RFT2

[darkgod]

There is even a bug to your advantage currently, stealth does not seem to always break on attack, so sometimes you can get multiple shadowstrikes !

I'm thinking the weapon masterioes are too powerful to be able to be pumped to max so soon.
Maybe I should add a requirement of level or stat to each points to make them smoothly distributed?

[madmonk]

Let's look at the broader picture...

There are 50 Clevels.

An extreme example: A Sword Master

Pumps Swordmastery and nothing else to the MAX. At what level should she achieve mastery of her weapon?

Another example: A Rogue

Generalises his skills to be the complete Rogue, so stealth, stealing, weapon mastery, archery, etc, etc, etc. Can he master anything within the 50 Clevels?

Assistants to achieving Mastery could be:

1) Class Mastery bonus - a bonus to mastery within a school. The size of the bonus will vary from Class to Class.

2) Class Specialisation points - So take the Weaponmastery School, it might be a class specialisation for you, so IF AND ONLY IF you allocate a point within the Weaponmastery school will you be able to spend the extra point. This is very powerful and you might want to make it a Birth thing, or an occasional bonus say every 10 Clevels. A bit oif juggling will be in order here to get the right balance.

3) Race Bonus - a natural facility with the indicated school, increasing the mastery bonus by a small amount.

4) Item Bonuses - wearing an item gives an indicated Mastery bonus for a school, power varies from item to item.

5) Potions - quaffing one of these gives an extra point(s) in a school

6) Scrolls - just like potions

7) Anything else

Basically what I am saying is that the concept we have is good, but we need to tinker with it, and stretching it out to cover the 50 levels and thus addressing how players achieve mastery of a school or talent needs to be addressed withing this context.

Does this work? What do we need to make this work over the course of the game? Do we retain the flexibility that Yottle mentions?

[darkgod]

I'm not sure I understand actually

That sounds a bit complex, I am a strong believe in simple systems that combines in complex effects so I'd rather keep the actual system
and make the masteries the way to get racial/class/items bonus

Potions/scrolls can also give points in school / talent yes.

[Yottle]

...Does this work? What do we need to make this work over the course of the game? Do we retain the flexibility that Yottle mentions?

I think that the two extremes to avoid are hard-coded characters and jack-of-all-trade characters. In the first case you have to spend all of your talent points in the obvious places and there is no room to experiment. In the second you have so many points that you can get every useful talent.

The trick is to ensure that there is always an reasonable alternative to where you decide to spend a good chunk of your points.

[madmonk]

'm thinking the weapon masterioes are too powerful to be able to be pumped to max so soon.
Maybe I should add a requirement of level or stat to each points to make them smoothly distributed?

I was responding to this where you asked the question about maxing out stuff so quickly...

So I asked the questions:

When is the earliest a player can max a mastery out (assuming no external assistance in the form of items/potions/etc?)
How many Masteries can be maxed out in this way?

That sounds a bit complex, I am a strong believe in simple systems that combines in complex effects so I'd rather keep the actual system and make the masteries the way to get racial/class/items bonus

Potions/scrolls can also give points in school / talent yes.

Now it's my turn to be confused... which suggests we have both not quite understood where the other is coming from!

So taking this back to the beginning, as far as I can see we have this and I am looking t your comments on damage from the Fireflash spell:

1) Talent Level (from 0 to Max, where max is a variable integer number)
2) Mastery Level (from Min to Max, where Min and Max are variable real numbers)
3) Magic_stat is what? I have no idea...

So you cannot cast a spell unless you have a Talent Level in it... and therefore there is an associated Mastery level which suggest Talent_level Min is 1.

So the formula for Fireflash you mentioned in the RFT thread really looks like this (I wish I had subscript and superscript so I could express this properly!). By the way I have written them large so I could see the difference between the different parentheses, anyway here it is:

28 + (0.4 * Magic_Stat) * (Talent_Level {0 -> Max} * School_Mastery {0 -> Max})

So I assume the number 28 is the base damage that Fireflash delivers, and if that is the case then we could express the formula for all spell damage as:

Base_Spell_Damage {0, Max} + (0.4 * Magic_Stat) * (Talent_Level {0, Max} * School_Mastery {0, Max})

Goodness working through things in this way, clarifies things a bit, or I think it does for me...

So once we look at this, it is the range in Talent Level multiplied by the range in School Mastery that is of interest and therefore the game (in Talent and Mastery terms) might look like this:

Start
Get base Talents going in as many skills as are needed by the char

Mid-Game
Start to emphasise Mastery points, now the player should have a sub-goal of getting as much mastery as possible in any schools
Less emphasis on Talent points - the Talents should be fairly rounded out in player terms

End-Game
Mastery points rule
Talent Levels should be maxed by this stage

I think I have this right...

[Shoob]

Ok... so now that I have "beaten" ADOM with an ultra ending I tried out this and I have beaten it with both warrior and rogue. Mages are still in progress... I got one to almost beat the first boss, but got unlucky.

I saw a variety of spelling/grammer errors, though I am not sure if you want to bother correcting them...

the potion of cure poison. just take off the 's' from the cures in the description as the syntax makes it grammatically incorrect.
danse --> dance (warrior talent)
death blow (description is wrong, or is it... it looks like a copy of stunning blow)

If you want a more complete list let me know.

gavalorn stuff is the highest that I have seen, and makes the game easy as pie (you have to guess which type of pie though, I ain't tellin')

also I noticed that monsters levels remained the same but that their hp went up with the characters level.

another strange thing I noted was that none of my warriors or rogues saw skeleton mages until the 3rd or so level, my mage however saw some on the first level... I guess the RNG hated my mage for some reason?

also is there any difference between base types... almost all of the rings and amulets I found were copper, I did manage to find one steel though.

and, I noted that sometimes the bonus from rings would disappear. that is I found a ring of str +7 and when I put on an amulet of willpower, that +7 vanished, it did come back when I took off and put back on the ring.

and lastly (I should be off, else I would drone on forever), is it possible to get mithril stuff, I see they are in there, but is the level to low? or do you just have to get really really *REALLY* lucky?

[darkgod]

Madmonk, yes most spells will use a similar formula. Magic Stat is well .. the Magic stat ?

Shoob: Ah thanks, fixed the typos.
Yes mithril is the highest and obviously it is uber rare at level 5
Skeleton mage starts at level 3 but could come OOD.

Monsters levelup scheme is zone dependant, but most zones will work as currently:
Each zone has a min and max level, monsters inside will be leveled to -2<>+2 levels of the player when he enters the zone, but respecting the monster min/max level.

As for the rnig of strengh, I am not able to reproduce it, can you ?

[madmonk]

Madmonk, yes most spells will use a similar formula. Magic Stat is well .. the Magic stat ?

Me being dumb, of course it is!!!

So coming back to your original point why did you want to make them level or stat dependant to make them smoothly distributed?

[darkgod]

Not all of them, but things like Sword Mastery can be maxed in the very first levels and it is a very potent buff. Probably far too potent.
No ?

[Shoob]

yeah, I would agree that maxing sword mastery at level 3 is too much... maybe make it like it was before with it being dependent on both lvl and str... (say an extra 2 or 3 levels and str for each step) and remember that knives would be dex not str...

about the ring of str what I did previously to that...

I was swapping a bunch of my rings around (quite a bit) (did I forget to mention that I made one of them disappear prior to the stat not working? well, I still retained the bonus from that, and I was able to wear a ring on top of it... that might be the problem)

[darkgod]

Ah yes disappearing certanily explains that. Now .. how did you make it disappear ?

Knives get half damage bonus from DEX and half from STR now. I think I'll implement a talent taht lets use knives with DEX/CUN instead of DEX/STR.

[madmonk]

The light dawns...

Certainly some sort of slowing down of maxing too early would be a great idea!

[Shoob]

oh... still havent managed to re-do what I did.

I do think that stone skin is WAY too powerful though... I am getting 55 armor from that alone the only things able to damage me were spells and the troll [EDIT: oops, did i mention the troll... silly me... am at 125 armor from that alone and no damage from him either now ]

[EDIT] Oh and wow... just found my first mithril object with my wizard too... a shield now to beef up str a bit (though I would get a better bonus just by increasing dex, but who cares .

and hmmm.... you probably should make poison bypass armor too.

[darkgod]

Hum yes, I'm re-adjusting things right now

[darkgod]

Luckily none of you found out about the Regeneration spell that heals each turn more than Heal does