User blog:Winterwolf7/Dragons, dragons and dragons of Redemption

Redemption has pretty consistently revolved around dragons.

In the beginning...
If you look back at the very early history of the game, it was true even then. Our MUD came from those who loved Moosehead SLED. On Moosehead dragons also existed. However most of the time I played there they were seen as weak. On MHS, dragons were all resistant to blunt and vulnerable to piercing. Any piercing weapons and especially thieves utterly destroyed them. Still, I played as Morrigan the dragon cleric in those days. There were no dragon colors, and breath weapons were a spell that cost several hundred mana and rarely used.

The immortals who left MHS and founded Redemption really liked dragons and made them an integral part of the game from the start. They were still pretty vanilla though. You started as a hatchling, advanced to level 10 and got a random color. All that you got was flying and your breath weapon and associated resists and vulns. Breath weapons could be used for free, but only 3 times and slowly recharged. Dragonslayer weapons existed and were even more devastating than piercing was on MHS, just less prevalent, and you had to choose between a DPS weapon like a dslayer and a weapon like the ceremonial dagger was horrible to battle against with all the status effects.

Even among the dragon colors there was disagreement. Many people viewed green dragons as the worst because of the existence of chain lightning. You should have heard Chain complain about it. Blue dragons and white dragons could also be hurt by acid blast and flamestrike, which were widely available to many classes. One contributing reason for Samantha being such a devastating and impossible to defeat cleric is that she was a black dragon and at that point, there was no way to hurt them with poison. So to even things out, Litazia added pyroblast, ice bolt and blast of rot, so that all dragons had equivalent vulnerabilities.

This actually never made much sense to me, because the same classes with acid blast now had all the spells, leading to no distinction between spells or dragon colors. Any dragon vs any mage/invoker turns out the same. This is pretty bad design.

So now all the dragons had pretty equivalent weaknesses. Slowly people started to think that other races offered more. Bash, berserk and sneak were all seen as more useful than the very limited use breath weapon. Consider that Breath is slow, and most of the base races were not vulnerable to any of the damage types. Why use acid breath when I can cast acid blast twice? Why be a dragon at all and be vulnerable to acid blast when you play as something else?

People whined and complained and so even the non-dragon races started to each have vulnerabilities. Pretty soon, even elves, which were almost unplayable because their hp was so low, were walking around with a physical vulnerability. Dwarves near immunity to magic (even their own spells fizzled when cast on themselves 50% of the time) was removed and dwarves even got a spell vulnerability… one of the biggest contradictions in the design of the game.

Pretty soon Dominia was added. Trolls, slivers and gargoyles were created, each with exploitable vulnerabilities.

The tides turns...
Around this time things started to power creep upwards for dragons. All of the newer races had stat problems that made people hesitate to play them when they could play a dragon with much better stats and no increase in vulnerabilities. Another nail in the coffin was when remorts were added. An often overlooked skill really turns the tide against non-dragons races and that’s tail attack. Suddenly a dragon mage or cleric has as many attacks per round as a non-dragon ranger or paladin. It’s hard to compete with a completely free DPS boost like that and none of the other races have anything similar.

To make them more different from each other, each dragon color also had a special unique skill created for it as well, many of which are very powerful. At the same time, none of the other races got new abilities.

What was once their remort penalty, not being able to equip gear in several slots, was even revised and turned into an advantage, granting dragons more AC and DAM than any other race can get in those slots.

Many of the other races have fairly crippling remort penalties. Sun blindness? Slowed by the rain? Dragons don’t have to contend with being randomly afflicted. Although those penalties make the races interesting and unique, they also have the side effect of making them strictly worse than dragons.

The defense always raised is that are dragonslayer weapons are a thing. They are kind of a thing, but there are elemental weapons of every other noun too. Bonuses are tallied in such a way to avoid stacking beyond a certain point, leading to dslayers being only marginally better than other options. And of course, the entire problem with dslayers is that they are weapons, which for the most part are easily disarmed or detonated which nearly every class can do… and very few characters can disarm better than dragons can. If you ever tried to fight Shadowsbane, good luck keeping your weapon in your hand for more than maybe 3 rounds of the battle.

Today and possible ways forward...
Much later in the history of game, metallic were added. I don’t feel that really made any of the problems worse, they just added more choices and perhaps a few things that need to be rebalanced. One of the side effects of metallic though, is that now fully half of the playable races on Redemption are dragons. Some of them are even designed to prey on the non-dragon races. Iron shard breath? Water breath? Nova? These all really punish people for playing non-dragons when they really didn’t need to.

All of this being said, I don’t have any plans to globally weaken dragons directly. I think they are cool, interesting, varied and powerful. They are fun to play. I would rather see some adjustments that help non-dragons compete. Some fairly simple ideas, that after reading this, maybe you’ll understand are simple a step back rather than a step forwards.

I suggest that most of the non-dragons races lose vulns. I suggest dwarves return to being sturdy and magic resistant. It’s not like they have much else going for them, given their stats. I suggest that elves having 500 less hp than dragons is enough of a penalty without giving iron weapons a chance to widen the gap even further.

<p class="MsoNormal">I am also considering the option of only allowing non-dragons to wield dragonslayer weapons, which puts dragons on an even footing with each other, but helps the other races catch up a bit in terms of DPS and overcoming the draconian stat advantages.

<p class="MsoNormal">I’m open to any other thoughts and suggestions, and I hope this entry helped you understand the history of how things got to where they are today through the process of power creep.