Hello, folks!
I'll be honest and say that I haven't posted on here much, and that I'm sure it's entirely too late for what I say to have any real influence on development. That said, I contributed a lot of to the Kickstarter and I've been watching the updates closely, and I love everything that I've seen - and I've been thinking about this concept a lot, so I decided to write up a post about it, in the hopes of getting some thoughts on it and, potentially, an MWM response.
CoH pretty much never leaves my thoughts for any significant length of time, and I spend a lot of time contemplating why it was so important to me and why it made such a big impact. I've had a number of revelations over the years as to what made it so appealing and why I kept coming back time after time, and one of them is this:
The Mag system.
Now, the Mag system itself is very important, but it's just one example of a design philosophy that was embodied in every part of CoH. Namely nonbinary mechanics.
What I mean by that is that in many conventional MMOs (I'll use WoW as my go-to example, because it's the one I have the most experience with and it and CoH were active at the same time) crowd control and status effects are binary. You turn some guy into a sheep, and then he is removed from the game until the effect wears off. The same is true of said status effects used on enemy players. Time out, Billy. You don't get to play for the next X seconds, go sit in the corner. Bosses obviously can't be given time-outs, that would just be silly, so they're immune. You can either use these abilities on a target, or you can't. (This is a similar problem to a lot of classic JRPGs, 'the only things i would ever want to cast this spell on are immune to it')
This is boring as hell.
But City of Heroes had the magnitude system. It started off simple - a minion requires Mag 2 to disable, a lieutenant requires Mag 3, a boss requires Mag 4, and so on up the chain. What this meant is that significant opponents were not explicitly immune to status effects (which was required, seeing as how there was a class built entirely around status effects). It was possible to disable a boss, an elite boss, and yes, even an archvillain - usually not for very long, but it was very doable.
This is one of the reasons that even these days, I think of City of Heroes as a good video game, not just a fun social experience with a cool character builder. Any ability that a character had was applicable to any situation, provided it was approached correctly. It was rarely possible to reliably disable an elite boss or an archvillain as a single, solitary Controller. But with a fellow Controller? Or indeed, even a Blaster or a Defender who had a good, usable hold or stun? That was a different story. Hell, leave Controllers or Dominators out entirely - just think about non-control characters who happened to have control powers. They could team up with one another, and make a pretty serious difference. Two of my fondest memories are of my main and a friend's, both Mind Controllers, who made it our personal mission to Confuse every archvillain in the game at least once (we did quite well at it - at one point we got Lord Recluse to mow down several of his honor guard at the end of the Statesman TF) and of a /Dark Scrapper and her partner, a /Devices Blaster, combining Taser and Oppressive Gloom to disable bosses.
And such characters could always contribute to the concentrated work of actual status effect-focused characters at disabling or suppressing a powerful target - I say 'or suppressing' because a similar (though not identical) system held true for 'soft' status effects; slows, recharge debuffs, damage debuffs, defense debuffs, etc. Targets were never made immune to these effects: only given resistance to them. A Cold corruptor could always slow an archvillain down - maybe they couldn't all but freeze them in place like they could a standard enemy, but they could always contribute something to a fight.
It worked both ways, too. Enemies could have status effects without instantly disabling all players or being rendered instantly useless by mez protection, because the system was not binary. And the fact that it was usually really difficult to carry these effects up into the higher tiers of opponent without some assistance encourages teamwork.
City of Heroes has always been, in my mind, one of the only games (perhaps the only MMO) to justify its existence as a massively multiplayer game. The first and most obvious reason for this is that the costume creator made the simple act of entering the game an act of creation, an act of making something cool and original that you could share with everyone else in the game. But things like the Mag system, and other such mechanics that directly encouraged teaming up and literally combining your powers to defeat larger threats, manifested this concept in the gameplay as well as the concept and the character creation, and made CoH a game that not only lost nothing from its existence as an MMO, but could not have worked the way it did in any other medium or genre - on top of being, in my opinion, the best execution of status effects in any RPG I have played.
So, my question is basically this: how is City of Titans going to handle this, and things like it? I guess my question isn't really any more specific than that - I don't want to suggest that you, y'know, Just Make CoH Again, but this is concept is a really, really important part of what made CoH so enjoyable for me, and I'm really curious as to you guys' take on it, or anything similar to it.
I know when I am now.
Thanks for contributing! Last we heard from Tannim, we'll have a non-binary system.
Be Well!
Fireheart
If it's of any help, crowd control has been discussed [url=http://cityoftitans.com/forum/system-mechanics-crowd-control-and-debuffs]here[/url] and [url=http://cityoftitans.com/forum/redlynne-gets-crazier-proposes-control-powers-system]here[/url], among at least one or two other threads. And that doesn't even include knockdown / knockback / knockup.
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[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
As I understand it, MWM is very aware of the challenges and joys of the "mez" system and all of it's attendant subsystems. One thing tangled up in that is PVP versus PVE. In PVE, mezzing a badguy, or even getting mezzed by a badguy is one thing. In PVP it's instant death with no way to defend yourself. since some people wnat their characters to work the same way in PVP as they do in PVE, and others say this is inherently a bad idea specifically in the case of mez effects, a lot of thought has to go into that, and it is, as far as we know.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
THANK you Psykera
Crowd Control Enthusiast
You're coming at this from a very human-centric point of view. You're implying that the NPCs who get mezzed in PvE don't find it completely frustrating when they get perma-held by us pesky player characters. I'll bet when the machines finally take over and put us up for the war crimes we've commited against them over the decades at least a few of the charges will involve our immoral use of perma-holds against innocent NPCs who were just following orders and doing their jobs.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
If they come after me I'm just going to blame it on NCSoft. I mean who'd you get revenge on, me, or the people who deleted you and your entire fake world at the push of a button?
Also, I don't remember any of the NPCs complaining about it CoX forums :)
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
To be fair, Lothic, the NPCs don't exactly file a whole lot of tickets with support for Griefing by PCs beating them down using Perma-Mez.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
... and giggling madly, while they do it, too! PCs can be awful people, when NPCs are involved.
Be Well!
Fireheart
Except for the fact that the mag system was itself a binary mechanism. What you're talking about here isn't nonbinary mechanics; you're talking about non-damage mechanics.
To explain, the mag system was binary because control powers did absolutely nothing until they reached a given threshold and then proceeded to do nothing different after reaching the given threshold. The only thing that mattered was whether you breached the mag requirements for the given control effect or didn't.
Damage/hp is, interestingly enough, a similarly binary system since the only damage that matters is the damage that reduces hp to less than 0 (which ends the fight by defeating the target). the reason why it's not generally viewed as a nonbinary system is because it's got big numbers to hide it.
In order to actually be a nonbinary system, mechanisms would need to have some effect at all points of use (or almost all points of use; it's not necessary to include additional effects when you're hitting the target that's already subject to the full effect, though you could consider refreshing the effect to be an additional effect and it would be effective at all points of use). If a mag system is implemented, this would mean that when you hit the target with a hold/stun power but don't hit them with *enough* hold/stun, they have their accuracy, recharge, damage, or some other value reduced by some level commensurate with the strength of the hold (strong hold = stronger debuff; weak hold = weaker debuff).
There are benefits and costs associated with either type of system: binary systems are simple and efficiency but don't give much leeway for balance whereas nonbinary systems are the inverse.
Personally, I'm incredibly ambivalent concerning what system they decide to implement control powers through. On the one hand, I could support a mag system that uses the mag values as governors of the strength of the relative nonbinary effects (e.g. with mag 100 resist, get hit with a mag 50 hold and experience a 50% reduction in attack speed) as long as those effects don't completely break game balance (which control powers have a tendency to do when there isn't some kind of diminishing returns). On the other, I could equally support a system that doesn't use magnitudes at all and instead purely relies upon resistances to decrease the duration of a given effect (so that a hold power always holds the target, it just doesn't end up holding the target for very long if it's something like an archvillian).
Either way, I'm in a wait-and-see kind of mood.
Resistance defense seems more realistic, but Defence (binary, Avoidance) defence isn't.
I'm not really down for Marrying the Two though. :/
In essence having one called "Sturdy" defense, where one Augment has both 70% Defence + 20% Resistance..
or another augment with 70% Resistance + 20% Defense, depending on what you prefer.
As long as there's Avoidance of any sort, there will be a Binary state.
And thats Ok. Especially as your levels get closer to cap.
If Defence (binary, Avoidance) is thrown out or marginalized, allot more dependency will be placed on Healers and other Support ATs. Having to rely on them most of the time, as you get in the high levels, would be a bad move. The feeling of a toon becoming Uber is lost. :<
CoH actually had both systems. Mag/Protection to see if it takes effects at all and if it does then resistance/enhancements to "adjust" the length of time that it affects the target.
Of course, that's part of the point: the enhancements and other modifiers affected the duration, but MAG itself was unmodifiable. You couldn't enhance for more MAG, for example.
And regarding how this affects the damage system, the "enemy fights at full strength until dead" thing is common in FPS, RPG, and MMO games to the point it's almost expected. Performance degradation due to damage is something you see all over the place in wargames, though. For example, in Civilization V, damaged units fight at a lower strength (and the Japanese have a civ effect that excludes them from this).
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
I would like to see tests run to examine the idea of breaking this 'full damage until dead' mold. Players expect it because games have always used it. Games used it because in the early days of gaming it's all there was. I don't see any reason to remain chained to an outmoded system if there is something better out there.
It's possible that the Momentum system that CoT will use could be leveraged to help characters who are losing to overcome their opponent. Temporary boosts could also do this. I have no problem with the idea that my character, at 10% health, is not fighting at full capacity as long as the game is balanced around this idea.
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
There have been other games that used systems where the lower your hp is/was, the worse you were at whatever function, but those games tend to not be RPGs (strategy games do this pretty often with injured units only capable of dealing a percentage of what they could deal at full health). The only RPG that I can recall that actually did something like this was WoD (e.g. Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, etc.) wherein you'd take varying global penalties to your dice pools if you only had a certain number of health boxes remaining.
The problem with these systems is twofold: they overemphasize/overvalue healing (since hp is synonymous with damage dealing capability) and they make it so that, as soon as you start losing, you're pretty much guaranteed to lose, neither of which is particularly fun in an RPG. Strategy games get away with it because you're controlling an army and the loss of individual units doesn't particularly mean much; WoD got away with it because it was designed to be a role-play centered system where combat was the last resort since you could very easily die even as a heavily combat focused character, not to mention that injuries took an extremely long time (re: closer to realistic) to heal compared to most other RPGs (this is also why the combat rules are significantly more complicated than those of most other systems; the devs explicitly did not want people resorting to combat unless absolutely necessary).
Even though the devs are going to allow for numerous non-combat (e.g. roleplaying) options in game, the fundamental conflict resolution mechanism of the game (at least when the players are interacting with the game rather than other players) is still going to be combat. As such, a system where, for players at least, damage also acts as a reduction in effectiveness simply isn't going to be viable.
You can add Shadowrun (in at least one Edition of it) where the more you were hurt, the harder it became to achieve certain things (which is why you had cyberwear that allowed you to ignore the penalty of damage that you had accrued, but not that you were actually bleeding like a stuck pig and about to die).
The other thing to remember is well with table Top RPG's where you have wound modifiers etc, they also emphasis hitting *first*. If you get that attack off and hurt the enemy they are *automatically* at a disadvantage just by virtue of being hurt "enough" before they can even react. Or if you cannot act first, at least being *tough enough* to take those hits.
((cue my friends Werewolf character which *depending on interpretation to rules* could roll over 100 dice to *hit* and for damage.... And he was built like a tank so he would never go first, but he would kill anything in his way)).
There is also the fact that keeping track of wound modifiers (along with other stuff) can add in a layer of complexity... I know that people here are not so keen on "gear maintenance" for a number of reasons... but I can see them using the same arguments against this idea as well (Doesn't make sense... out of place for a superhero game etc etc)
But that's the thing; it wasn't all there was. It was all there was [i]on computers[/i], but even pen and paper games had more detailed mechanics available. There were several systems that had critical hit systems that were effectively random debuff generators; the important point here i that you didn't have to have a power that was directly trying to generate that exact debuff, as the "proc" systems work in MMOs.
And, again, wargames were all there already. [url=http://bg.battletech.com/]Battletech[/url] had a system where incoming damage would hit a random part of the mech, with higher odds on the larger parts. Damage would first count off the armor, with no ill effect. But after you got through the armor, you damaged the internal structure of that part, and had a chance to disable or destroy the various weapons and devices mounted there. Destroy all the internal structure and everything on that part was gone, and if you knocked off a leg, it fell right down.
[url=http://www.starfleetgames.com/starfleetbattles.shtml]Star Fleet Battles[/url] had a far more detailed system, where your ship had a diagram showing its various parts, six independent shields, so you could maneuver to get a fresh shield between you and the enemy though at a cost of putting some of your weapons out of arc, and a damage allocation chart to deal with whatever got past the shields. The DAC was set up with a 2d6 system, one row per total, one roll per point of damage, where the hardest-to-hit stuff (bridge, auxiliary control) were on the 2 and 12 rows, and the easily-hit stuff (hull, cargo) were on the 6, 7, and 8 rows. Further, it was split into a series of columns, and you worked your way from left to right, destroying all of the given type in a box before moving to the next column. Last column was all Excess Damage; run out of those and the ship explodes. And one last wrinkle was that some boxes, usually weapons and sensors, only got allocated one damage point before skipping to the next column. This would reset each volley. So you could get more weapon hits if you could space your attacks out, getting more surface hits.
There was a simpler, "sister" game to SFB, called [url=http://www.starfiredesign.com/starfire/]Starfire[/url], which simply represented a ship as a row of letters, like SSAAZH(I)(I)WaMgXr(I)(I)QsDX(I). Each capital letter or capital-and-lowercase pair was one system destroyed by one damage point, with some exceptions. Ion engines (the I's) were grouped into engine rooms; each room needed more engines for larger ships, and generated one point of movement. Damage points generally just destroyed things left to right. Again, this gave you a system of performance degradation due to damage, but with so little work that large fleet battles weren't cumbersome.
Hella complex systems to play with pen and paper, but we did... and it would be a lot easier to do with a computer doing the grunt work. the main issue is, "how much complexity will the player base care for?" If the players just see the system as a lot of flavor, they'll probably think it's cool. if they try to min/max it, they'll whine and complain that it's hard.
My point being that there's lots out there for the taking, but players have settled for less for so long that the market hasn't bothered to disabuse them of their accepted mediocrity. Just think, if the Malta giant robot took damage like a Battletech mech, where you could try to aim for certain parts (at the cost of a greater chance of missing or, or hitting somewhere else with reduced damage), and if you started doing significant damage to a critical part, the players doing the damage would get a lot more aggro than they would otherwise with a bucket-o-hit-points system. So do we just try to brute force it to death, or do the glass cannons aim for the head, at significant risk of pulling aggro off the tanks and getting wiped?
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
P.S. Forgot to mention, one kind of "degradation due to damage" out in the MMO wilds is the ESO system, where your field of vision narrows and darkens, and the borders of the screen slowly turn red, as your HP heads toward 0. But then again, that only affects the player; best I can tell DPS doesn't drop.
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
That's a big "if" that we already know isn't going to be available in CoT. Even in general, this is an idea that could work well if the game is designed with it in mind, but it is not something that can be tacked on as an "oh yeah" kind of thing. As has been pointed out, such a system would place considerable emphasis on either avoiding damage entirely or being able to heal it, i.e. it would actively encourage players to create tank-mage characters.
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[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
The [i]existing[/i] system does that, too. It's got nothing to do with the presence or absence of performance degradation due to damage.
The thing that will stop tank-mages is making the character building system prevent it outright or impose ruinous costs on it. Nothing else will be effective.
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
Of course, that brings up another interesting point: in wargaming, "healing" and damage avoidance are usually weak or nonexistent. Maybe that is another thing that needs to be chalked up to "well the old fantasy MMOs did it so the players demand it" or "why we can't have nice things."
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
Depends on the game... If you can only take one hit before you die (for a generic rank and file mob) then there is no point in having "healers"... you are either dead or alive.
Now going past there, depending on the game you can have saves that are either modifiable (generic armour vs weapons of various qualities) and the unmodifiable save (ie for a fixed chance of surviving *anything*.) Downside to the unmodifiable is that you could go down to a whole horde of spitwads.... just after taking 3 titan lasers to the face with not a scratch....
So no ideal system there either, unless you want to start tracking *each* and *every* single model... and seeing as some wargames deal with hundreds of models......
I'm old enough to have played every one of these games. Yes, they had different damage systems (most complex, some not) but none of them was an RPG or an MMO.
If we want to go back to PnP RPGs (more representative than a game of battles between starships) we can:
DnD: You have 3 of 60 hit points left. You are not under the effects of any curses or spells yet you stand on the brink of death. Do you do full damage? Yep
V&V: Same thing
Champions PnP: Same thing
GURPS had an optional wound system where you could have a body part lose function from a lucky shot so that was a sort of hybrid system. Worked very well too btw.
Rolemaster had the most phenomenal series of charts and tables for every possible weapon, spell, trap, random effect and general occurrence ever. Everything fro 'You take damage' to 'you take extra damage and are at -something next round' to 'you die is glorious fashion and people will sing songs and stories about it.' However the logistics of managing the charts and tables was a nightmare.
As you said, there are other systems out there...however I think for the ease of balance, design and play most games have taken the easy road. It's up to the Devs but I would at least like to see a different idea explored.
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
Mutants & Masterminds ... as previously mentioned ... dispenses with the concept of Hit Points entirely. Instead, when you take damage, you simply accrue a stacking penalty to [b][i]everything you do[/i][/b] so as to degrade PERFORMANCE in a rather direct fashion.
Take a Light Wound? You are now -1 to every action (both offensive, defensive and skill related).
Take a second Light Wound? You are now at a cumulative -2 to every action.
Undamaged and take a Severe Wound? You are now -5 to every action.
Doesn't take a whole lot of game theory to realize that you're looking at a potential Cascade Failure in which once you've been wounded sufficiently your character's performance DEGRADES progressively, which in effect both "knocks you off your game" and also shifts the balance of power against you. The effects of damage are, of course, cumulative, and can result in "beating the crap of you" such that with sufficient damage your character becomes quite ineffective.
The net result, of course, is that there is a BIG difference between Fighting Hurt and Fighting Fresh. Given the way that Players have a propensity to min/max almost everything, even light wounds will "weigh" upon the performance of a character ... UNLIKE pretty much each and every Hit Point system out there. Indeed, it is very easy to game out scenarios in which just about every combat will have a "tipping point" at which the cascade failure of increasing damage taken begins to manifest itself and the tide of battle turns (perhaps more than once!) ... UNLIKE just about every single Hit Point based system in existence.
Obviously, a damage system like Mutants & Masterminds relies on a sliding scale of relative advantages which have to be viewed in context. This is more complex of a concept than just having a Hit Point stat, with the attendant assumption of no performance issues until Hit Points gets dropped to zero or below.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Not sure if this would work in an MMO setting but it's an interesting idea. The deal with MMOs is that you have a constant income of damage to deal with. So a character, EVERY character, would have to have an inherent rate of damage recovery built in. Either that or many hits would have to carry only fractions of 1% or 1 level of debuff. It would be like everyone having a small amount of Regen.
Still...intriguing idea.
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
Something as subtle as making the damaged characters move a little slower and have less stealth would potentially be a very "swingy" effect, depending on the mission. Added to that you could have a small reduction in Endo recovery rates, and/or power recharge rates as your toon devoted more internal energy to healing, etc. So your heal rate remains the same but other stuff get's slightly worse as you're now trying to run or hide or move quietly with a large bleeding wound and you're getting tired faster from blood loss, etc.
If you nerf all three of movement, recovery and recharge even just a very small amount, the combined effect is definitely noticeable.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
As much as I love M&M - translating this into a video game may be problematic. There is a certain narrative control a GM provides with this system on a tabletop, but in a videogame I fear it would put undue emphasis on "healers" at worst, or at the very least - people will be ticked off due to the inevitable "death spiral."
To be fair, at no point was I advocating the M&M system for City of Titans. I was merely offering it as a counterfactual to the notion that everything has to work on a Hit Point system because that's the only option. Hit Point systems on their own introduce a tremendous bias into all kind of performance issues (including the Holy Trinity).
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
And right there you've locked in the Hit Points Bucket model. You've got a cash flow mechanic where you've got to keep income (healing/regen) greater than outflows (damage "points") or you lose, and there is no room for nuance o details. Enjoy working for the Trinity.
You've got to ditch the concept of damage as [i]only[/i] "points," and completely fungible, in a tally. Sure, you can still have some kind of "point"measure, but the other factors should not be discarded. The method of delivery (i.e. damage type) could mean something (geez, was there any difference between "smashing" and "lethal" damage in more than a couple places?) and not just as something to match up against a "percent damage resist" table. I brought up SFB because it had a model for random damage locations; wounds to someone's foot don't break their gun (unless it's built into their peg leg). It also opens up a called-shot mechanic that doesn't exist otherwise.
Not that any of this matters; CoT is going to be a "bucket of hit points" system anyway. Just frustrated that, as you've pointed out, the field is resistant to alternatives to the point that most folks are convinced they don't exist.
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
"I've got a sandwich. Why would anyone in the world be hungry?"
Right there with you Lin ...
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Not (exactly) true.
There's spike damage and there's pressure damage. There's also Damage over Time, which itself is a form of pressure damage. There's even Damage [i]after[/i] Time, if dealing with "delayed blast" explosives in a sort of limpet mine sort of scenario (or "toe bombing" for those who remember) which is another form of spike damage.
Damage happens, but I wouldn't by any stretch want to claim it comes in constantly, or even near constantly. We use that as a kind of shorthand averaging when doing spreadsheet analyses for Time To Live calculations, because it simplifies things, but it's really more of an abstract representation of what "really" happens in and during gameplay.
Not trying to jump on your case or anything Comicsluvr, but I figured this is one case where the nuances are important enough to look past the broad brushstroke you were making.
Damage Happens ... granted ... but assuming it'll happen in any kind of a "constant" fashion would be a first order mistake. For one thing, we don't even know what the acceptable bounds of performance will be on Accuracy/Defense yet, which could throw all kinds of assumptions like the "constancy" of incoming damage out of whack.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
With a Mind Controller, the damage is all in your head! *grin*
Be Well!
Fireheart
I initially typed out a whole post about Elite Dangerous and how it deals with it, but then realised that it would have been pointless.
The thing is, I don't think that game designers are against the idea... it is just that "location specific" effects and targeting game play offer a completely different feel and vibe to the game compared to the normal "bag of hitpoints" style of game play.
And even then, one style of game play mechanic might not necessarily work in a different game even in the same genre ie the Tabula Rasa style of being able to free aim worked, but it wouldn't necessarily work in City of Heroes (for better or for worse, or even because of what the player base is expecting)
Remember that in the initial Alpha video of City of Heroes, you had the ability to target specific locations (and the gameplay was more "twitch" than what was released), but that got removed for one reason or another (quite possibly: because it didn't feel right)
Yeah, as so as you reach for Tab Select (City of Heroes style) or even Tab Lock (Tabula Rasa style) you're basically reaching for a Hit Box model of being able to designate your target to attack. That in and of itself carries a huge generalization that effectively amounts to [b]assume a spherical chicken of uniform density[/b] when it comes to any sort of Hit Location mechanics targeting specific body parts. It also has the benefit of being able to handle "non-standard" forms and shapes (such as Ghosts and critters and so on) without requiring use of extra rules and workarounds.
So Tab Select/Tab Lock tremendously favors a "genericization" of survival mechanics that is most easily and neatly addressed using the Bucket Of Hitpoints model, which effectively amounts to using [b]assume a spherical chicken of uniform density[/b] when it comes to inflicting and absorbing damage. It just averages everything together and hand waves away the details (like Hit Locations and so on). So, in effect, the choice of User Interface and Controls (including rejection of "twitchy" targeting) dictates the favoring of the Hit Box/Hit Point model. Go figure.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
I'd rather be [b]ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL.[/b]
[B]Revenge is motivation enough. At least it's honest...[/B]
Roleplayer; Esteemed Villain
[img]http://www.nodiatis.com/pub/5.jpg[/img]
You know, occasionally, I wonder what that spherical chicken would taste like, deep fried with barbecue sauce. Perhaps it's not the best model for everything?
Be Well!
Fireheart
Wonder no more ...
[img]http://imgs.sfgate.com/blogs/images/sfgate/sfmoms/2010/06/28/mcnugget.jpg[/img]
Although if you want to get REALLY technical about it, this probably answers your question best ...
[youtube]Pi-g1e5JCE0[/youtube]
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
I'm just waiting to hear soon how its now doable/possible to make processed chicken look like the inside of a strip of chicken when pulled apart to revean the inside. :|
[img]http://i.imgur.com/QFvGK1P.png[/img]
Actually, that might be impressive to me. ;D
It depends on if the finished product needs to be edible.
Don't assume the answer.
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]