ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Try this experiment.

• 1. Create a new character.
  2. Develop it in some distinctive way (e.g., add a point to strength but save the other stat points, and add a rank to a the first available skill).
  3. Go get yourself killed.
  4. Choose the restart character option from the death dialog.
  5. Notice that your restarted character has the same distinctive partial development pattern as the original.

Things get even funkier if then you continue playing the restarted character until you level, develop it (let's say using all your points this time) and then get killed again. When you restart the second time, the character has the same distinctive development as the first restart, but NOT the development of the character who just died.

Am I missing something here? This isn't a resurrection, so shouldn't each character restart with the full set of unused development points?

The recreation savefile is created along with your first save file.

So yes, any stat points or talent points you spend before the games first save will go into your recreate file.

*note that the game doesn't save until after you exit out of the talent screen)*

This is by design and not a bug. If you think it should work differently then you're welcome to post about it in the ideas forum

You do not have to assign any stats/talent points at that initial screen if you want the rebirth to be "vanilla."

edge2054 wrote:The recreation savefile is created along with your first save file.

So yes, any stat points or talent points you spend before the games first save will go into your recreate file.

*note that the game doesn't save until after you exit out of the talent screen)*

This is by design and not a bug. If you think it should work differently then you're welcome to post about it in the ideas forum

That's opaque, but at least it's intentional. I suppose it provides people a chance to short-circuit the first level of development, but if I'm dying often enough for that to be useful I think I'd probably be better off reevaluating my development strategy.

C'est la mort...

yufra wrote:You do not have to assign any stats/talent points at that initial screen if you want the rebirth to be "vanilla."

I see the usage, I just found the behavior...unexpected. Frankly, I rarely develop my stats without first checking my talents to see what the threshold minima are, so I suppose I usually got the "tabula rasa" without even knowing it.

The other unexpected factor was the game saving after the first development screen, which I didn't realize until I checked the output after reading edge2054's comment. Again, it's not terrible, and in fact is undoubtedly done in this fashion to produce exactly this outcome. That said, since the exiting the development screen doesn't save any other time (that I know of?), I was unaware that it did so then. I suppose that's why it's only the principle of least surprise, not the law...

It still feels more like a funky Perl script with an exploitable side effect than a RLG, but people love those too...

Thanks for clarifying things for me.