MedievaLands Forums

I briefly touched on this on Zane's post regarding how to make Yserbius more engaging, but I thought I'd write about it here in a little more depth.

What I think would benefit Yserbius (and Twinion, surely) would be a type system where enemies, weapons and spells have different strengths and weaknesses. Here are a few examples of what I mean:

Your party is fighting a group of enemies, including a wolf and a skeleton.

The skeleton, being made of bones with no flesh to speak of, is a little more resistant to bladed weapons like swords and katanas but much weaker against blunt weapons like clubs or nunchuks. Meanwhile, arrows and bolts won't do much damage and are hard to land.

The wolf on the other hand has no real innate strengths, perhaps its warm fur protects it somewhat from cold attacks such as Hail, but is more susceptible to burning from a Fireball.

So, if we were to categorize weapons into damage types:

Blunt Weapons - Clubs, hammers, maces, staves...

Piercing Weapons - Spears, bows, crossbows, rapiers...

Slashing Weapons - Axes, swords, halberds, knives...

We could categorize some enemies into types as well:

Beasts (--Fire, -Piercing, +Wind, +Cold) / Wolves, panthers, birds, bats...

Lizards (-Slashing, --Piercing, +Cold, +Wind, +Blunt) / Snakes, lizardmen...

Undead (-Fire, --Blunt, +Slashing, ++Piercing, ++Cold) / Zombies, skeletons...

Humanoid (No real weaknesses or strengths) / Kobolds, goblins, giants...

Magical (-Slashing, -Blunt, -Piercing, +Fire, +Cold, +Wind) / Beholders, mimics...

For "playable race encounters", you could likely use the Humanoid setup above. An alternate but more difficult system to create would be to make each individual enemy have different strengths and weaknesses, which would be even better but a lot, lot more work to accomplish.

What do you guys think?