are you seriously accusing me of ripping off your ideas?
Of course...not. Yet still, pretty amusing correlations. Was working on EKs concept few years ago for completely different project, by the way (just to note).
something I'd be willing to aid you with on IRC if you decide to go through with that
Given enough time – I would. Once again, said ideas needs to be refined up to usable stage for that.
As to the idea you posted, it sounds like a pain to balance.
Well, actually easiest way to achieve that is making quick save on start of each stage, just to erase all acquired passions (items, currency), yet not experience. Legalized grinder ? Not really, given harsh requirement for talent in question: ~50 cunning to start with. Still, very nice layout refresher "just in case".
P.S. Talking about “unused ideas for RPGs”: I still eager to implement reality-warping class, whose abilities revolve around 3D->2D optical distortion (think M.C. Escher works and Echochrome).
Alright, working on the secondary Feedback tree now. I've adjusted how the base feedback works a bit.
What I'm looking for is ideas along these lines, primarily offensive in nature.
Psychic/Discharge - A class version of the feedback tree.
Psychic Discharge
Activate to discharge up to %0.2f feedback in a radius %d cone. Targets damaged by this attack may become brainlocked.
Learning this talent will increase the amount of feedback you can store by 100 (first talent point only).
The damage will scale with your mindpower.
Feedback Overflow - (sustain)
While active you store up to %d excess feedback as overflow. At the start of your turn the overflow will be unleased as mind damage in a radius of %d.
Learning this talent will increase the amount of feedback you can store by 100 (first talent point only).
The max excess you can store will improve with your mindpower and max feedback.
Obviously this could easily have some overlap with Mindslayers. I'm not sure yet if I want to go that route. Kinetic Discharge was one thought I had (but it's very similar to spiking a Kinetic Aura). So any other thoughts? Thoughts on having mindslayerish effects?
- Feedback shouldn't be static. Otherwise, you get the situation where you want to find some nice, nonthreatening monster somewhere so that you can farm them for damage (or do something equally silly. Set yourself on firre, perhaps?). It warps the game. One way or the other, at the end fo a decent rest, you should either be at full feedback or empty feedback. If it *is* static, there should at least be a reasonable power or two that will result in gaining more of the stuff. Personally, feedback seems to me to be the sort of stuff that ought to decay over time.
- This brings us to our second issue. If there is that decay, Feedback Overflow can very quickly render itself obsolete. You're getting feedback caps 100 points at a time. Pretty quickly, that results in a pool that you can't easily fill without serious threat to your own life - possibly exacerbated by the way the Solipsist treats Hp vs mindpower (depending on how the "gain feedback" function works). If your pools are too large, and they decay over time, you may find that you just aren't ever getting any overflow.
So you can get 100 from the first generic feedback talent and 100 more from the first discharge talent and every talent after that gives 50 more. So in total you could get 200 + (50 * 6) so 500 points. 300 points less then I had it set earlier tonight
As to decay it's set at -1 (has been since the beginning) and you can't get feedback by damaging yourself. The first talent in each tree will say "You now store damage you take from outside sources as psionic feedback."
Good thoughts though, I appreciate the feedback even if I was ahead of you (So don't let it discourage you from bringing other things to my attention, I was ahead of you this time but next time I might not even think of it).
I'm also a bit worried that Overflow won't be very good due to the nature of the mechanics. We'll see how it actually plays out once I get some more talents done and can start doing some good play testing.
Alright, after some thought I've decided to ditch the Feedback mechanic and have on of the trees be called Resonance.
The first talent will be Feedback, a sustain that converts pain (damage) into Psi regen over ten turns which will have amazing synergy for Solipsists. It will still be a generic tree though.
So I need a few generic talent ideas for a tree that's about Resonating (or being in tune) with the world around you.
Some name ideas.
Resonance (possibly something to do with wearing psionically powered equipment but I might have issues coding that).
1. GuevaraChan, I obviously don't know what was going through Edge's head, but I have a very hard time believing he read your ideas, given that all your posts look as if they had been fed through Google Translator.
2. I love the concept of this class! The first set of talents strike me as a bit bizarre, though - they're supposed to be incredibly powerful, given the massive drawbacks involved in taking them, but they aren't. The fourth one in particular is simply a movement infusion in disguise. I can't see myself ever making so large a sacrifice for so little reward.
3. For talents that involve "harmonizing" with the surroundings, some random ideas:
a. Equilibrium reduction if you have equilibrium (potentially very powerful if you go antimagic and have Antimagic shield up)
b. Splitting your consciousness among a few different "bodies," each with a fraction of your health and damage; if one is killed, the effect ends, and you suffer mental damage as backlash
c. Seeing through walls
d. Bolt spells/effects have a chance to pass harmlessly through you
e. Enemies in melee range have a chance to think they are you, causing them to fight on your side for a turn
f. Passing through walls
g. Temporarily merge with an item in your inventory, destroying it and gaining bonuses based on the item type, egos, and material level
h. Merge with the floor, gaining damage reduction but losing the ability to move, use items, and maybe a few other things
I changed the Solipsism tree quite a bit since my initial post. The first talent and the healing part of the second talent have been merged, Clarity is the same, the saving throw effect on balance now applies to spell saves too, and dismissal lets you make a mental save vs. damage.
- So, basically, this new skill is a way for the Solipsist to use pain to ground themselves in reality. Interesting thought.
...and it actually suggests that the Solipsist is running everything off of an inhumanly powerful subconscious that's badly dissociated from reality. He/she can reach back to it for power, but the more in tune with it they get, the less attached to reality they are. A few interesting thoughts on that one...
possibly something that will let the Solipsist continue casting into negative psi, but doing so stuns them for a few rounds. It's not that their inner mental titan runs out of juice, its that they get lost in their own psyche and have to find their way out. Of course, they'd also be recovering mental power pretty quickly while stunned.
Similarly, it suggests a skill that would give you a pretty hefty mindpower boost (or whatever) as your psi got low. Sure, you're a bit apathetic about the world around you, but when you *can* rouse yourself to care, you're also a lot more in tune with the monster of psionic power that is your inner tiny god. That, in tune, suggests a different playstyle - rather than trying to stay topped up on psi, so as to remain more in tune with the world, you burn it down to the dregs. Sure, you go slower, but everything you do hits a lot harder, too. Attached to that, then, we'd have a skills like "Fake Normality" - it lets you overcome (to a degree) the penalties of losing yourself to your own Solipsism - not by actually remaining grounded and caring, but by convincing yourself that *pretending* to be grounded is a fun game that you're playing for your own purposes.
Similarly, suggests a skill that allows the Solipsist to spend a turn regaining mental power - just a moment of focusing on the world around them, grounding them.
The new version of resonance works a lot better. Oddly, it suggests a way that some of the follow-on resonance ideas still work. Basically, you add another bit of bar on your psi-pool, beyond your normal max. If you are above the line, then you actually have a fairly significant drain, rather than a slow refresh. In addition, while you are above the line, resonance effects kick in that give you benefits for being above the line - regeneration efects, damage auras, and so forth. Anything you can do that cranks you up there lets you use them.
Mindcrush - deals Mind damage to a single target; if that would be enough to bring the target below X% HP, instead attempts to apply the yeek Dominate effect (and then deals the damage if that fails).
Ravage Mind - focuses continuously on a single target like Feed; each turn it deals Mind damage and has a chance to cause one of a few status effects (Confuse, Blind, Pin, maybe Slow or Disarm)
Convulse - Mind damage, and each enemy damaged has a chance to physically attack itself.
Battle of Wits - Fearscape-like, but both participants have the Mindslayer TK Focus wil-and-cun-instead-of-str-and-dex rules.
<Ferret> The Spellblaze was like a nuclear disaster apparently: ammo became the "real" currency.
Sirrocco I like the feedback above max Psi idea but I'm not sure how to incorporate it into what I already have. The issue being that Solipsists will basically use there Psi as a life bar (I didn't show the percentages on the Solipsism talent but it approaches 100% really easily and can even hit that with a talent mastery boost).
Maybe calculations for Feedback decay could use Psi + Feedback and the character could spend Feedback *as* Psi if they have it. Effectively allowing the Solipsist to use both damage they take as Psi and there health directly as Psi.
Likewise the Resonance effects you mentioned could simply use Psi + Feedback as the baseline. I'll have to ponder this more but more feedback (har har) would be good in the mean time.
Alright, I have Feedback half adjusted in the actor code. I'll need to go through and adjust the talents still :/
Currently Feedback looks like this.
Each talent point invested in a feedback talent improves pool size by 10 (this will give 500 max if the player fully invests in both trees).
Feedback talents will require feedback to operate (not Psi).
Feedback can be used in place of Psi for Psi powered talents.
The first Feedback talent improves the amount of feedback you get from each point of damage you take. The base ratio is 50% + whatever the talent gives. Actors that don't have this talent will just use 50%.
I'm not sure if I want Solipsism and Clarity to use feedback in calculations. The fact that Feedback gives a buffer (a secondary resource pool basically) should be enough. That said I'm still keen on Solipsism and Clarity *like* effects that run purely off stored Feedback.
*edit* Also adjusted feedback decay, it's 10% of the pool per turn or 1, which ever is greater.
Sustain that summons a wall waking invisible version of yourself that shares hit points with you. When you venture to far from your body the summon time begins to tick down. The projection can only deal mind damage and only to 'ghosts' and creatures you've mind linked with.
Further talents in the tree will be Mind Link and Psychic Surgery (a heal with maybe mental effect removal).
Had a couple of random thoughts... rather unformed for this stage of things, but maybe you can find them useful anyway.
- Enlightenment Tree: There is something that at the very least looks an awful lot like Zen enlightenment that can leave you with really very limited stores of motivation with respect to the world. If the world is an illusion, and you have pierced its veil to see it as it is, and cast away suffering... why do anything? At the same time, enlightenment has been described as granting all sorts of awesome powers. This seemed to me to be a rather strong fit with the Solipsist idea.
- Feedback: Looking back at the idea where the Solipsist has a tremendously powerful subconscious, with psi being the degree to which the conscious self is grounded in reality... Feedback is that *subconscious* being grounded in reality - usually by pain. It doesn't like it - it fights to return to blissful detachment, and so feedback burns away very quickly, but in the meantime, you can connect to your subconscious without as much cost to your conscious groundedness (thus spending psi) and you can teach it ways to lash out. None of the feedback effects would be active - they could well include powerful damage auras, as the subconscious lashes out at its tormenters, or mindpower, as the subconscious gives of its powers more freely, or cooldown rate effects, or global speed, or things like that. In some ways, I'd want to make it include healing, but I can totally see where that would get into weird near-unkillable resource loops.
As an interesting idea, though, to go along with the idea of the build that focuses on running low-psi, making up for the speed loss with per-action power, the pinnacle skill fo the feedback tree (or of a feedback tree) might still be an active skill - inversion. Your current psi is set to your current feedback and vice versa. Fairly significant cooldown. For someone who's mastered the right trees, though, this basically means that you've suddenly become a raging mindstorm that walks around very slowly and hits like an absolute truck. Of course, it has disadvantages, too.
It is at this time that I note the somewhat awkward situation where the solipsist finds that getting damaged carves off chunks of their global speed. This seems... dangerous.
Here's my current thoughts on feedback (forgive me if I'm repeating myself, I've been considering your ideas for the last couple of days Sirroco).
Feedback will take a lot of dedication for the Solipsist to master, storing and discharging energy like this is more of a mindslayer niche after all.
Feedback will consist of two sister trees, one generic and one class. Both will be unlockable trees (requiring two category points if you really want to master feedback).
Feedback - generic
Feedback - Increases the base conversion ratio.
Resonance Field - Summons a damage shield that reduces all damage you receive by 50% (until the maximum absorption level is reached). This shield does not interfere with feedback gain (in other words, you gain feedback from the full hit, the shield will be called very late in the shield chain and after feedback is calculated).
Biofeedback (sustain) - Increases your life regen by a percentage of your current feedback.
????
Discharge - class
Discharge - Projects a beam of lightning/mind damage. At talent level 5 this mind damage has a chance to brain lock the target based on the damage done.
Overcharge - Increases the potency of all feedback talents by X% for a few turns. While Overcharge is active nearby actors (radius 1/2) will suffer X lightning/mind damage. At talent level 5 this mind damage has a chance to brain lock the target based on the damage done.
Feedback Loop - Project a short range bolt that deals lightning/mind and puts a debuff on the target. Each time the target uses a talent they'll suffer lightning/mind damage. At talent level 5 this mind damage has a chance to brain lock the target based on the damage done.
Brain Shocks (sustain) - Your brain locks now inflict X lightning damage each turn they're active. At talent level 5 this lightning damage can daze the target.
Now I want to say that the above is just thoughts and I wanted to get them on paper before I forgot about them.
That said I really like your take on Feedback Sirrocco. But I'm having trouble coming up with passive effects for it. Right now Feedback can be used as Psi if you have it and the first talent ('Feedback') is coded. Without the talent the base feedback gain ratio is 50% of damage received.
Trees full of passives and/or sustains can be kinda difficult to do. But I'm all ears if people have better ideas. We can certainly go that direction is what I'm getting at (i.e. none of the above is really set in stone).
So any specific ideas for Sirrocco's take on Feedback? His take would probably be base trees (not requiring unlocks that is).
Hmm.. maybe the Discharge tree could work like a damaging version of gloom?
In which case the tree could look like...
Discharge (no energy to activate sustain) - Projects a bolt of lightning/mind damage at a random actor within range (5). Additional talent points increase the number of projections fired each turn but an actor can't be targeted more then once. Each discharge drains X feedback (less with more talent points).
???? -
Feedback Loop (passive) - Your discharges now pull the target into a feedback loop for X turns. Every time you use a talent that costs psi targets you've effected with feedback loop suffer X lightning/mind damage.
Overflow (sustain) - Feedback gains over your normal maximum trigger an immediate discharge if the lost feedback exceeds (X - talent level). (Note that as a sustain this will actually reduce your maximum feedback, thus increasing the chances it fires.)
(So don't let it discourage you from bringing other things to my attention, I was ahead of you this time but next time I might not even think of it).