rename: One Thousand Needles

For the other examples mentioned... maybe Formulaic Damage?

Altered Algorithm Attack? If we go with the subtropes, title the supertrope something along the lines of Oddly Calculated Damage. As for the subtropes (or my ideas for them, anyway);

• "Ignores defence" - Defence Ignoring Attack, Armour Piercing Strike, Defence Piercing Attack or some variation.
• "Unusually calculated" - Curiously Calculated Attack

I'd do the rest, but they seem to have plenty of suggestions already (e.g. Fixed Damage etc).

Hmm... maybe, but for me "formula" doesn't involve the use of random values, whereas "calculation" can.

• a^2 +b^2 = c^2 is the formula for a right triangle.

• 1d6*level of caster is a damage formula

• 1000 points of damage is not a formula.

Not entirely true. A constant is the simplest sort of formula, one without any operators. However, that's a technical nitpick and not one that I'd try to apply to the trope name.

I personally know what One Thousand Needles means but I can easily see how the trope name could be confusing. We could definitely set up some kind of a trope hierarchy for Videogame Damage Types, with subtropes for Damage Formula, Roll AD 6, Flat Damage, Unsoakable Damage, that sort of thing. Not sure how many examples we'd get for each, but if we're going to get into system mechanics it's one way to handle the issue.

Madru: That's why I said Fixed Damage for a constant value and Formulaic Damage for other things.

Damage By Formula and Damage By Decree?

I don't generally go in for the on-the-nose names, but Fixed Damage is what I hear gamers, both in traditional and video games, refer to this trope as most of the time, so it probably makes the most sense to have it as that here. Whatever we name the trope to officially, Fixed Damage needs to at least be a redirect since people who don't know what it's called are probably most likely to search for it by that name.

edited 18th Mar '10 11:30:55 AM by Shadowtext

Piercing defense is already a trope. Or at least I saw a ykttw for it a while ago. Oh, here it is: Piercing Attack.

I wouldn't mind creating a supertrope for it though. I note it links to HP to One which is another variation, sort of.

One specific reason this trope needs to be renamed is because it's also the original name of Death of a Thousand Cuts.

Shadowtext is right. The accepted (I don't quite want to say "industry standard," but perhaps fan standard is correct) name is Fixed Damage. No reason to go hunting for something that is technically more correct, but less likely to be recognized by the appropriate fanbase, particularly since the name's SPOON-friendly as it is.

If that's as close as there is to an industry standard Fixed Damage works for me.

How many different tropes do we want to do (and can we find examples for)? I count three or four:

1. Fixed Damage. The attack always deals the same amount of damage.

2. HP to One: Always reduces the victim to one Hit Point (or the equivalent) remaining, no matter how much they had to start with.

3. Bookended Damage: Does at least this much and at most that much, no matter who uses it; attacks that don't vary based on the attackers stats but simply do damage that falls within a specific range: 6d6 or 1-to-4d4 and so on.

4. Calculated Damage: anything that uses a more complicated formula or calculation than Bookended Damage: 2d6*casters level, 3d10*strength and so on.

I say it's three or four because Bookended and Calculated could be put together.

How you figure out how much damage the victim actually takes doesn't enter into which of these tropes any attack falls into; these are purely based on how the damage it will cause if there's no save of any kind is determined.

edited 18th Mar '10 3:48:34 PM by Madrugada

What about those attacks that do percentage based damage instead of the standard amount? The Gravity variations of Final Fantasy, which do a percentage of your current HP in damage, for instance?

If you want to get technical, floor(X% * target's HP).

The thing is, Madrugada, you can't really drag TRP Gs into this because they have far simpler damage formulas out of necessity. Only in computer-based RP Gs can these complex formulas such as "floor((attack + weapon power - defense - armor) * element-matching * IF(attacker level <= defender level, 1, else 1+ln(attacker level - defender level))" be dealt with at a timescale that can keep the player's attention.

Anyway, we have the following characteristics, which are sometimes combined:

• normal damage formula
• ignores parts of normal damage formula (e.g. element, defense, attack, weapon, armor, magical shielding, etc.)
• ignores all of normal damage formula and substitutes its own
• fixed damage ignoring all of damage formula
• damage based on unusual choice of stats, replacing/adding to/detracting from the normal damage formula
• random damage ignoring all of damage formula
  • whose range may be either preset or based on various stats, typical or atypical

How about we come up with something with a little more wit than Fixed Damage?

Maybe Always Hits For Twenty or something? Anyone have a sufficiently clear reference we might be able to use?

Always One Thousand Damage.

I just think One Thousand Needles sounds cool.

The problem is that it is confused with another trope (which it was the former name for).

I think there's also a debate over the exact scope of the trope as well.

edited 18th Mar '10 5:42:29 PM by GlennMagusHarvey

There is, but just skimming over this, none of these names really have the same "impact" as One Thousand Needles to me, all of them seem boringly descriptive. Which is odd because I'm all for renaming character/series-specific tropes (especially "The CharacterName" tropes), but I also like how we can name tropes things that are actually fun to say. It's an odd balance I guess.

Why does the complexity of the formula matter?

Either 1) the damage is fixed at a certain amount, no matter what; 2) it always does a certain amount relative to the hit points of the victim; 3) it does a varying amount that will always fall within certain limits; or 4) there's a formula using two or more variables used to calculate it. There's no need to further complicate it by how many variables or what they're based on. In a pencil and paper RPG the formula may be as simple as XdX*stat or as complicated as XdX*(([stat+level]-[other stat])*class bonus). Or whatever.

"Either 1) the damage is fixed at a certain amount, no matter what; 2) it always does a certain amount relative to the hit points of the victim; 3) it does a varying amount that will always fall within certain limits; or 4) there's a formula using two or more variables used to calculate it. There's no need to further complicate it by how many variables or what they're based on. In a pencil and paper RPG the formula may be as simple as Xd X*stat or as complicated as Xd X*(([stat+level]-[other stat])*class bonus). Or whatever."

Those should all be separate tropes.

1. Does the same damage no matter what. ("One Thousand Needles")
2. Does damage relative to hit points ("Gravity, Gravija")
3. Varies withing a range of damage (most of the spells in Final Fantasy I)
4. Okay, that seems more like just an irregular calculation form.

So I say we split.

Final Fantasy I's spells seem to have been based off of D&D spells. Later games came up with more complex formulas that...well, just glance through this to see Final Fantasy IV's algorithms.

Perhaps we can split it a different way: How about spells whose damage does not depend on user or target, versus spells that do depend on the user or target?

This way, on one side we have these:

• all the normally-calculated attacks
• Robo's Crisis Arm (attack power based on last digit of HP)
• FFVI's atmaweapon (damage based on attacker's HP)
• Seismic Toss (damage equal to attacker's level)
• "gravity" spells (damage equal to a fraction of target's HP, rounded down)

and on the other side we have these:

• FFVI's Fixed Dice (damage equal to 22 x product of dice rolls)
• 1000 Needles (1000 damage)
• FFVII's lucky 7s (7777 damage)

Then we can further split the first group into whether it depends on a typical or atypical statistic.

edited 18th Mar '10 9:10:09 PM by GlennMagusHarvey

Yeah, I basically agree—I think the best way to handle this is with three, maybe 4 tropes:

1. Damage based on user's stats (the normal case). This would include attacks with some reductions from the target's defense or a chance for the target to dodge, the point is just that the main damage decider is the user of the attack, not the target.
2. Damage based on the target's stats (things like Final Fantasy's Gravity spells, or Pokemon's Low Kick),
3. Fixed damage.

And I don't think #1 really counts as tropable, since it's just assumed to be the case most of the time. It's more or less a universal trope, like "Human characters tend to breathe oxygen," so it wouldn't really need a trope page.

But maybe we could have a general trope for "Odd Algorithm Out," for spells that follow different rules than most of the others in that game, which could be a supertrope for #2 and #3, and could include weird cases like Final Fantasy IX's Dragon's Crest, which does damage based on the number of dragons you've killed. But it would have to be for abilities or attacks that have odd damage calculation within that work, I think.

At any rate, I think splitting it by which stat the damage is based on is getting way too specific, so making it "Based on HP" is a bad idea.

edited 18th Mar '10 9:21:47 PM by Shadowtext

Type 1 could be example-less but explained. Or the examples could be of formulas that are either particularly common or particularly unique.

Or just link to some documents like Ben Siron's FF 2 guide or Terii Senshi's FF 6 guide that have actual algorithm data.

Pardon me for bumping this, but can anyone come up with a good classification scheme for these tropes?