The Second Sky: Weapons

We do of course get a steady diet of new monsters and terrain features as the game goes on. Notable additions include spike traps that spring up and kill things every ten turns, temporal beacons that let you deliberately return rooms to their unsolved state to enable elaborate Room Clear/Level Clear gate shenanigans, and Fluff, a sort of aerial tarstuff with enough novel properties to fill a blog post of its own. But there’s one addition that has me particularly interested, because it’s a completely new category of thing for the designers to experiment with: weapons.

In a sense, this isn’t entirely new. The City Beneath gave us one other alternate weapon, that being the null weapon, the state of being weaponless. Also, the idea was played with a bit in Wonderquest, the one game I know of that outright imitates DROD‘s mechanics. Wonderquest had this notion that you were playing as a party of multiple characters with different abilities, and some of those characters had different weapons; I remember in particular one that had a staff that extended in two opposite directions. You only had one character in play at a time, though, and switched among them by stepping on tokens on the floor. It mainly used this to limit access to characters, making the ones you needed difficult to access.

DROD‘s weapon-switching is also based around stepping on tokens, but so far, it’s mainly used this to force you to switch to weapons you don’t want, ones that are less powerful than the default Really Big Sword. The first alternative you get is a mere wooden stick, incapable of killing anything directly. Hitting something with a stick briefly stuns it, and pushes it to an adjacent space if there’s room. Mind you, this can be enough to kill things. Just push it off a cliff, or into a hazard like a spike trap. And the ability to push monsters around isn’t nothing. There are loads of puzzles throughout the DROD series about getting monsters to go where they’re useful to you, and previously, the only way to do this was to make them chase you there.

The second weapon you get is a spear. This is capable of killing things, but only with poking movements. Hit a monster with the side and it just acts like a stick. In a way, this seems like the best of both worlds, because you can both kill and push with it. But so much of my monster-slaying technique relies on swings and side-steps and back-swipes that you can only do with the sword. Killing with a spear is just a great deal less efficient. If you want to stand your ground, you have to keep backing up to do it.

That’s all I’ve found. I expect there will be more, maybe even the long-anticipated ray gun. That’s an old in-joke from the Caravel forums — the ray gun is the canonical example of a player’s request for a feature that would ruin the game by making it too easy. But I trust that the designers would find ways of making a ray gun into a liability.

After all, they’ve found ways to make the obviously inferior weapons better than your sword.

It all comes down to the immense variety of game elements and how they interact. Some monsters, like Gentryii or Wubbas, are invulnerable to damage. If you hit them with your sword, it just does nothing. If you hit them with a stick, it pushes them just like it pushes anything else. So the stick is a better choice than the sword against them. And as for the spear, I’ve recently discovered that it has a secret virtue: it can damage tarstuff at any point, without regard to edge or corner. These things aren’t inferior. They’re specialized.

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