Re: CF: Re: AC and armour

[Raphaël Quinet <>]

Anthony Thyssen wrote:
> Ok lets clear up one confusion I have.  What is the difference between
> AC and armour?   All I have seen is a big mumbo-jumbo on how hit and
> damage is calculated and I don't want or should need to wade through
> that morass.

To put it simply: AC defines how difficult it is for someone else to
hit you (i.e. whether they hit or miss), while armour reduces the
damage that you take if you are hit.

So if you have a very good AC but a very low armour, you will be hard
to hit but once you are hit you will take a lot of damage.  On the
other hand, if your AC is not so good but you have a lot of armour,
then you will be hit very often but you will not take much damage from
these hits.

The same applies to the WC and weapon damage.  To make things even
more confusing, a low AC or WC is better than a high AC or WC (less
is better) and a weapon that has "WC +1" is in fact reducing your WC
by 1.  Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be better to choose other
names for that, change the sign of these things and get away from
the AD&D tradition...

> Howabout putting that info in a ``internals guide'' and replace it with
> just a simple guide of what the meanings of the various things are.

There is a beginners' guide, but I agree that even this guide is too
complex for a real beginner.  Like most CrossFire docs, it assumes that
the player already knows some basic principles of the game.

CrossFire needs some better docs, and I am glad to see that some people
are starting to work on that.  For example, did you ever try to explain
to a beginner how he could improve his weapon (e.g. making it "Dex +1")?
The rules defining when and how you can do that are not easy to
understand, and even the interface is confusing ("What do you mean, I
have to mark that stuff?  How do I do that?").

> Another confusion I have is that of speed and weight.  Even with a ring
> of speed +2 my speed is terriable!

Hmmm...  Actually, I am not even sure of how this works in practice, so
I will let someone else answer that question.  ;-)  But if you are
carrying a lot of stuff, you should not be surprised that your character
becomes very slow, even with an improved speed.

-Raphaël
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