[Hajo]

I'm currently building a small dungeon crawl module for Sonnheim and I again face a problem that always comes at a certain point: Items need to get attributes. Weapons do damage, armor has defense, most things are worth more or less of the games currency.

Starting at zero, I just don't know how to set up my items properly.

I mean, for example:

- A cloth shirt
- A leather jacket
- A soft leather armor
- A padded leather armor
- A chain mail
- A torso plate

Basically these go up in defensive value. And they go up in monetary value. But where to start? And what relations should be between them, I mean, is a torso plate worth as much money as 1000 shirts? Or rather only 100?

Particularly the monetary value bugs me. In that dungeon crawl module there will also be things like gems, and patterns/designs/recipes for crafting other items. I assume a recipe should be rather valuable? A gem most likely, too.

If you make a new game, how do you start? I mean, how do you work out the initial attribute set of your items. So far I more or less randomly chose numbers that "looked good" to me, and adjusted them later based on feedback from players, if actually someone played my games and told me about their findings.

[cowgod]

I would say that each piece of armor needs to be at least 30% better than the previous piece of armor or no one will bother with it.

The monetary value generally depends upon the game. I would go with something like (base cost) * (armor's defense value)^2. It has to be something higher than linear because you generally gain more gold and equipment as the game progresses.

And suits of armor with special defense types or enchantments would cost more.

An alternate method is to just make the armor available only through accomplishing quests, but that takes some of the fun out of the game.

[Captain Vimes]

Heh, I would just do the slap-armor-values-together thing, but if I had to think about it, I would start with something like this:

Cloth defense = 1

Okay, going from there, what do we do? The next level up is probably something like

Leather defense = 2

So far, so good. By the time the player finds this armor, they'll still be at a really low level, so the extra 1 defense will really make leather armor good. But the higher the character's level, the more you need to add in defense for each armor level that you go up - wow, I just confused myself.

Err... let's work on that explanation.

Players at level 1-5 are fighting things like Rats and Goblins - basic RPG enemies with low attack values. Let's assume that Rats are the weakest (in terms of attack) enemies in the game. They have an attack of 1. Goblins are the next level up, with an attack of 2.
Wearing cloth (defense 1) is fine for fighting Rats, and the PCs can hold their own against Goblins, but they'll be severely wounded. Finding leather (defense 2) fixes that, so leather armor is extremely valuable at low levels (it's only worth a few gold, but the player only has a few gold, so they're pretty rare at lower levels, see?).
Now, at higher levels, let's say the characters are wearing full plate (defense 5). Now the range of enemies includes more powerful ones. The most common enemy (Slime, attack 5) still gives the characters a challenge because, while it's the weakest and most common enemy, it's more powerful than the weakest and most common enemies at the beginning of the game. So full plate armor ceases to be worth as much and becomes the equivalent of cloth. Then the equivalent of Goblin (except now it's probably something like a Werewolf) has attack 8, because at higher levels the player has to have more of a challenge. Therefore the difference in power levels between enemies increases the higher level the player is.

Maybe that didn't help so much. What I'm saying is that armor defense has to increase exponentially, not linearly... linearely? Lininearerly?
Whatever. Price and power of armor increases exponentially, but the needs and resources of the players increase at such a rate that it sorts itself out. The players are always looking for the next level of armor. Just make sure that you don't dole out incredibly high amounts of treasure and let the PCs get to where they're cutting up those Rats with +42 Swords of Pwning.
_________________
"Sometimes it is better to light a flamethrower than to curse the darkness."
- Terry Pratchett

[RedSlash]

For an MMORPG?

Maybe the monetary value could be based on how long it would take a player to gain the amount gold required to purchase the item when fighting in an area with the appropriate leveling experience for that item.

So for example, for a cloth shirt, you may say you want it to be worth 1 hour of game play in a Lv.1 field. So if I takes 1 hour to acquire 70 gold, then the cloth shirt should be worth ~70g ± adjustments (such as rarity, etc..).

[Hajo]

Right now the cloth shirt seems to the cheapest and simplest item in my list. I think I'll give it a value of "10" assuming I'll later also add items that are worth even less.

From this I'll try to measure other items in comparison, and use this as a cornerstone. Once more items have values I'll get a better "grid" of cornerstones to fit items in.

Most likely there will be a lot of adjusting during alpha and beta testing this way.

For the defense values, I want the scale to be roughly starting with single points, and sum up to about 100 for a fully equipped character with good armor. So for an individual piece of armor the range will be about 1...20 points.