Ironworks Gaming Forum - View Single Post - A Rough Numerical Guide to Party Creation

NobleNick · 05-02-2005, 06:08 PM

Aerich,

Excellent thoughts. This would be a neat metric to figure out just how powerful and balanced a party was. (Are you sure you want to go into law? You might be repressing an engineering drive: and that's not healthy!)

I'd like to pursue this, but don't have the time, today. Meanwhile, several thoughts struck me. Here's my two cents worth:

1.) To be really useful, the metric should accurately reflect how easily a given party could advance through the game.

2.) The total of the weights, per character, should not be constrained; but each weight for each ability should be pro-rated against the ideal for a character rolled and developed to get the best possible score in that ability.

3.) I wouldn't constrain the scoring based on how much time a PC spends with the skill. For example: A situation might come when you need lots of Cleric power. The fact that your Fighter/Cleric spends most of his time bashing skulls and not using his excellent spells has no effect on his utility in the situation where he can lend a healing hand.

4.) The abilities should be compared for *PARTIES* of characters with the same total PARTY expo, since this, negating the effects of camping, roughly represents how far a party has advanced in the game and therefore how tough their opposition is). Perhaps, in keeping with the system you introduced, assigning a "1.0" to the ability level of a character in a 6-character party who is sacrificing all to perfect that trait. Thus, each character in a 4-PC party with the same total expo (i.e., the party has advanced to the same point in the game), will have 150% of the EXPO of the 6-PC party character. This might well mean that a member of the 4-PC party would have an ability score greater than 1.0.

Thanks for the invitation to engage in armchair number crunching.

--------------------
What's a party,
without a song?
Bards ROCK!
Party On!!

05-02-2005, 06:08 PM	#3
NobleNick Quintesson Join Date: February 5, 2002 Location: Huntsville, AL, USA Age: 65 Posts: 1,045	Aerich, Excellent thoughts. This would be a neat metric to figure out just how powerful and balanced a party was. (Are you sure you want to go into law? You might be repressing an engineering drive: and that's not healthy!) I'd like to pursue this, but don't have the time, today. Meanwhile, several thoughts struck me. Here's my two cents worth: 1.) To be really useful, the metric should accurately reflect how easily a given party could advance through the game. 2.) The total of the weights, per character, should not be constrained; but each weight for each ability should be pro-rated against the ideal for a character rolled and developed to get the best possible score in that ability. 3.) I wouldn't constrain the scoring based on how much time a PC spends with the skill. For example: A situation might come when you need lots of Cleric power. The fact that your Fighter/Cleric spends most of his time bashing skulls and not using his excellent spells has no effect on his utility in the situation where he can lend a healing hand. 4.) The abilities should be compared for PARTIES of characters with the same total PARTY expo, since this, negating the effects of camping, roughly represents how far a party has advanced in the game and therefore how tough their opposition is). Perhaps, in keeping with the system you introduced, assigning a "1.0" to the ability level of a character in a 6-character party who is sacrificing all to perfect that trait. Thus, each character in a 4-PC party with the same total expo (i.e., the party has advanced to the same point in the game), will have 150% of the EXPO of the 6-PC party character. This might well mean that a member of the 4-PC party would have an ability score greater than 1.0. Thanks for the invitation to engage in armchair number crunching. -------------------- What's a party, without a song? Bards ROCK! Party On!!