Flat damage reduction is very hard to implement together with rising difficulty. High AC gives invunerability to the player and on the flip side low AC feels to the player as if any encounter is deadly if they had bad luck at getting better armor.
If you plan any sort of rising difficulty you should not use flat damage reduction. Please look at where it is used in successfull mainstream games:
In Starcraft 2 high armor would be 2. Yes just two points is enough to describe a unit as having high armor value. Even most special units and heroes have 0 or only 1 point of armor. 3 is reversed for very hard/unfair units.
In D&D there are very few flat damage reducing abilities. The most accessible is “Heavy Armor Mastery” that give 2 points.
If you do not want to use a chance system for determining successfull attacks you could instead use the “Fire Emblem” system with different weapons do different damage to each other. But with spin for monster fighting.
Another system that might be usefull is a stance based system like in “Renowned Explorers: International Society” where the type of attacks performed changes your own stance to that type making such attacks stronger but changing the vunerability to other attacks as well.
I see now, many thanks. I want to add this system but I understand the current way it works is not optimal, I’ll reconsider the AC implementation and will explore other options (I’m really interested in the Wizardry approach).
In the Wizardry games, AC is a value that determines the chances of the enemy to attack you. The lower your AC is, the less chance the enemy has to deal damage to you. It’s a little confusing at first because “more” AC is actually bad in this system, but could fit well into the game.
Kind of. The heavier your armor is, the lower your AC is and you’re more likely to not receive damage from the enemy, but heavy gear will need “minimum weight” to be equipped and if you have grown too big, your AC will get naturally affected by that.
They have some great praise, and have some notable crossovers; most people have heard of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, but other entries include Chocobo’s Mystery Dungeon (Final Fantasy), Torneko’s Mystery Dungeon (Dragon Quest), and Shiren The Wanderer (Chunsoft’s Original IP).
They have randomly generated dungeons and have a lot of replayability due to their roguelike structure of gameplay, which involves entering said dungeons, gathering items, armor, treasure and weapons, combatting enemies and using the out-of-dungeon resources to plan ahead and prepare for failure (which you WILL do a lot).
I brought up the topic because I felt that the dungeon-crawling game you’re making has some similarity with the Mystery Dungeon series, and as such could be helped by taking a page out of their book (with some HEAVY edits, of course ).
For example, a shared event between many of the games is the “monster house”: a rare event where the player may encounter a room COMPLETELY stuffed with enemies, which spelled the end of many unprepared players. I was thinking about your project and the monster house came to mind, but then I thought “I don’t think that would work, since all combat we’ve seen is single target-only, and multiple monsters would bring gameplay to a crawl”. Then I thought that since this was a weight-gain centered game, how about we replace all the monsters with FOOD. And for good measure, make the room a banquet hall for an explanation.
Sorry for ranting so long, but I just wanted to give you an idea to help with your game, but I hope my response was informative and helpful. (By the way, YES I have played one of them, and YES they are very good. Tough as nails though.)
).