ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

In response to questions posed in a private message:

My biggest issue is the dialog errors.

It's a recurring problem due to a conceptual limitation in the dialogue system. Though, to be fair...I was the one who made it. That's not the engine. Those errors need to be hunted down and fixed individually. There's no one simple fix for them. And DBT has ~700K of dialogue, so I'm pretty much dependant on playtesting to find them.

When you find them, please send me exactly where in the dialogue it broke, and I'll try to fix them.

I miss about half of the Krillin and Pilaf dialogs regularly, and other dialogs break pretty easily as well.

The Pilaf dialogue is notoriously bad. It's so huge that even after four years there are probably still paths in it that in the history of DBT nobody has ever seen. Krillan surprises me...that one should be clean.

In any case, if you can give me exact dialogue options that cause problems, I'll take a look.

The difficulty curve is pretty unforgiving as well

For reasons that escape me, there's some quality to Dragonball T that encourages new players to be suicidally uncautious. I don't really understand it, but back when the wiki was getting daily traffic, pretty much every new player to show up always complained about dying to the same things: At level 1: wandering orange belts. In Mr. Satan's Estate: getting stuck in corridors and swarmed. Around levels 15-20, people who hold down arrows keys to move instead of using shift-run tend to get blown up by Lunch. In Muscle Tower: blindness and bleeding to death. All of these causes of death are trivial to avoid if you take reasonable precautions.

Muscle Tower is the real make-or-break point. If you try to climb it with no blindness resistence, no way to cure cuts, no way to deal with traps, no technology skill and standard speed, armor and constituion...yeah, you're going to die.

Most players seem to try to focus on just one thing: lots of hitpoints, lots of armor, high barehanded damage, high speed, whatever. That doesn't work.

Other common mistakes:
* Refusing to invest stat points in charisma
* Being so fixated on being a barehanded fighter to the point of refusing to use weapons even when they do ten times as much damage
* Not reading the help files and not knowing about the S command
* Not investing in technology skill
* Spending money on gym membership and not leaving money for training
* Lugging around dragonballs even with -200 speed and dying because of it
* General refusal to use tools and consumables: laser pointers, compasses, Zheng Gui Shui, mountain dew, etc.
* Insisting on single-school builds
* Going into Mr. Satan's Estate at level 4 or 5.

until they figure out that it's better to start
out killing snakes than other martial artists)

An orange belt is always my first kill. It's an instant jump to level 3, and once you know the game it's perfectly safe to do regardless of your starting stats. The most obvious method: buy a staff and set your speed to running. Let him walk up to you so you get the first attack. BAM! One-maybe-two-hit-kill.

but if ego stuff can be fixed, that would definitely help.

Yes, I'll take a look at that. Again...Muscle Tower may be impractical without blindness resistence. Maybe the problem was resolved with alpha19. I haven't look at it in a while. Nerdanal claimed that the problem was fixed, but when I last tried her fix, it didn't seem to actually work except for some particular couple flags that none of my modules use.

I have no idea how to get back to Earth. North Kai's planet seems like a dead end (there's no one to talk to to learn jokes from) and once you're on it you're stuck.

Testing it just now, apparently the return path from the Kaio's planet is bugged. It should return you to the Serpent's Path. Go the other way. The east path leads to the Kaio's planet. The west path leads back to earth.

I would like to be able to cover some of the afterlife stuff, but currently I have no idea how to get back to Earth. And if you fall off Snake Way, Hell seems inescapable as well. Is that all there is to it, or am I missing something obvious?

...ok...afterlife is remarkably complex, and there's enough to it that I probably don't even remember all the details. Or, for that matter, what works in the current version and what doesn't. If you want to be spoiled, I can look stuff up. If you're content with generalities...

* There are multiple solutions for pretty much every problem. With a few exceptions.
* It is possible to come back to life. But, only two methods to do so are implemented. One is easy, but obscure, and only works once. The other is obvious, and repeatable, but impractically difficult. Overall, while being dead is more or less viable as a chi-barehanded fighter, it's not really recommended for most other character types. Actually, it's not recommended at all, but I know of at least one player who had success being deliberately dead
* There are three different afterlives. Which you go to depends on your alignment. If you want it easy, get your alignment to +100 before you die, and you'll go to Heaven.
* Yes it is possible to escape from hell.
* It is possible to complete the North Kaio's quest. However, it is sufficiently non-obvious how to do so that I recommend not focusing on it. It's something that you figure out over the course of many, many games. You will probably stumble on solutions purely by accident. However...the nature of the quest is such that there's not one simple "solution" that can be applied every game. The quest has a random quality to it, and will be different with each game. What works one game might not work in the next. All I can suggest is that you read dialogue. Huge hint: you don't learn jokes on his planet.
* There are multiple ways to make traversing the Serpent Road completely safe and trivial. Walking its length without making use of one of these methods is possible, but not recommended. If you're freshly level 25 when you die, and have no abilities or artifacts...it might be easier to simply abandon the character than try to escape. It can be done, but every time you fall you'll have to escape from hell all over again. It might be easier to level a new character to 25.
* It is not neccesary to die to go to planet Namek.
* Making the trip to Namek is probably not warranted, since only a couple quests are implemented, and it is not possible to summon Porunga.
* There are multiple ways to get to Kami. Some involve dying. Some do not. One method in particular is obvious. However, what happens when you meet him will depend highly on what has transpired so far in the game, as well as your alignment. It is possible to be evil and train with Kami, but the methods are non-obvious.

Hey folks. I'm the guy who sent him the pm.

On the dialog stuff, I can certainly run some wizmode chars and break the ones I know that break.

Glad to know that the path back from King Kai's (North Kaio) planet is busted. Thought I was going crazy. And yes, trying to walk Serpent's Way without a certain ability or a help from a particular source is a pain in the ass. That's a fiendish little maze you built for that.

About the first kill. An orange belt certainly works, but a snake is a hell of a lot safer. For one thing, they don't currently fight back. The big issue is whether or not you can kill it before it runs away, and they're a lot faster than you are.

One thing to keep in mind, is that most rpger's aren't used to Charisma in video games being used for anything more than extraneous romance quests. High Charisma is practically a necessity in this mod.

I'm going to put together a detailed newbie guide, and I'll post it here. I'll cover things like what schools work well together, starting attributes, what the skills do, early strategies, and just point folks in the right direction.

I had some ideas for how the Seiyan stuff could be implemented, and a modification for the Chi Projection ability. Would you like those here, or should I pm those to you?

good luck (says the guy who can get to lvl 40 routinely even with the higher ascii broken)

it is *possible* to get pretty far into the game without a high charisma, but still it makes it more bearable I guess.

(I can complete past muscle tower with chr at 10 at the beginning, and only increase it with items as needed, that includes 17+ charisma quests.)

yeah, I personally do snakes, making them flee into a corner, this also makes the other snakes "hostile" giving you more than a few levels.

if you want some help/pointers you can ask me too, been playtesting it since it was introduced.

(yes, I even know how to do the north kaio planet too)

rickvoid wrote: An orange belt certainly works, but a snake is a hell of a lot safer.

I try to avoid attacking neutrals. In some cases it can be a bad thing. And orange belts have a maximum possible damage of 6 points, and move at base speed. So if you start with 14 con and speed, turn on running and buy a staff or get the Aru quest knife, it's zero-risk so long as you aren't spectuclarly careless. Just hit it, step away, repeat until it's dead. If you ever get taken down to below 7 hp, just walk in circles until you heal.

most rpger's aren't used to Charisma in video games being used for anything
High Charisma is practically a necessity in this mod.

Yes. I think the help files even mention that. "Charisma is not a drop stat. Neglect it at your own risk" or something to that effect.

And yes, trying to walk Serpent's Way without a certain ability or a help from a particular source is a pain in the ass.

It can be done. It has been done. But not often.

I'm going to put together a detailed newbie guide, and I'll post it here

I heartily encourage this.

It appears that the old wiki is functioning at the moment. You might glance through it. A lot of people spent a lot of hours there. There's very likely to be useful information.

Main Dragonball T portal
Gameplay discussion
Compiled game tips
Character build discussion
OLD worldmap image
Complete quest/NPC/dungeon list

I'll cover things like what schools work well together, starting attributes, what the skills do, early strategies

I'm curious to hear your ideas. Previously there's been a good deal of disagreement about what is and isn't a good way to go about things. DBT has several totally viable, but completely incompatible playstyles. I remember having a number of entertaining disagreements with Sirroco about character design.

I actually wouldn't be terribly surprised if there were as many functional combinations as non-functional ones.

I had some ideas for how the Seiyan stuff could be implemented, and a modification for the Chi Projection ability. Would you like those here, or should I pm those to you?

Discussion here would be better. I'm not going to go back to seriously coding for DBT unless the playerbase returns. So discussion where people can see it is far preferable to private messages.

Seiyan stuff

I'm not sure it's realistic to expect the Saiyan arc to even be completed. The original design plan for DBT was to progress through all the major arcs: Red Ribbon Army, World Tournament, Piccolo, Saiyan, Androids, Cell and Buu. At present, the RRA arc is finished, the World Tournament is mostly finished but broken, the Piccolo and Android arcs have a couple scraps in place, the Saiyan arc is not finished enough to even be mentionable, and Buu is completely untouched except for a couple code references in the combat scripts.

If you can generate enough excitement to return DBT to its glory days of daily feedback and wiki/forum activity, I'd seriously consider going back and adding all the originally intended content. But unless you can generate that kind of interest, it may be more realistic to hope for cleanip and fleshing out of the existing content and a formal end to the game at the end of the Red Ribbon Army content.

Which would probably not be that bad. So far as I know, no one has ever even made it to Red Ribbon Army Supreme Headquarters, let alone completed it.

LordBucket wrote:Which would probably not be that bad. So far as I know, no one has ever even made it to Red Ribbon Army Supreme Headquarters, let alone completed it.

*cough* ... not saying anything... (I did have to "cheat" on one of the rising water levels because of a bug, but besides that...)

LordBucket wrote:Discussion here would be better. I'm not going to go back to seriously coding for DBT unless the playerbase returns. So discussion where people can see it is far preferable to private messages.

yeah, dbt is and was my fav t3 module... then you left it to go to bgc , granted it was mainly just 2 of us (besides you) around there then posting on the wiki.

my fav build is a passive chi/weaponmaster, with about 200-300 to hit and armor if you build it correctly.

Shoob wrote: rising water levels

...rising water levels...so that would be General Blue's underwater lair, right? Not RRA Supreme HQ. That's the four-dungeon multiplex with Commander Red at the end.

fav build is a passive chi/weaponmaster

I think a generic barehander is my favorite. Simple, unoriginal...but I like them. There's something about having 3000 hit points at level 25 that makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

yeah, I know, but that is what I had to "cheat' my way out of, I did eventually enter the multi-plex and do it.

I've been trying for the last couple of hours trying to find a way to play this module. Ever since I've played it in the past its always been one of my faves. Please help me out, I just want to play this while watching Dragonball.