ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Posted: **Sun Sep 18, 2011 7:55 pm**

It's no secret that the Chronomancer classes were early favorites of mine. The moment when I realized my future self had come back in time to kill me was the moment I was definitely hooked on Tales of Maj'Eyal, and one of my first truly successful characters was a Paradox Mage.

The Chronomancy roster is fairly well-filled-out, with greedy and foolish Paradox Mages tinkering with the composition of the timestream for personal benefit and noble temporal wardens repairing the damage. But it's always seemed to me that they hint at a third role. Paradox mages, though using time travel for personal gain, seem to exercise some caution and expertise in their talents. There's no class representing the truly foolhardy and unenlightened, who have stumbled upon Chronomantic powers but are reckless and wanton with them.

After all, the best stories about time travel involve protagonists who barely understand what they're doing. The ones who try to deposit a penny in 1911 in order to be a millionaire in the future. The ones who can't figure out what will happen if they go back in time and stop themselves from going back in time, and get so frustrated thinking about it that they just go for it. The ones who are always surprised by the ramifications of their actions.

Enter the Time Bandit, whose temporal gatecrashing makes him a true criminal-- the sort more likely to evade and flee Wardens than try to blast them apart.

A new style of Chronomancer: The Time Bandit.

Access to:

Techniques/Combat Training
Techniques/Dual Weapon Training
Cunning/Stealth
Cunning/Survival
Chronomancy/Spacetime Weaving
Chronomancy/Time Travel
(NEW) Chronomancy/Affront to Spacetime
(NEW) Chronomancy/Futures Investment

Chronomancy/Futures Investment

//Benefactor (Unranked)
You selflessly/selfishly send an anonymous gift to your past self in another timeline.
Stores an item in its own shop window, with no immediate benefit. It is irretrievable until the game is wiped by It's All On You, Kid.

//Catch the Sale
Time travel makes haggling easy and allows you to check the past and future for the rise and fall of demand. You get better deals in stores.
Passive
You receive an X% discount on goods sold in shops, and get +X% more money for goods sold to shops.

//Borrow Energy
Cooldown: 50 turns
You swap your magic items with instances of themselves at different points on the timeline, when they are better charged.
Restores 100 energy to X magic items the character is carrying. Cooldown decreases with talent points.

//Temporal Shell Game
You look for a point along an item's history where it was in better condition than it presently is. But beware, this is delicate work, and may botch the transaction. Artifacts have too strong an aura of fate to be affected by this.
A percent chance, improving with talent levels, that any given item will:
-Improve its power, accuracy, attack speed, armor, defense or fatigue slightly.
-Gain a new ego.
-Decline in power, accuracy, attack speed, armor, defense, or fatigue moderately.
-Lose one of its egos, if any.
-Disintegrate.
-Be replaced by a useless rubber chicken.
Obviously, the total chance of something good happening should never exceed the chance of something bad happening; it should never be statistically beneficial to continue to use this on an item ad-infinitum.

//It's All On You, Kid
Single-Use
You've had it. You've made too many mistakes. It's all become so complicated! If only you could go back to where it all started, with what you know now... better go educate some poor sap kid before he makes the same mistakes you did.
This talent wipes the entire game session, as if birthing a new character of the same name, race and class, with the following differences:
-All items stored with Benefactor are added to the character's starting equipment. It is possible to build up an impressive collection of potions and artifacts by repeatedly shunting them sideways along timelines.
-The previous character is stored as a unique NPC for later. They may show up randomly in any zone as a temporary ally.
-The character's minimum paradox increases by 25.
-A unique dialogue explains that you were just about to begin your adventure a man claiming to be your future self appeared, hastily gave you a series of warning and a bag full of magical trinkets, wished you luck and ran off.

Additionally, the following effects occur depending on the rank of It's All On You, Kid when used:
Rank 2: The new character retains 100% of the original's gold.
Rank 3: The new character gains a note with a number of half-applicable warnings about the future scribbled on it. This is a weightless plot item, the Warning Note, which grants a small bonus to the character's saves and immunities.
Rank 4: The benefactor gives the new character a fast training session, granting the new character 1 category point, 1 general talent point, and 1 class talent point.
Rank 5: The Warning Note contains comprehensive information on the weaknesses of future foes, granting a small percentage to all damage resistance penetration.
Rank 6: The previous character redirects his future potential into the next one, granting a single extra life.

Chronomancy: Affronts to Spacetime
Affronts to Spacetime scale with Cunning.

//Time Hopping
Sustain – 50/75/100/125/150/175/200 Paradox
Every time you step, there is a 5/10/15/20/25/30/35% chance that you will teleport an additional tile in that direction.

//Reality Shield
You tear apart the fabric spacetime itself to protect yourself.
Cooldown: 20 turns
Usage Speed: Instant
You gain a damage shield of X strength that lasts 5 turns, but cause an immediate anomaly.

//Rift to Nowhere
You open a guttering wound in the universe which begins to draw matter into it.
Cooldown 12 Turns
Usage Speed: 1 Turn
Range: 6
Costs Paradox
Creates a radius 1/2/3/3/4/4/5/5 zone that deals X-Y temporal damage, X-Y cold damage and X-Y darkness damage each turn, depending on their distance from the epicenter.
The rift also creates a radius 3/4/5/6/6/7/7 zone that draws creatures towards the center each turn if they fail a physical save.
The rift lasts Z turns.

//Trail of Distortion
You've become so out of synch with the universe that it warps and bends in your presence.
Sustained talent.
Wherever you travel, you leave Distortion fields, clouds of warped temporal energy which may spread to adjacent spaces. Other targets entering the distortion fields may find themselves slowed, stunned, dazed, or time prisoned for a very short duration.

I have no real attachment to the balance of these mechanics, and I understand if you think they're game-breaking or should be tweaked and changed. It's All On You, Kid is a playstyle-changing talent, obviously, and could lead to very powerful characters given an extreme investment of time and risk (like collecting dozens of elixirs of the fox and drinking them all on the final character in a chain, then charging through early zones with high-level runes and weapons), but I kind of like that.

In any case, this was just a brainstorm. The idea wouldn't leave me alone until I wrote it down. I welcome comments and balance notes and other ideas in the same venue.

Posted: **Mon Sep 19, 2011 12:47 am**

Bwahaha. That's hillarious.

Though one theme about chronomancy is that when you bork around with the timeline like this, negative effects abound. Look at borrowed time. You're literally borrowing your time from the future, and then you don't have it, maybe when you need it most.

Stuff like borrow energy is the most obvious application of this paradigm. It needs a component whereby in the future, you get your items stolen and replaced by your past self (with some appropriate flavor text like "Some asshole ran by and stole some of your stuff! Wait, no, your stuff's still there, that must've been you. Your past self is such a dick.")

Posted: **Mon Sep 19, 2011 3:16 am**

I actually considered that exact effect for Borrow Energy, but decided that (A) the more simple abilities, the better, with the other temporal nonsense happening and (B) if you're stealing your own stuff from somewhere along the timeline, it's probably just as simple to take them from a point where you weren't using them than one where you were in danger. There's a lot of downtime on the overworld map.

That said, messages like "Your past self is such a dick!" is absolutely in keeping with the spirit of the idea.

Posted: **Mon Sep 19, 2011 3:27 am**

...and one of the great things about It's All On You, Kid is that if you die by any other means, it's all lost.

Mind you, the Eidolon makes this a trivial issue.

Maybe that power could be somehow restricted to roguelike characters? It seems somehow appropriate that Time Bandits would lead more dangerous lives than anyone else.

...mind you, that just makes me want to come up with a power called "Rob the Eidolon", for when this guy realizes that everyone *else* has these tremendously powerful benefactors from outside space and time. "Well, I can travel outside space and time." Have an entire tree built around stealing intangibles from absurdly powerful beings far in the future, and then doubling back into the past where they can't *possibly* remember.

Alternately, have two different trees, one for adventurer, one for roguelike. If you're playing roguelike, then you're running scared, and you eventually give up with a whimper and pass it all off on some other poor schlub, in the hopes that he can do it better. If you're playing adventurer, then you know there's an eidolon out there who has your back. Perhaps you can take this opportunity to rifle through their silverware drawer. After all, if you can tweak things *just* right, you can have your body shuttling through time and space just as you die. If the Eidolon doesn't *remember* resurrecting you 12 times, then he/she/it won't mind doing it one more. (Basic effect: you get one more Eidolon resurrect for every point spent in the skill)

Posted: **Mon Sep 19, 2011 3:28 am**

One way to help balance "it's all on you, kid" would be to prevent passing down a item marked it, preventing it from being passed down a second time, something like "future elemental steel longsword of corruption". This would prevent stacking a dozen sandworm queen hearts for a single character, which IMO is much more exploitable than alchemists rewards.

Posted: **Mon Sep 19, 2011 3:39 am**

lukep wrote:One way to help balance "it's all on you, kid" would be to prevent passing down a item marked it, preventing it from being passed down a second time, something like "future elemental steel longsword of corruption". This would prevent stacking a dozen sandworm queen hearts for a single character, which IMO is much more exploitable than alchemists rewards.

Indeed

Posted: **Mon Sep 19, 2011 3:52 am**

I didn't even think about the idea in relation to the Heart of the Sandworm Queen. Don't eat too many Sandworm Queen Hearts; you'll get fat!

For the few instances like that where there's a truly exploitable reward, maybe make it so that consuming 3 or more sandworm hearts on the same character makes sandworm babies erupt out of your stomach.

Posted: **Mon Sep 19, 2011 6:18 am**

An idea that came to mind about unlockable skills, like the sandworm heart:

By picking up class-based skills like that, you've warped the timeline such that time now recognizes your original class as something different. Effectively, this means you start out as a time bandit and, when rebirthing [for lack of a better term] yourself, have a chance to find that you lost your ability to manipulate time and, instead, became... whatever it is that the sandworm heart set is most closely related to. (Or in the case of the graveyard, you become a Cursed, or learned the chants from an escort, an Anorithil etc.) On the other hand, you have a fixed low percentage to spawn anomalies.

Posted: **Mon Sep 19, 2011 1:31 pm**

Make it a Roguelike only class and make "its all on you kid" the last talent in an unlockable tree so you need high twenties to get it sorted, and if its exploitable, its exploitable. time bandits are all *about* ludicrously exploiting the time stream for hilarious and terribly broken results. Yes if you don't put clever protection mechanisms in place it will be abused for pure cheese... but what's wrong with cheese? Someone wants to spend a few hundred hours stashing away a dozen sandworm queen hearts and thirty of every stat elixer? Fine, let them - its a fun time sink, and that kind of hilarious power gaming is one of the fun things you can do in roguelikes that its very hard to do elsewhere besides, if that guy with 11 queen hearts and 29 elixers of the fox happens to bump into a nasty out of depth pack of mages before he gets to learn its all on you... well shoot, all those toys down the drain.

A further suggestion would be to make the unlock for such a class to be Wining the game. That way this becomes the legitimate way to do a "New game+" (Something I adore in the games that support it) so that you have a class who can go through the game get cool toys, and then pass em down to a different class who can really use them, or on to another bandit who can stack even more toys!

Posted: **Mon Sep 19, 2011 2:06 pm**

Additionally the new birth screen should enforce that you re-roll as your original race, with an exception.... If your first pick was undead, its quite conceivable that your future self would choose to go back to when you were alive alive, and allow you to pick from the "humanoid" selection

Posted: **Mon Sep 19, 2011 2:51 pm**

As soon as this class becomes available (and I'm hoping that this does indeed get coded) I'm so going to play one! I'm liking the idea of sending items to a previous version of yourself; too many times I find something good, but I've found it too late to matter. For example, I've found a decent randart steel longsword when I'm using a vile dwarven-steel mace.

Is the intent of "It's All On You, Kid" to give items to your beginner Time Bandit self, or before you started down the Time Bandit path? I can imagine locking race for this reversion, but if you go far enough back you can (paradoxically) change your class by telling yourself not to become a Time Bandit.

Posted: **Mon Sep 19, 2011 3:34 pm**

Honestly if I implement It's All On You Kid I'm putting it in the Paradox tree (and I do plan to look at the rebirthing code today and see how manageable this effect is)

I'm all for people posting ideas for new chronomancy classes and I do plan to code a couple more but I'm not content yet with the state of the Paradox Mage and don't think I'll be adding any new chronomancy classes until I rewrite the anomaly code and give Paradox Mages another tree or two.

Posted: **Mon Sep 19, 2011 5:33 pm**

Maybe the rebirth could get more powerful the more points you put into it? A 1-point rebirth lets you take two items and one stat point, 3-points gives you 5 items, 1 stat, 1 class, and a new class, 5-points gives you 10 items, 2 stat, 1 class, 1 generic and a new race/class? (Don't take the numbers literally, I didn't give too much thought about that.) Could even make it uncapped, so the more points you invest in this, the more powerful you... will eventually have been.

Posted: **Mon Sep 19, 2011 5:54 pm**

I probably would balance it something like this.

TL 1 - You give your past self some advice, increasing all saves by X.
TL 2 - You teach your past self some basic knowledge, giving it +2 generic talent points
TL 3 - You teach your past self some advanced knowledge, giving it +2 class talent points
TL 4 - You continue to watch your past self after your initial encounter and will pull it out of the timeline for a split second when it's about to die and take it's place. (Grants the past self an extra life or something along those lines.)
TL 5 - You split the timeline, allowing you to pass an item off to your past self without destroying the spacetime continuum. This permanently increases your past self's paradox by 25 or 50 if the item was an artifact.

I'd also make the talent easily accessible in combat. Current character is about to die and you don't see a way out, "Well it's up to you now kid."

I've goofed around with it a bit this morning. Having trouble getting the newGame function to pass along the characters birth values (it keeps pulling up the birth screen and letting me reselect everything).

As to uncapped, nah, I don't like it. It encourages grinding up till the talent is at 5/5 and restarting again and again.

Posted: **Mon Sep 19, 2011 6:13 pm**

edge2054 wrote: As to uncapped, nah, I don't like it. It encourages grinding up till the talent is at 5/5 and restarting again and again.

But that's the *Fun* part!

ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Time Bandits: A Third Chronomancy Class.

Time Bandits: A Third Chronomancy Class.

Re: Time Bandits: A Third Chronomancy Class.

Re: Time Bandits: A Third Chronomancy Class.

Re: Time Bandits: A Third Chronomancy Class.

Re: Time Bandits: A Third Chronomancy Class.

Re: Time Bandits: A Third Chronomancy Class.

Re: Time Bandits: A Third Chronomancy Class.

Re: Time Bandits: A Third Chronomancy Class.

Re: Time Bandits: A Third Chronomancy Class.

Re: Time Bandits: A Third Chronomancy Class.

Re: Time Bandits: A Third Chronomancy Class.

Re: Time Bandits: A Third Chronomancy Class.

Re: Time Bandits: A Third Chronomancy Class.

Re: Time Bandits: A Third Chronomancy Class.

Re: Time Bandits: A Third Chronomancy Class.