tantanoid wrote:I believe that having varying Max HP/MP between characters and several ways of HP and MP gain (with varying speeds and costs) adds tactical complexity and potentially meaningful choices. To avoid tedium the slowest method should be something that a player would do anyway during normal play. Some candidates:
- Eating: in practice wouldn't be too different than resting and could cause to unintuitively avoid eating when hungry but at full HP.
- Exploration: while obviously rewards the player to take on risks it can force one to leave safe parts unexplored and backtrack to be safe
- XP gain: if xp is also gained from exploration it has the same benefits, but with many other XP sources I believe it would be less likely to encourage unintuitive behavior. To avoid farming all XP sources will max out after some point.
1. This can work if food is limited (which I assume it is lol), but there's something I don't like about it. It just feels like an annoyance to have to make that decision. It's not a meaningful choice that adds enjoyment to the game, if you get what I'm saying. It's stressful.
2. An interesting thought but this introduces tedium as well.
3. HP healing by XP gain be exciting, but it can also be very agitating to the player. I think most people play crawl to relax; if you use this it should be in a game where people actually want to get excited, aka something that isn't turn-based.
I'm familiar with Brogue and while it's very cool and innovative it doesn't represent the gameplay I currently envision. While having a clock that encourages optimal gameplay is good I don't think it should be too punishing to completionists or players that enjoy messing around (this is probably a backlash against all the survival games that have been coming out recently).
The clock can be used as an answer to the HP/MP regain thing, if combined with resting, although that introduces tedium and complicated, unfun thought processes involving how much the player would want to rest.
Alternatively, you can combine it with the "gain XP for HP" thing to amplify the effect.
I'm actually considering removing hunger to reduce micro-managment and only keeping food for intrinsics and other special properties.
The main clock will be the score as it will decrease for every action the character takes. XP and items will not influence the score.
The goal of the game will be to kill or disable 'The Endboss'. Initially TEB will be pretty much invincible, but for every 'Rune' a player collects TEB will have a predetermined penalty applied (e.g. fire immunity removed or armor decreased). The catch is that for every rune collected the score will be further decreased (in addition to the turns penalty).
The only way of improving the score is by maintaining conducts.
I really like both of these. Hey dpeg can the number of runes affect Zot somehow?
tasonir wrote:Anyways: my recommendation: Transparent combat/growth mechanics. Make it clear what weapons do; display values that players need to figure out what's going on. Avoid "hinting" at values like when crawl tells you that you did "!!!" damage rather than just saying "46". When a player gets stronger, make it clear how they got stronger and what they can do with their new powers (ie, you gained 3 dex, this gives you +5% chance to hit and 3% chance to dodge".
It'll drastically lower the learning curve and help people get into your game easier.
Yes, I find this type of randomness/obscurity annoying. I plan on having fixed damage values, non-random effects and no spell cast failure chance. I'm still thinking about how to handle hit/miss.
Also the interface will have easy access to information that you would normally have to remember or search on wiki.
It's there for a reason. It does feel less of a drain the less numbers that are displayed. There was a lot of thought put into the concepts that enemy AC, EV, and MR be obscure. Only recently has max HP been revealed, and that's honestly just there to give the player the ability to better analyze the enemy (ie it tells you that slimes and phantoms have a crapton of health). All that extra mumbo jumbo makes it tempting and subsequently very annoying to calculate stuff. This sort of thing works in Fire Emblem because calculating that stuff is simple addition/subtraction math, but not here.
That being said, I wouldn't mind seeing some accuracy numbers, nor some damage numbers for the player, if only to see the difference between archmagi and no archmagi.
If the player really wants extremely descriptive values for leveling up skills and xp level, you should instead include them as part of a command. Like pressing '@' would display what you would get from your next level.
Random effects, including variable damage, introduce 'complications' to an otherwise completely predictable situation. They make the game interesting and I don't think blanket removal is a good answer here. Getting rid of spell cast failure chance I can get behind though. It's a case-by-case basis.
For hit/miss, you ideally want damage between player turns to fall on a bell-curve. This is done in crawl by having multiple monsters attack at once (albeit somewhat lopsidedly) and having rolls for damage. If you don't like that single attacks are 100% hit or miss, you could do something similar to Pillars of Eternity and have more than one accuracy category. PoE has 4: Miss, Graze, Hit, and Crit, which multiply effects by 0%, 50%, 100%, and some number > 100%, respectively. I use the word effects because it's not just damage that gets multiplied. Status effect duration and magnitude are also affected by the accuracy categories, with a critical bleeding status effect being way worse than a grazed bleeding status effect.
@dpeg: multiple accuracy categories might actually make accuracy in crawl worth thinking about, although if done badly it could add another complicated layer.