Daggerfall Mechanics thread: Volunteers welcome

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Jay_H
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Re: Daggerfall Mechanics thread: Volunteers welcome

Post by Jay_H »

Interesting. I've never noticed such a difference myself, and it isn't documented anywhere in the game, so thanks for the info. I'll include it in testing.

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Arl
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Re: Daggerfall Mechanics thread: Volunteers welcome

Post by Arl »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
Narf the Mouse wrote:Having fought skeletal warriors with long blades, and lately, with blunt weapons, I'm fairly sure that the damage range specified by the weapon isn't all there is to it; skelys seem to die quite a bit faster to blunt weapons, while rats and bats seem to live longer.
It's been long since I actually played Daggerfall seriously, but I remember that my impression was the same: blunt better for skeletons, blades better for bats and rats.

Make sense, smashing a skeleton with a mace can be more effective than swinging a blade against it. After all they are undead foes, there's no flesh to cut, and they carry bucklers.
My Deviantart page, I have some Daggerfall stuff in there.

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Interkarma
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Re: Daggerfall Mechanics thread: Volunteers welcome

Post by Interkarma »

Daggerfall Chronicles makes mention of this on page 141 against the entry for skeletal warrior: "Edged weapons inflict 1/2 damage". Although I was never really sure if this was actually implemented in game or not.

It's a bit of a throwback to pen & paper RPGs like D&D where blunt weapons were more effective against skeletal foes. A nice touch, as edged weapons will just scrape off bone and thrusting weapons might get tangled in the rib cage. Whereas a blunt weapon smashes those bones to dust.

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Jay_H
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Re: Daggerfall Mechanics thread: Volunteers welcome

Post by Jay_H »

Interkarma wrote:Daggerfall Chronicles makes mention of this on page 141 against the entry for skeletal warrior: "Edged weapons inflict 1/2 damage". Although I was never really sure if this was actually implemented in game or not.

It's a bit of a throwback to pen & paper RPGs like D&D where blunt weapons were more effective against skeletal foes. A nice touch, as edged weapons will just scrape off bone and thrusting weapons might get tangled in the rib cage. Whereas a blunt weapon smashes those bones to dust.
Excellent. I'm actually a bit surprised, since I thought TES was made without major inspiration from D&D. It seems like everyone took some ideas from it in one form or another.

By the way, I noticed the recent poll on your twitter account. I'm sure you're already planning on doing this, but feel free to let us know what we can do to help with quests when you get there.

Narf the Mouse
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Re: Daggerfall Mechanics thread: Volunteers welcome

Post by Narf the Mouse »

Jay_H wrote:Excellent. I'm actually a bit surprised, since I thought TES was made without major inspiration from D&D. It seems like everyone took some ideas from it in one form or another.

By the way, I noticed the recent poll on your twitter account. I'm sure you're already planning on doing this, but feel free to let us know what we can do to help with quests when you get there.
I can't source the quote, since I read it years ago; supposedly, the Elder Scrolls started life as a house rule'd D&D campaign.

...Which is also, from what I've read, the source of a number of successful tabletop RPGs of the 70s and 80s. Someone publishing their extensive house-rules, that is.
Previous experience tells me it's very easy to misunderstand the tone, intent, or meaning of what I've posted. If you have questions, ask.

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Jay_H
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Re: Daggerfall Mechanics thread: Volunteers welcome

Post by Jay_H »

Just for my own curiosity, I stopped by a nearby weapon store and picked up an iron quarterstaff and an iron shortsword, both with 0-6 damage. I set the weapon skills to 100 and strength to 50, and went to Privateer's Hold to practice on the skeleton. I've attached a save file to this post if anyone else wanted to verify it.

Quarterstaff: 27 hits needed
Short Sword: 59 hits needed

With the short sword, less than 1 out of 5 attacks were successful. In one instance, 10 attacks in a row were ineffective. I had no idea this had such an effect on to-hit with skeletons. The quarterstaff took like 50 hits more or less to score 27 successes, but the Short Sword was well past 200.

I'm imagining many, many of those attempts were dropped to zero damage through the skeleton's armor rating combined with the edged damage reduction. For example, if I roll a 2, the damage could have been 2(/2)+(-1), granting a 0; or if it were the other way around, it would have been (2+(-1))/2, granting a zero if Daggerfall rounds down. That's assuming the skeleton only reduces damage by 1 per hit, which it probably doesn't. This is proof of concept enough for me, and actually could perhaps illuminate more about the combat formulas.

Now I understand why so many players have complained about "that impossible skeleton in the first dungeon."
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Jay_H
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Re: Daggerfall Mechanics thread: Volunteers welcome

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Still not in the mood to return to combat testing, I decided to go back to the shops a little bit. The mystery thickens, and it's quite viscous now. The good news is that the shops all vary by day uniformly, as shown in the Whitefort testing I've added, so incense and rusty stores still matter as much as they ever have. The bad news is that the variation is random or semi-random. Every attempt in each respective day was made at the same hour, so time of day isn't a variable here. For the Day 1 variations, I left town and came back to see if town boundaries determined price changes; they don't. For the Day 2 variations, I used a Groundhog Day method, where I passed a single day traveling to various locations. The results are odd but not as variable as I expected. In this case, the numbers varied by about 2% up or 2% down, but they varied consistently between the same two values. It sounds like each day has two values it can choose from at random.

If anyone wants to test this more they're welcome to, but I've seen about as much as I can from a testing perspective. I only hope something is available in memory that clearly establishes the daily value.
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Interkarma
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Re: Daggerfall Mechanics thread: Volunteers welcome

Post by Interkarma »

Jay_H wrote: By the way, I noticed the recent poll on your twitter account. I'm sure you're already planning on doing this, but feel free to let us know what we can do to help with quests when you get there.
Cheers mate. Quests are a huge subject and I'll be taking in small bites to make the job manageable. Will outline more after 0.3 drops in a few weeks.
Jay_H wrote:Just for my own curiosity, I stopped by a nearby weapon store and picked up an iron quarterstaff and an iron shortsword, both with 0-6 damage. I set the weapon skills to 100 and strength to 50, and went to Privateer's Hold to practice on the skeleton. I've attached a save file to this post if anyone else wanted to verify it.

Quarterstaff: 27 hits needed
Short Sword: 59 hits needed
That's good evidence right there. Great to know this is actually in the game. I'll need to make sure I put it in at some point as well. :)
Narf the Mouse wrote: I can't source the quote, since I read it years ago; supposedly, the Elder Scrolls started life as a house rule'd D&D campaign.
I've read that also, but can't recall from where.

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Jay_H
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Re: Daggerfall Mechanics thread: Volunteers welcome

Post by Jay_H »

I did some more combat testing. I want to test a few other features like whether Speed alters to-hit, and maybe get more proper testing for some of the statistical anomalies, but for the most part I think what we have is sufficient to determine how much each tested component matters. It's less than I expected to test, but it's because it's a grinding effort and I think it'll be redundant soon. The specific numbers are in the attached spreadsheet.

I feel safe in saying the following:

Weapon skills overwhelmingly determine hit rate.
Strength between 1 and 50 negatively alters hit rate. Strength between 50 and 100 does not alter hit rate.
Agility is inconclusive but appears to have no impact on to-hit.
Adrenaline Rush has no impact on to-hit.
Bonus to Hit [TYPE] has no impact on to-hit.
Phobia has no impact on to-hit.
Weapon Expertise has no impact on to-hit.
Athleticism has no impact on to-hit.

There are some of these that I want to revisit in the future since there are still anomalous circumstances to them, but I'm stopping here on general to-hit testing. This was thankfully more stable than I expected; if Daggerfall determined hit success through a dice roll or something, we could look at any variety of numbers (or maybe it does and the effect is minimized in some way). I've added a new table that compares page 2 to page 1, and the numbers vary little.

Damage, the character's evasion rate, and damage reduction via armor are still to be investigated, so there's no leaving this forest yet. But I believe they will require less effort than what's been done until now.

I've also added a third page that color-codes the major impacts on to-hit, as a quick reference.
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Jay_H
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Re: Daggerfall Mechanics thread: Volunteers welcome

Post by Jay_H »

Just to give a status on this thread, I'm pausing any work on it in general. I'll be watching the Work Requests and other forums to see what's needed by developers at any given time. There's a risk of me focusing too much on something that's a long ways into the future and getting tired of testing right when it's most needed, so I'll be going with an "on demand" approach now.

With that said, I'm leaving all the information here as is, and I really do say this thread's been a fantastic beginning into the work of deciphering Daggerfall with everyone's help.

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