dpeg wrote:evilmike: All good points. Can you estimate how many tiers the Glow indicator would have to have? Using "Glow" in various colours and perhaps *, ** and *** suffixes would go a long way.
It depends on how important glow becomes, really. My main worry is this:
Lets say grey glow is still the level before yellow, and I want to avoid yellow glow. Grey encompasses a range of values, from "I can still cast a few spells safely", to "I am one point away from being in the yellow". The problem is, I might be one point away without knowing it - and then go into yellow glow by casting something like beastly appendage. The possibility of this bothers me, since it means either
(a) I have to "manually" track how much glow I have (so I can differentiate between "high grey" and "low grey", so to speak), or
(b) I have to rest whenever I reach grey glow, if I want to play it safe.
Now, this is a pretty bad situation, so the system should be designed to avoid it. Giving a number is the easiest way to *totally* avoid this problem. But, the following might be good enough:
No status light: you have exactly 0 magical contamination
Dark grey: Some contamination, but low enough that *all* contaminating spells are safe to cast - even the most contaminating. Miscasts excepted, of course.
Light grey: You're still safe, but within a few points of yellow. Glow-heavy spells like haste and invis are *always* dangerous to cast at this level (the threshold between dark grey and light grey should be something like, "the point when casting the most glow-heavy spell will bring you into the yellow").
Yellow: You are slightly past the safe threshold, and will take minor penalties. Stuff that can be ignored in small amounts, but will add up over time. Accumulating more contamination at this stage becomes a very bad idea.
Red & dark red: Explosions and mutations. You were either desperate or foolish to get to this level.
I'm just using colours here because that's what the current system uses. It could just as easily be a scale of [.....] to [*****], with [***..] being yellow (one nice feature here is that the bad stuff happens when the "bar" is more than half-full).
In addition: a warning when you cast a spell that can contaminate you to dangerous levels. Perhaps a config option where the player can set this to yellow, red, or none. This would probably require an upfront glow cost to buff spells. This warning feature would prevent "accidents". I'm thinking of a warning prompt, which you can automatically avoid by force-casting with Z. More fine-grained contam thresholds are nice, but the key is really to help the player manage this, without it being a nuisance.