the way items work in mausritter
weve been playing mausritter which is one of these ones where your character is largely defined by what items they can carry.
you have a number of slots, weapons and spells and tools and stuff take up slots, status effects also take up slots. if you haven’t got a spare slot for a status effect i think you have to drop something to pick it up. if you want to bring home loot from the adventure you sort of have to bring fewer abilities. you can bring hirelings, which gives you more slots, but you have to keep the hirelings alive if you want to bring that stuff home.
um, so this is a very literal interpretation of the idea that you have to have a limit on the complexity of player characters - you have one resource and it has a explicit limit and you can spend that on any of the things that there are but theres no obvious way to exceed the limit without a tradeoff.
you could extend this so that all of the kinds of abilities you have in dnd, the barbarian rage and whatever, are items that can fill slots in this kind of system
the opposite idea of that
is like, you can have an endless list of abilities that keeps getting longer every time you pick up another item, learn new spells, or level up, and nothing ever expends, your guy keeps getting more and more complex, maybe you can keep track of all the stuff and maybe you cant. i think this is also a fun guy to play, its just like, a different style. if youre the kind of player who has to always do the best thing on your turn, maybe this style means your turn gets really long.
i think the advantage of this style is if you find something that seems cool to use on the first adventure, bring it on every adventure after that, but never use it, at least there’s no opportunity cost to bring it. and maybe it will pay off eventually. it’s fun to win with the thing the dm forgot you had.
but then the opposite idea of that, again, is basically steez control
like where each guy has a particular steez, the thing that they are good at, that is their thing. this is the design goal that allows for the crunch and cruft of late dnd - with classes and subclasses and feats and so on. in the mausritter style this would be modeled with different sets of equipment.
steez control is a good desirable thing to have. it feels good to have a pattern for your guy that either fits the game well or that you can cobble bits of game together to model as a frankenstein guy. a well designed game can model many types of guy, a multiplayer game wants different guys that work well together, this is a well established good idea
but that fails when one guy’s steez is so broad that they do everything well, or someone else does your steez better than you, or your steez never applies to the adventure, or if it always applies to every situation - and here the game can really fall apart, if you can always use the same tools in the same way to resolve any situation, you reach a sort of steez equilibrium where there’s no longer any tension in the system (and maybe your friends are mad at you because they don’t get to do their thing)
anyway i think this happens less often in dnd and more often in diablo so
now we’re talking about diablo
diablo kind of implements both of the broad styles i was talking about before, you have a limited number of slots and you can only put one item in each slot, but you can carry a bunch of items. you hope to pick up new stuff that can replace the items you have equipped.
occasionally youll pick up an item with a unique power that you can basically build the rest of your guy around. for example, The Barber - a unique ceremonial knife for the Witch Doctor character, has this effect:
Instead of dealing direct damage, Spirit Barrage now accumulates on the target. When casting stops, it explodes dealing 450–500% of the accumulated damage to all enemies within 15 yards.
which turns ‘spirit barrage’ from a middley ranged attack to something that instantly blows up every dude in range. so you might never use ‘spirit barrage’ before you pick this up, but as soon as you do, youre strongly incentivised to switch to a build where you only equip stuff that makes spirit barrage faster and more reliable, and then you should stick to that until you find another weapon that does more than 5x as much damage as this does. and then youre back to just hitting one guy instead of hitting every guy at once.
now, ive never played multiplayer diablo but i assume that the player who instantly kills everything on the screen at range is an annoying guy to play with when youre a slower melee guy. even in the single player game, it gets boring after a while to remove all of the tension from the game. this kind of ‘destroy everything at once’ playstyle is fun for a while until its not anymore. if im playing diablo eventually ill want to switch to a guy who does something other than just hold down the one button
In dungeons and dragons
in dungeons and dragons if one player develops a stratagem that overwhelms every system in the game you can pull that player aside and say “hey, lets not do this thing anymore” and maybe like remove or alter that thing
but its hard to build this kinda stopgap in at the system level. i think mausritter solves this problem by not really having any piece of equipment be really good, which is quite boring. i think a too-eager dm could easily start handing out items that are too good, which is… i dont know. I think that mausritter is probably a quite difficult system to generate magic items for, which is a shame because it might almost be really good.
