damerell wrote:I agree very strongly with this. Stoat Soup has done Portal Projectile, which doesn't have any Charms in it, and conversely we are unlikely ever to do Spectral Weapon, which to me is "just another summon" (and I don't want to do permasummons) with an added dose of "actually, I don't want it against every opponent because of the way sometimes it cops a massive AoE and does nothing except share me some damage".
Agreed. You can only have permabuffs for spells with well defined triggers. At least with Spectral, you have clear Yes/No situations so you can manage the spell.
These spells have limits. As far as I know every summon does except Dragon's Call (where the duration and time between dragons provides a practical upper limit); nearly all summons do, anyway. Call Canine Familiar might be an option because its long duration means it often lasts between fights anyway, but other than that I think permasummons would have the problem of saving a bunch of time at the start of the fight in spades, and summons are very strong anyway. (Also, either you have to get rid of the XP penalty or players will be incentivised to fiddle with exactly how many summons they have switched on (whether that is actually worth worrying about or not)).
What I meant by the cap is that there is a global summoning cap. Some spells only give you one ally regardless of the number of times it is cast. Others allow you cast multiple times until you hit the cap. Others ignore the cap entirely. The code wouldn't be able to tell which spell you are trying to hit the cap with first. With permabuffs, you would either need to limit each spell to one instance (which I think would work), or recast the spell with a higher associated MP cost (which would be wacky to code).
Regarding the time savings of permabuffs. That's mine too, but I can't see any way around it if permabuffs are actually to be nicer to use than ordinary spells. If they came up one by one on sighting a monster, you'd sometimes want to arrange the set of permabuffs (or the order, if that was possible) to get the right ones up first, and now it's as fiddly as non-permabuffs. We have mid-combat miscasts which force the spell off for a period - no immediate recasting - but it's still a huge improvement.
I would love to see miscast chances integrated to Hellcrawl.
The biggest offender with the reserved system is that you can ignore the spell failure of a permabuff spell. As long as you can hit the MP cost, you get the spell active. Thus, you can can get just enough EXP to cast the spell and enjoy its benefits. Playing an Unarmed Octopode? Just get that Dragon Form down to 20% and you'll be off to the races. Have a couple ice enhancer rings and a decent Charm skill? Ozo's is viable despite being at 20%. Those kinds of numbers would be risky in vanilla, especially on something squishy like a Octopode. It would reign in a lot of the shenanigans associated with permabuffs by adding risk back into the equation. You would actually be forced spend enough EXP to get the spell failure down low enough for the risk/reward to be reasonable, rather than strictly looking at the reserved MP cost.
Well, you can easily run the MP pool dry with Portal Projectile - I've got a HESk whose jewellery happens to include MP+9 and MPRegen, and they've run the pool dry in spite of that (with MP costs comparable to repeated recasting, not MP reservation; PProj is one of the spells like Regeneration where MP reservation can easily work to your advantage compared to recasting in vanilla).
I actually like that some spells have both a reserved and active cost. I am a big fan of using MP as the limiting resource for casting. In fact, I think that the formula's for Reserved MP cost are too forgiving; I shouldn't be able to have a buff up "at cost" until I have that spell failure down to 1-2%. I don't even think that "at cost" is high enough, especially for spells like Regeneration. Maintaining the spell should probably be 150% of the vanilla cost, even when you are very good at casting the spell. Those changes would limit the number of buffs you have active and actually force the player to make meaningful decisions on both the number of buffs active, as well as the EXP you are willing to spend to get the costs down.
Right now, a blaster can rock an Ozo's, Repel Missile and a Regeneration with pretty low EXP investments and it barely effects their ability to blast (9 MP reserved). Higher reserved costs would force you to look at the opportunity costs; is the Ozo's worth it in exchange for an extra Fireball or two before hitting 0 MP? Is upgrading to Deflect Missile worth it if I can't dedicate a significant amount of EXP to bring the MP cost down? You don't really have to make those calls right now. Bumping up the Reserved MP cost would make running buffs a meaningful decision for players that need that MP to function.
Another issue with importing Hellcrawl's system is it does nothing about hunger costs, because it doesn't have to. Until vanilla admits it's actually getting rid of food, something would have to be done about that.
On the subject of food;
1) I don't think it is a good limiting resource. It pretty much only affects casters, Rage users and a few species. All of those situations are better addressed with other mechanics. There is a reason why weapon-dudes are so popular in vanilla; people don't want to deal with food.
2) Casters already have a limiting resource in MP, so balance should be based around that. If having no food makes casters super strong, start bumping up MP costs. We already know that using a formula that changes MP costs based on your skills is doable (see the Reserved MP mechanics). Don't jerry-rig a weird hunger system to bog them down when you have a perfectly good system already there. Two half baked systems is not better than one well implemented system.
3) Rage is great in vanilla, but forcing Hell onto all players and amping up the difficulty of Zot more or less fixed the issues around that ability in Hellcrawl. You can't just Rage your way through the easy runes and walk out without addressing Rage's glaring flaws in those environments. You get great early game answers to problems, but they fizzle as the game progresses. If Rage is still a problem,
look at the ability itself. If it is too strong for its drawbacks, either amp up the drawbacks or scale back its power. Don't slap a hunger mechanic on it and call it a day. Actually look at the ability itself.
4) Species; food mechanics add a lot of flavour (haha) but it doesn't have to be there. Trolls can be managed by slowly giving them their good mutations over time, rather than all at once. Spriggans are only busted because of the way vanilla does stairs; you could give them Swiftness as an ability rather than a full time mechanic to address that. Undead can be tempered with aptitude/HP changes or forcing more holy enemies and Dispel Undead users on them. My point is that the strong species that are balanced by their food mechanics can be addressed with other mechanics; it doesn't have to be food.
tealizard wrote:Things that might work are increases in spell level/difficulty for permacharms, cumulative, symmetric increases in spell difficulty when maintaining multiple permacharms (e.g. each permacharm gets +nK to base difficulty where n is the number of permacharms active and K is some constant), or some other kind of additional, preferably easily mentally calculated additional cost to maintain many permacharms.
I really like this idea. Stacking buffs is the real problem. If there was a cost to doing so, the player would have to make the choice on which buffs are worth running.