Fate Meta-Class: Subclasses: Wyrdthief, Oracle, Champion

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

Not a perfect fit... but "Augury" for a tree name? Given how you're playing with 'fate', as in the future, that would sort of fit.

Augury means telling the future by studying the flight of birds. Granted, the correct term for doing this with cards, "Cartomancy", sounds as if somebody made it up for his homemade roleplaying system, but it's where it's at.

Now, as for this, Augury (by what I knew of the word) was trying to read the future, typically through chicken entrails... Though I thought any sort of religious hokum to read the future was synonymous with that. Dice sort of seemed a right fit, but whatever. To further complicate the meaning of the words (and not because it connects in any way), an auger is a drill. Perhaps we can drill into the future then?
Agreed however, that Cartomancy sounds... odd. So what would telling the future by dice be?

(Apparently, you learn something everyday.)

But what does it do that Luck doesn't? Plus, we'd loose all those nice expressions like being "down on your luck", "out of luck", and so on. Double plus, karma has a moral dimension that luck hasn't and that doesn't fit at all with the class as described. Halflings are lucky, but if karma was a thing in Maj'Eyal they would have bad karma.

Not so, granted that a few halflings in the past were horrible people, who would then suffer horrible karma; but the entire race isn't evil. Especially modern halflings. (Hey, they made peace with humans, so....) Granted, they're probably all still giant d***s on the inside, but still.

[nate]

To get a hang for the code:

If you're using Windows, use Wordpad to read the .luas. (Notepad won't show linefeeds in a comprehensible manner, and OpenOffice will try to save your files in the wrong format.)

If you don't have a good search program, get one. You'll want to search all files in subdirectories for text strings, so that you can trace functions, see how everything fits together, because one talent might be referenced in multiple different bits of code in distant directories. (On XP, I downloaded SearchMyFiles, available at http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/search_my_files.html , and it's working well for me.)

Duplicating existing functionality is very easy to code. You just find something that does what you want and copy it over, pretty much. Run your add-on in cheat mode for testing, and if it hangs, check your log, which will give you a good idea of wherever you forgot a comma

It's not a bad idea to just play around with stuff that's unrelated to your idea, to get a feel for how everything fits together. I'm still figuring out the code myself.

[HousePet]

Karma seems to suggest that it gets better if you help people though.

However, calling a resource the same name as a stat is not a good idea.

[notmiki]

"Champion: Gains from "Lucky Moments" (crits, dodges, and so on... they snowball, but that's part of the point)."

This. I like this. Reminds me of the Luck / Morale system from heroes of might and magic. Talent idea time.

Twist Fate
Sustained

You have had it with Fate telling you how things are going to turn out, so you are taking things into your own hands now.
If you fail 5 saving throws in a row within a moderate period of time (20 turns? 30 turns?) You gain a large boost to...something. Resource pool? Saves? Speed? Phys power? A combination of these?

how about a passive ability with a 15 cooldown that removes all your negative statuses when you fail 5 saves within 20 turns.

or alternately how about a boost of 10 spell/phys/mindpower whenever you fail a save, which can stack up to 5 times and lasts 5 turns.

both similar to spin fate, but sufficiently different not to be duplicative.

[nate]

I can definitely understand people's concern with calling it "Luck." Imagine if this were in the default game (not an add-on) and I played a Wyrdthief for my first character-- the whole time I might be saying, "Hey, +max psi artifact, don't think I need that." Next game, I play a Berserker. Especially since Luck is a hidden attribute, and since I'm familiar with it as a resource for Wyrdthieves, I'll probably say, "Hey, +luck artifact, don't think I need that." I'd be mistaken, of course.

But if you're just looking at it as an add-on, the picture changes. You can expect people to come to the add-on with some experience with the game. Calling your resource "Luck" suggests to those players that +Luck items would affect it. And Luck is something that is already thematically part of ToME. (Whereas "karma" comes with different baggage that you might not want to attach to the game's background, and definitely does suggest different things to different people-- for instance, to me, it does suggest that you gain it from acting justly, and that might pervert your thematic vision.)

[Mewtarthio]

Agreed however, that Cartomancy sounds... odd. So what would telling the future by dice be?

The word is astragalomancy, which is a bit of a mouthful, to say the least.

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

Why not just call the resource 'Chance'? That would get around same-name issue, and convey about the same meaning... 'Fortune' would be another good choice.

Other options 'destiny', 'fate', 'potential'... Though you're getting further and further from the meaning.

The word is astragalomancy, which is a bit of a mouthful, to say the least.

Errrrr.... I vote we call the dice tree 'Gamble' or something?

Again, learn something everyday. In this case we learned what we won't be calling the dice tree.

[Kaja Rainbow]

It's not a bad idea to download a program that's specifically designed for coding, like Notepad++ as an example. They'll have things like syntax highlighting and whatnot to help you read the code, and they don't have problems with line breaks. Plus various features. (Note: Notepad++ is very distinct from basic Notepad and not even made by the same people.)

[aardvark]

Why not call it Tarotmancy?

P.S. Notepad++ is what I use, also.

[bricks]

Sublime is also a nice text editor. The default color scheme is easy on the eyes.

[Infinitum]

Major Arcana kind of works as well, it being the occult name for the deck used (with Minor Arcana being the name for the usual 52-card deck used in most card games). It does run the risk of being mixed up with arcane in this setting though. Perhaps splitting the card tree into two separate trees, one each for Oracle/Wyrdthief with the other starting as an unlockable would be in order? The Wyrdthief one could then be centered around card combos and the Oracle one around scrying.

[Mewtarthio]

Major Arcana is the set of 22 "trumps" that most people associate with the Tarot (The Fool, The Magician, The High Priestess, etc). The Tarot also includes the 52-card Minor Arcana, which has four suits (Coins, Cups, Swords, and Staves) with ten numbered cards and four "face" cards (Page, Knight, Queen, an King) per suit. A Tarot deck contains all 74 cards, with each card having a separate meaning if used for divination.

That being said, "Major Arcana" is probably a perfectly fine name for a Tarot-based tree, since, unless you're really ambitious, you probably only want to implement twenty-two different card effects (which is certainly a lot of work, but nowhere near as much work as implementing seventy-four effects). The only problem I'd have would be... would the Tarot even exist in Maj'Eyal?

[Sradac]

dont use wordpad.

use either notepad++ or geany

[NEHZ]

About the card thing: this could lead to people using cards and shuffling before combat untill they have the cards left that they want.
Some suggestions that can prevent this:
-Automaticly shuffle when you go from enemies out of sight to enemies in sight or
-automaticly shuffle every 30 turns since last shuffle or
-only capable of dealing cards when enemies are in sight.

About the karma thing:
From what I know about karma, I'd say the name is a very ill fit. Depending on your religious view, karma either ties together past actions with future events, or is more camparable with debt. Well, this probably isn't really correct, but in any case karma has nothing to do with luck. If anything, it's an opposite.
From the suggested resource names, I personally like Fortune best. Was Chance named?

Class names, here are some suggestions:
Destined (if you want to show that they are guided by fate, nice thing is that the name in itself doesn't say what they're destined for)
Schemers (if you want to show that they controll or use their fate)

[jotwebe]

The only problem I'd have would be... would the Tarot even exist in Maj'Eyal?

I could see a Tome-efied version working very well. A lot of the major arcana could stay the same, some would even be good fits for Tome classes. Like, the Moon would obviously be an Anorithil, the Chariot an Alchimist with golem and the Hermit a Solipsist. The Tower might make sense renamed as the Spellblaze, and so on. It'd be another topic, though...

And on a different note, I can also recommend geany.