Kerkerkruip design journal #6: silver weapons

Monsters and the undead

In Kerkerkruip, regular monsters are not only the main obstacles, but also the main opportunities: you gain powers by killing them, and absorbing their souls is the only way of healing. (If you kill a regular monster, you immediately regain all your health.)

This means that having more low-level monsters in the dungeon actually makes the game easier, because you can retreat from a difficult boss fight in order to kill a lowly monster and regain your health. But in general we want additional monsters to make the game harder, especially if they are generated because the player tried something risky, like opening that sarcophagus that may or may not contain treasure... and may or may not contain a monster. Therefore, we have soulless monsters which grant neither powers nor healing; and the most important class of those are the undead.

Undead not having souls makes sense and is easy to remember, and it is also easy for the player to recognise new monsters as undead, even though they might vary as wildly as vampires, mummies and liches. (None of whom are in the game right now, by the way. I only have one lonely stock skeleton in order to test things.)

Silver weapons - resistances and vulnerabilities

Having made undead, the urge to make a kind of weapon that is especially good against undead came to me immediately, and I coded up the silver property. Silver weapons deal less damage to non-undead, but significantly more damage to undead. Diversifying loot -- great idea! Right?

Wrong. As Ascii Dreams has told us long ago, there is something deeply wrong with the common system of resistances and vulnerabilities, where some monsters take more or less damage from weapons or spell of a certain type. It mostly devolves into finding out once what the best type of weapon/spell is to use against enemy X, and then using that type in the future. It gives us a one time 'puzzle', not a recurring strategic or tactical decision. Undead? Use silver. Boring.

Now I guess there is some value in simply diversifying loot, since it gives the player more things to look forward to, and more moments to relish. But resistances are about the worst way to accomplish this, as they finally boil down to a simple question of luck: if you do find a silver weapon, undead will be easier than in the average game; if you do not, they will be harder. There is nothing interesting about it.

Alchemy to the rescue

But what if you never give the player a silver weapon, but you do give him a means to turn a normal weapon into a silver weapon, permanently? In effect, this means ruining a weapon for normal combat, while making it better for combat against the undead. Is there a weapon you want to sacrifice for this purpose? If so, which weapon?

In the right circumstances, these can be interesting choices. They are not interesting if you carry around fifty almost identical weapons, because in that case, you are not sacrificing anything when you turn one of them into a dedicated anti-undead weapon. But in Kerkerkruip, an average playthrough should yield maybe three or four weapons, each with their own distinctive advantaged and disadvantages, useful against different foes and in different circumstances. Deciding to turn one of them into a silver weapon, less useful in normal combat, should be a relatively tough decision. And tough decisions is what we are looking for.

Thus was born the unguentum argenti, which I hope is Latin for "salve of silver", which can turn iron weapons into silver weapons. For this to be tactically interesting, all of the following conditions must be met:

• At any time, a player will have relatively few weapons, all of which might be useful in the future. (Or if a weapon will not be useful in the future, it will not be useful against the undead either.)
• The player does not find silver weapons, but must actively sacrifice a normal weapon.
• Turning a weapon into silver must be permanent and non-reversible, otherwise the decision becomes a no-brainer.

If at any time one of these conditions will cease to be true, I'll have to rethink the mechanic.

Towards generality

Thereis always the temptation to write code for the special case, rather than to write code for the general case, which might become useful later on. In Kerkerkruip I try to resist this temptation as often as possible, but in the case of silver weapons I succumbed to it. I just made a silver property which only weapons can have, and made a standard message for using the unguentum on anything that was not a weapon.

And then I though: but what if the player tries to apply the salve to an iron monster, of which I already have two in the game? Wouldn't it be lame if this did nothing? Wouldn't it be cool if by this (incredibly risky) action you could actually weaken those iron monsters? Asking the questions was answering them, so I started anew, and coded a more general materials system.

Now to think up some more good uses for it...