Hate ideas

[Infinitum]

1. When idle, your hate will sit at 0.
2. Hate grows very quickly when in combat. Maybe +10/turn for a certain threshold of damage inflicted or received, +20/kill, etc.
3. Hate falls very quickly. Maybe -5/turn or -10/turn when you haven't gained any for 3 turns.
4. Talent use does not reduce hate, but some may require a threshold. So blindside might work at 0 hate, but rampage might require you to be at 40+ hate to activate it.
5. Many more talents should scale power off hate so you come into combat cold and become a killing machine the longer you fight.

This allows for auto-explore (since hate falls to 0 pretty much immediately) and some pretty interesting tactics in battle. I think this is similar to the idea of having a hate bar on every creature, but it is simpler and rewards you regardless of whether you are fighting a lot of weaker enemies or one tough one.

The hate part is pretty easy to modify, but this requires some changes to the talents. I've been putting together another addon (an afflicted-themed dungeon), but I might give this a try at some point to see if it plays ok.

This indeed looks like an improvement, but I still think that individual hate bars would be better thematically - hate is a targeted emotion, it needs a subject to be projected on. Hating everything indiscriminately seems more like rage to me (or teenage angst or whatever).

Individual bars would also allow for hate to start off at a set value for each new enemy (say 50) and then change dynamically during the battle (increasing with the enemy's actions against the PC and vice versa). This would circumvent supermini's problem with initially low hate encouraging bumping enemies at the beginning of fights.

[supermini]

This indeed looks like an improvement, but I still think that individual hate bars would be better thematically - hate is a targeted emotion, it needs a subject to be projected on. Hating everything indiscriminately seems more like rage to me (or teenage angst or whatever).

Lets not bring realism into a game mechanics discussion. What makes or doesn't make sense to you or what you think fits thematically has nothing to do with this. Fun game mechanic comes first, and you can hammer in the thematics later if necessary (just call it rage instead of hate in your head if it bothers you that much).

Individual bars would also allow for hate to start off at a set value for each new enemy (say 50) and then change dynamically during the battle (increasing with the enemy's actions against the PC and vice versa). This would circumvent supermini's problem with initially low hate encouraging bumping enemies at the beginning of fights.

What would the individual hate bars accomplish? Most trash is dead from 2-3 hits from cursed. The individual hate score wouldn't come into play 95% of the time, which means that it would be pointless. Any sort of talent cost would be meaningless on anything but a boss. I just don't see how you imagine this to work.

[SageAcrin]

That's an interesting idea, but if hate is just something that naturally builds up during the fight and no abilities use it up, then you'd hit the same problem that we have now - cursed would simply not pay attention to the hate bar at all. It would just be a generic damage modifier. You'd have to have some skills costing hate and some giving more hate to add a strategic element to it.

Sorta...not entirely, but sorta.

Let's look at Reckless Charge and Blindside, right now, assuming this system.

Reckless Charge does halved damage at 0 Hate, while Blindside does 30%.

Which would you use at the start of the fight? Probably Reckless Charge. That's a big difference in starting damage.

But Reckless Charge can also be used as an escape. So, maybe you'd use the low damage Blindside to go in, in a dangerous looking situation. Then you can leave using Reckless Charge.

This doesn't require looking at Hate too much, but it does require you to think more about Hate, as it pertains to combat. It's less a resource and more of a playstyle guide, this way-which does fit more.

You're probably right, though. A few skills consuming Hate-and in pretty large 20+ chunks-while the rest of your skills did not consume any...that would probably be optimal for making it interesting.

(Obviously, you wouldn't want 0 Hate damages as low as those skills are now, though. That's an extreme situation. But that's just to illustrate my thoughts.)

[nate]

I've got to disagree with Infinitum:

a) That sense of resources a wastin' is a feature. It's the only thing that keeps Cursed on the rampage-- it drives a playstyle of constantly looking for the next fight. Without hate loss over time, it's really just another resource bar.

b) Given that, the fear of hate loss is more emotional than rational. Capped loss and rapid gains make it so that hate is never scarce. I remember one time when I didn't have enough hate to drive my abilities: when I was running the ID and insisting on killing every boss. Eventually, after many many rounds of hit-and-run, you start to run low. Since few of your defensive abilities scale with hate (although it's nice to be able to blindside/reckless charge out of a bad situation), and since bosses hardly ever win by out-healing you, running out of hate is just an inconvenience anyways.

c) Keeping track of separate hate for each critter is bad precedent. It might not seem like a huge resource drain-- it's not-- but it adds up. Consider if somebody was to make a level where all of the critters were Cursed, all keeping track of how much they hated each other, maybe even in which ways. And consider what would happen if other classes started doing things that way too. These kind of relationships suck up memory (and hence garbage collection) a lot faster than it seems that they ought. So if you can avoid relationship tables like this via a reasonable abstraction, that's preferable.

I agree with benli (and SageAcrin and others). Here's how I'd put it:

Hate begets hate. Even vengeance leaves one unsatisfied. Thus, talents that scale with hate shouldn't deplete hate.
So if you want hate to be meaningful and thematic, it needs to be a scaling factor rather than a traditional resource.
Since you want to keep Cursed balanced in light of reduced resource requirements, you allow hate to drop even further (to zero, no halfsies). I think 3 turns to zero is a little fast, though, since it doesn't give you any encouragement to find another fight as fast as you can.
If there are some abilities you imagine should be reserved until hate is at a sufficient level, you assign thresholds (must have hate>=50, for instance) to those abilities.
You magnify hate scaling (more like Blindside, less like Slash), unless you think an ability is thematically an opening move.
To deal with other thematic visions of hate (like NEHZ's observation that hate isn't rage), you use talents. (For instance, you make a sustained component of Seethe which banks hate to a certain limit while active and that doesn't decay with time, and which releases that Hate back into your resource bar when deactivated.)

Then you playtest and rebalance-- if Rampage comes out ahead of Slaughter, you tone down Rampage and tone up Slaughter. (Which probably ought to happen anyways.) If the early part of the game is too tough, you increase fixed bonuses, but reduce attribute scaling. (And probably, along the way, figure out what ought to happen with Unnatural Body.) Of course a change to Hate would throw things out of whack. But not irrepairably so.

[benli]

I've posted an add-on to try out a new system for hate:

http://te4.org/games/addons/tome/hate-change

This is the approach that seemd to work the best:

* Hate goes up by 20 every time you inflict more thant 5% of your life in damage -or- hate goes up by 20 if you kill at least one enemy (bonus hate for powerful enemies).
* Hate drops by 30% every turn (not counting hate gain from combat).
* Hate no longer penalizes healing.
* Hate gives you -80% to +150% damage.
* Talents no longer individually scale damage based on hate.
* Opening talents like Blindside, Beckon, Reproach, etc have no hate cost.
* Talents that provide hate now provide more of it.

This formula gives you a very simple way to gain hate (by hurting things). It does not keep hate around for long (maybe 5 turns). Auto-explore is irrelevant. Hate is always important for the damage bonus, but its easy enough to get that you won't mind spending it on the talents that cost more hate.

This seems to work better for doomed as doomed can gain hate more easily and spend it more easily. That makes the tactics more interesting For Cursed it gets a little lost, but is still more meaningful than the old version. I tried out some variations on this (based on some of the comments here), but this seems to cut things down to what's important. One thing lost here is carrying hate from one battle to the next. My initial version held hate longer and higher (10 turns or so) so you could carry it into the next fight. That was nice but hate loses meaning when it gets too high halfway through the battle.

The add-on only balances the classes and they may not be well balanced. For this to work, items and NPCs would have to be changed as well.

[phantomglider]

* Hate gives you -80% to +150% damage.

This, or at least this magnitude of scaling, sounds like it would be a problem for cursed - if they have no hate, they can't do damage, so they can't kill stuff effectively or deal big chunks of damage, so they can't gain hate well. I think it could work, but Cursed would need a talent or two to deal with it - Slash could deal extra damage at low Hate or be immune to low-hate damage penalties, for example, to give you a way to start the pain train running.

EDIT: Ah, this is worded badly; it scales from 80% to 150% damage, i.e. -20% to +50%. That works fine.

[benli]

That should read 80% to 150%. A couple of attacks give you enough hate to get over 100% damage. Generally cursed hover around 20-60 hate, so 94-122% damage. I don't know if I got the balance quite right there. I've only tried it on lower level characters.