KataKumbas weapons balance study
Introduction
We were asked to verify the balance of a tabletop RPG of our choice, at first we looked at D&D 5e, but we realized that those prices were set according to the actual cost the weapon would have had. So we looked for another system, and we ended up with KataKumbas, a setting for the Savage Worlds system. Unfortunately, the manual is only available in Italian, so both the weapon table and the spreadsheet are in Italian since we wanted to keep consistency through the documentation.
Here you can find the google spreadsheet I will be referring next
Here you can find the original weapons table
As already stated they are both in Italian
Process
We started by transferring the weapons onto a table and dividing the properties of the weapons into several columns. In this phase we have also eliminated some weapons with properties with non-obtainable costs, such as the knight's and tournament lances, or those with magical properties, which were outside the curve, as they were precisely magical.
We then went on to do the analysis: those tables in the right are the results.
Weapons are divided into categories according to the die added to the character's Strength modifier.
Each weapon has a base value (in cash) assigned to it by the category it is in.
The more damage a weapon does the more normal it is that it is large, so the base weight of the weapons also varies. Each category has a weight range within which the weight of the weapon does not affect its value.
Always for this reasoning, the same amount of weight will impact differently on weapons of different categories.
Each property has a different value based on its effectiveness, this value varies from positive to negative depending on whether the property applies a bonus or a malus.
Once the values ​​were obtained, we created a function that derives the absolute value of the weapon and its delta with respect to the curve, a table for the creation of new weapons just below that of the already present weapons and we have summarized the results of the curve in a graph dispersion:
As you can see, all weapons except the spear come out a maximum of 50 gold from the curve, positive or negative and of these only 4 are above 25 gold of difference.
Conclusions
Unlike many other RPGs, primarily D&D, the economic system was founded on the effectiveness of the weapons and not on the actual difficulties of realization (more realistic methodology but which creates a less balanced game). All weapons, in fact, fall more or less in the curve drawn, with the exception of the spear which the game creators must be true enthusiasts of, being clearly an extremely powerful weapon, considering that it can also be used as a throwing weapon.