Expanded effects for Luck

[Doctornull]

Zeno's half damage paradox only occurs if you assume nothing ever deals more damage than it needs to, to kill.
I'm pretty sure ToME is quite happy to overkill.

Actually, no.

Zeno's half-damage paradox happens when you receive MASSIVE overkill damage but an unlimited cycle of no-cooldown half-damage kicks in repeatedly, until the damage is no longer enough to kill you.

My point is that there's a need to limit the effect to 1/round or giving it another kind of cooldown.

[HousePet]

I don't think anyone was suggeting that the halving of damage could apply more than once to a single damage hit.
Who would ever make a damage mitigation effect that repeatedly applied until no damage remained???

[Doctornull]

I don't think anyone was suggeting that the halving of damage could apply more than once to a single damage hit.
Who would ever make a damage mitigation effect that repeatedly applied until no damage remained???

That is my point. Thank you for getting to it. You have correctly recognized the condition which I was warning we ought to avoid.

Zeno's Paradox involves an INFINITE sequence, which people usually intuit to mean MORE THAN ONE, so ... you know what, now that I've had to fully explain the joke, any possible funny is dead past re-animation even by some kind of comedic Eidolon, so let's just drop this and pretend it never happened.

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All I'm gonna say is: IMHO it'd be nice if Luck had a non-combat effect, so Luck wasn't something you stacked with other combat enhancements -- it would be something you sacrificed combat stacking to obtain.

Maybe stuff like avoiding Orc Patrols? Or finding more gold? Or squeezing your way out of being trapped in a collapsing sand tunnel? I dunno.

[MalReynolds]

I like this idea, of having it be an occasional escape with varying likelihoods from certain very well defined situations. Say, like 30 of them, maybe organized by severity or commonness (where the chance of escape below is modified by something basic like (Luck-50)/50, min 0; keeping in mind that I have no idea what the scale of Luck is; anyway, it should be 2 or 3 for very very lucky characters and 0 for average or below luck).

This would mostly be for color; it wouldn't normally have a big effect, but would be funny when it happened. A random list with no serious thought of problems that could get lucked away:

Code: Select all

Chance of escape /
      Situation

20.0% Bump into orc patrol
15.0% something 
12.0% something else
10.0% Trapped in sandworm tunnel for a turn
08.0% Spell would fizzle (like ctrl phase door LOS)
07.0% Stepping on harmful territory like fire
05.0% Single shot would kill you from >80% health
03.0% Taking damage from friendly fire
02.0% Spell crit
01.0% Finding an item unusually low in tier (would bump up to +1 expected tier)
00.5% Shot would kill you
00.2% Seeing darkened or stealthed or invisible enemy because of glint, per turn

An announcement in the game log would be made, "You got lucky and X happened..." or something like that; and all the while some of the other detailed numerical work of luck would be running in the background.

And maybe once per game you could stumble across a buried treasure, maybe at the end of a rainbow, which was equal to 5 times your level times the above factor in gold.

Again, just for color.