ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

There may be a really obvious way of doing this that I'm just full-on missing.

The thing I'm currently up to in fleshing out my module is the skill tree structure for the classes. What I seem to be getting hung up on is that several of the classes have a fair number of "Mastery" abilities available to them, which are meant to significantly boost a specific type of functionality, but choosing one restricts you from all the others.

The example of this I'm currently looking at is the Elementalist class. They have five spell elements: Fire, Water, Wind, Earth and Electric, each of which has a Mastery associated with it, which boosts each of that element's spells, as well as being prerequisites for the two "ultimate" abilities from that element. (There's a sixth Mastery, Flow Mastery, that counts as a level in each but can only be raised half as high and doesn't open any ultimate abilities). Once one Mastery is chosen, the other five (and anything which have them as a prerequisite) are forbidden to the Elementalist.

Problem is, the "talent" field in the requirements table only seems to be able to support requirements where you need to have levels in a talent, not where you need to have no levels in one. Is there any way around this? I seem to recall seeing ToME doing something with "hidden" talents somewhere, and that seems like it might work if I knew what it was doing. So would overloading ActorTalents:CanLearnTalent to add support for another requirement type, I think, if I understood the structure of Lua well enough to know how to do that.

Ohh an other module maker!
What game are you creating ?

Yes you can make your Actor class overload canLearnTalent this will work.

Although I'll probably add this feature for next beta, since this sounds useful anyway.

Ok, in next beta you can do:
require = { talent = { { Talents.T_STONE_SKIN, false }, }, },

To make a talent require an otehr to not exist.

Welcome FinalParagon and good luck with your module!

Well, if this is going to exist without me hammering it out in the near future, no reason why I shouldn't just work on other parts in the mean time. Thanks!

The idea for my module originally came about something like four years ago, when I wanted to make an Angband variant about as original a world as possible, mostly in that while I was willing to indirectly reference stuff, I didn't want to directly reference real-world mythology or religion. The result was a world of nine nations, each as distinct and immediately recognizable from one another as possible; each was settled in a unique sort of terrain, each had a different government, a different specialty, a different style of architecture, and most had their own language. Since one of these nations was meant to be an industrial powerhouse, and another was built as a massive network of spiral-shaped caves connected by very long tunnels deep underground, trains became a huge part of the setting, which sort of indirectly led to a steampunk-ish setting.

I later ran a heavily modified D&D campaign around the setting, which allowed me to focus on things smaller in scope, like religious structure and the physical and political geography of the world, beyond the relative position of each of the nations to one another. Then I happened across T-Engine, which I discovered handled most of the concepts I had planned for the original Angband variant natively (Ability trees, skills that reserve a chunk of resources as long as they're active, support for a stat system I actually like rather than just deal with), plus a bunch of other stuff I never really even considered, like Factions, that'd allow me to make a vast, well-defined world that the player actually felt like a character in, not just a world that exists for the purpose of "Go To '>', Make With The Killing".

The setting for you module sounds great! I'll pass on the advice that I have received from other RL developers including DG and suggest you pick some small aspect of the world and get it up and running first so that you can attract play-testers.

Good call on that. Branching out of a single, fairly standard dungeon, likely a mine shaft, was something I only intended on doing after I had at least two very different classes (probably one of the Fighter classes and the aforementioned Elementalist) built up to a playable state. My general development goals at this stage are, more or less in this order:

- Create the basic combat mechanics, stat system, and leveling system. This part is basically done, except that some stats (Cognition and Spirit) are of questionable use, since the stuff they'd affect don't exist yet.
- Structure skill trees for the 12 initially-playable classes. Most of this is meant to be placeholders, just to give me an idea of what kind of items, monsters, resources, and weird resolvers I'm going to need eventually.
- Throw in some basic items and equipment.
- Develop enough ability effects to allow a few classes to reach Level 20 without running out of (useful) things to put points into; eventually this'll rise to 100, but that'll be after I get some testing by people who aren't myself.
- Make some more thematically-appropriate monsters than Kobold Warrior with which to populate a test dungeon.
- Implement said test dungeon!

Once that's up and running and I get some testing feedback, then I'd start working on a few more classes and a higher level cap, and a really basic proof-of-concept implementation of the overworld and transportation system. This is all stuff I intend to plan out when I get to this point, though.