ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

What is anger?
When you are fighting a healer and he just keeps healing...
When you are fighting a boss for 30 minutes and you just cannot kill it...
When you are low level, enter a high difficulty dungeon, and you just cannot kill that skeleton because he has to much armor and HP...

... and you just want to smash your keyboard in the game or launch a nuclear missile.

That is anger.

Anger is a game mechanic that you can use to counter a stalemate in the game. The game tracks how much damage you do and how often you kill something. If you are doing a lot of damage and you are not killing something, then your anger increases. When you are out of combat, anger goes down. How much anger you get when doing damage, and how much you loose when killing something should be determined by the HP of the things you are killing. Average HP of the monsters you are supposed to be fighting can be determined by the level of the player. At level 1 for example monsters have only ~50 hp, so the game assumes that 50 dmg/kill is normal and does not raise anger. If a level one tries to kill something with 150 hp, then his anger level could increase from 1 point to 3 points. 3 points of anger would unlock certain skills.

Example of anger skills:
* Healing reduction skills - If you are not killing stuff, it muse be healing right? Obvious counter would be healing reduction.
* Big nukes - For whenever you need an atom bomb
* Damage increase - to get you more angry faster so you can release some real mayhem when you need it
* Hp reduction - if you cant kill them, lower their hit-points
* Self-destruct - for when you just cant take the game anymore. Kills everything on the level including you!

Q: But anger would make bosses really easy!
A: Nope, it is designed to make normal fights harder. Most game mechanics reward the player for fights with short duration (skills cost mana or stamina so you get worn out in long fights). This causes the game to be really easy 90% of the time. The other 10% is where you die. Anger allows the class to be balanced for boss fights, while keeping trash mobs challenging by preventing powerful skills from being used when the player has low anger.

That's a really interesting idea for a talent tree, marvalis. This could be really useful when fighting the Weirdling Beast in the Sher-tul fortress, because it now has a wild infusion, regeneration infusion, healing infusion, shielding rune, speed rune, and bone shield, which makes killing it quite hard. Then again, maybe it's supposed to be really hard to kill.

I think there ought to be drawbacks for being angry, too. Perhaps your defense, accuracy, and/or spell/mind/physical saves drop the more angry you are.

Also, I think "Self-destruct" would be too easily abused if playing on "Adventure" level, and not very useful if you're playing "Rogue-like".

Hmm, it could also be scary if NPCs had access to these talents

tiger_eye wrote:Also, I think "Self-destruct" would be too easily abused if playing on "Adventure" level, and not very useful if you're playing "Rogue-like".

After using self destruct the level would be radioactive, dealing 1000 dmg each turn and causing cancer. Cancer kills you after 100 turns and persists trough death.
And it is not supposed to be useful xD it is supposed to be a fun way to end the game when you don't wanna play anymore.

tiger_eye wrote:Hmm, it could also be scary if NPCs had access to these talents

Lets hope we never get them angry enough. Better kill them before they do to much damage to you. Might actually be interesting. Considering that anger ramps up, a normal fight would never last long enough to have access to self-destruct.

Oh shit, an anger demon :/ do I try to kill it or run away?

Cant imagine the face on a new player when the nuke goes off.

Technically, I think the Rampage tree of the Cursed is pretty similar to what you are proposing here...