ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I think that making the randart 'theme' and item type not totally random could improve gameplay, make the arts fit more with the setting, and reduce the changes of RNG screwage for the player.

How?
Two ideas.

1)Randart theme - and base item type - could be affected by the boss dropping it.
Bill would be more likely to drop a weapon or nature randart,
Shade would drop something death/arcane based, and maybe more likely to be jewelry.
Minotaur a 'warriorish' weapon or armour piece, and so on.

2)Less 'realistic' but more player-friendly: the game could be more likely to generate arts that are fit with the player class. No guarantee, but an overall tendency.
The game needs to know what each class would benefit most from - fighters want one handed weapons and shields, berserkers two-handers, both could enjoy armour...
And so on.
There are some slightly unusual cases such as Alchemists who want some mage stuff but also two-handers/body armour for the golem, but these shouldn't be too hard to handle.

Note that these two ideas, while different, are NOT are not opposed and could be implemented together, although it might take some extra work.

Also, although the post is mainly about randarts, it might be interesting to apply these rules to world arts too. So a fighter-type boss would be more likely to drop fighterish randarts AND world artifacts.


There should still be the significant chance of a 'surprise' however.
An example: I got the feathersteel amulet from Bill, and while it has nothing to do thematically with the dungeon or the boss, it was nice.
I don't wand this kind of possibility removed from the game - perhaps some world arts should be flagged as 'generally' useful and all classes would have roughly equal chances of getting them.

This occurs in Hengband, and it is great. Randarts have a higher percentage chance to have stats skewed towards those beneficial to the player class. e.g. for Ninjas, Str Dex Con, and for Mages, Int and so forth.

The randarts have a theme, and a name (from a file) is picked to correspond with its powers. E.g. 'Roaring Lightning Dragon' has electricity-themed abilities, and Rengoku-Kaen (presumably having something to do with fire) always has fire attributes. 'of Cinderella' has +charisma, and it is greatly entertaining when one finds a Steel Helm of Cinderella as a randart. Never knew she needed one, but then who can plumb the depths of any human? I also can't figure out why my Small Metal Shield of Pro Wrestler has +stealth; maybe has something to do with the incredibly "sneaky" moves they pull off on one another *chuckle*

The naming seems to be somewhat thematic already, but the attributes could definitely use a *LOT* more alignment. I found a hard leather cap on my berserker named Flamewoe that had +fire melee damage, but also had +spellpower and +spellcrit--essentially useless to me. Also, several weapons had +acid and +light damage, but then boosted frost and fire damage.

It's always fun to find randarts, but thematizing them more would add a whole order of magnitude of fun.

I have been finding a lot of bows that add an element to melee damage, which is kind of annoying. Or am I missing something?

Lailoken wrote:I have been finding a lot of bows that add an element to melee damage, which is kind of annoying. Or am I missing something?

File it as a bug?