ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

So, now that the primary emotional connection to ToME is gone (alas, poor Tolkien--but I still love the game!), I was wondering if there was another chemical bond that could be put in its place.

And I had it: let's have more than one @!!! Like in the old adventure games!

There is one roguelike which already has a multi-character party built in: Guild. (See http://www.roguetemple.com/guild/.) It was at a very basic stage--really just proof of concept. But it did it surprisingly well. The user interface was a bit rough, but it worked. Experience is shared by various rules, and you can hand things between players, and cast spells on other players, and push past players, and so forth.

In general, there are two interface options for controlling a party:

(1) allow the player to control each of the four characters individually

(2) allow the player to control only one character, giving the other three general guidance to be interpreted by the AI (defense; stay; wander), but allowing the player to switch between characters in some cases.

There are a variety of issues with this. Do the characters need to all be within a few tiles to go down stairs together? If they aren't, do the characters that aren't just wander the dungeon, or try to catch up, or... If a character dies, how do you get a new one? At the town? Does he start at level 1? Are the monsters easier if you try to tackle them just alone without a party? Old games like Ultima solve this by effectively having the party all be in the same place all the time. A roguelike could send a thief and archer around the long way to make a flanking maneuver; and if it goes bad, what happens when the warrior and mage need to escape up the stairs?

But I think that, if the user interface were to be worked out well, this could catapult ToME immediately into being one of the major roguelikes, along with adom and dcss, etc. A party would add untold possibilities for interaction between characters, new needs for spells, crazy possibilities for sacrificing characters, a bit of a blurring of the permadeath aspect of roguelikes (a party could last for a long time: "it's my favorite hammer--i've changed the head four times and the handle three times"), etc.

This would be a very exciting development. Just wanted to put it out there!

I should also say that, although I was sad that the platform moved from C to lua (since I know C and C++ very well, while lua seems...odd...even though I know some lisp via emacs), if a larger movement developed towards parties, I would be willing to contribute to coding.

I do have thoughts about making party stuff, if only to better handle the golem. But then it'd open some neat possibilities indeed

seems more like variant turf to me.
(but possibly super cool variant turf.)

Not really it could help a lot with pet classes

The more pet classes the better.

I wonder if this would just have to grow up organically out of the pet classes, then.

As golems become able to be handed things with more precision, and possibly to give things back to the alky, and as giving directions to pets/golems gets better, and as pets/golems become able to scout out areas and see things the player can't and we get used to exposing parts of the dungeon that aren't in LoS of just the @, eventually there would be enough structure in place to have a permanent companion who would in the end be on par and coequal with the original @.

Then there would be a natural need for new spells. For example, defensive spells right now primarily just protect the @, while attacks are often area effects; but with better pets/golems and eventually more than one @, area defensive spells could become more important (a scintillating white area of the screen which protects or heals).

If this happens naturally, and one wanted total control of all adventurers for short periods rather than using the AI, the primary new requirement would be a user interface which would tell you which character your next keystroke would be an action for, focusing on that adventurer.

Finally, if that works well, all kinds of crazy things could be *modded* in, like a new class of wizard twins who affect each others' power, and have spells that arc between the two wizards, causing monsters massive lightning damage if the twins get dangerously separated. Or the ability for a priest-like class to borrow energy from party members and give it to one focal adventurer, maybe the guy who steps into the room first. Formations: thief leads the way, looking for traps. Archers can learn to shoot through (with a chance to fail) squares with friendly characters. Leader characters can give semi-magical encouragement to those who are close enough. Etc etc.

I agree that many (most) people wouldn't want to play like this. But if the pet stuff gets good enough, one can make party mods using the pet structures, without having to basically rewrite the core of the game.