Dex/Str Concept idea

 by shoelucky » Thu Apr 19, 2012 9:10 am

Hey, didn't know where to bring this idea up, so thought here was a good place. Sorry for the long read!
Talking about games like dark souls and dragon age - rpg's that use strength and dexterity for character development. I had a neat idea - people I have discussed this with feel that it's not yet being done to it's full potential. In games I have played, usually if you have high enough stats, you can wield the weapon in question. And that's that. But if you are a dex based character and increase that lots, your character never seemed to get more powerful. Dex based weapons were always relatively weak and even though you were increasing those values, you didn't seem all that much better. Strength based characters got much more powerful, and exciting to use.
So here is the idea - have the strength value the only requirement to wield a weapon (makes sense, why can't a huge guy wield a 'bandits knife') and have it the value that determines damage as well. Have dexterity determine soly the attack speed and nature of using the weapon (how it swings). So if you had low strength and super high dex, you could only wield smaller, low damaging weapons, but you could use them so quickly it would make up for it. And perhaps when you increase dex in big amounts you can get more swings in faster for better combos, or even change the way it's wielded all together perhaps, making it way cooler. And it'd still be cool if you chose to rock a high stregnth, low dex character. You could use high damaging larger weapons, but swing slowly. In lue of getting sweet combos with high dex, you could earn force bonuses perhaps with high strength. Lots of cool options to elaborate on and the idea of a high strength, high dex battle machine if you could manage to get there sounds great! I like this idea because even a middle of the road character could be useful. To even further talk about bonuses, a high dex or high stength could both unlock dual wielding or sword and shield type combat, but use them in different ways. Just to throw this in, archery could be a separate skill, because any person can learn to use a bow. And just so the gameplay wouldn't be too similar, they would both have natural weaknesses. For example, the slower strong character has a tougher time with many enemies, but the quick dex character has a tougher time with bigger enemies.
One more area to elaborate on is armor, I think it could work the same. Even small weaker people can wear suits of armor, so I don't think they need a strength requirement. But every armor would have an additional dex value. High protection, heavy armor would minus dex points, where as lighter armors would grant dex points. I think the idea checks out in many scenarios and could be quite effective. There is lots of room for elaboration, I am just curious if this sounds interesting to anyone else too. It's not entirely original, but it hasn't been done this way yet, I like it. Thoughts?