ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Not really a bug, just a minor inconsistency. I used Precognition thinking I could get an advance peek at the contents of a random grave, but after the precog ended I opened the same grave and it was a different enemy. I think DG changed this a while back for the Last Hope graveyard, so that the tomb contents are now pre-determined during level generation. It would make more sense if the same was true for random graves, and chests if they work the same way. But if it's a PITA to change this it's not that big a deal!

The contents of glowing chests are determined on level generation, but the what's guarding the tombstone graves is not.

This is a rather serious bug with precognition, in the first place. Random events like hit-chance and tomb generation are not repeated, as they are random.

This could be fixed by changing precognition with two changes:

• First, save the random seed when activating the power. When the precog run ends, set the random seed back to exactly what it was before activating pre-cog.
  Second, make sure that the turn count matches in both events. I have noticed that precog uses a turn, but then when it rewinds back you have an extra turn to act, making precognition effectively never have happend on the second timeline, which causes de-sync. This could be remedied by having the rewound timeline start AFTER precognition was activated instead of BEFORE.

These two changes would make the two timelines play out in exactly the same way if exactly the same actions were taken. That would mean that if you use precognition to see what is in the tomb, in both timelines the same thing would be found since the dice would fall the exact same way... but if you used a buff afterwards the timelines would diverge, again.

Honestly, the guards for the tombs should be generated when you enter, anyways. That won't affect anyone without precognition, but honestly if precognition cannot be used for things like this then it just doesn't make any sense as a power anyways.

Jeoshua wrote:This is a rather serious bug with precognition, in the first place. Random events like hit-chance and tomb generation are not repeated, as they are random.

This could be fixed by changing precognition with two changes:

• First, save the random seed when activating the power. When the precog run ends, set the random seed back to exactly what it was before activating pre-cog.
  Second, make sure that the turn count matches in both events. I have noticed that precog uses a turn, but then when it rewinds back you have an extra turn to act, making precognition effectively instantaneous to use the second time around, which causes de-sync. This could be remedied by having the rewound timeline start AFTER precognition was activated instead of BEFORE.

These two changes would make the two timelines play out in exactly the same way if exactly the same actions were taken. That would mean that if you use precognition to see what is in the tomb, in both timelines the same thing would be found since the dice would fall the exact same way... but if you used a buff afterwards the timelines would diverge, again.

Honestly, the guards for the tombs should be generated when you enter, anyways. That won't affect anyone without precognition, but honestly if precognition cannot be used for things like this then it just doesn't make any sense as a power anyways.

Agreed on fixing the turn-count thing, and on generating the tomb guards on level generation like everything else, unless you wanted to change the text of what happens when you open a tomb; maybe some necromantic energies are released at the moment the tomb is opened, thus creating an undead monster?

Honestly I'm not sure I'd want to have Precog be completely deterministic as you describe. If it was, one could use it just before opening a gnarly vault, or activating an orb. If your first action failed, enemy saved or whatever, you could run away and wait for Precog to end. Take a step to change the RNG seed, try again. Repeat until you are successful. Tedious, but do-able, and would make Precog sort of unbalanced IMO.

And more philosophically, is the Tome world really so deterministic that Precog should predict even such vagaries of fate? Hmm... I must ponder upon this

True, but on the other hand, the ability to split the timeline is already an extremely powerful ability, if you think about it. The balance is that if you die in the alternate timeline, you die for real. Spamming the power to check to see if every action succeeds would be extremely tedious, would create massive amounts of paradox, and ultimately could get you killed with no chance of a do-over if you pushed it too far... just as it should be, actually.

Also, gaming the RNG seed like you describe requires a bit of meta-gaming and might be seen as cheating, but of course could ALSO be seen as a legitimate use of time powers, invoking the butterfly effect, trying different things to get different results.

Basically to make this not a game breaking thing, one would need to find all of the things that are randomly generated but should not differ between timelines (Tombs, Chests, loot drops) and make sure that the results are generated before their actual sources are activated. That way the ability to game the system would be wholly neutralized, and precognition would be able to be used for what it really ought to be used for - namely, checking ahead before taking an action that might lead to some issues.

Really, if you can't check a tomb, or a chest, or a vault for what is in there before hand, and decide better about opening it in the second timeline when you get away from the nasty guards by the skin of your teeth and are sitting in front of it in the alternate timeline, what good is the power of splitting the timeline in the first place? Them being randomly generated right when you open them makes little sense, pre-generating them on level creation wouldn't take much more time for the game to process, and when using time-bending abilities to check before hand what's in there, one should expect the same thing to be in there on the second go-around.