Armor protection and weapon damage ranges

[Lash]

Just out of curiosity, I'm wondering what protection values others assign to armor and against what typical damage types.

What is your rationale behind having an armor protect against multiple damage types with different values assigned to their types?
Is there a specific range that you use for common and typical armors used in your scenario (instructions for builders)?
When a player has access to a description of the armor (let's say using an identify spell) what kind of information does the player get?
For example, an output might be something like:

This armor provides protection against the following damage types:
Blade - extraordinary
Blunt - poor
Shock - very good
etc.

To what values would the descriptions correspond?

Additionally, what are typical damage ranges used with the SetClass() function for weapons in the scenario?
Are there upper and lower limits that are restricted?

I know this is situational for each mud, and I've seen creator documents for other mudlibs, but nothing specifically for an up and running Dead Souls mud. Just looking for some input, or even better, if you have creator documents that can be shared for comparison purposes, that would be great!

[quixadhal]

Typically, a damage type system has to allow for each weapon to have one (or more) damage types, and then each defensive item have one (or more) damage modifiers... or have every defensive item have values for all types.

Consider real life examples.

Chain mail defends quite well against blunt weapons, and against slashing weapons, but does horribly against piercing weapons, which just go through the links.  OTOH, leather armor defends decently against piercing weapons, but falls apart to slashing weapons, and without padding under it, doesn't do much against blunt weapons.

If you're looking at magical damage types, plate mail would be horrible at defending against elemental attacks... heat, cold, lightning.. all would be conducted right through to any exposed skin.  Cloth or leather though would insulate the wearer to some degree, but cloth would easily catch fire and leather would become brittle from cold.

Ages ago, when I was designing an original system for this, I gave each armor piece values for "damage absorbed" and "damage passed through".  The idea is that every hit had some damage value and type.  It would do some damage to the armor itself (absorb), and pass the rest of the damage through to the wearer.  By having multipliers, you could make some armor take extra damage (itself) while still protecting the wearer, or other damage types might bypass the armor almost entirely.

Plate mail, for example, would (itself) take very little damage from fire (0.1 absorb), but would also not protect the wearer and in fact, tend to hold onto the heat and increase the damage caused to them (2.0 passthru).

[Nilrin]

I'm gathering you're simply looking for an idea of where to start as far as integer values for your weapons and armour? Well, in Rebirth, every tangible object that can be worn has at least some protection, albeit extremely small for basic cloth clothing, such as a point or two for most normal damage types (blunt, blade, shock, cold, heat, etc...) all the way up to your plate armours which might have 10 or 20 points defence against things such as blades. When deciding the basic attach values for common weapons such as knives and swords and such, I started with the base values used back in the old AD&D rules, where a basic dagger had a weapon class of about 4, up to your big swords that were around 8 or 10. However, Rebirth is hugely a skill based game, so those values are just the base. Also, keep in mind that, I believe by default, the damage absorbed on a strike is a range from 1/2 the armour value to the full armour value.

I don't mean to get into a medieval armour debate or anything, but technically the term 'chain mail' is a misnomer, as it is simply called 'mail' or 'maille'. This armour, in fact, protects very poorly against blunt weapons, so traditionally they wore kinds of padding under their maille, such as brigandine armour. I realise you were just giving examples quix, I just thought I could put in my two cents.

Lash, any values you go with, in the end, are just arbitrary numbers. The only thing you really want to be care of is choosing a range so small, you end up backing yourself into a corner when designing weapons and armour, or numbers so large that it becomes difficult in getting a feel for exactly how good an item really is.

[quixadhal]

A better design philosophy is to plan out how you want your systems to work, and then code appropriately.

For example, when figuring out how much experience something is worth, you should be thinking in terms of how many average NPC's a player needs to kill to level.  Likewise, for armor and weapons and basic combat systems, think in terms of how long you want an average fight to last under the assumption that the players and NPC's both have appropriate weapons and armor for the fight.

THEN, when you adjust the weapons and armor against each other, you will be adjusting the duration of the fight.  If the NPC's have leather armor and the players have slashing weapons, the fight would take less time (more damage gets through).

Years ago, I was trying to design a combat system that still worked mostly like traditional D&D combat, but didn't have the issue where a level 10 warrior could literally wade through a sea of level 2 or 3 creatures and slaughter them by the thousands without taking a scratch.  I ran simulations to adjust the values through various combat rounds, and eventually settled on a scaling system that tended to favor the unwashed masses once they got over a threshold count.

Anyways, that's my suggestion.  Decide how you want your weapons and armor values to affect combat and write some simulation code to see how adjusting a number changes the dynamic.