ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Pre-Confusion Situation:

Before players get confused they are usually running around owning the dungeon in whatever pattern have you.

To take a scenario that happen today with my Ghoul Necromancer I'm currently running: I'm running along willy nilly hitting keys on my hotbar for one of my active targetable talents like Chill of the Tomb, Invoke Darkness, or whatnot have you. After selecting a target a mouse click for the destination for my spell usually instantly happens after hitting the hotbar key for the talent. Sometimes if I decide that perhaps I would rather not cast Chill of the Tomb for say hitting myself in the face with my own spell, I cancel use of the talent and save my turn to do something else.

I doubt this is not far from the ordinary for most characters regardless of what characters they play when using talents and then selecting the target. This is generally normal gameplay for me at least in terms of player input actions on my part.

Confusion Situation:

So, you've been hit by confusion. Moving around becomes erractic - or alternatively you bump a random target; this is fine and probably working as intended. The problems however occur regarding confusion with Talents.

Back to my Ghoul Necromancer, I have just been confused by something and inflicted with the Confusion Status for X turns. Following my usually pattern from pre-confusion, I go to select one of my attack talents and have the talent instantly fail. This is a problem and not just for the fact that perhaps I may have decided against using talent - but because soon after using my talent I click on my target which results in either a move toward that target square or a bump attack.

Suggestion:

Instead of a talent instantly failing after you hit the hotbar key for said talent, players should be able to finish targeting with targetted talents like they would in the pre-confusion situation or deselect the talent should they perhaps wish to do something else. Once the player completes his action, only then should a Confusion Check get rolled.

This should avoid unnecessary moves getting made when they aren't desired by the player; at least in the sense that the confusion effect only happens AFTER they are finished imputing the action they want their character to 'try' to pursue while confused.

I definitely agree, I like to check which enemies are in range of talents by selecting the talent and hovering over enemies. This change would be greatly appreciated since its hard to estimate how far away enemies are just by looking.

This would also eliminate a current (minor) exploit, which is that if you're in a hallway and you try to move, you'll lose fewer turns to confusion because there are fewer valid directions, and invalid directions don't consume a turn.

When I'm playing a bump-attack class, being confused in a hallway is barely noticeable: I'm either bump-attacking or I'm running away, both of which are usually pretty acceptable.

My Ideas exceed even my Own Expectations!

Though I'm not sure it will necessarily do much to a bump-class in a hallway where he can only move forward or backward; you're still only going to move forward or backward. Suppose it would help (or hinder) in situations though where 6 tiles around your character weren't walls though.

bpat wrote:I definitely agree, I like to check which enemies are in range of talents by selecting the talent and hovering over enemies. This change would be greatly appreciated since its hard to estimate how far away enemies are just by looking.

Hover your mouse over the enemy and check the tooltip. It tells you how far away they are.

Davion Fuxa wrote:Though I'm not sure it will necessarily do much to a bump-class in a hallway where he can only move forward or backward; you're still only going to move forward or backward. Suppose it would help (or hinder) in situations though where 6 tiles around your character weren't walls though.

The idea is that, if you're confused and surrounded by walls, you should keep bumping into the walls while you're staggering around.

Mewtarthio wrote:

Davion Fuxa wrote:Though I'm not sure it will necessarily do much to a bump-class in a hallway where he can only move forward or backward; you're still only going to move forward or backward. Suppose it would help (or hinder) in situations though where 6 tiles around your character weren't walls though.

The idea is that, if you're confused and surrounded by walls, you should keep bumping into the walls while you're staggering around.

Currently confusion costs you a turn EXCEPT when you would have bumped into a wall, since bumping into a wall is resolved as "no energy" before the rest of the action.

With a commit-before-confusion action strategy, you'd commit to the energy-consuming action BEFORE you are forced to wall-bump.

In laymans turns, if you try to bump attack or move away in a corridor and fail a confusion check that bumps you into the wall, you don't move into the wall (or rather perhaps you try but you can't) and that costs you your turn as opposed to the current system?

Certainly would make Confusion much more threatening.

Also it'd be nice if Paradox and Equilibrium failures would have the same fix, since it's annoying to lose a turn when I'm just trying to check the range of a talent.