Thread by @heroofhyla

So what I wound up doing is splitting inherent power from weapon power, and the same for defense. 4 stats:
- weapon
- might
- armor
- toughness

The damage formula I devised for basic attacks is 4 * a.might * (a.weapon - b.armor)/b.toughness.
#rpgmakermz #rpgmaker

I chose curves for might, weapon power, and target damage-per-round for my "ideal character" arbitrarily. Then I also chose arbitrarily that a character with a weapon 4 levels out-dated should do about 40% as much damage as a properly-equipped one.

With two datapoints for damage at a particular level (well-equipped, poorly equipped), i was able to algebraically solve for the ideal armor and toughness of an enemy in order to reach a target damage-per-turn on it.

I was able to do the same in reverse to calculate enemy weapon and might values by using the ideal character's HP, expected incoming damage-per-round, armor, and toughness, along with a "armor that's 4 levels outdated should block half as much damage" target.

Now that covered my ideal character, but how do I keep my other folks in line? For them, I provided scale factors to the ideal character's damage-per-round, armor, toughness, HP, and survival targets. So my striker character targets 1.3x damage-per-turn with a 1.1x might score.

Naturally, we can algebraically solve what the weapon power must be for that striker given everything else. And the same goes for the other stats (armor is a bit backwards in that I'm providing the armor multiplier and calculating toughness, instead of vice versa).

Overall, I'm pretty happy with it except for some wonk in the shape of the derived curves - my character with heavy armor would actually have his toughness start *decreasing* at some point, to maintain the target survivability. Past my level cap tho so it's not a big deal.

Okay it's still way too easy to get your butt kicked with very slightly outdated gear lmao