ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Okay, so this started as a joke in the code for one of my other addons... but being me it kinda turned into a real thing.

So, I give you Star Kitties, the race! Star Kitties are interstellar Travellers, who are born in the void of space. They're absolutely fascinated with the universe and spend their entire lives doing nothing but exploring it, trying to learn as much as possible.

Racial Stats:
-2 Strength, +4 Dexterity, -2 Constitution, +5 Magic, -3 Willpower, +5 Cunning.
They're very smart and quite capable with their paw-hands, but are not particularly physically robust. Also, they lack focus.

Racial Skills:
Curious Leap: Jump to a location that is 2x talent level tiles away to better explore things. (This uses code borrowed from Peppersauce, who apparently used code from Telekinetic Leap. Should work in vaults. Note: Unlike most racial skills, this ability is not instant!)

Void-Born: Being native to interstellar space, you're highly resistant to the elements found there. Increases temporal, darkness, cold, fire, and physical resistances by 5.5% per talent level, and stun immunity by 20% per level. (This is balanced on the Thalore resist/immunity racial. They get 4% blight and 2% all resist, there's about a dozen damage types, so they get 28% total resistance per level. Mine gives 27.5% resistance per level.)

Absolute Curiosity: Star Kitties are incredibly curious. As such, they push themselves to move faster and act faster. However, they are also very easily distracted! Increases your movement speed by 10x talent level, your global speed by 5x talent level, but reduces your mental save by 15x talent level.

Nine Lives: Whenever you might die, the innate luck of your species kicks in. A roll is made against your luck: If you pass the roll, you do not die and instead you gain X life. Every consecutive time you pass this roll, it becomes less likely that you survive. Chance to survive scales with your Luck and life regained scales with your Constitution. **THIS TALENT IS CURRENTLY A PLACEHOLDER. DOES NOTHING.**
This ability is complete placeholder until I can learn how to code it. The idea is that at default luck you have a 50/50 chance of survival the first time it gets rolled, and each time you roll this, it becomes 10% harder. Each point of luck you have also weights it in your favor by 1%. So if you had the Lucky Day prodigy and were wearing +10 luck on items, you'd be guaranteed to live the first time.
The ability does show projected health gains, which are (Constitution x 15) + 100. So if you want to comment on whether or not that's a good amount of health, go ahead.

TODO LIST:
1.) Better art. At least get some modified tiles for this. As it stands I just borrowed tiles.
2.) Make the Absolute Curiosity talent work according to my original design: Mental save penalty ought to "ramp up" as you put points into it. Designed penalty levels are 5/15/30/50/75.
3.) Actually make the Nine Lives ability work at all.

Thoughts? Balance notes? Kudos? Bottles drunkenly thrown at my head?

9 lives might get a fair bit of side-eye just because it isn't actually dying. Would the talent reset in adventure mode after an actual death, or continue to not save you?

Curiosity I like. Hefty penalty for some nifty gains.

Sadly, the race is a complete failure because it is not Angel-Catgirl.

The way Nine Lives is designed, although I've not yet coded it, is to use code similar to SunPa's Second Life or Cauterize to prevent death altogether. And on a failure it resets to original values, so any time you have to use an alternate resurrection method (adventurer lives, blood of life, etc) it's back to full potency. However, I'd try to find a way for it to apply after things like that).

So, if you would die:
1.) Second Life/Cauterize/others proc
2.) Nine Lives rolls.
2a.) if you succeed the check, you survive and the check gets incremented
2b.) if you fail the check, you die and have to use lives/Blood

Possible alternate route:
1.) Nine Lives rolls.
1a.) if you succeed, see 2a above
2.) cauterize/second life procs
3.) if you still die, then (and only then) does the Nine Lives difficulty reset.

The first design causes Nine Lives to stack very well, the second has it stack much more poorly. Thoughts?

The way you're proposing it, Nine Lives would considerably more than double your number of lives with Lucky Day, and increase them at least 1.5x with default Luck. That's a bit much.

I definitely don't think making it take priority over prodigies is a good idea. That said, if you really wanted to look at this, you need to look at it as being a save with near-minimal health. These absolutely CANNOT be get out of jail free cards, they have to be last resort emergency measures. Life regained on 'death' would have to be quite carefully balanced. And I'll point out that having this 'life' is never a guarantee. I can almost see the hate garnered when someone dies and it doesn't trip, which might actually be an effective balancing tool in and of itself.

As it stands, there are seven ways I know of to not-die if you would die.

1.) Adventurer mode lives
2.) One-use items (Blood of Life/Ring of the Dead)
3.) Lichform
4.) Second Life
5.) Cauterize
6.) Unstoppable
7.) Reassemble

These can be categorized and discussed several ways. Adventurer lives, Blood of Life/Ring, Lichform, and Reassemble all have the distinction of being inexorable. Eventually, they WILL run out. Each activation of them permanently prevents you from re-using that method of resurrection. Cauterize and Second Life, however, are special in that they are infinitely re-usable, given enough time between activations. Unstoppable is kind of a special case because it completely obviate death, albeit for only a short time. Additionally, it has to be activated just a few turns before death, while all the others can be prepared any time prior.

Therefore, this application does, to some extent, use elements from a lot of the different existing ways. It is inexorable, in that it can only save you so many times before your luck has to run out, no matter how many +luck items you stack. However, it provides some multi-turn protection in that successful rolls can save you multiple consecutive turns if the situation's really bad.

Also, while I am listening to your balance advice and taking it into consideration, keep in mind that this is an addon race. I do not expect it to be perfectly balanced to existing things, and I also believe that the novelty of the implementation gives it some leeway.
Plus the inevitable tears when that Elixir of Serendipity-drinking, Lucky Day-having guy dies on the first activation, failing a 95% chance. Delicious delicious tears. I'll tithe the appropriate portion to that Darkest of Gods, of course.

P.S. Does anyone know what order things go off in now? Lets say you were playing an Adventurer who got the Guardian tree for Second Life, Lichform from necromancy, and had the Cauterize prodigy running. If they received lethal damage, which would activate first? Second Life would be my guess, followed by Cauterize then Lichform, but I honestly don't know.

P.P.S. I'll also have the ability grant an unclearable "other" buff that displays the current number of successful activations.

You left out negative life things like Heroism and Blurred mortality. How will those interact with your ability?

I don't count Heroism and Blurred Mortality. I don't think they'll interact at all (although I'm still trying to figure out the code for how death stuff works).

They don't prevent death: All they do is modify the point at which you die. In the save file there's a "die_at" variable that controls, obviously, the life level at which you die. Usually this is 0, but Blurred Mortality and Heroism play with that, as does Frenzy and a few other things. AFAIK all death stuff happens if you drop below your "die_at" point. So those aren't death prevention in this sense, they're damage shields that you can't check the amount left. Although they may have some interesting interactions with Unstoppable, depending on how that particular ability is coded.

Waladil wrote:Also, while I am listening to your balance advice and taking it into consideration, keep in mind that this is an addon race. I do not expect it to be perfectly balanced to existing things, and I also believe that the novelty of the implementation gives it some leeway.
Plus the inevitable tears when that Elixir of Serendipity-drinking, Lucky Day-having guy dies on the first activation, failing a 95% chance. Delicious delicious tears. I'll tithe the appropriate portion to that Darkest of Gods, of course.

Fair enough. This does look like an interesting and fun race.

Waladil wrote: Void-Born: Being native to interstellar space, you're highly resistant to the elements found there. Increases temporal, darkness, cold, fire, and physical resistances by 5.5% per talent level, and stun immunity by 20% per level. (This is balanced on the Thalore resist/immunity racial. They get 4% blight and 2% all resist, there's about a dozen damage types, so they get 28% total resistance per level. Mine gives 27.5% resistance per level.)

well, it's a bit necroposting but i couldn't help myself not to answer. resistance are definitely passable (not sure about physical)... except stun immunity. 100 stun immunity in a racial tree, especially as an early skill, is crazy op. even lichform has 50% and it has multiple downsides

also absolute curiosity is absolute useless, if nine lives were coded and were good, people could put a point into it though, taking -15 saves as a price

i will leave some additional feedback in case that this addon isn't completely abandoned/may be resurrected

i had a good run on roguelike as a star kitty recently, i just wanted to play a catgirl character which is not a furry (:, died in slime tunnels due to a some really unlucky things, so, what i can say, this race is already very strong even with 2 usable skills. curious leap (the name is amusing since this leap is usually used for fleeing in safety which is completely opposite to curiosity) is amazing, it's probably too amazing and possibly could get some (slight) nerf both to range and to cooldown when maxed and be moved further in the tree, void born gives too much either, it shouldn't give more than 50% stun resist imo and the physical resist could get a (slight) nerf too and it could be moved further in the tree either. absolute curiosity should have mental save penalty many times lower because i personally don't want to be fast and dead, right now imo it doesn't worth investing a single point unless you have some reliable way to clear mental effects, the gains may be lower too of course. speaking of nine lives, since this race is already very strong and would be strong even with some nerfs, it doesn't need yet another op ability, i think something simple like mild passive luck etc would be well enough and it could be moved lower in the racial tree

not sure if i play them again though, i already constantly asked myself wasn't it a cheating and could i do the same/better as one of the standard races... leap just adds so much to many classes like archer, stun resist is op too