PowerCombatWeaponCreation

Weapon Creation in Power Combat

This is a page of various rules for creating non-artifact weapons in Power Combat. For rules for creating artifact weapons in Power Combat, see PowerCombatArtifactCreation.

Raindoll's Version

Bladed Weapons

(discovered by Raindoll)

This is a formula for all mundane weapons in the "bladed" catagory.

All bladed weapons start with 29 points.

Speed:    1 point
Accuracy: <derived>*
Damage:   3 points
Defense:  1 point
Rate:     7 points

Bonus points for every dot of minimum Strength: 3

* Rather than being bought up directly, Accuracy is calculated as a function of the other stats. The formula is:

Accuracy = (-2 x Speed - 35 x Damage + 27 x Defense + 15 x Rate + 93 x minimum Strength)/87 + (2/3 x Resource Cost)

The formula above is an approximation. The original values were as follows:

Accuracy = -(0.022988507 x Speed) - (0.4022988506 x Damage) + (0.3103448276 x Defense) + (0.1724137931 x Rate) + (1.068965514 x minimum Strength) + (2/3 x Resource Cost)

This formula and point system holds for the Power Combat version of knives, short swords, straight swords, chopping swords, slashing swords, and great swords.

Impact Weapons

("discovered" by Raindoll)

It turns out that there is a single formula that can explain the stats for every non-artifact impact weapon in Power Combat. The formula even provides a conversion from bashing damage to lethal damage. Unfortunately, the formula is also completely insane.

All impact weapons start with 564.5 points.

Speed:            1   point
Accuracy:        57.5 points
Bashing Damage:  60   points
Lethal Damage:  100   points
Defense:          6   points
Rate:            39   points

Bonus points for every dot of minimum Strength: 126
Penalty for every dot of resources cost:        191

The formula works for axes, great axes, poleaxes, clubs, maces, sledges, and staves.

Limits

Here are the highest and lowest traits of mundane hand-to-hand weapons that appear in Power Combat:

            Min       Max
Speed       -6        +10
Defense     -3        +3
Accuracy    -1        +2
Damage(L)   +0        +7
Damage(B)   +0        +12
Rate         1         4 (5 for bare fist)
Min. Str.    1         4
Min. Dex.    -         4
Min. MA      -         4
Cost         -         3

I think it would be reasonable to assume that it is impossible to create a non-exceptional weapon with defense or accuracy higher than +3, and that it's probably impossible to make a normal weapon with defense or accuracy lower than -3. There doesn't seem to be any upper limit to Speed, although it's probably not possible to have a Speed lower than -6. No published mundane weapon has a Rate higher than 4 (excluding a bare fist), and it is probably impossible to exceed this number except by creating an exceptional weapon.

BrokenShade's Version

I think things are a little more complex. I've approached this from the joint point of view of what was actually done and what I thought should be done, and come up with the numbers below. I don't think a linear function works in all cases, as you will see!

Here are my point costs for Melee weapons ...

Per point

  Accuracy      1
  Speed         0.4
  Damage        1
  Defence       0.5

Individual Items

  Lethal Damage          2
  Piercing               3
  Throwable              3.5
  Usable for Charging    4.5
  Brawling               5.5
  Martial Arts           5.5
  Clinching             10
  Has MA Requirements   -1
  Requires 2 Hands      -0,5
  Requires Strength 4   -1

Variable

  Rate
     One       0
     Two       3
     Three     5
     Four      6
     Five      6.5
     Six       6.8
     Seven     7
  Resources
     None      0
     One      -0.2
     Two      -0.5 
     Three    -1

Normal Melee weapons have a value of close to 14.5

This seems to fit approximately for most things, and as these are the values I feel are about right I have even adjusted some melee weapons slightly (generally by only one point in a particular area) to "fix" imbalances.

Oh, and for artifact weapons, the standard adjuster is

   Speed +3
   Accuracy +0 (if this is higher, the balance is taken out of damage 1 for 1)
   Damage +3
   Defence +1
   Rate +1 (if this is too valuable adjust speed, if a clinch adjust other numbers up)

The value for a standard Artifact (irrespective of dots) is 21.

Dots (for standard items) somehow seem more based on item size or something similar! ^_^

That fits for most things, though the Grand Daiklave / Reaper Daiklave and Grand Goremaul clearly have other bonuses. These are paid by Essence on a 1 point for 1 extra commitment basis. Razor Claws and Heaven Thunder Leaves reduce similarly.

Individual specially crafted items like the Flying Silver Dream seem to have values closer to 25.

Hope this helps somebody! ^_^ BrokenShade

Comments

The purpose of the "Limits" section is to delinate the physical limitations that seem to constain what can be made with mortal smithery in Exalted. In other words, explicitly addressing why you can't make a mundane blade with +29 Defense. - Raindoll

Can you represent those ugly decimals as fractions? - willows

I've tried and I'll try again, but somehow I keep on messing it up. Somehow, the formula becomes less accurate when I write it this way. - Raindoll

Cool, thanks! I'm going to put your decimals back in for redundancy's sake. I'm sure we can find them both useful. How did you arrive at these values? - willows

I wrote a matrix whose rows were the statistics of every mundane bladed weapon (Speed, Acc, Dam, Def, Rate, Min Str, Cost) and put it in reduced echelon form. There are only 6 bladed weapons and 7 variables; however, based on my results, I was able to guess that the value of Accuracy was zero. (It turns out that this has to be the case.) This indicated that Accuracy was purely derived from the other stats. By setting Accuracy's value to 0, I was able to get values for all of the other stats. Then, I set up another matrix to solve for Accuracy as a function of the other traits. I was somewhat surprised that it worked out so well.\\ - Raindoll