mps wrote:@Siegurt: I don't understand where you get from what I've said that I think this new mechanic is bad because it's new.
Maybe it'll turn out that I'm the only one who would ever think it's weird that using a phial of floods drains phials of floods you find laying around on the ground, but I really doubt it. So you either have items on the floor that say straight out that they're drained exactly as much as the ones in your inventory or you hide the fact and you have people wondering why you can't drop your old fans and find new charged ones. The mechanic has no logic to it beyond the truth: A class of items, which previously worked the way many other evocables work and which makes sense within the logic of the game and other games of its type, was judged to be too powerful and this was how it was nerfed. The fact that it's novel in a way that doesn't really make any sense within the game setting should give you pause. The behavior is too contrived and sticks out as an instance of something being nerfed in a heavy-handed way.
I think you're going to find that the dominant reaction to this change is disappointment. People are going to be surprised by the way this type of evocable works and their surprise is going to be of the "well, that sucks" variety. If you don't want players spamming something, don't give them as much of it and make it take more time to recharge. I just can't understand why you'd go for a change like this when there are obvious, almost surely better alternatives. If there's an issue, it's that fans and lamps and so on are too easily available and they charge too fast.
last edit: An example: The only time I really use elemental evokers are in panic button situations to create a diversion or get monsters off me and in predictable big fights, e.g. Zot:5 and Vaults:5. During vaults:5, my evokers recharge DURING the fight, even if I use several of them. This strongly suggests to me that the issue with spamming them can be addressed by reducing the charge rate. Just say: How many of these should you be able to use in a dungeon branch? Take that number, divide the amount of XP in a typical branch by it, and that's how long they need to charge. You don't need wild new mechanics to address an issue like this. If you're worried you can produce too big of a burst of elemental evocation by picking up a lot of them, then reduce the number that generate in a typical game.
Again, I'll point out that reducing the number that generate in a typical game doesn't solve the problem trying to be solved here. Nor does influencing the recharge rage, the problem isn't that the items recharge, it's that you *can* get an infinte number of them, *and use them all in any specific hard fight* it doesn't matter how long it takes for them to regen, making them take longer to regen just increases the number you need to carry to never run out when it's important, and it doesn't matter if you reduce their spawn rate, that just increases the amount of time you need to spend farming the game for more of them.
The problem is *not* with how they're used when they're used as designed which is 1-2 in a hard fight, then maybe again sometime later in another fight, it's when you have a gigantic, inexhaustible stack of them.
Now "Generate only one of these items ever" *is* a viable solution to that problem, it's also IMHO less interesting than being able to collect several and have them have a sort of collective effect in a single evocation. Another option would be to not let the items recharge, ever (essentially turning them into scrolls) Or have them use the existing "wand charge" mechanic, which is limited by sharing recharge scrolls with wands. Turning them into wands or scrolls does remove their distinctiveness completely though, and I'd rather see more types of mechanics (that *work*) rather than less.
I do appear to have misinterpreted this:
mps wrote:It's such a strange behavior and only one kind of item has it... It'll never sit right.
As you not liking it because it was new (attributed to the "only one kind of item has it" and "it'll never sit right")
I'm interpreting your more recent post as you don't like it because "it doesn't make sense" So a couple things:
Justifying the reason something happens in terms of game-making-sense is something called "flavor" in *all* cases, what works the best for good game play trumps all logic, reason, sensibility and flavor in all forms.
Yes, you'll need to adjust the description of what happens when you use one of these items. Do you think that the description of how these items work dictate the best course of action for how they should *work*? No, it of course it shouldn't.
So if they need some reflavoring (bikeshedding) it sounds to me like this:
"This item opens a portal to calls forth the raw elemental power from the (fire/earth/air/water) plane and lets it spew forth on your enemies, the denziens of that plane will perform this service, but require rest afterwards to recover their exhausted power. All (lamps of fire|phial of floods|stones of earth|fans of air) open a portal to the same plane, and hence when one is used you cannot evoke a portal using another until the plane itself has recovered. Using multiple items at a time, one can open a larger portal letting more elemental power pour through at once."
Would that "make sense" or be "less controversial" (or at least seem "less strange")?