Two pages of the same thing, probably accidentally duplicated: Design It Yourself Equipment

Design-It-Yourself Equipment (plain English link) and Design-It-Yourself Equipment (title Ptitleylrbmgm1) are two separate articles. The former's page history goes back to a minor addition in August, the latter's to a minor addition in November. Neither page history yields any clues. Wicks point to both. Both articles end with the category Video Game Tropes, though the only visible category on the former is Video Game Items and Inventory and the latter says that it isn't indexed. Their contents are almost identical, but one has more commentary and the last few items on both are different. Edits to one don't show up on the other or the other's history.

Is there any reason not to turn one into a redirect to the other, add in the missing examples and nix some of the **'d commentary?

Here are the differences between the two pages:

- The former has a mostly incomprehensible image and caption. Its description uses italics and more line breaks. - The former's description says "Done poorly, and it may result in an utter Game Breaker." The latter's says "They may result in an utter Game Breaker when pulled off right." - The former has an entry that says "Over half of the gameplay by weight in Gratuitous Space Battles." The latter has an entry that says "This is literally half of the game in Gratuitous Space Battles. The other half is watching these designs fight in the aforementioned battles."

- The former lacks these entries:

• Not quite. Gran Turismo has actual customization, while NFSU is limited to visuals.
• Of course custom units do cost more credits to build, and if you really go wild you'll end up with something that can take your faction's entire income to build just one of.
• And synthesise weapons/accesories.

• Dark Cloud 2.
  • Well, Dark Cloud in general.
• World Of Warcraft allows this to some extent with gem sockets on higher level items, which allow you to mount gems that provide stat bonuses depending on their type. The upcoming Cataclysm expansion will also introduce Reforging, where you can actually reallocate the intrinsic bonuses built into an item.
• Elemental War Of Magic allows you to arm, armour, clothe and outfit your sovereign, heroes and your entire army to whatever specifications take your fancy. Want everybody in your Legion of Doom to wear a fez? Go ahead!

- The latter lacks these entries:

• Ships and economy buildings are stock, though.
• In Master Of Orion 2 with the right combination of technologies, you could recreate pretty much any science fiction space battle, from the first Death Star getting blown up to the battle of Wolf 359.

• The online game NavyField features customizable World War II ships. You can change out engine, guns, torpedoes, ammo type and quantity, armor, fire control, aircraft, and crew within specified maximum limits based on weight and physical size. Of course, bigger guns have larger shells and on a tiny ship that can really limit your ammo. The guns even have a few quality modifiers for guns where an "L" gun will have longer range but weigh more while a "D" gun of the same caliber will have less range but weigh less.
• The player could design a weapon of their own in Worms 4, complete with adjustable variables such as knock-back, terrain destruction potential, and even whether or not its rounds could poison enemy worms.
• Trinity Universe has the managraphics system which lets you repaint weapons with bizarre themes to have slightly different abilities.
• The old Amiga game K240 had this, basic ships had only hp, no weapons, those were added onto Hardpoints, with ships having from 1 - 6 depending on size. It wasn't just weapons either (of which you got air-to-air and air-to-ground types, you could also get several different types of defences.
• In the Genesis and Game Gear versions of Home Alone, Kevin has to assemble all of his weapons other than the BB Gun. In general, the only difference is what the weapon fires or what the trajectory is. In the easier difficulty, the game will automatically suggest combinations based on what he's collected so far. The harder difficulty has a few exclusive parts, and thus exclusive weapons.
• An upcoming FPS They touts the "Weapon Tuning System" as a major feature.
• The Neverwinter Nights expansion Hordes of the Underdark gives you access to a forge at the beginning of the second act. If you've got the gold for it, you can make some pretty insane weapons, like a Keen Flaming + 7 Longsword... that's still called a + 2 Longsword, because you can't change the names of the weapons.
  • The game's built-in Level Editor takes it a step farther, allowing you to load up a character with custom-made Infinity Plus One equipment, then import that character into a normal game. Want a + 20 Flaming Frost Shocking Greatsword that casts Hellball with each hit? That'll teach those goblins in the tutorial level.
• In Overlord the overlord can only use wapons and armor made specially for him. While available designs and materials are limited, said items can be given special effects by sacrificing Minions. Lots of Minions.
• The entire point of Robot Arena. You must design a robot from scratch, using the parts provided by the game (like pistons and wheels and engines and of course various kinds of weaponry), paint it, decal it, and control it in a deathmatch with other robots. The trick of course was to keep the weight of the robot to a minimum, and also to make good use of the limited space inside the robot's chasis.
• Legend Of Mana almost WALLOWS in this trope, as the player can build weapons, armor, musical instruments (used ingame for magic spells) and even custom robot sidekicks. There exists a subset of Mana players whose sole reason for still playing the game is creating recipes for new items.
• The first two installments in the Elder Scrollsseries, Arena and Daggerfall, have a system in which the player creates their own spells. Naturally, they render the spells made for you completely and utterly worthless.

edited 9th Dec '10 3:39:33 AM by Kizor

Wow, this is sort of a mess. Not only are there two different articles, there's also two competing redirects — Design-It-Yourself Equipment (on the Main namespace) redirects to the plaintext version, but Design It Yourself Equipment (on the Video Games namespace) redirects to the ptitle version.

There may also be two different tropes here. Most games have base equipment that can be changed with the use of varient parts — you can give a gun an extended magazine for larger clips or a tactical magazine for faster reloads, a silencer for quiet kills or an extended barrel for higher accuracy, etc. But a handful of games let you design your equipment completely from the ground up — they give you basic building blocks and let you use whatever your deranged imagination can devise. Examples of that would be the gummi ships in Kingdom Hearts, or the vehicles from Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts (I think — not actually played it myself).

I'd call the former Customizable Equipment and the latter Player Designed Equipment. The whole Design-It-Yourself thing is needly weird, and those pages only have like 20 wicks anyway, so it's not like they're entrenched names.

edited 9th Dec '10 10:58:36 AM by NativeJovian

support

I'll throw in behind this as well. There is a difference between things you can tweak a little and things you design from the ground up.

Thanks for this. Let's make things even worse so that the problem won't return.

The reason I was looking was that I was hoping to start an YKTTW named Spell Crafting, about rare games where the player builds his own spells. The player doesn't find, buy or receive spells, but is told the combinations. Now that we're drawing lines, it could use your opinion on whether it belongs in some article or a new one. Otherwise we'll be back at this in a while.

I'm very fond of this system that I've never actually used. In most games, probably, only predetermined combinations are meaningful, in some they all are, and I think that at least one allows customization.

• In Ultima IV through VII, spells are a mix of incantations and reagents. Only a few combinations work, but there's logic behind them: AN NOX is Cure poison, so IN NOX is Poison, VAS IN NOX is Poison cloud, and VAS FLAM is Fireball.
• Ultima Underworld does the same, though the player has to find the runes for the incantations first.
• In Dungeon Master spells are cast by picking any of six power glyphs to determine their effectiveness, then one to three runes to form the effect. Again only some combinations work, but the glyphs make sense: VI is in all healing spells, FUL in all fire-based spells. One reviewer reportedly dreamed of the formula for an explosive bottle for nights on end, convinced that there's a sensible combination for that.
• In Legend / Four Crystals of Trazere, spell effects are determined by runes, consume ingredients and are created entirely by the player. "Missile-freeze-continuous-damage" freezes a target on a chosen square, and creates a fireball on that spot every five seconds. ""Surrround-missile-damage-surround-missile-thrall" fires damaging missiles in all directions, and if one strikes an enemy it'll fire enemy-converting missiles in all directions. (No more than two missile runes and no creating endless barrages in all directions. Endless barrages in one direction are fine.)
• In Treasure Of The Rudra, any word is a spell. The algorithm is too large to crack, but there are suffixes: REFU heals, REFUNA heals the party, REFUT Ei UMU heals one person a great deal, etc.

^ Please take that to YKTTW with these:

• Games in The Elder Scrolls series allow spell customization at spell altars. Which let players design their own spells for a price.
• The central mechanic of Mage The Ascension and Mage The Awakening is being able to cast customized spell effects on the fly by combining the effects of different arcana. The whole systems are based around it.
• Dungeons And Dragons has rules for creating custom spells.

edited 9th Dec '10 2:40:31 PM by shimaspawn

I'm thinking I'll let it float around here for a bit and take it to YKTTW when and if the question of whether it should have its own page is resolved. Or until someone yells at me. That question has to be addressed, and this is a better spot for it than YKTTW.

Thanks for the examples! Yeah, tabletop RPGs. This is going to get a lot of those.

edited 9th Dec '10 5:31:30 PM by Kizor

I'd say spells are close enough to equipment that they should be lumpable with one page or the other. If you start with a basic spell but can adjust casting time/damage/mana cost/etc, then it's Customizable Equipment; if you start from scratch and control every aspect of the spell, then its Player Designed Equipment. Maybe make some redirects, Customizable Spell and Player Designed Spell?

I think spells can go in something different. They aren't really equipment. They're more like abilities. They fit, but you have to turn them sideways, mangle them, then use a shoehorn to stuff them in. They'd thrive better under their own trope.

How so? They're things that your character gets that increase your character's attributes or gives them additional abilities in some way.

For example, what's the difference between creating a submachine gun with a quick-change magazine (faster reloading) and rechambered for larger calibur rounds (higher damage), and a spell of magic missile tweaked for shorter cooldown and higher damage? Other than flavor?

It depends on the game, but the general answer is, a lot. A spell is knowledge your character has, not equipment he carries. It can't be sold. It can't be traded. It's not a physical thing. It doesn't follow the same rules. You can't just add parts to it. There are a few games that use the same mechanics, but they're few and far between.

My point is that there's no point in having the exact same trope except one is for physical equipment and one is for spells. If if fits the trope otherwise — either a base with various tweaks ("I took Frostbolt and gave it a faster cooldown and more damage") or a assembled-from-building-blocks ("I made a spell by combining 'energy damage', 'cold elemental', 'single target' and 'fast cooldown'. I call it Frostbolt.") — then I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be listed under one of these two tropes we're already proposing.

Ah, it's actually not normally done by just tweaking parameters like that. It can be a lot more free form. Especially in games like Mage where the same arcana can go from "Find my car keys" to "Turn this table into a tea pot". Weapons have a lot more inherent limitations on them. The cool down stuff isn't the most common application of the trope. We'd basically be unable to list tabletop examples because most of them are too free form to fit into either trope.

edited 10th Dec '10 12:51:08 PM by shimaspawn

What's worse, there's no customization involved in Ultima or Dungeon Master. The only thing the player gets to decide is how many magic points to put into each individual Dungeon Master spell. Yet their magic systems have proven to be memorable, and Ultima IV's is of further gameplay significance: the most powerful reagents aren't sold. Finding a place where mandrake grows is one of the bigger side trips.

We'd basically be unable to list tabletop examples because most of them are too free form to fit into either trope.

Making new spells in tabletop games I'd say is indistinguishable from house rules (and thus not worthy of another trope) unless there's some sort of a system in place for doing so — in which case it probable falls into one of the two above tropes.

Actually, most established systems for making spells in tabletop don't fit into either of the above tropes. That's the problem. They don't count as house rules either though because they're the rules in the book for the game. They just aren't in line with something as simple as the above tropes.

Either of the mage games I mentioned would probably be the clearest examples. The games are based around designing your own spells, but they don't fit either of the above tropes.

edited 11th Dec '10 5:48:15 PM by shimaspawn

Well, how do they work, then? I can't think of a system that doesn't work like either "take a base and modify it" or "take basic building blocks and combine them", honestly. And are there other examples that don't fit besides that one system? Because one example does not a trope make.

It's because they don't have something quite as concrete as basic building blocks. They have take vague concepts and twist them as you see fit instead. They lack the base structure that either of the tropes imply. There is structure there, but it's too abstract to fit the tropes in question.

It is more like mixing colors on a palette and painting a picture.

It is not "house rules". There are explicit, official rules about what colors of paint you start with. What you make out of them is less regulated.

edited 13th Dec '10 4:13:48 PM by rodneyAnonymous