ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

There are two problems I'd like to address simultaneously. The first is that everybody does too much damage relative to the health of the target. One-shots abound, both by the player character and of the player character. The second is something that all players eventually discover: the key to a successful character is boosting constitution. If every character maxes con, then it's no longer a very meaningful element of the game.

To address the first concern, let's inflate health values of monsters and player characters. This should lead to longer, more interesting fights and fewer instadeaths. It will also make resource management more of an issue.

To address the second concern, let's disallow spending points to increase constitution while still allowing increases from gear and whatever else. Maybe this should go along with a reduction in the number of stat points we get each level. This means that we'll need fairly drastic health increases to address the first concern.

These two changes, if implemented without any change to what con does, would make con increases pretty useless. I therefore suggest we change the way constitution affects health. Let's have it be a percentage increase; a con of 10 means that your base health gets increased by 10%. A con of 50 means that your base health gets increased by 50%. This has the added bonus of making con-increasing gear more valuable for characters with naturally higher health pools.

To go along with all this, I'd change the health talent so that each point spent increases con by X. Eliminate the stat requirement.

I agree with raising HP globally, but stat based systems where you can't raise a particular stat make me cry. Constitution will already be made worse if its HP boost is being made smaller in comparison to other sources of HP.

Could increase hit points globally and decrease the gain from Con.

So net total would remain the same or higher (depending on DGs preference) and the value of Con would decrease.

I am certainly not "proposing a huge nerf to con." The first change taken alone decreases the relative importance of con, but all the changes taken together actually increase the value of con, especially later in the game.

Gandolfo wrote: I think the main problem ... is a single strategy dominating the game

Gandolfo wrote:The problem needs to be addressed more permanently than kludging a stat so that it sucks.

Gandolfo wrote:What needs to be done is that the whole damage vs combat system needs rethinking

After you identify a problem you should propose solutions. Failing to do so is the difference between a useful piece of constructive criticism and a complaint.

Gandolfo wrote:I suggest instead of proposing ideas that are bound to draw criticism from those who fear losing their only advantage in a fairly hard game, lets think about how combat works and come up with a system that does not suck for the player while avoiding the traps of 1-strategy wins.

I'm willing to risk the criticism of people who think I'm trying to take things away from them; it doesn't happen nearly as much as you seem to think. Folks around here have been pretty level-headed and willing to trust that Darkgod will balance things to keep Tome fun. Despite all the controversial suggestions that have gone live, Tome is getting more and more player friendly and winnable. Bring on the crazy ideas.

I don't like the idea of not being able to increase Con - it makes the stat pointless, such that everything should just modify Life directly. At the moment it's a resource that you must invest in at the expense of others, which is good. However it's also 100% required to be maxed by all characters in order to survive for a decent amount of time - this choice without choice is bad.

I would suggest spreading the Life-increasing effects across multiple stats to make Con less useful for everyone, but making Con give an armour boost so that it is still an important melee stat.

For example:

1 Str gives +1 Life
1 Wil gives +1.5 Life
1 Con gives +3 Life and +0.5 Armour

This means that classes investing in Willpower and Strength (which covers most classes) would not rely on Con as heavily, unless they also want to get involved in melee a lot. I would also suggest making the Dexterity stat increase Defense and Ranged Defense much more significantly and the Cunning stat increase crit defense significantly, so that every class will be covered by natural increases in defences when investing in their usual stats.

An across the board damage reduction (both players and enemies - oh, and traps too) would also be good, but it shouldn't be too huge.

On top of that an increase in the availability of shielding runes would give more tactical options than simply pumping Life till you're unassailable.

eronarn wrote:I agree with raising HP globally, but stat based systems where you can't raise a particular stat make me cry. Constitution will already be made worse if its HP boost is being made smaller in comparison to other sources of HP.

I am also troubled by the inconsistency and arbitrariness of simply disallowing people to raise con. Ideally we want a way to achieve all the same effects without that admittedly strange limitation. Do you have any ideas? I don't want to simply let the health inflation devalue constitution.

Maybe constitution could require two stat points to raise. Or maybe there could be a whole system of class-based stat costs, though that's a complicated enough issue that I don't really want to look at it right now.

Maybe the amount of health a point of con gives you is based on class.

Maybe we could allow characters to raise con, but rescale the percentage increase so that endgame characters with maxed con don't have ridiculous health. Half a percent increase per point of con? Then 100 con results in a 50% increase to base health.

All of the above basically boil down to "make health increases from con better for certain classes." A more complicated solution would involve creating more ways to increase survivability that are based off other stats so that, for example, a mage might find it in his best interest to increase cunning instead of constitution, as he has some sort of great ability that scales with cunning that he deems more valuable than a simple increase in health. Since characters get enough stat points to max three stats with some to spare, this would require adjusting things so that con isn't always in the top three stats for any given class. I think that this sort of thing is what Gandolfo was trying to say in the last part of his post. It's the most elegant solution, but by far the most difficult to achieve in terms of design and coding.

Grey wrote:1 Str gives +1 Life
1 Wil gives +1.5 Life
1 Con gives +3 Life and +0.5 Armour

This means that classes investing in Willpower and Strength (which covers most classes) would not rely on Con as heavily, unless they also want to get involved in melee a lot. I would also suggest making the Dexterity stat increase Defense and Ranged Defense much more significantly and the Cunning stat increase crit defense significantly, so that every class will be covered by natural increases in defences.

I like this idea.

Grey wrote:An across the board damage reduction (both players and enemies - oh, and traps too) would also be good, but it shouldn't be too huge.

The health inflation accomplishes the same things, but is much easier to implement and doesn't feel like a nerf.

Inflating numbers feels silly though - where does it end? Either way is the same I guess. Not entirely sure which is easier, as I imagine both require going through a lot of files and manually changing a lot of values.

I wouldn't think that the "add natural defenses to all stats" would necessarily require all that many changes. That's a serious point in its favor. I note, though, that there's some unfairness between the stats here. Specifically, as written it's a comparative nerf to int. Do we really need to nerf the int-based classes? Perhaps every 5 points of into could give you an extra 1% max resist. Cranking int to 50 would mean that your max resists would be 85% rather than 75%. It wouldn't be enough of a reason for non-int characters to invest in it, and it still requires you to hunt down the resist sources to take advantage of that maximum, but it seems somewhat in keeping with the feel of the stat and it would mean that int-based characters weren't *entirely* out in the cold as far as defenses go.

I'd also suggest that once we've done that, we consider making the general combat training skill... less general. Right now it's a must-have because everyone has to take health or die - which means, in turn, that everyone has to get access to heavy (and massive) armors. Make HP from non-skill sources somewhat more accessible and...

What is this strange intelligence stat you talk of? :P

Is CON really overpowered? I would say that all players raising CON is simply due to all classes needed CON. I would venture that the issue is more that no players raise DEX, MAG or CUN if their class doesn't require it.

But if you want to make CON less essential, while still making it relevant, there are better ways that to heavily restrict it.
Examples:
- Making healing/regeneration more important than the life cap. If a large CON character will never be able to be fully healed before the next fight, then having large STR or DEX instead is more interesting (quicker battles -> less damage received, so healing can keep up). (By the way, this is what I am aiming to for BOB.)
- Makes going to zero HP non-fatal by adding wound points (WP) that are independent of CON and are very hard to regenerate in the dungeon. Get hit at 0 HP -> loses a WP. Loses all WP -> die. This also have the advantage of removing one-hit kills. Steamband has a feature like that.
- Increases the amount of damage an actor receives for every hit it suffered in last N turns. Then avoiding attacks is more important than being able to absorb the damage, as the damage would increases dangerously after 3-4 hits.

I am not proposing that any of this examples be implemented in ToME, but I wanted to show that there are ways around making CON less central without actually changing what CON does (increasing the maximum life).

Bah! Magic. I meant "magic". Argument still holds.

Well any class using magic will also use Willpower or Cunning (the latter mostly for Anorithils). But yeah, an increase to resist caps certainly works for the Magic stat.

I still say that if there's an issue here a simple change would be best.

Have Con give less hit points (say 3) and give players more hit points per level (say 2 or 3). This results in Con being less valuable because it gives less and because you're getting more for free it's giving a smaller percentage of your hit point pool.

It's also a much easier change then adjusting every damage value in the game and a lot easier to balance or rebalance if things go wrong.

I like Grey's idea too. It looks good on paper but I think many classes may feel to easy starting off with five extra armor, especially those that start with mail already. On the other hand it might be good for squishier classes. Either way though it's a pretty big change, especially early game.

edge2054 wrote: I like Grey's idea too. It looks good on paper but I think many classes may feel to easy starting off with five extra armor, especially those that start with mail already. On the other hand it might be good for squishier classes. Either way though it's a pretty big change, especially early game.

Then have it only kick in after Con 20. I agree that we don't need to make the start game any easier.