ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Necromancers? Crude puppeteers, making bodies dance with hamfisted strings of magic. Alchemists? Such a waste of a scientific mind; those bomb-throwing maniacs know nothing of subtlety, and their brutish golems are even worse at it. Corruptors and the Doomed? Entertaining to watch, but they can't look at things rationally, too driven by perverse delight or raging spite to know how to create. All those psychics? I can respect their approach, but they're too focused on the mind. The body is a complicated, beautiful machine, a delicate balance of ichors and humors that just barely keeps itself bubbling - and by adding a few more chemicals, it's all too easy to make that balance tip.

Had an idea for an Apothecary class and a cool mechanic for it, but I have no clue what its playstyle would be or how to balance it.

Basically, the central idea is that you have a slew of different Toxic Mixture sustains (representing the ingredients in whatever horrible concoction you're carting around) which take 15 turns to prepare (so no switching mid-combat, unless you invest in its stealth skills, a teleport rune, or a psychoport torque), and a few different ways of putting those mixtures to use (throwable flasks, melee-range injection, chuggable Jekyll-and-Hyde potion, a "drip can" which creates splashing puddles where you walk, possibly a chemical sprayer as a top-tier talent). Each mixture has a different range of effects for Vapors, Splashes, Intravenous, and Oral (potion) effects; thrown flasks tend to splash on a direct-hit and make a larger cloud of vapor, chemical sprayers make a narrow cone of splash/puddles and a much wider cone of vapors, intravenous is generally restricted to melee-injections. You can have any three Mixtures active at a time. A few examples of possible mixtures:

Corrosive Agent

• Intravenous: Nasty acid DoT and sharply reduced physical saves
• Splash: Acid damage, reduced armor and chance of disarm
• Vapor: Blinding, light acid damage
• Potion: Melee attacks against you trigger a conal acid-spray in that direction

Hallucinogenic Solvent

• Intravenous: Daze for a couple of turns, then long-lasting confusion
• Splash: Sharply reduced fire resistance / guaranteed crit on next fire attack, burns off after one attack
• Vapor: Any fire attack within the cloud ignites the vapor cloud, causing a damaging / stunning or knockback-ing explosion
• Potion: Grants your monstrous form a confusing fire-breath attack

Binder (the inactive ingredients used to hold medicines into a solid pill form)

• Intravenous: Sharply increases critical multiplier of other mixtures (it won't do anything, unless it causes a clot...)
• Splash: Nothing from puddles, but makes thrown flasks burst into shards, causing bleeding and a chance of applying other mixtures' Intravenous effects
• Vapor: Clouds stay in the air longer
• Potion: Increases monstrous form's armor and max-HP

Raging Methanol

• Intravenous: Long-duration blind, or maybe a poison that repeatedly reapplies blind (a la Pacification Hex's dazes)
• Splash: Fire damage
• Vapor: "Berserks" enemies, increasing attack power but causing them to sometimes attack allies (a la Paranoia); your monstrous form will gain attack power in the vapors
• Potion: Increased attack power / speed, reduced accuracy

Pitchblende Precipitate

• Intravenous: Immediate spike of light damage; causes a very-long-duration Bloodlock-like effect ("Radiation Sickness"), slowly decaying enemy health and other physical stats to a minimum of 40% of base (requires repeated injections)
• Splash: Light damage, constitution / physical-save reduction
• Vapor: Causes a weaker form of Radiation Sickness, can drain stats to 80% of base if given enough time
• Potion: Gives your monstrous form an aura of light damage, decreases its physical/magical saves

Cellsplitting Hormone

• Intravenous: Allows you to inject yourself for a heal, but also minor detrimental (Vapor) effects from the other active mixtures
• Splash: Heals target, but applies a nasty DoT due to ensuing tumors
• Vapor: Regenerates health, rapidly drains resources (stamina, mana, etc)
• Potion: Grants rapid health regeneration to your monstrous form and allows you to exceed maximum health up to 150%, but slows you by 1% for every percent you're over the maximum; if you are over maximum when it wears off, you are given a Rampant Tumors debuff, decreasing global speed by 50% and damaging you over time until you reach (100 - overheal%)% HP, at which point the debuff expires

The problem is, I have no idea how the class should actually play, aside from a few basic ideas (stealth or vision skills to allow you to scout the level for possible mob types and adjust your mixture accordingly, poisoning mobs with Pitchblende as you go or contaminating rooms to make a favorable battle-arena; a talent-category focused on potion berserking), and as a novice ToME player I am the last person who should actually be making decisions on game balance. The lore / "flavor" is too fun for me to let it go, though - if anyone has any ideas to solidify this concept, please let us know!

tl;dr: a class based around a much more complicated version of Alchemists' "bombs and infusions" mechanic

I'd like to see a much wider array of components and effects. Maybe a psychoactive component that can give you telepathy and cause confusion/berserk/etc to enemies, maybe a magical component or two that do things like teleporting (if you use it, teleporting whole, if used on others, teleporting parts of them out, causing arcane damage), invisibility (for you, phased reduced damage, arcane damage, blindness that passes blind immunity to others), and maybe some other really creative ideas.

Something that poisons the enemy, doing damage to them, but preserves the body after 0 HP is reached and causes the creature to be on your side a % of the time based on the lost HP would also be really cool. What that means is that, if an enemy is at 50% HP this turn and under this effect, they have a 50% chance to act as an ally to you instead of an enemy. When they're at 25% HP, they have a 75% chance. When at 0% or less, they effectively become zombies that do your bidding. This may be only an injection effect of something, though.

Planetus wrote:Something that poisons the enemy, doing damage to them, but preserves the body after 0 HP is reached and causes the creature to be on your side a % of the time based on the lost HP would also be really cool. What that means is that, if an enemy is at 50% HP this turn and under this effect, they have a 50% chance to act as an ally to you instead of an enemy. When they're at 25% HP, they have a 75% chance. When at 0% or less, they effectively become zombies that do your bidding. This may be only an injection effect of something, though.

I had an idea sorta like this when I was first writing this up, based on the supposed method of making "zombies" in traditional Haitian voodoo, but couldn't think of a good way to apply the debuff. I love your ideas though, especially the teleporting mixture - definitely going to use that one when I make this into an addon!

My current plan (still hammering out details) is that the "main" talent trees will be based on the four humors of ancient medicine, plus a new "Arcanic Humor" representing the flow of magic. Sanguine would have talents/mixtures based on direct damage, regeneration, and a Hyde-form that excels in open-area brawls; Choleric would have the berserking effects, critical-hit stuff, short-term debuffs, and a more rogue-ish Hyde-form; Melancholic would have all the slow-acting debuffs, long-lasting area contamination, zombies, and a lich-like Hyde-form that can inflict spike-damage on debuffed targets; Phlegmatic would be based around slowing / controlling enemies, defenses, and staying calm enough in Hyde-form to use it as an amplification of your usual abilities than a complete playstyle change (maybe a Throw Keg ability that works like a beefed-up Throw Flask). Arcanic (possibly an unlockable tree?) would be about utility effects, and its Hyde-form talents would give it a "wild magic" effect - some form of chain-lightning on melee attacks, maybe? I'm also not sure whether potions should always be a transform-effect, or if the Hyde-effect should only be an effect from a mixture in the Sanguine tree, allowing other talent-specs to use their potions as a short-term buff, a heal / MP-restore, or a trigger for a breath attack.

Another couple of ideas I'm indecisive on, as long as I'm brainstorming: a Gadgetry talent in the Phlegmatic tree which grants the chemical-sprayer, as well as a Breathing Mask sustain-talent. While the mask is active, you are immune to vapor / splash effects, and maybe gain some resistance to breath-attacks / blind / poison, but your vision is restricted to a cone in the direction of your last attack; you also gain a one-turn-cooldown instant-use "Look" talent to let you look towards another spot of your choosing (but the two combined wouldn't give you full 360-degree visibility). Maybe Gadgetry should be its own tree, and also give you a sprayer-mine trap or a ranged-injection Dart Blowpipe? I was also thinking of a "Research" tree or talent which would allow you to gain permanent bonuses against specific monster types / sub-types by experimenting on them (subjecting that type / sub-type to several different combinations of Mixtures and/or administration methods; "trolls seemed to shrug off these toxins in this order, this must be how their liver's processing them, I know just the thing to shut it down," gain effect duration vs. trolls), and/or unlock new mixtures by killing mobs with an otherwise-useless Preservative mixture active (study the bodies of trolls to learn how they regenerate and extract Cellsplitting Hormone, etc).

Anyway, I'm glad you like the idea of having a whole lot of different mixtures / effects! Brewing your own concoctions should be a fun process with enough ingredients to choose from, letting you design your attacks based on the mobs you're fighting, the loot you've managed to find (got an amulet that provides blind immunity? might as well use blinding vapors!), and your preferred playstyle. I'll keep thinking of more mixtures, and ways to make the combinations synergize in interesting ways. (Possible idea: each mixture gets a pH level, and a large enough difference between the lowest and highest pH-mixtures will cause flasks to explode with more force, and puddles to bubble into large clouds of vapor.)

Thanks for the feedback

You should probably make this thing, you could say it...



oozes with style.

YEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hmm, not sure I like the name of the Arcanic Humor. It sounds uncomfortable to me. Maybe make it Ley Humor, based on Ley Lines, Aether Humor, based on Aether theory, or maybe Chakra Humor, Chi Humor, Meridian Humor, based on the idea of energy flows through human bodies (more of a humor there). Not sure any of those sound comfortable or proper to me either, but there are some ideas.

The Breathing Mask should have a pretty wide cone of visibility. Limits to line of sight are a very powerful debuff. Maybe make it something like 170-175 degrees, so you can see almost (but not quite) half the normal field? With the Look skill, you could see just short of 360 degrees, so probably find any source of damage in one look, but just maybe not, especially if you're moving in the open and the enemies could come from anywhere.

I also like the idea of a whole tree of gadgetry. Maybe the first one is explosive flasks, which add physical damage and boost the range of your flasks, then the sprayer, then the mine, and finally the dart-gun, which increases range and at higher levels takes less than a full turn and/or 0 cooldown (thinking a machine-dart-gun here)?

I also like the idea of experimenting on enemies, and possibly harvesting resources that expand your capability from them, but that one would suggest a pretty radical change to the whole class, and make it much more dependent on what it comes across (appropriate for a roguelike, I think, but needs to be considered). Maybe the class could have a mixtures tree, an application tree with various methods (like the Gadgetry tree), and some ... other stuff? Anyway, activate the mix talent and it brings up a list of your various ingredients (same as the list from the Alchemist quest, but this talent doesn't use them up). You can mix some ingredients and gain a sustainable talent that applies the resultant effects to your application talents. You have a limit to how many of those mixes you can keep at once, though (i.e. a limit to how many sustains you can know, only one can be applied at a time, I'm thinking each mixture is kept in a barrel or something, and you can only plug one in at a time), and a talent in the Mixtures tree could expand that (maybe start at 2-3 and end around 5?). Another talent in the Mixtures tree could increase how many ingredients you can mix at once (start with 1 and expand to 4-5?). And you'll start out with the 4 basic humors to work with. Use blood (sanguine) and it does X for each method. Kill a troll and gain Troll Intestines and you can use them instead, to do Y effect. Increase the mixture talent and you can mix blood (normal blood) with Troll Intestines to get some mixture of effects.

Anyway, that would probably be the whole focus of the class, with no humor-dedicated trees, because there'd be so many of them. There would also end up being a LOT of ingredients (don't know how many there are off the top of my head, but I'd guess around 30+), which suggests you'd want a simple combinations system (mix Troll Intestines with Wight Ectoplasm does a combined effect of the two separately, nothing more) rather than writing specialized effects for every possible combination. Still, though, you may be able to 'discover' (through experimentation) special combinations that have specific, specially coded effects. I still see it as being an awful lot of work, though.