Enter the Pariah

[Lord Estraven]

This idea is (kind of) ripped off from WH40K. Take it as you will. Anyway...

The Pariah would be a new subrace, which would get +1 antimagic by default and a decent modifier (maybe .8 or so?) to the skill. All magic-related skills would of course be zeroed out. A bonus to saving throw might also be good, but other than that they'd get nothing unusual.

The idea in-game is that these are people who have a natural resistance to magic. They can't use it, but like Unbelievers can learn to detect and suppress it.

Why is this good? Because it would let you have antimagic rogues, antimagic monks, and antimagic archers (without the weapon of nothingness rubbish).

Oh, one other possible limitation... ToME is pretty loose with Tolkien mythology, but in the mythos immortality basically = magic IIRC. So I'm thinking maybe the Pariah subrace should only be allowed for mortal races, just for flavor and whatnot.

[ggoDeye]

This idea is (kind of) ripped off from WH40K. Take it as you will. Anyway...
Why is this good? Because it would let you have antimagic rogues, antimagic monks, and antimagic archers (without the weapon of nothingness rubbish).

I like this idea a lot. I currently just modify p_info.txt to add antimagic skill to these classes at a 0.5 modifier. This obviously doesn't work as well for most people as adding an official subrace. Also 0.8 would be a more reasonable modifier.

[Lord Estraven]

Thanks for the feedback. Perhaps I'll add it to hacktome.

[Yottle]

Currently a player can get Antimagic from FF quests, so this is not a big change. It makes it easier to start up a character that you want to go that way since you don't have to be lucky with quests to get it going.

I like it. But keep the multiplier low. The character isn't going to be putting points into any of the magic skills, and you don't want to have them be able to max out everything else.

[Lord Estraven]

On second thought, it might be better to just give archers, rogues, and monks Antimagic at +0.5 or so. That would avoid the problem of Pariah Warriors getting a very large antimagic multiplier.

[AnonymousHero]

IIRC it should be possible to set the Antimagic skill modifier instead of adding to it. That should prevent absurd multipliers for classes who already have Antimagic.

[Yottle]

On second thought, it might be better to just give archers, rogues, and monks Antimagic at +0.5 or so. That would avoid the problem of Pariah Warriors getting a very large antimagic multiplier.

Don't forget Alchemists. They can use Antimagic too.

[Lord Estraven]

AH: you're right, there is a way to do that. D'oh.

Yottle: I personally think that compatibility should be considered a bug.

I'm thinking of redoing Alchemists too, with a focus on magic devices and potions as grenades. (Increasing alchemy skill would boost thrown potion damage.) Maybe get rid of artifact creation entirely; or make it random at no HP penalty, e.g. 50 magic essences + an item = a randart with a power level depending on Alchemy skill. 'Twould probably be a lot of work though.

[Lord Estraven]

Well I created the class and rolled up a Pariah monk, can't say I'm too impressed; monks are more interesting when they have some spells. Also "prohibited" classes aren't really prohibited, and you get to pick a god even though it has no effect. I think I may just give monks, archers, rogues, and assassins Antimagic, and update the help files.

Then again, it's already an FF skill, as has been pointed out. Granted that FF is not exactly reliable.

[AnonymousHero]

Regarding the god thing: For classes it's possible to prevent selection of a god by using a line

Code: Select all

C:a:g:Nobody

Does that not work for subraces?

P.S. I've pushed the spell conversion changes to gitorious. Spells are now coded completely in C++. Geomancy, Music and Meta are quite broken right now, but other schools should mostly be working OK.

I'm not sure which major Lua subsystem I'll remove next, I'm thinking the best thing would probably be something where data structures are shared across the Lua<->C boundary.