
> to all new abilities, not only newly cemented items.

Unusually for me, I've thought of a clumsy Post Hoc Kludge (TM). Rather than using 12, increase the default starting ability for new stuff.

A quick and dirty method of doing this might be to take the average of the 3 best abilities the hero has, and work out by what factor this is better than the "starting" average of what the 3 best abilities was. Then increase the default rating of 12 for a new ability by that factor.

For example:

A starting characters 2 best abilities are 1W, 1W & 5W - the average of these is (roughly) 2W (or 22).
Oranda's 3 best abilities are 14W, 10W and 8W - the average of these is (roughly) 11W (or 31).

(31/22) x 9 = 16.9

Rounding up gives us a starting level for new abilities/items of 17.

We'd end up with a table (argh!), showing Average of 3 Best Abilities against the Rating for New Items/Abilities. Something like this:

AVG 	NEW ABILITY RATING
2W		12
3-4W		13
5-6W		14
7-8W		15
9-10W		16
11-12W		17
13W		18
14-15W		19
16-17W		20
18-19W		1W

And so on if you want to....

Sadly, this does mean that the new stuff ends up being at a higher rating than all the things you learned to do a long time ago - that is, all the stuff at level 13 you got from you 100 word write-up and never had enough HPs to put up.

But I'm not clever enough to fix that without an even more clumsy Kludge...

Regards,

Bruce

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