Combat RPGs don’t traditionally offer much active choice to a warrior character: Do you attack? Do you not attack?
Maybe you get to quaff (but never “drink”) a potion every so often. A player’s agency comes more from the set-up to combat through having a much more equipment-driven character than, say, a wizard. It is compelling to collect and use equipment, but a warrior really ought to have something to do in combat aside from clicking “attack”.
But this is a known problem, and it has been dealt before, and cleverly.
I must mention Blizzard’s evolving solutions to the problem: The Diablo 1 warrior had barely anything to do but hit ‘attack’, quaff potions, and collect loot. Diablo 2 gave the Barbarian class piles of both passive and spell-like skills which used mana as a limiting resource (though perhaps mana is thematically inconsistent for the class). Titan Quest did similarly, and with mana. Now take World of Warcraft as an example – it’s been quite some time since I’ve played, but from what I recall, Warriors build up and use “rage” to execute special attacks along with using skills that use timed cool-down periods per-skill as a limiting factor. Or maybe it was Rogues that build up skill to do neat attacks. Regardless, there were also talent trees which gave specialized skills, attacks, etc – The latest D&D even seems to have taken up MMO-influenced abilities for warrior-type classes with gusto.
The necessity of giving pure-combat classes more gameplay/agency has generally been recognized so, in all, games give warrior characters many more choices to make than they once did. One hopes that these are always interesting and meaningful choices, of course.
Dredmor takes up a few approaches to giving warriors the love they deserve: Naturally, we have piles upon piles of ridiculous items to wield, consume, quaff, and wear upon one’s head and/or other extremities. Said items shall have sundry absurd powers and unique odours. We are also giving the warrior a number of pre-combat passive specialization skills and silly special abilities along with in-combat spell-like combat powers.
Between the item collecting, booze drinking, weapon swinging, carrot hunting, area attacking, face mashing, health stealing, and hat wearing, if you really can’t find enough to do as a warrior, you can always effectively multiclass because Dredmor is an entirely skill based game (read: no classes) and is made to be friendly toward combinations of skills across class archetypes.
Edit: Epyon, in a comment, makes me think of a great conclusion for this post:
What would you, dear reader, do to make the Warrior an interesting class to play?
Try Berserk! roguelike for one solution. It’s pure warrior combat, yet plays like tactical chess ;]
Hey, I went and tried it out – very interesting. And it’s very interesting that we’ve actually got most of the mechanics Berserk! has going on. Well, we have them all in theory, if not necessarily all in effective practice. Ahem. I don’t think we have special attacks that move the player yet though, like their jump attack. I think it’d be good to take up some of these…
I really like the focus on the tile position of a player vs. enemies as a tactical consideration which Berserk! features – using the tile grid as a tactical field has been an imperative for this whole round of iteration on Dredmor.
Thanks for the suggestion! (And, even further, Berserk! makes me want to integrate thrown/crossbow weapons/skills better as complementary to melee. Hmm…)
This is more of a general suggestion than warrior specific but I’ve always loved games where items had uses. Say you could invoke a sword to specially shock and stun an enemy, or invoke boots to kick, stuff like that. It adds diversity and excitement to loot you find, IMHO. I don’t know if it’s anything like what you’re planning on doing but it sure does bring variation.
BTW.. I really love that art. Good job.
That’s a good point which relates to another design point I’ve been kicking around – it’s a matter of state-vs-stat based differences. Like, you could have a sword that causes poisoning and a sword that stuns an enemy versus a sword that does 2-14 damage with a 2% chance to crit and a sword that does 3-12 damage with a 3% chance of crit.
Hmm, how to describe this; I recall making a somewhat mean-spirited reference to the “Brad Wardell School of Design” as a reference to Elemental: War of Magic (and previous Stardock game designs) using stat percentage boosts, numerical iterations to differentiate spells/items/structure rather than some kind of state change differences. I should say, the effect was that the lack of really meaningful differences between game elements was rather boring.
Take as a counterexample how Dominions 3 handles injury to units – yes, they have hitpoints, but units can gain “afflictions” like ‘crippled’ [reduces movement] or ‘lost an eye’ [reduces accuracy] to add state-based flavor to what would otherwise be a rather sterile stat-based approach to hitpoints.
Or better yet, Starcraft is a prime example: each of the three sides plays differently because their difference is much greater than the Age of Empires sort of “+15% movement to Korean villagers” or whatever. — and this gets right back to why the races in Elemental: War of Magic failed to evoke the interest of the races in Master of Magic.
… I should turn this into a post and actually apply it to Dredmor.
… Oh, and glad you like the art, thanks! 😀
So from what I gather , with that kind of system it’s sort of trying to mix classic rpg itemization with classic roguelike feel as well? That’s something I greatly would enjoy, for sure.
I agree with you that games which only either give you small increments or stats that you don’t care about make for a very boring loot system. Now, other than Diablo (which I’m sure you’ve played) and its clones, there’s only one other rpg I’ve played with a truly random loot system. It’s called Divinity 2: The Dragon Knight Saga. Pretty recent game in fact. It’s quite fun as well. But essentially, every equipment item was randomized (except uniques and set items) like this:
Base damage
Magic damage
stats
enchantment
charm slot(s)
random effect
Enchantment was a random propriety, like a stat boost, or more damage, armor, etc.
Charms are like diablo
And every item had a random effect. whether a certain chance to shock an enemy on touch, a higher crit %, a chance to have a buff, etc.
Now obviously those can’t all be applied to roguelikes but I definitely liked the concept. Made you feel like you had powerful items, even if they weren’t. Made you feel *yay treasure*. I’d suggest you play it if you have time.
On a final note, how do you feel on charms as loot, that you’d be able to equip on some items? perhaps on artifacts only.
To be honest, I’m still hashing out how items will work – we’ve just got some nice features in for modifying all sorts of primary and secondary stats from the item definitions, so I can now have weapons fit into niche playstyles. Someone (me) just has to iterate through the xml again and come up with a system for everything to operate on. That’ll definitely take more iteration with testing.
Procedural generation is a cornerstone of Dredmor, but I don’t want to randomize /everything/, of course. I feel it’s important that players have the ability to learn something solid about how to deal with the environment they’re exploring, but we /do/ certainly have crazy random artifacts. Our debugging artifact-dispenser makes lovely artifacts with the downside that everything it creates smells like fish, for instance.
Oh yeah, going off what you said, I loved the socketed gems and things in Diablo 2! We don’t reference that system directly (yet), but we are playing around with crafting which allows one to forge weapon enhancements (“Your mace menaces with spikes of uranium.”). The system is somewhat ill-defined at present however. More on that when we get to it — crafting skills are a subsection of Rogue skills (just because) and that’s scheduled for after we finish the Warrior skill and basic combat mechanics revision pass.
So I’m not even sure how it’ll all look in the end because things are still fluid (and I could harass Nicholas to add yet more features to the item system if it becomes necessary), but at the least I very much appreciate your input. I’m really interested in people’s ideas and expectations, both from potential player’s perspective and from fellow game designers 🙂
[I don’t have any time at all, but I’ll have to at least read up on Divinity 2…]
Sounds good to me, and I have to thank you for all the open-ness and spending the time to reply to people. You guys rule. And the crafting part sounds very interesting. I’ll definitely keep bugging you guys as time goes, and keep me in mind for beta testing when you get that far.