I'm replying to everyone's points thus far in one big post, because it
makes keeping track of feedback easier.
Summary: Suggestions that are fairly easily codable will be in the next
release, on the basis that if they don't work, they can be backed out
again easily enough. However, if I've indicated I'm implementing or
have implemented something you're not happy with, please quote the
relevant bit of this and give me a good argument. :)
(Don't look at the Subversion repository for these changes straight
away; they'll take a few days for me to test and commit.)
Eddie Grove wrote:
> I tried to think of interesting combinations, but the only one that ever
> seemed good the next day was { +int, +wis, -str}. The problem is that
other
> than str, any stat decrease is either meaningless or too painful to
consider
> at the point where you would consider a mixed blessing item.
This would require multiple pvals, which I'm not going to implement too
soon. However, noted until then. (multiple pvals filed as issue #571)
> How about a potion that attempts to blind you, and then gives ESP as
long as
> the blindness lasts. Perhaps you could extend the effect with other
forms of
> blindness, such as being breathed on by appropriate hounds.
Gargoon wrote:
> I like the idea of potions of blindness also giving tem****ary ESP.
> I'd untie it from the blindness effect so that you stll get temp ESP
> if you have rblind, though.
I'm happy to give this a go, as a replacement for !Blindness.
David Vestal wrote:
> Moderately rare scrolls of Intensification. They have a chance to
> change a potion into a stronger version of itself. CLW becomes CSW,
> Heal become *Heal*, wands of Cold Balls become wands of Dragon's
> Breath, etc. Potions of restore stat become potions of increase stat;
> potions of increase stat have a tiny chance of become potions of
> augmentation. Failure becomes more likely as the item level becomes
> higher. It's annoying to s*** for healing or stat-gain potions; this
> could make it easier.
Having a scroll of intensification would mean that instead of just
s***ming for healing or stat-gain potions, people would s*** for
healing, stat-gain, /or/ intensification.
It sounds like it would be a better idea to just help avoid the
s***ming, maybe by sellling high-end healing potions in the shops for
suitably high-level character at a suitably high price.
> Potions/Scrolls of Vital Armor: tem****arily raises AC by 30-50 or so
> points by sapping your life-force (thus, MHP is also tem****arily
> reduced by 10-30%).
I have something like this in the mushroom of stoneskin. (raises AC,
slows you down)
> It's not a consumable, but I've always wanted an early-game amulet
> that raises AC by 50 or so, and has no other effects.
I'm not sure how balanced that would be.
Andrew Doull wrote:
> I've made rings of Tele****tation stop randomly tele****ting you after a
> while, and then allow you to activate for Tele****t. So it's worth the
> initial pain to get a tele****t item early on.
Gargoon wrote:
> I also like the idea of cursed items like the ring of tele****tation
> uncursing over time. Connecting that to leveling up or to gaining a
> certain amount of experience would prevent people from stair s***ming
> to get rid of curses. This would also make trying unidentified
> weapons and armors much less of a hassle, since they wouldn't require
> a trip back to town to remove.
>
> An alternative way to make tele****tation rings interesting would be to
> give them a very small amount of speed. At lower levels, I'd be very
> tempted to wear a +2 speed ring that would tele****t me randomly. For
> extra evil, tie the frequency of the tele****t activation to the pval
> of the ring, so the more speed you get, the more often you get kicked
> into a pack of acid hounds.
David Vestal wrote:
> Having rings of tele****tation activate for tele****tation would be a
> very quick way to make it worthwhile to uncurse and wear them. Seems
> intuitive also.
R Dan Henry wrote:
> And very "it's been done", which is why I like the speed idea better.
It's funny, I always keep a ring/amulet of tele****tation around with my
characters so that if I think I'm going to get into serious trouble in a
few turns, I can slip it on and hopefully get tele****ted out if things
get bad. So I'm tempted to say it's already quite mixed-blessing
enough: with a speed boost, this would become almost a no-brainer for
those situations. I'm willing to give it a try, though.
Billy Bissette:
> At that rate, why not just turn random tele****tation into a
> potential negative curse effect on items. Such a move could help
> in expanding the nature of curses as well.
>
> You wouldn't get a Ring of Tele****tation (+2 Speed), you would
> get a Ring of Speed (+2) with a random tele****tation curse effect.
> Or Ring of Constitution, or Damage, or whatever. Like Aggravate
> Monster being so popular a negative effect in RandArt systems.
>
> Whether Remove Curse could kill the random tele****ts depends on
> whether you'd want it to be a removable or permanent effect.
> Or *Remove Curse*?
I think the downsides of random tele****tation would easily outweigh any
positive effects for normal wear. I think any unusual curses like this
one should be unremoveable by Remove Curse, too.
Other curses I planned for were:
- bonus-flipping curse: an item whose positive bonuses become negative
and vice versa, every now and again.
- cannot-drop curse. I'm less convinced this is a good curse idea now
than I used to be. (obviously would have to be able to be removed)
Andrew Doull wrote:
> You may want to look at the various item racial flags in Unangband
> that prevent you wielding an item with the equivalent slay. e.g.
> Dragon armour stops you using SLAY_DRAGON weapons.
That might help make endgame kits a bit more diverse, but I can only
think of DRAGON that would work in V as-is. I'll keep this in mind,
though, if I ever try an EyAngband-like item prefix system.
Timo Pietilä wrote:
> Most mushrooms are very good source for "identifying by testing"-method.
> Other good is "bad" potions.
I hope that the need to do this is reduced a bit now that *ID* is
removed and ID grants full knowledge.
Gargoon wrote:
> A few suggestions:
> Remove scrolls of aggravate monster. Replace them with scrolls of
> envy, which aggravate monsters and also generate a "good" or "great"
> item (either way, whatever makes it worth using but not too good)
> somewhere random on the level.
I'm not so keen on this because I want to tilt gameplay towards diving
more than exploring fully-- and reading one of those would force you to
search the level to find the item.
> Potions of slowness could be renamed potions of iron-skin, giving
> their usual slowing and a large AC boost. They'd still be pretty bad,
> but not totally useless.
I have mushrooms of stoneskin, which slow you down (-5) but give a boost
of 30AC for the duration.
Hallvard B Furuseth wrote:
> I've only tried a few variants myself, but aren't there plenty of
> well-tested ideas to steal from them?
Variants seem not to innovate so much in the mixed-blessing department,
at least the ones close to V. I don't get much time to play variants
(or even V) recreationally, so I think that asking people here for ideas
is a better thing to do than invest the time myself which would be
better spent getting a release out of the door.
> Armor and weapons could be consumable. They could degenerate with use -
> how quickly would depend on how many/hard hits they take or give, on the
> item's quality,
I think this is less of a mixed-blessing idea and more a fundamental
rework of how weapons or armour work. To make it an interesting game
mechanic, you would need some significant percentage of combat gear be
subject to wear and tear, and I think that's out of scope for V.
> and on your slovenliness (a new stat, why don't we have
> negative stats?)
There was a little discussion on this but it seems that the idea didn't
go down very well.
Igenlode Wordsmith wrote:
> Borrowing from other variants -- some kind of item of Terrified Escape,
> that makes it impossible to hit anything (including shooting
> straight, or it might be too abusable!) but gives you a massive boost to
> armour class and speed? The idea being that you're so scared that all
> your efforts are given over to getting out of this alive... Would have
> to be a consumable or an activation.
I have this down as a Mushroom of Terror (tem****ary speed boost and a
special fear which doesn't get cured with healing).
> Likewise, rings/amulets that carry a speed penalty along with a
> significant bonus/resist. I suppose this wouldn't be very different
> from, say, heavy weapons or artifact armour as they stand...
I have this down as an amulet which gives FA but also slows you down. I
haven't got a good name though (currently Slow Motion). Ideas?
> An item that gives you acute night vision (See Invisible+Infravision)
> but renders your eyes thereby so sensitive that you can't bear bright
> light? i.e. HP damage in daylight, tem****ary (1d6 turns) blindness when
> casting light-up-room spells, backwash from Wands/Rods of Light, etc.
I like the idea, but I don't think it's plausible to implement at the
moment.
> An amulet of godly dedication, that repels undead physical attacks and
> gives Hold Life, but halves damage against 'good' creatures? Or
> conversely, an item of soul-selling that has the same effects (after
> all, you've sold your soul to the dark side, you must have got some
> benefits out of it) but halves damage against your fellow evil
> creatures? But that might be a little *too* difficult to live with...
and
> An amulet/ring of bowman****p that gives a bonus to ranged attacks but a
> penalty to close combat? (But doesn't affect rangers -- they're already
> as practised at bowman****p as they're going to get...)
Both would be too hard to implement, so I veto them. :)
> Some kind of item (?staff?) of Mass Confusion, that addles the brains of
> every monster within sight -- until the effects wear off, of course!
I've added this, but I fear it will just turn into another staff of
slow/sleep.
> How about another object like a Wand of Wonder, that generally has a
> good effect but sometimes has a bad effect, and you never know which
> you're going to get next? A Scroll/Staff of Armour Tinkering, for
> instance: there's a good chance that a one-off use will endow a random
> (selected from among your existing, equipped, unenhanced possessions)
> piece of equipment with a random resist, but if you get greedy and try
> it too often, then ultimately the tinkering is bound to destroy one of
> your existing excellent items instead -- and you don't get to choose
> which bit of equipment gets tinkered with, either way. (This would
> really make more narrative sense as an encounter with a random
> wandering wizard who takes away one of your items during the night and
> starts fiddling with it ;-)
I believe that there's something that can be done to item enchantment
different and better, but I'm not sure this is it.
Ray Dillinger wrote:
> A weapon whose bonus depends on how hungry you are. The closer you are
> to starvation, the bigger the bonuses it gets. Maybe it also gives you
> a (very small) amount of nutrition whenever you kill something with it.
Not in-theme, I think.
> Make resist-cold and resist-fire mutually exclusive. If you have more
> sources of resist-cold, you resist cold -- but not fire. And vice
versa.
> Possibly do likewise for other "opposed element" resistances. This
would
> probably require toning down some resistable attacks by say, 30%, for
> game balance reasons.
I don't think this has a good cost-benefit ratio.
> Detect Magic could cause blindness if someone else activates an artifact
> in your FOV.
mangband.org got a redesign recently, did you know? :)
> You could have poisons that cancel each other out/act as antidotes for
> each other.
I'm not sure the cost-benefit of this change would be high enough. I
was pondering having mushrooms of stoneskin poison you with a special
poison as long as your AC was high, but I gave up on that idea.
> Rings of aggravate monster could also have beneficial effects like
> strength.
Aggravation has been used as a bad side-effect in randart code, and
people seem to object to it a lot there.
> Rings of slow digestion could also make you vulnerable to confusion
> (at least, *I* get dizzy and lightheaded when I've been not eating
> enough...), reduce your strength or constitution while being worn,
> or reduce the rate at which you heal or recover mana.
As Otto Martin mentions, slow digestion is already one of the least
useful abilities, so weakening it makes it even less so.
> Potions of speed could have a small chance of reducing your
constitution.
>
> Healing potions and speed potions should inflict hunger when used.
> This should be severe enough that you can't use 3 of them back-to-back
> without stopping to eat.
I like the gist of the idea, but I'm not convinced they're a good fit
for V. If anyone wanted to resurrect Rangband, though... (or maybe
Trainspottingband.) See below for the ideas this idea spawned, though.
> Boots of speed could have a "break-in" period where you occasionally
> misstep or fall down while you get used to them. Maybe the first
thousand
> turns you wear them? But don't count time on this clock unless there's
> an active, hostile monster with at least half the player's HP around,
> otherwise you'll get people just sitting there in a locked room for a
> thousand turns.
>
> [from another post]
> I was thinking that occasionally (chances starting at 10% and declining
> to 1% in increments throughout the breakin period) you'd accidentally
> step or attack in a direction other than the direction of the arrow
> you pressed, like a "confusion" effect. At that point the game would
> mark a "speed boots" proficiency somewhere in the character record
> and you'd not have to do it again.
I think in practice this would have very little effect; you're unlikely
to find your boots of speed on the floor and wear them straight away,
but rather you'd ID them first. In that case (that you have just IDd
them or bought them), you are more than likely in a safe spot anymore,
so you'd just walk around a bit until you wore them in.
> Scrolls of enchant weapon could become a lot more fun but riskier, if
> they were a lot more trouble to use. For example, if after reading
> them, you had to actually wield the weapon you were enchanting for
> at least a thousand hit dice of monsters vanquished (no switching
> weapons, no unwielding, no digging, no using wands/anything else
> in your hands, etc) before the enchantment took effect. For bonus
> coolness, the enchantment could vary depending on what you actually
> did with the weapon during that time. If you fought mostly orcs,
> you'd be likely to get a sword of orc slaying, for example -
> instead of having the same "plus-one" effect from every scroll that
> works. Natch, you'd need to make them rarer and increase the odds of
> them actually working.
I think this affects the character of the game too much.
> Scrolls of confuse monster (where your hands glow until you touch
> something, etc) could backfire and confuse *you* if too much time
> p***** before you touch something.
I like that.
> You could have a negatively enchanted weapon (say -3) that is such
> because it makes all your mistakes in weapon-handling obvious. Use
> it for long enough in combat, and you get an intrinsic +1 or +2 with
> that type of weapon, because it also forces you to learn from your
> mistakes.
I don't think this would work in practice.
> A rod of light or frost bolts or something that drains mana every
> time it is invoked. Useful to people who don't have the spell, but
> for wizards who do, not worth carrying.
I'm not sure what that would hold over just a rod of light or frost
bolts or something. Unless those rods were only available in
mana-draining flavours, in which case the TMJ problem for spellcasters
just got worse.
Kenneth Boyd (zaimoni) wrote:
> Slow Metabolism, that directly impairs hp regeneration (and possibly
> also CON's hp bonus). Leave the CON regeneration bonus alone, as I
> don't feel sadistic enough to make it harder to recovery from stunning
> and cuts.
I'll implement it but I'm not sure what items to put it on.
> Slow Magical Metabolism, which directly impairs mana regeneration, and
> possibly also the spell-casting stat bonus to maximum mana.
I could see this being on a ring that increased wis and int.
Otto Martin wrote:
> In any case, Slow Digestion doesn't need weakening, it's already
> one of the least useful specs. In fact...
> (Feather Falling being the other. Change it to levitation (ignore
> some trap effects) and add dangerous / unusual terrain, and it
> begins to matter.)
I'm tempted to make it levitation, so that the player doesn't fall down
trap doors wearing it, as you say. But new terrain is a while off yet,
so I don't think I'll be doing anything with this right now.
> To make Slow Digestion matter more, I think having healing reduce your
> "fullness" is a good idea.
>
> However, a few caveats:
> To avoid major rebalancing, it shouldn't be nearly as drastic as Ray
> wrote, but rather a minor effect that makes players be more aware of
> the need for food in the later game as well.
>
> In fact, I think high Con should make you hungry quicker, but also
> raise the maximum number for satiation. To me, high Con brings to
> mind a hale and hearty hero, one able to eat en entire roast boar
> or something similar. (Of course, tough as nails is another option,
> but with less potential for game-play options.)
This makes sense.
> Renegeration should have even more of an effect on hunger than
> currently, and maybe a slightly strogner HP gain. Then it could be
> seen as a mixed blessing and curse -- heals increadibly quickly,
> but can never be satiated for long, always needing to eat more...
Frankly I think current regeneration carries enough of a penalty w.r.t.
hunger.
> A few addenums to healing also making you hungrier: there should be
> more effect when you're Full, some when you're normal, only a little
> when you're Hungry, and none when Weak or worse. Heroes may have great
> appetites, but they shouldn't die of starvation caused by healing.
> Also, maybe have a few particular healing effects actually fill you,
> wihle the rest make you hungrier. (I'd say Curing, to make it more
> different from others, and Life, since it's supposed to be powerful.)
Timo Pietilä wrote:
> In fact in Moria you increase your food consumption with speed. I
> once used some savefile hacking to make me go like a rocket compared
> to anything else. I died on starvation before at the first move I
> made.
>
> Speed could make you use more food. I don't think that is appropriate
for
> healing. Opposite could be better. You can't drink too many
> healing-potions because your get gorged. Then salt water becomes
useful.
I like the idea of healing potions having a significant nutritional
value, so I've done that. We'll have to see if it works or not...
konijn wrote:
> Random thoughts, bash at your pleasure
>
> * Ring of Rage ( -10 to hit, +10 damage )
> * Ring of the Cat ( +7 stealth, -1 CON )
Implemented variations on these.
> * Potion of Colon Cleaning ( restore CON, STR , put character hungry )
Tasteful name. :)
> * Potion of Caffeine ( +10 speed for twice as long as regular !speed,
> afterwards -10 speed for same time )
Done, but I'd like a more in-theme name. :)
> * Lich/Leech Wand of... ( always has 0 charges, steals charges from
> your other wands when activated )
This is noted down for some future time, but right now isn't up.
> * Potion of Hideousness ( scare all monsters for x turns, then
> aggravate monster for same amount of turns )
Because current fear items don't get used enough anyway, I don't know
that this would actually get used.
dstillwa wrote:
> Perhaps other ideas along these lines might include:
> * Ring of Reckless Attacks (+7 to hit, +7 dam, -30 AC)
Implemented a variation.
> * Ring of the Mouse (-5 dam, +5 stealth)
I think this is covered by the above Ring of the Cat.
Well, if you read this far, well done to you! :)
--
Andrew Sidwell
http://rephial.org/
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