I'm curious: how would a living (and possibly sentient) piece of equipment work? Would it gain exp depending on what you kill, or would it sap exp from the character? And would it be feasible to allow the piece of equipment to grow and change shape as it matures? And what reason would you have to equip it in the first place?

interesting question (though more of inquiry than questions). Those would great ideas, and I'd have to add in a design standpoint you could do a lot with the idea. To throw out some random ideas, during the game you could collect gene alterating items that you'd add to the weapon to unlock new things or make it faster, more powerful, or more accurate.

Prey used living weapons, if that's where you got the idea from.

About the question: "And what reason would you have to equip it in the first place?" it would have to depend solely on the game. For instance it could be that your human and lose your weapons (or don't have any, like prey did) on a planet and are forced to pick up the wierd looking weapons that you encounter in the game. Or it could be revolved around the character being alien and the weapons coexist in the world as living creatures. Or the weapons were genetically made. All up to you, tons of ideas and possibilities it seems.

Have you heard of Nightmare? He's a combination of weapon and man. That giant grotesque looking blade with a purple eye is the sword. There are also a lot of myths and legends about living swords.

One huge advantage of using a living weapon would be the fact that you could befriend it to the point that it refuses to be used by anyone else. In fact, it could do the opposite and attack the person trying to attack you with it. A lot depends on the type of weapon it is.

Actually, I got the idea from the countless examples of living weapons in mythology and fantasy.

Like that sword from Discworld. Whats-its-name.

And yes, I have heard of Nightmare. He kicks ass. I almost exclusively used him in Soul Caliibur 2. And Soul Edge is a great example of a living weapon, and kinda what I was thinking of when I made this.

Only, you know, without the evil soul-stealing thing.


It could change depending on how you treat it and use it. It's personality could maybe change depending on how you kill stuff with it. Or it gains different attributes eg it can transform into an animal. And where would you get a living weapon in the first place? They wouldn't just grow on trees...or would they?

Hiya

This reminds my quite a bit about the Yuuzhan Vong (out of the New Jedi Order Star Wars books). All their technology was grown (even their space ships). They had slaves cultivate their growing weapons/armour and then had shapers (their version of scientists) add extra stuff to them.

Some Yuuzhan Vong even had limbs grafted on from animals, and there was one who had an biologically advanced eye that could shoot poison.

If you want to know more check out:
Yuuzhan Vong
Amphistaffs(Their grown weapons)

I think one of the newer ninja-gaidens or Shinobi's had a kind of living sword that fed of the deaths of your enemies (and if you didn't kill something for to long, it would feed off you). You could always makes the weapons Symbiotic as a reason for the player to have to equip them, as they may not last long without a host, like Venom from spiderman (or whatever reason you may want to use).

This is how the d20 system usually handles living weapons.

Quote:

Original post by Kest One huge advantage of using a living weapon would be the fact that you could befriend it to the point that it refuses to be used by anyone else. In fact, it could do the opposite and attack the person trying to attack you with it. A lot depends on the type of weapon it is.

I think that's an interesting aspect. It allows tricks like 'training' your daggers, then leaving them somewhere to be picked up by your enemies before starting the fight. Gotcha. A sort of alternative 'boobytrap'.

Living weapons could be set to die, or grow older, giving them new abilities over time and finally start to decay. Which means, a living weapon could offer very usefull abilities, but their availability would never be as reliable as a mechanical weapon. This could make them feel more special and the time pressure could impact the players decisions.

Or, they could be parasitic. The stronger they get, the weaker the player becomes. I think a parasitic weapon would need to be pretty usefull to players for them to accept this aspect. Basically, it rewards the risk of becoming weaker with a stronger weapon.

I highly recommend the SciFi world of Peter F. Hamilton dealt with in his Reality Disfunction book(s) ... they have living biological space ships - which are both awesome and very well dealt with. Also the Stephen R. Donnelson Gap Cycle books have an alien race which uses Biology to build everything - although it is somewhat less sentient in some cases than Hamilton's ships.

A living weapon could mean some many many things ... on one side you can imagine something like the brain of a man wired into a predator drone, on another you get magical and have "living steel" or other such things, where the lifeforce has the ability to manipulate its body in various way (it would be trivial for a sword of living metal to make itself extremely hard to balance and use effectively - but much less trivial in a non-mystical universe to make such a sword actually attack an enemy) ... other options would involve thinking about these things like you would sentient plants - plants because a weapon shouldn't be very animal like or you would just call it a creature - not a weapon - inspired by things like venus fly traps, or vampire roses from D&D. There was an old Greyhawk adventure that had dozens of crazy creations, such as self-propelled horizontal stalagtites - which would eject gas when triggered (one shot only - but it's a spore based reproductive system).

Ratchet and Clank Series (at least some of the later PS2 ones) had a leveling system for all their weapons. It varied from game to game as to how it worked. Essentially the weapons just gained exp as you used them, based on monster kill (like a normal player gains exp), but they did different things with it. In one game (imo I liked this system alot), the weapons initially had 0 "slots" but could eventually be leveled to the point where they had 2 mod types (I forget how many of each). Each slot you could place an "mod" of some sort that had varying effects. Some increased the fire rate, others increased ammo (yes these were all guns), while others could add effects, such as cold, fire, explosion, morphing, while others still were XP, healing, etc. There were two types of mods which helped you do all this and was very useful and what you added directly effected the difficulty of the game. All of the "items" you placed in one mod group was shared between all mods, preventing you from say, making all weapons have a super high ammo count for example. I couldn't really find much about it online, save this faq, The name of the game that this is from is called "Ratchet: Deadlocked" available on the PS2.

All of the weapons had 99 levels and they increased with damage slightly per level as well.

Hope that helps.