ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Teleport has a minimum range of 15, and encounter maps appear to be 14x14, so it makes sense to either downgrade teleport in these zones to just be 'anywhere on level' (maybe minimum 5?), or grey it out so that a turn - generally quite important in such encounters - is not wasted on it.

The actual result is that a turn is wasted, the rune is put on cooldown, and the graphical effect is generated as if it had worked.

IIRC, you can still go corner to corner, but I agree, if there is no space outside of 15, it should retry with no restriction.

Actually, when you think about it, using teleport in these encounters should shove you back to the world map, a couple of squares away... Maybe 1 square per 15 squares you teleport.

I imagine that characters are unable to use Digging, Phasing, Wall-Walking, Porting etc on the world map because if you were able to use these it'd take a bunch more effort to make the WM 'safe' for that kind of thing (so players won't get stuck, break their games, etc)... So not too sure about that idea Talon Porting from one of the corners you start near does have a high chance of getting you close to the exit portal though! Next best thing?

As I found out in later encounters, yes teleport does still work (and is still very useful) if you're near a corner. The behaviour when you're near the middle of an edge, though, still seems kinda 'broken'. I haven't even played 20% of the possible areas/quests in the game yet, so I can't be sure, but as far as I've seen so far, encounters are the *only* place where teleport can fail like this. It seems to me that the 'minimum range 15' attribute on tele was intended as a feature and not a restriction - i.e, if you're a few squares away from a monster and you teleport to escape them, you can be confident that you will get moved a safe distance away and won't get plonked right next to them.

If teleport is *intended* to fail like this, when there isn't enough room to be moved 15+, then there should be an appropriate feedback message given - instead of "Ranger Stacey uses Teleport!", maybe something like "Ranger Stacey tries to Teleport, but the spell fizzles (too enclosed)!" That's a crap idea for text to replace it but you get the idea

In general I'd like to see teleport's minimum range shortened to 10, to make the spell less pointless in such circumstance.

In general I'd also like to see the adventurer party encounter maps increased in size to make them more fair.

Grey wrote:In general I'd like to see teleport's minimum range shortened to 10, to make the spell less pointless in such circumstance.

In general I'd also like to see the adventurer party encounter maps increased in size to make them more fair.

These are both great ideas. To expand on the first point, any sort of random teleport skill should always make an effort to find a free space*, and non-teleport squares should be made a little clearer to understand. The other day in chat, someone though they kept failing with Dimensional Step, when in reality they were in the Sher'Tul fortress, where teleport is forbidden.

*The exact behavior isn't too important; I imagine you could just shrink the min radius by 1 every time you get a failure due to out-of-map.

bricks wrote:exact behavior isn't too important; I imagine you could just shrink the min radius by 1 every time you get a failure due to out-of-map.

I would prefer dropping the minimum to 0 in situations like that, as slowly shrinking the radius would lead to less random behaviour, as you would always end up in a corner.

But 0 could move you immediately adjacent to yourself, which seems a bit undesirable.

I suggest halving the minimum range on each successive attempt. This is enough of a drop to avoid something like always putting you in the corner, while preserving something of your rune's stats and keeping teleportation somewhat long-range even then.

Its a lot more complicated to code and slower I would imagine, But it if it tries to place you off map, it should check if there is a free space more than 15 away and if so keep trying until it hits one, if there are no free spaces outside of 15, then half the range and try and again, repeat until successful fizzle if you are on a 1x1 map ^^

(just to prevent you moving 2-3 squares in Elven ruins B3 because you cast teleport in the corner and got unlucky)