Science behind a dead hobbit 5 – Turning gameplay into numbers

Unpublished part 5 of a beginners introduction to stats in lotro. Never figured out to present the follow-up and advanced parts and kinda stopped on them. As you’ll see in the level difference part.

Skipping ahead a bit to the actual less than theory bit. We’ll come back to the science later, but for now we’ll go beyond the introduction course.

One important thing to remember. Lotro doesn’t use direct numbers for nearly all translations. It will turn 10 – 1 = 9 into 10 – 10% = 9. While it looks more complicated it allows the game to use 1 calculation for everyone.

Example 10 % discount vs 1 gold in Bree
The Bree vendor likes you and it likes to give you a discount on a 10 gold gem. Giving you 1 gold discount is easier to understand. But this will lead to complications.  Such as

• What if the next gem costs 1000 gold. 1 gold isn’t that much of a discount.
• What if the next gem costs 100 silver. Do you get 900 silver and the gem for free?
• You have a coupon for an extra discount. What is extra?

Instead lotro uses an invisible step in between to prevent this. Why is it invisible? Cause it can get quite complicated. And most don’t care about the how. Just the end result.

Turning gameplay into numbers

You hit an orc and the orc dies or gets wet. In the normal world that axe you wield has a weight, the edge is sharp and you’re strong. In lotro all these things need to be translated from what you’d expect and understand into something a computer can make use.  You don’t speak computerish and your pc doesn’t understand English. What we need is a translation or conversion as we’ll call it.

Behind the scenes

An example of what happens behind the scenes when gollum tries to knock frodo out and take the ring. We know Frodo has some armor, gollum has a rock and he has hit Frodo with it. But lets take a look and see what lotro does with that.

Defense – What is armor?
Frodo wears some pants, a shirt and a backpack that each has some armor. In lotro where you get hit doesn’t matter. The game totals all these numbers up to make it easier to give you 1 number for damage reduction.

Defense – Turning armour (and others) into mitigation
But armour isn’t the only thing that gives you damage reduction. You have essences, virtues, trait points etc. All these things can’t simply be added up. So the game uses a translator (mitigation).

Defense – Turning mitigation into a percentage
Tallying all these different things up will give us a total which we can use. The game looks up what 10 mitigation will give us. For the level frodo this would give us 20% damage reduction against an equal foe such as gollum.

Offence – Weapon damage (min-max)
Gollum has a rock that will do between 2 and 5 damage. The game will randomly roll decide how much damage you will take.  You can vary a lot of things about the weapon that will give you a different minimum or maximum damage, but this is fixed for every weapon.

Offence – Damage bonus
Gollum has been living in a cave so he doesn’t have any bonuses to his rock. But if he were an elf wielding a sword he’d get 2,5 % extra. Or he has mastered the way of a bow and has a high physical mastery. All these numbers work the same as mitigations, they get added up and are turned into 1 percentage. Armour is easier to understand and we’ll go over all the different damage bonuses in a later article.

Offence – Critical hit
One major damage bonus that doesn’t get swooped up with the others is Critical hit. You hit a vital organ or bump Frodo on the head. This will result in a large fixed damage bonus.

Result – Turning numbers to gameplay
Gollum has hit Frodo for 5 damage. Frodo is the same level as Gollum so all his armor and buffs give him a 20 % damage reduction. Resulting in 4 damage to Frodo.

This is what happens behind the scenes when your characters gets attacked. You might only see 1 number, but there’s a lot more under the hood.

Level difference

This all counts when Frodo and Gollum are the same level. Once a level difference gets in the mix it becomes a whole lot more complicated.  In the short version: The game will take the mitigation, mastery and critical rating the character and enemy has and compare it to the original amount needed to reduce or increase the damage.

Aragorn is sparring Frodo. Aragorn has 100 levels on Frodo and is sitting on 1000 mastery rating. And Frodo is only level 5. Where Gollum has 10 mastery to get 100% damage bonus. Aragorn puts up 1000 against the 10 needed. In lotro (currently) you can only get 200% damage bonus. So 980 of Aragons mastery is sort of wasted and Frodo takes 200% of Aragorns base damage. Good thing Aragorn is using a practice stick and not Narsil.

But Frodo has armour on that gives him 50% damage reduction against Gollum! Alas Aragorn level difference means he will overpower any defences Frodo has. *How this exactly works is not completely clear to me. But at 80 levels difference there is no difference in char wearing no armour or any armour in tests we did.