From mwedel at sonic.net Mon Oct 1 00:10:38 2007 From: mwedel at sonic.net (Mark Wedel) Date: Sun, 30 Sep 2007 22:10:38 -0700 Subject: [crossfire] Spell brainstorming Message-ID: <4700814E.4050400@sonic.net> Lots of discussion about spells, etc, on the slow down combat thread, but I thought I'd start a topic with just general ideas on spells. The main points to think about is that we want a spell system that is meaningful from level 1 to 100 (in this case, meaning at higher levels you get new spells or the like). Also, with changes in combat, it is likely there will be quite a bit fewer creatures about. Spells should also be balanced with melee combat. Hard to say exactly what this means - I'd say that a mage should be able to kill most creatures with spells at the same rate as a fighter in combat - maybe a little bit slower, based on the fact that they may be using range attacks and thus safer. It's also been mentioned that some of the magic skills are not balanced - it may even be worth rethinking those. Instead of trying to separate by type of spells, maybe have what effectively amounts to just game points. For example, you could have 'red' and 'green' magic schools - the red magic is derived from ancient dragon magic, and green from more recently researched human efforts, and thus not compatible. In this way, you could pretty much put a spell in any of these different areas. Quick thoughts of mine: With fewer monsters, things like cones and exploding ball (fireball) become less useful. These spells were never really friendly for party play. Right now, there is a magic bullet spell, but other than a couple versions (small, big), it just does physical damage. Having other versions (magma bullet, ice bullet, poison dart, etc) that basically act the same way but different attack types would be a way to get some new spells that are useful for solo monsters. It may also be reasonable to make more ball lightning spells, but with different attack forms (chaos ball would be _very_ interesting I think) I think bolt spells are pretty much OK as now - they will need some adjustments most likely, but probably not a big redesign. I think character protection and stat improvement spells should have a much longer duration - probably at least 5 minutes. In a sense, long enough to cast on you (or party members), and then be able to go and do a level of a dungeon before casting again. I don't have exact numbers, but I think the number spells/school of magic should probably be about 50, maybe less. If this is supposed to scale, it means roughly 1 new spell every 2 levels (not that bad actually - never too far away from getting something new). It be good to have new spell ideas for higher level spells. It is simple enough just to increase damage, duration, whatever for higher level spells, but that isn't particularly interesting. I find in games I play, when you get a new spell that does something interesting, that is pretty cool. From mwedel at sonic.net Mon Oct 1 02:14:36 2007 From: mwedel at sonic.net (Mark Wedel) Date: Mon, 01 Oct 2007 00:14:36 -0700 Subject: [crossfire] tavern combat server, was Re: Project: Slow down combat In-Reply-To: <46FE025B.5070309@sonic.net> References: <46E64006.6020004@sonic.net> <46FE025B.5070309@sonic.net> Message-ID: <47009E5C.4060905@sonic.net> Decided to change the subject to make it clearer what the message is about. First, I just want to note that what I do on the tavern.santa-clara.ca.us server should not be seen as a final product. I just think it is a good point of experimentation - in a sense, taking something from the lab and trying it in the field. Many of the things there I try may fail in terms of right way to go, but in many cases, giving it a try is easy enough, so I feel no harm in trying it. I made some changes tonight: - Made the AC of the creatures I had previously modified worse (easier to hit). The AC is still a bit better than the original. - Give all players a 30 hp/grace/mana boost. I did this as a race attribute, so one could tune this different (elves get 20 hp, 40 mana, 30 grace for example). For now, I just gave all player races 30/30/30. Existing players on the server will see this when they log in (don't need a new character) - All new characters will start with a stat sum of 105. Previous, range was 82 to 116 - that is a very big difference - I think a standard number like this makes it better for testing, as things are more consistent - a character with stats in the 80s is going to have a much harder time than a character with stats in the high 100s. - If a character is resting (standing around not doing commands), hp/mana/grace regen rate goes up. With the higher starting values, this reduces time waiting about to regain those, but doesn't make battles easier, as while in battle, you don't get the benefit of the faster rate. The rate increase is by 2 ticks, but could be increased more - this was mostly just an expiremental test value. - I added 'you miss foo' messages to the server, and also modified it so it prints all attack messages (before it printed about a third of them). This makes things quite a bit more verbose, but in this testing server, it makes it much easier to see how fast the character is actually attacking, and the effects of those attacks. - Modified (fixed) wc - the old code had wc improve 1 point for each level in the skill (which is why high level characters have a wc of -120). Now, wc on the server increases 1 point/5 levels, so things don't get easier quite as fast. It also means that at 15 level difference in melee skills is only a 3 delta in hit probability, so characters that are mostly mages could go in and still be able to hit things with melee. - increased the hp for orcs, kobolds, goblins, and gnolls. It is not nearly as big an increase as it is for players (in the 5-10 range for all those creatures I think), but this means it takes an extra hit or two to kill them. And since not every swing hits them, adds some definite extra time. Note that other than AC and HP, monsters have not been modified in any other way (their chance to hit is the same,the damage they do is the same, etc) --- After doing those changes, I made up a new character. On Kevin's note, I made a paladin - something that isn't pure fighter. I also arranged the stats in that manner (put some of the better ones in wis and pow). And because not all characters start with armor, I took the armor off the character. My notes/thoughts: - Kobolds are actually dangerous now. With the higher hitpoints, I was never in any real danger of being killed, but at the same time, I couldn't just waltz anyplace - getting surrounded by creatures is much more dangerous, as it takes much longer to hack your way out to safety. The hardest part was killing the initial swarm out of the newbie tower - once those were killed (after taking a rest now and again to get back HP), going in and killing the generators and the smaller group of kobolds wasn't as much a problem. - Orcs are tougher. The character didn't have any real problem killing the orcs, but getting surrounded is more dangerous. The characters only spell was cause light wounds, which with the 30+ grace, could be cast enough to kill the orcs (2 casts would do it), but that is slow. I don't think that is much different here than old system - cause light was never a fast way to kill things. the real problem the paladin (not wearing armor) has is killing orcs faster than the generators put them out. I never liked generators much, and I'm tempted to remove them from that map and see what it plays like (or maybe greatly reduce number). I did find I perhaps did use more tactics with the orcs than I might otherwise do, luring them in small groups to kill them to reduce risk of death. Death here was only a real danger if one got too agressive - trying to go deep into the orc pile to get the generators. That may be one reason at at least a few generators are needed. - The increase in starting hp but same number of hp gained per level (about 10) changes dynamics quite a bit - getting second level really didn't help things much, nor did third - extra hp are good, but going from 40 to 60 is not nearly as a big of jump as from 10 to 30. Maybe a good thing? Not sure. - If the reason for not using armor was lack of money, once the orcs started falling, that probably starts to go away, as they tend to leave lots of loot - probably enough at least to buy non magical armor. - I do like the fact that the character no longer mows through kobolds, and that these other creatures start being dangerous enough to pay some attention to. I'm not sure the speed balance is quite there yet. From news at jonasstein.de Mon Oct 1 11:48:43 2007 From: news at jonasstein.de (Jonas Stein) Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2007 18:48:43 +0200 Subject: [crossfire] Spam and subject in mailing list In-Reply-To: <200709301908.35429.subs@eracc.com> References: <200709301823.36212.news@jonasstein.de> <200709301908.35429.subs@eracc.com> Message-ID: <200710011848.43396.news@jonasstein.de> > I have not seen any SPAM come through this list. Are you certain it is this > list that is generating SPAM for you? sorry wrong list. -- kind regards, Jonas Stein From kbulgrien at worldnet.att.net Mon Oct 1 22:48:49 2007 From: kbulgrien at worldnet.att.net (Kevin R. Bulgrien) Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2007 22:48:49 -0500 Subject: [crossfire] Spell brainstorming In-Reply-To: <4700814E.4050400@sonic.net> References: <4700814E.4050400@sonic.net> Message-ID: <200710012248.49867.kbulgrien@worldnet.att.net> > Lots of discussion about spells, etc, on the slow down combat thread, but I > thought I'd start a topic with just general ideas on spells. A different sort of attune/repel by vocation: It is interesting how you can pick a particular spell path by vocation when a character is created, but at least at mid-levels, after getting all the different skills or talisman's, you can completely change your character's vocation, or level each equivalently. By vocation, I mean sorcery, evocation, summoning, and pyromancy. I stumbled on this idea because of the description of one of the magic vocations indicates the character will be a generalist of magic users even though it is difficult to see how that is true in point of fact. It strikes me that I have heard that it is not possible to have all of the vocations/paths/skills/whatever at the same level at the highest level or end-game, so this might not be applicable at all levels of play. Nonetheless, it struck me when creating a character the other day that it could be possible to change the way vocations are handled outside of the attune/repel attributes that religion can impose on paths. NOTE: Percentages given below are for discussion primarily, could be different but also could refer to experience earned and/or could be placed into a computation to determine mana used to cast the spell along the lines of attunement and repelling. 1) Vocational concentration - It is harder to master multiple trades. Let's say we create a summoner. It seems fair to say that if a character is created as an summoner, that it should be difficult to change vocations. The idea I had was to allow normal/unmodified experience earning to occur inside the chosen vocation, but to inhibit the ability to cross-train in other vocations. If the character later learns a new vocation such as pyromancy, this vocation would earn experience at a reduced rate... say 75% of what the primary vocation earns. A player could effectively switch vocations, but at a cost. Further, for each additional vocation learned, the cost would be modified down another 25% (understanding that there are 4 possible vocational paths in magic). For reference: 100% + 75% + 50% + 25% = 250. 2) The generalist - jack of all trades, master of none? Then, to make it even more interesting, a character could be designed that is a generalist from the start... not necessarily trained in all vocations at the start of the game, but able to use each vocation equally, though at a lower level than other vocations... say at about 60% effectiveness for each. Comparatively: 60% + 60% + 60% + 60% = 240. 3) Balancing growth by level - experience in one vocation aids in the understanding of new vocations. Say that talisman's are no longer able to be gained to automatically be able to "learn" new vocations. Perhaps then characters are granted an option to learn a new vocation at various points in their career. The character can choose the new vocation. Presumably the levels at which new vocations could be added are 25, 75, and 100. 4) The generalist revisited - fair play. As 2) above, combined with 3) above could make the generalist a bit weak, one could consider that a penalty along the lines of "jack of all trades, master of none". On the other hand, perhaps the generalist is permitted to learn additional vocations on an accelerated schedule, say at levels 20, 40, and 60, for example. 5) Acquiring new vocations - not necessarily granted. Perhaps achieving a certain level gains you the right to learn a new vocation at the hands of a master. Early renditions of the feature could simply grant the new vocations for simplicity, but possibly in such a way that a future revision of the game could support having to do a quest to obtain the training needed to acquire the vocation. Perhaps some fee might be associated with acquiring the training necessary to start practicing the additional vocation. 6) Learning Spells The ideas above could be implemented indirectly by affecting the chance-to-learn percentages to simplify things. Admittedly I have no real clue about role-playing game rule sets as I am mostly a "player" not a game designer or DM, so this might be somewhat preposterous, and further, after applying race mods and religious attune/repel mods, perhaps the system would be way too complex, but it is a thought on how one might achieve balance across the spectrum of levels and vocational lines. Right now, in the game there are places where talismans/skill scrolls may be found so one can hit up those places frequently to increase the chances of finding all of them, or, one high level player can give a new player a pile of talismans to make a super-magician at low-levels. Perhaps game balance would be facilitated by making it more difficult to create these super-magicians. Recognizing that certain vocations are considered poor should not be a reason to avoid this type of balancing since repairing the poor vocations should be done at a higher priority, but I guess I see the addition of new spells to support growth throughout the game as being yet another opportunity to abuse via gifting or repeat-plays of certain maps known to give talismans or skill scrolls. Anyway, not sure if this will fly, but figured there was at least merit to tossing it out as an idea in case it was okay or helped someone think of a better way to manage the same things. Kevin PS & OT: Physical combat? Perhaps something of this nature could also be done with physical combat skills also... to get away from having super-warriors that can use all weapons equally well and made possible through the acquisition of skill scrolls. The originally granted skills gained through character class and/or vocation would be unmodified, but additional combat skills would undergo some modification. Attune/Repel for physical combat? BTW, is it possible for a hobbit to effectively become a two-handed or poleaxe expert to the same basic degree a human/troll/orc can? Curious, because a skill scroll could give this skill to a hobbit that really should be repelled from using this type of weapon due to physical limits. I suppose other character stats might effectively take can of this, so maybe this it is a non-issue. I haven't tried it. From mwedel at sonic.net Mon Oct 1 23:37:07 2007 From: mwedel at sonic.net (Mark Wedel) Date: Mon, 01 Oct 2007 21:37:07 -0700 Subject: [crossfire] Spell brainstorming In-Reply-To: <200710012248.49867.kbulgrien@worldnet.att.net> References: <4700814E.4050400@sonic.net> <200710012248.49867.kbulgrien@worldnet.att.net> Message-ID: <4701CAF3.8090501@sonic.net> Kevin R. Bulgrien wrote: >> Lots of discussion about spells, etc, on the slow down combat thread, but I >> thought I'd start a topic with just general ideas on spells. > > A different sort of attune/repel by vocation: > > It is interesting how you can pick a particular spell path by vocation when > a character is created, but at least at mid-levels, after getting all the > different skills or talisman's, you can completely change your character's > vocation, or level each equivalently. By vocation, I mean sorcery, > evocation, summoning, and pyromancy. I stumbled on this idea because of > the description of one of the magic vocations indicates the character will > be a generalist of magic users even though it is difficult to see how that > is true in point of fact. > > It strikes me that I have heard that it is not possible to have all of the > vocations/paths/skills/whatever at the same level at the highest level or > end-game, so this might not be applicable at all levels of play. It is highly likely that talismans/rings/whatever don't exist to get all the attunements active at the same time (and most items that attune also repel something else). But this is purely on archetype/map enforcement. Within the code, there is nothing preventing someone from having all the skills, and an item being created that gives all the attunements (or more likely, some combination of items that give all attunements with minimal repels) > Nonetheless, it struck me when creating a character the other day that it > could be possible to change the way vocations are handled outside of the > attune/repel attributes that religion can impose on paths. > Admittedly I have no real clue about role-playing game rule sets as I am > mostly a "player" not a game designer or DM, so this might be somewhat > preposterous, and further, after applying race mods and religious > attune/repel mods, perhaps the system would be way too complex, but it > is a thought on how one might achieve balance across the spectrum of > levels and vocational lines. At some level, that is more a discussion about skills, and not just spells, as it also applies there - can someone be really good in all skills (fighting + magic) - it isn't just a matter of spell skills. I don't remember the outcome of those discussions off the top of my head. The complication here is that there are probably some skills which shouldn't be counted against, otherwise no one would use them (most of the item creation skills. They are a fun diversion and somewhat useful for adventurers, but if having them decreased the amount of exp I gain through play using the main skills, I wouldn't use them). > > Right now, in the game there are places where talismans/skill scrolls > may be found so one can hit up those places frequently to increase the > chances of finding all of them, or, one high level player can give a new > player a pile of talismans to make a super-magician at low-levels. > Perhaps game balance would be facilitated by making it more difficult to > create these super-magicians. IMO, it is probably reasonable for skill scrolls to get removed from random treasure, and used sparingly even for quests. But that really doesn't fix the problem - even if the sorcery skill is buried in some high level quest, people would probably give you scrolls if you asked for it. And then there is the question of what is the point of being able to learn sorcery skill if you're character is level 80? I didn't specifically mention it, but if the idea of green school of magic and red school of magic was added (names purely arbitrary here - something better could be chosen) was done, my thought is the only way to get those skills is at character creation. If you choose a character that has the red magic skill, you get it. Likewise for green magic. There wouldn't be a character that has both red and green. And if you choose a class/race that doesn't get either, you're out of luck. In some sense, if you choose to be a fighter at first level, you will be a fighter for the entire game. where this sort of breaks down is the melee skills - mages still need to be able to use weapons, so if that green mage gets the magic skill + weapons, then characters that want to be fighters can still take that class, but optimize the stats for fighters, but still have the option for spell casting. Another idea mentioned was different versions of the skills, that have different exp gain rates. Skills that characters start with would generally be the best, and ones you pick up off of scrolls (or talismans) would be mediocre - this sort of matches one of your ideas. From juhaj at iki.fi Tue Oct 2 00:13:41 2007 From: juhaj at iki.fi (Juha =?UTF-8?B?SsOkeWtrw6Q=?=) Date: Tue, 02 Oct 2007 08:13:41 +0300 Subject: [crossfire] Project: Slow down combat In-Reply-To: <47006789.8080502@sonic.net> References: <46E64006.6020004@sonic.net> <46FE025B.5070309@sonic.net> <200709301935.27461.kbulgrien@worldnet.att.net> <47006789.8080502@sonic.net> Message-ID: <20071002081341.2e856267@alnitak.juhaj.iki.fi> Hi! I'm going to reply to multiple emails in one mail, so please bear with me if I seem to jump from thing to thing rather incoherently. First, Mark did nothing to monsters and spells; what he did was a start, not the whole thing. And I think his approach is good: first make fighters work in melee like we want them to. After that, adjust everything else. We have a clear (well, -ish) goal: to make a balanced combat system, where every class and race stands (relatively) equal chance of staying alive (on average - some class/race combos will naturally fare better against certain adversaries and worse against others), gaining levels etc; plus we want to have a system where battles happen slowly enough to make it possible to use tactics and even teamwork. I think the best way of doing this is to first get a baseline, like 1st level fighter battling against newbie tower and beginners places #1 and #2. We can then proceed to other 1st level classes while fighters go up to 2nd level (or fifth or whatever small number) to fix the baseline there. But what Kevin did with the priest, is very important as well; although it may have been a little premature at this point. Later on, though, that kind of testing will be paramount. The idea of mana/grace regeneration needing rest is, again, one thing that has been used a lot in pen-and-paper RPG's over the time. I think it has proven itself a good solution. *BUT* in order to keep the magic users comparable to warriors in this kind of system, the magic users must be able to do a lot more damage than warriors per unit time. This is because the magic user can only cast a certain number of spells before retreating to regenerate the mana/grace while the warrior can keep up hacking and slashing. (Note that some systems have some kind of exhaustion or endurance for warriors as well, which means they need to rest as well. In that case the amount of damage/time may be closer to same.) > But this does lead to an interesting question - how do we deal with > classes that are not good at melee, especially hybrid classes? Do we need to handle them any differently from basic classes? I do not think 50/50 fighter/mage has to be able to finish off a 80th level monster - the character is just 50th level, after all. In practise, this means twice the work for the dual-class character to reach 50/50 level when compared to a single-classer, but is that a problem? The dual-classer is basically playing two single class characters. Paladins, rogues (do we have them?-o) and such are a more difficult question. They need careful balancing. > monster. The simplest fix would just can't use a bow if next to > monster (and vice versa) whether it is attacking you or not. I have a different idea about this. How about if arrows never hit a monster/*player* next to the archer? This should be easy enough to implement for single-square monsters, but how about bigger beasts, like dragons, I do not know. The nice thing about this is that it gives possibility of teamwork: put a fighter in front of the archer to keep the orcs from hitting the archer... and the archer won't hit the fighter either. I am a little confused about the talk about buffering keystrokes. Do we need to buffer them at all? What advantage does it give anyway? It seems to mostly make people die; have died many times myself casting a few too many spells in a row... Personally I hate it and use running all the time because it does not buffer (why?). As what comes to the speed of the battle, I do not think it matters is clearing the newbie tower takes some time. I do not care if getting to level 2 takes a while etc. What I crave for is a sense of going forward, gaining something. This can be loot, levels, skills, spells; sometimes it can even be a piece of information eventually leading to some quest or just the history of the place. Slow pace is ok, I do not need to be 100th level in a couple of days. Mark mentioned he needed to use tactics in the newbie tower - I think this is a good sign! We are definitely moving in the right direction. Generators, of course, are a bit of a problem if killing monsters takes too long, but generators spawn-rate can be adjusted down accordingly (without need to remove the generators at all). I do not like generators but I do not think we should get rid of them - yet. They are too essential (they provide the challenge) in too many maps. As what comes to spells, I am against big, medium and small versions of the same spells; just having the effect increase by caster level is enough. I also favour area effect spells and big numbers of monsters - in certain situations. This has to do with the above mention of spellcasters needing a higher kills/second ratio than fighters because their "resources" run out. (BTW spells like fireball are useless even now, they can kill nothing except critter: at low levels not even a fireborn can cast enough of them to kill any relevant number of orcs and when the caster has leveled up the player no longer wants to even hear the mention of an orc, which is not about the toughest monster one's fireballs can kill.) High level spells need a lot of thought. Things like frost nova should definitely be very high level or quest-spells. On the other hand, destruction is nearly useless at the moment but it is currently the highest-level spell there is... strange. I think some of the very highest level spells might not be combat-related at all, but this needs a little more dynamical playing world. (Thinking of combat spells one thought appeals a lot to me: earthquake... think of what that could do in a dungeon!) That's it this time; this has been written during a couple of evenings so if it is incoherent in places, please bear with me! -Juha -- ----------------------------------------------- | Juha J?ykk?, juolja at utu.fi | | home: http://www.utu.fi/~juolja/ | ----------------------------------------------- From mwedel at sonic.net Tue Oct 2 23:46:52 2007 From: mwedel at sonic.net (Mark Wedel) Date: Tue, 02 Oct 2007 21:46:52 -0700 Subject: [crossfire] Project: Slow down combat In-Reply-To: <20071002081341.2e856267@alnitak.juhaj.iki.fi> References: <46E64006.6020004@sonic.net> <46FE025B.5070309@sonic.net> <200709301935.27461.kbulgrien@worldnet.att.net> <47006789.8080502@sonic.net> <20071002081341.2e856267@alnitak.juhaj.iki.fi> Message-ID: <47031EBC.4080500@sonic.net> Juha J?ykk? wrote: > The idea of mana/grace regeneration needing rest is, again, one thing > that has been used a lot in pen-and-paper RPG's over the time. I think it > has proven itself a good solution. *BUT* in order to keep the magic users > comparable to warriors in this kind of system, the magic users must be > able to do a lot more damage than warriors per unit time. This is because > the magic user can only cast a certain number of spells before retreating > to regenerate the mana/grace while the warrior can keep up hacking and > slashing. (Note that some systems have some kind of exhaustion or > endurance for warriors as well, which means they need to rest as well. In > that case the amount of damage/time may be closer to same.) Yes - some form of fatigue system has been suggested. I'm not sure I'm crazy about that. One thing that I think could be quite easily done to help out mana users is to make weaker (and thus more common and cheaper versions) of mana regain potions. Right now, there is the single 'magic power potion' which regains all your mana. That is great if you have 500 mana and are high level so the cost isn't an issue. But if your level level and have 50 mana, you'd really just rather take the money from that and buy better spells, etc. Adding in cheap versions of the potions that only give 50 mana max would seem easy to do, and make them relatively cheap. I'm not sure what to do for priests - with praying, they can get it back fairly quickly. Having bottled grace seems a bit odd. I agree that spell casters probably need to kill things a bit faster than melee, but this gets trickier to measure. For example, if the mage is using firebolt against a single monster, it being same speed or even slower would seem reasonable. The reason is firebolt has the potential to hit many creatures, so if it is a hallway and you can hit 6 creatures with that firebolt, now on average kill rate, you are probably faster. So it sort of becomes using the right spell for the job - burning hands on a single tile creature is not effective use - burning hands is useful because it hits many more creatures at once, etc. And mentioned elsewhere, to some extent, spell casters have some advantage in that they are typically going to be farther away (hitting creatures with range), which also generally means safer. > >> But this does lead to an interesting question - how do we deal with >> classes that are not good at melee, especially hybrid classes? > > Do we need to handle them any differently from basic classes? I do not > think 50/50 fighter/mage has to be able to finish off a 80th level > monster - the character is just 50th level, after all. In practise, this > means twice the work for the dual-class character to reach 50/50 level > when compared to a single-classer, but is that a problem? The > dual-classer is basically playing two single class characters. > > Paladins, rogues (do we have them?-o) and such are a more difficult > question. They need careful balancing. Crossfire really doesn't have classes, it has skills. But that question still applies. There is also the warlock, which is supposed to be a fighter/mage type of combo. The answer may be that if you do diversify, you're not going to be as good as a specialist - that makes some sense. A person that took that to an extreme (one handed weapons, 2 handed weapons, missile, praying, sorcery, evocation, etc) _should_ have a tougher time - if his top level in each of those skills is 20, vs 80 if he specialized, being able to kill higher level creatures may not be possible. Nothing preventing that character from killing level 30-40 creatures of course. > >> monster. The simplest fix would just can't use a bow if next to >> monster (and vice versa) whether it is attacking you or not. > > I have a different idea about this. How about if arrows never hit a > monster/*player* next to the archer? This should be easy enough to > implement for single-square monsters, but how about bigger beasts, like > dragons, I do not know. The nice thing about this is that it gives > possibility of teamwork: put a fighter in front of the archer to keep the > orcs from hitting the archer... and the archer won't hit the fighter > either. I was sort of thinking the same way, but perhaps a bit differently - you can fire arrows (or bullets) through friendly creatures, but not enemy creatures. Thus, the same situation above applies (fighters in front row, spell caster or archers in the back). OTOH, this would also make things nastier for the players - the group of orcs could have ones in the back row firing at the player. I actually doubt the fact it was an archer next to the player was an issue - orcs, and many monsters, get generated with random stuff. For orcs, most of the time it may be no weapon at all, or a crappy weapon. But once in a while, they could get a good one - whether that is a bow or a sword or whatever, it makes that creature much more dangerous. Real problem here however is that in crossfire, there isn't any easy way to tell (you could examine the monsters, but spending the time to do that probably isn't good) Sort of goes back to Gros's point about seeing the characters (and then by extension, the monsters) weapon they are swinging, so you can what is being used. I have some ideas how that would be done, but that isn't a small project (it would be right up there with letting characters dress themselves, etc). > > I am a little confused about the talk about buffering keystrokes. Do we > need to buffer them at all? What advantage does it give anyway? It seems > to mostly make people die; have died many times myself casting a few too > many spells in a row... Personally I hate it and use running all the time > because it does not buffer (why?). This can be controlled to some extent in the command window option in the client - that basically limits the number of commands that can be pending on the server before the client starts dropping commands. The real problem with dropping commands is you may not really know what command is dropped. If you're in battle, and do something like 'apply potion of healing' and 'attack east', dropping that apply potion of healing but still attacking east may not be the thing you want to do. Running doesn't really buffer because it operates different - the client basically says 'keep moving in this direction until I tell you to stop'. So the server does that, looks at incoming commands and executes them (which may be stop running or change direction), etc. But if you're just doing general movement or other commands, they get sent to the server, and the server executes them as the character has actions to do them. Most any player can type in commands faster than the character can execute them (especially true with compound bindings). The other reason to buffer at all is because you want the character to do something when he has an action. If you set the command window to 1, what happens then is basically no buffering - the client sends a command, and will drop all subsequent commands entered until it gets confirmation of that first command being completed. The problem here is that due to time for packet traversal, there will be a time there where the character has an action, but doesn't have a command to do anything (the time it takes for the reply that the command succeeded to get to the client, and then the client to send a new command). If you're playing on a local server, that isn't a big deal. But if it takes 60 ms for a round trip, that is basically half a tick. > > As what comes to the speed of the battle, I do not think it matters is > clearing the newbie tower takes some time. I do not care if getting to > level 2 takes a while etc. What I crave for is a sense of going forward, > gaining something. This can be loot, levels, skills, spells; sometimes it > can even be a piece of information eventually leading to some quest or > just the history of the place. Slow pace is ok, I do not need to be 100th > level in a couple of days. I agree. IMO, getting the first few levels always happened really fast (level 3 within an hour). I think slower rate also helps out balance in other areas - if you can't kill things as fast, it means you can't get loot as fast either. > Generators, of course, are a bit of a problem if killing monsters takes > too long, but generators spawn-rate can be adjusted down accordingly > (without need to remove the generators at all). I do not like generators > but I do not think we should get rid of them - yet. They are too > essential (they provide the challenge) in too many maps. A downside about generators is they also provide camping opportunities. Maybe that is OK, but it means that a character can sit on a map and just wait for creatures to pop out, kill them, get loot & exp, and repeat for ever. I think I'd probably ammend what I said to 'generators should be used sparingly'. I'm going to try reducing the number in the newbie tower, and also put them a bit more in the back and see what effect that has. > > As what comes to spells, I am against big, medium and small versions of > the same spells; just having the effect increase by caster level is > enough. I also favour area effect spells and big numbers of monsters - in > certain situations. This has to do with the above mention of spellcasters > needing a higher kills/second ratio than fighters because their > "resources" run out. (BTW spells like fireball are useless even now, they > can kill nothing except critter: at low levels not even a fireborn can > cast enough of them to kill any relevant number of orcs and when the > caster has leveled up the player no longer wants to even hear the mention > of an orc, which is not about the toughest monster one's fireballs can > kill.) There was a suggestion that there should really only be one version that gets better as it goes along, and perhaps some way to modify them. Eg, the 'lighting bolt' spell at high levels would act like large lightning, but it may be desirable to cast it as a 'small lightning' type of thing. > > High level spells need a lot of thought. Things like frost nova should > definitely be very high level or quest-spells. On the other hand, > destruction is nearly useless at the moment but it is currently the > highest-level spell there is... strange. I think some of the very highest > level spells might not be combat-related at all, but this needs a little > more dynamical playing world. (Thinking of combat spells one thought > appeals a lot to me: earthquake... think of what that could do in a > dungeon!) yes - destruction is a very old spell, and was never very useful IMO. From mwedel at sonic.net Wed Oct 3 01:59:38 2007 From: mwedel at sonic.net (Mark Wedel) Date: Tue, 02 Oct 2007 23:59:38 -0700 Subject: [crossfire] Spell brainstorming In-Reply-To: <4700814E.4050400@sonic.net> References: <4700814E.4050400@sonic.net> Message-ID: <47033DDA.2060004@sonic.net> One thought I had for high level spells: Currently, the game world is largely immutable. I know there is buildable buildings, etc. But would it be unreasonable to have high level spells be able to also do stuff like this? For example, would a level 75 spell that allows you to destroy a real wall (not just a weak wall) but over powered? Now you wouldn't be able to use this in no magic areas of course (still can't cast magic in no magic), and if the wall was no magic area, it should also be immune. Likewise, high level spells to create permanent or semi permanent (until map resets) objects like walls From kbulgrien at worldnet.att.net Sat Oct 6 00:26:16 2007 From: kbulgrien at worldnet.att.net (Kevin R. Bulgrien) Date: Sat, 6 Oct 2007 00:26:16 -0500 Subject: [crossfire] tavern combat server, was Re: Project: Slow down combat In-Reply-To: <47009E5C.4060905@sonic.net> References: <46E64006.6020004@sonic.net> <46FE025B.5070309@sonic.net> <47009E5C.4060905@sonic.net> Message-ID: <200710060026.16734.kbulgrien@worldnet.att.net> Started an elven sorcerer a day or so ago... and have put in a couple of hours on him by now (mid-level 4). He has no melee combat skills except punching. I was very surprising/fun and very playable. In fact, it was almost too easy ... and resulted in a death or three from overconfidence while adjusting to the new playing style. I have to say that the increased regeneration rate while "resting" is a huge improvement. A lot of the old games let you 'sleep' for this effect. It has a huge impact on being able to hit-n-run with a pure magic user, and I would vote it a resounding success. The elven sorcerer might as well forget melee altogether at low levels, and possibly forever until learning a skill other than punching. That is probably a good thing, considering the dramatic changes that result from increased HP, etc. As far as the low level sorcerer goes, I'd say the first 4/5 levels that I did play seemed a bit too easy, though I don't know how that might scale as levels go up. I think I was only level 2 or low 3 when I was able to clear Resir's. The big dudes in the innermost chamber got me twice while figuring out a strategy, but it wasn't hard to get one... running around the sides of the building and taking them on one at a time, or, using an invisibility scroll that I had happened to pick up earlier. Found/fixed a bug in the Sorceror's Hat as a result of this session, so it was an all-around success. The hat granted at character generation did not take up the head slot, so it was possible to wear a helmet and the hat at the same time. All in all, great go on this round of experimental tweaks. I'll try another character class out soon... though I'd like to retry starting a priest as before to see how the recent changes affected that type of character. Kevin From schmorp at schmorp.de Sat Oct 6 13:46:29 2007 From: schmorp at schmorp.de (Marc Lehmann) Date: Sat, 6 Oct 2007 20:46:29 +0200 Subject: [crossfire] clarifications to more outright lies Message-ID: <20071006184629.GA15685@schmorp.de> Hmm, the thread (again I was left out of the discussion) about the removal of the schmorp servers from the metaserver was brought ot my attention again, and unfortunately yann just posted more outright lies. Here, again, is the utter truth, for those willing to follow the truth instead of his fabrications: > Yann Chachkoff: > Le Saturday 15 September 2007 13:55:51 Marc Lehmann, vous avez ?crit : > > Yann, you are a liar, and you know it. There is no excuse for the amount of > > FUD you spread, as what you say can easily be verified. The fact that you > > didn't even try to verify your claims and sitll do them has no excuse. > > > I don't like answering personal attacks, Don't take it as a personal attack. It isn't. You keep repeating simple, obvious lies. Thats a statement of fact. And that keeps being unacceptable by any moral standard. For example: > 3. About "forgetting the CF servers in the TRT clients lists" > > b) they were removed first from the metaserver; > Point b) is simply not true. The TRT servers were removed from the CF No matter how *often* you repeat untruths, it won't make them any truer. We were blocked to retrieve metaserver information about two weeks before our servers were blocked. How it was done exactly we don't know (likely simply firewalled), who did it and why we don't know either, you will have to ask the responsible persons for that. I can only report the effects. Since all of us were quite busy at the time, we didn't have the time to create our own metaserver (the client used its own protocol, both because its simpler and more reliable, and because we have been held hostage a number of times with the existing metaserver protocol). Removing us from the metaserver made it extremely hard for most gcfclient users who didn't know how to select servers to connect to the server they regulary play on. Most that managed days later said they believed the server would be down. The decision to roll our own protocol was a good one for our users (although it was made for technical reasons, i.e. richer protocol), as at least the cfplus users were not cut off from playing on their favourite server. The point, however, is that CFPLUS WAS CUT OFF FROM THE METASERVER FIRST, roughly weeks before, so the reason cfplus stopped displaying other servers shortly before the removal is that cfplus was banned from getting that information and we couldn't come up with an alternative within that short time frame. > a) they didn't have time to create their own metaserver compatible with > gcfclient; Two weeks are a rather short time to set up the infrastructure for that. And rolling new clients out and getting people to use it within that time is simply not realistic. Neither is setting up the infrastructure for a metaserver. Sorry, won't do. > Point c) could have easily been solved by discussing the blocking issue with There simply was no time for that. It is also irrelevant for the truth of my statement and the untruth of your lie: we were blocked first from accessing the information, and this was later used against us by lieing about what happened. Great plan, Yann. Worked perfectly, some people actually believed you :( > Whatever the reasons, the result was the same: TRT servers used the CF > infrastructure to advertise their presence, but TRT clients didn't bother > listing the CF servers. That was out of our powers, and only for a very short time. If you hadn't blocked us, we would have shown the servers AS WE DID ALL THE YEARS BEFORE THAT. Please stop spreading this lie. Its just not true as you can verify by asking any cfplus user who remembers having used the server list feature a few months ago. > 4. On being blocked "without any notice" > > First, the discussion was conducted on the public mailing list. One that some > of the TRT developers are subscribers of. I asked all remaining developers (one person), and he said he wasn't subscribed. So thats just another of your lies, unless you claim there are some hiden underground developers in our project we do not know off. So, yet another outright lie from you. Thats a fact, unfortunately only people with access to the mailinglist data can verify that. > They (or you) had the opportunity to participate in the discussion, and > formulate objections. In fact, my reply was held back multiple days. I wouldn't call that being able to participate in a discussion. Especially as we weren't notified of it in any way, and were not subscribed to the list. > If you chose not to take part on the debate and expose your own > position, it was up to you. That so reminds me of hitchhikers guide to the galaxy "you earthlings would only have had to travel to proxima centauri to say something against the plans" (or whatever star it was). Bullshit. > Second, *I* didn't block TRT from both metaservers without any notice; I just No, you just asked others to do it for you, by making up lies. Thats much worse than blocking it yourself, as you decieved others :( > As a side note, the original discussion that led to the exclusion of TRT > servers, was about the metaserver2, and not the metaserver1. > > they have a brain and can decide by themselves if my > proposal is grounded or not. Well, obviously, those people that "have a brain and can decide for themselves" interpreted your proposal as to remove all our servers from both metaservers at once, without prior or later notice of any kind. So they obviously weren't bright enough to understand your proposal, right, which didn't actually call for that (and note there is no other public discussion about this, and still nobody told us why it happened, or even *that* it happened). Given that you keep spreading outright lies, I can't much fail them either though, they simply relied on your honesty, which was a mistake, probably some mistake that fit into their agenda, but nevertheless, you used lies to get them to do that. Thats a verifiable fact, no personal attack :/ > 5. About "criminal behavior" > > On this, I'd just like to point out that calling somebody a criminal on a > public discussion when no crime has been committed is, in most countries, > condemnable by law. Well, nobody called you a criminal, so get over it before you feel the urge to fabricate some lies about it. You are just a public and repeated liar :) > Most of the "honest" people here (and I believe all of the CF devs nowadays > are honest and willing) So thats either another wrong statement or you don't count yourself as one of the CF devs. No matter what it is, you are publicly spreading lies, and keep doing so. Wether you call that criminal or not, its not a behaviour an honest person will take part in, and I doubt anybody here disagrees with that... > already know what I said on several occasions: "This > is *my* opinion. Saying "this is not the truth" or stating untruths as facts is not a statement of opinion. Thats quite simply lies. > Do I sound cool ? No, you sound like some asshole who uses whatever lies he can come up with to try to make people hurt other people. Thats a personal attack, btw. If you have a problem being called a liar publicly you should probably stop with that. It really isn't about sounding cool. You keep making up and repeating lies about me, us, our server, our project etc. in public. Do your honestly expect that I will just let them sit there uncorrected? > This will be my final message on this topic. There is nothing left to discuss, Sure, there would be a lot to discuss, for example, why do you keep lieing? > unless the goal is to bind me on a mast and burn me on the public place - but Not a bad idea, I'd rather prefer that actually than having to see you spreading lies into other peoples faces. Seriously, I don't like liars. > Witch Hunting is sooo old-fashioned these days... :) Well, they also made up lies about people to get some court or non-court decision. Just like you do. I can only keep repeating the facts. > Nicholas Weeger: > > This nicely sums up my issues with Schmorp : our common sense, perception of > the world and handling of diplomacy are too different to lead to anything > positive. I am sorry, Nicholas. But Yann simply keeps repeating pointless lies. This has nothing to do with diplomacy or perception of the world or anything like that. He lies, and he doesn't make the slightest attempt of hiding it or substantiating his claims. When people make up obvious lies as Yann keeps doing, thats really the end of it. Unfortunately, as in the past, all that happens is to hurt _users_ more and split the already dwindling userbase even more. When will the crossfire project wake up and see that competition and working towards the same goal is good? All this yann-liar is achieving is yet another split (and unfortunately it hurts us more as we always supported the crossfire project instead of rolling our own), and ultimately the death of a project (I really hope so to keep future contributors from the same fiasko), all to cling to their small userbase which just got split in half again. It was your choice to do it like that or follow up with yanns plans, not ours. Asking for diplomacy is too much... -- The choice of a -----==- _GNU_ ----==-- _ generation Marc Lehmann ---==---(_)__ __ ____ __ pcg at goof.com --==---/ / _ \/ // /\ \/ / http://schmorp.de/ -=====/_/_//_/\_,_/ /_/\_\ XX11-RIPE From mwedel at sonic.net Sat Oct 6 22:33:07 2007 From: mwedel at sonic.net (Mark Wedel) Date: Sat, 06 Oct 2007 20:33:07 -0700 Subject: [crossfire] tavern combat server, was Re: Project: Slow down combat In-Reply-To: <200710060026.16734.kbulgrien@worldnet.att.net> References: <46E64006.6020004@sonic.net> <46FE025B.5070309@sonic.net> <47009E5C.4060905@sonic.net> <200710060026.16734.kbulgrien@worldnet.att.net> Message-ID: <47085373.9070808@sonic.net> Kevin R. Bulgrien wrote: > Started an elven sorcerer a day or so ago... and have put in a > couple of hours on him by now (mid-level 4). He has no melee > combat skills except punching. I was very surprising/fun and > very playable. In fact, it was almost too easy ... and resulted > in a death or three from overconfidence while adjusting to the > new playing style. It should be noted that the fact that spells have not been changed may mean that they are more powerful than before relative to melee combat. Creatures have more HP now (at least some of them), which make them tougher. But the fact that combat has been slowed down, but spells have not been weakened or slowed down likely does make them a bit more effective. > > I have to say that the increased regeneration rate while "resting" > is a huge improvement. A lot of the old games let you 'sleep' for > this effect. It has a huge impact on being able to hit-n-run with > a pure magic user, and I would vote it a resounding success. It always struck me that sitting outside whatever dungeon waiting for your hp/sp/whatever to go back up wasn't particularly interesting, so speeding this up seemed like a good idea. Also, the way regen rates work in crossfire is that they are more or less tuned so that the amount of time it takes to go to 0 to max is about the same, no matter what max hp/sp/grace happens to be. With a higher total starting at low levels, this does mean that regain rates are effectively faster - takes same amount of time to go from min to max, but the time to get 5 hp back should be less. From nicolas.weeger at laposte.net Mon Oct 8 15:59:04 2007 From: nicolas.weeger at laposte.net (Nicolas Weeger) Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2007 22:59:04 +0200 Subject: [crossfire] Spell brainstorming In-Reply-To: <4701CAF3.8090501@sonic.net> References: <4700814E.4050400@sonic.net> <200710012248.49867.kbulgrien@worldnet.att.net> <4701CAF3.8090501@sonic.net> Message-ID: <200710082259.07992.nicolas.weeger@laposte.net> > It is highly likely that talismans/rings/whatever don't exist to get all > the attunements active at the same time (and most items that attune also > repel something else). But this is purely on archetype/map enforcement. > Within the code, there is nothing preventing someone from having all the > skills, and an item being created that gives all the attunements (or more > likely, some combination of items that give all attunements with minimal > repels) And IMO there should be no way to have all attunements at the same time :) Else that's a too powerful item (ok, maybe if its item power is 105, but still). > At some level, that is more a discussion about skills, and not just > spells, as it also applies there - can someone be really good in all skills > (fighting + magic) - it isn't just a matter of spell skills. That was much discussed, I think, and I remember something about different exp gains (like you describe later). > I don't remember the outcome of those discussions off the top of my head. > The complication here is that there are probably some skills which > shouldn't be counted against, otherwise no one would use them (most of the > item creation skills. They are a fun diversion and somewhat useful for > adventurers, but if having them decreased the amount of exp I gain through > play using the main skills, I wouldn't use them). I'd rather use the experience factor - have some skills don't contribute to the overall exp. If players use them for fun, good, but no penalty for not using them. > IMO, it is probably reasonable for skill scrolls to get removed from > random treasure, and used sparingly even for quests. But that really > doesn't fix the problem - even if the sorcery skill is buried in some high > level quest, people would probably give you scrolls if you asked for it. > And then there is the question of what is the point of being able to learn > sorcery skill if you're character is level 80? I'd say skills should be acquired through some initiation quest - want to learn stealing? Go to a thief guild and follow the training :) > I didn't specifically mention it, but if the idea of green school of > magic and red school of magic was added (names purely arbitrary here - > something better could be chosen) was done, my thought is the only way to > get those skills is at character creation. > > If you choose a character that has the red magic skill, you get it. > Likewise for green magic. There wouldn't be a character that has both red > and green. And if you choose a class/race that doesn't get either, you're > out of luck. > > In some sense, if you choose to be a fighter at first level, you will be > a fighter for the entire game. With some limits - a fighter needs some magic, though of course not as skilled as a high level mage. > where this sort of breaks down is the melee skills - mages still need to > be able to use weapons, so if that green mage gets the magic skill + > weapons, then characters that want to be fighters can still take that > class, but optimize the stats for fighters, but still have the option for > spell casting. *nods* Maybe increase encumbrance penalty, make fighters take more casting time / miss more often? > Another idea mentioned was different versions of the skills, that have > different exp gain rates. Skills that characters start with would > generally be the best, and ones you pick up off of scrolls (or talismans) > would be mediocre - this sort of matches one of your ideas. *nods* Maybe it could be slightly more tuned - a fighter could have eg an exp gain ratio of 100% for his "main" skill (one handed weapon), ~70% for some weapon-related skills (two handed weapon), ~50 for others (missile weapon), and ~30 or less for magic. In the same way a red mage would have 100% for red-related spells, ~70% for other magic, and low for weapons. And if we also add some caps - fighter can't get over level 50 magic? or spells are 2 times less effective? or can't learn some spells?), it should be interesting. Note that we can't really prevent someone playing a lot to reach high levels everywhere - we can only make it less powerful. Nicolas -- http://nicolas.weeger.org [Petit site d'images, de textes, de code, bref de l'al?atoire !] -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part. Url : http://mailman.metalforge.org/pipermail/crossfire/attachments/20071008/0720d83f/attachment.pgp From mwedel at sonic.net Tue Oct 9 02:23:31 2007 From: mwedel at sonic.net (Mark Wedel) Date: Tue, 09 Oct 2007 00:23:31 -0700 Subject: [crossfire] Skills (again), was Re: Spell brainstorming In-Reply-To: <200710082259.07992.nicolas.weeger@laposte.net> References: <4700814E.4050400@sonic.net> <200710012248.49867.kbulgrien@worldnet.att.net> <4701CAF3.8090501@sonic.net> <200710082259.07992.nicolas.weeger@laposte.net> Message-ID: <470B2C73.1050705@sonic.net> Changing topic, as this is more about skills than spells... Nicolas Weeger wrote: >> IMO, it is probably reasonable for skill scrolls to get removed from >> random treasure, and used sparingly even for quests. But that really >> doesn't fix the problem - even if the sorcery skill is buried in some high >> level quest, people would probably give you scrolls if you asked for it. >> And then there is the question of what is the point of being able to learn >> sorcery skill if you're character is level 80? > > I'd say skills should be acquired through some initiation quest - want to > learn stealing? Go to a thief guild and follow the training :) Maybe, but finding the right balance can be hard. If you can go to various guilds at relatively low levels and learn new skills, then the starting skills are not very important. OTOH, if you need to be high level before you can learn new skills, that probably isn't very useful either (going to the case above where a high level fighter learns sorcery). >> >> In some sense, if you choose to be a fighter at first level, you will be >> a fighter for the entire game. > > With some limits - a fighter needs some magic, though of course not as skilled > as a high level mage. Is that really true? In what context? Do scrolls, potions, wands, and rods not cover the needs? Is it a case that maybe more useful shop items should be generated (the method right now basically generates the same junk you find in the dungeons - which is probably one reason players don't buy stuff from shops very often) - should it be tailored to the spells that non spell casters need/want, like word of recall, town portal, etc? > >> where this sort of breaks down is the melee skills - mages still need to >> be able to use weapons, so if that green mage gets the magic skill + >> weapons, then characters that want to be fighters can still take that >> class, but optimize the stats for fighters, but still have the option for >> spell casting. > > *nods* > Maybe increase encumbrance penalty, make fighters take more casting time / > miss more often? that may come down to different versions of the skills - an basic skill vs advanced. Whether it is done by adjusting the exp gain (which I think is simpler) or actual skill effect, doesn't make a huge difference. The problem is at low levels, this distinction may not be much - if you're overall level is 5, being level 3 vs 2 in melee weapons probably doesn't amount to much. Another adjustment here could be that this 'bad' version of melee weapons perhaps includes effectively a penalty (like a WC 1 worse than that of the good version) - with the changes in AC, a 1 WC difference actually means something at low levels. The spell encumbrance could be increased - but it sort of depends on how the character is being played. For someone that is largely playing as a fighter but only occasionally casts spells, that doesn't make much difference (strip off armor, then cast the spell). It does make it harder for those characters that are playing as wizards but need to fight once in a while (out of spell points) - in those case, only thing they are likely to be using is a weapon, so hard to change it that much. But going back to having worse skills, that is likely the way to handle it. > >> Another idea mentioned was different versions of the skills, that have >> different exp gain rates. Skills that characters start with would >> generally be the best, and ones you pick up off of scrolls (or talismans) >> would be mediocre - this sort of matches one of your ideas. > > *nods* > Maybe it could be slightly more tuned - a fighter could have eg an exp gain > ratio of 100% for his "main" skill (one handed weapon), ~70% for some > weapon-related skills (two handed weapon), ~50 for others (missile weapon), > and ~30 or less for magic. I'm not sure there is a problem with exp gain for fighters in all the weapon type skills - in general, they are going to specialize in one form, which will basically result in them having a pretty big split in levels. With some of the changes of combat, that becomes more important - in the past, wc was pretty irrelevant, so you could go and whack most things - when that gets adjusted right, if the skill is quite a bit different (level 50 one handed, level 30 two handed), that two handed skill is much less effective at those higher level monsters. > In the same way a red mage would have 100% for red-related spells, ~70% for > other magic, and low for weapons. Exact numbers hard to deal with, but yeah, for starting skills, exp gain like that may be reasonable. > And if we also add some caps - fighter can't get over level 50 magic? or > spells are 2 times less effective? or can't learn some spells?), it should be > interesting. Can't learn some spells get tricky, as it becomes more difficult to tag it. It would certainly be reasonable that basic versions of skills have some maximum achievable level, and if that is say level 50 for spells, and we have level 51+ spells, that effectively means they can't learn them. As I stated before, I think it only really makes sense to either tune how fast/easy it is to gain levels or the effect of the skill for different levels. Tuning both would seem to start getting tricky (if a spell is only half as effectively, that may mean that due to various ways the spells work out, it doesn't work at all). One could increase the spell point costs. Or for people like barbarians, it could be that all spell paths are repelled. > Note that we can't really prevent someone playing a lot to reach high levels > everywhere - we can only make it less powerful. Actually we can. In the most basic, if a fighter can't learn magic, he can't every get high level in that. If a mage is stuck only with punching (or we have different versions of melee weapons, say simple and advanced with different skills, such that mages only get simple version and fighters get both), it means that mages won't be as good fighters, especially if most of the artifacts require/need the advanced version. Many games have the idea of fairly immutable classes - what your character starts with is what he is stuck with - if you start with a fighter, you're not going to cast magic. If you start with a wizard, your not going to wear plate armor and swing a battle axe, etc. Crossfire is pretty much the extreme opposite - what skills you start with is pretty much irrelevant, as you can change your class. Certain races are more immutable, simply because a fireborn will never be able to use a weapon, etc. From nicolas.weeger at laposte.net Sat Oct 20 14:38:01 2007 From: nicolas.weeger at laposte.net (Nicolas Weeger) Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2007 21:38:01 +0200 Subject: [crossfire] Python guilds In-Reply-To: <200709112332.15612.nicolas.weeger@laposte.net> References: <200709112332.15612.nicolas.weeger@laposte.net> Message-ID: <200710202138.06459.nicolas.weeger@laposte.net> Hello. I committed the Python guilds, and fixed the most obvious mistakes - some may be left, of course :) Thanks Alestan for the work on the maps :) Feedback welcome. Nicolas -- http://nicolas.weeger.org [Petit site d'images, de textes, de code, bref de l'al?atoire !] -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part. Url : http://mailman.metalforge.org/pipermail/crossfire/attachments/20071020/200efba2/attachment.pgp From kbulgrien at worldnet.att.net Sun Oct 21 21:28:43 2007 From: kbulgrien at worldnet.att.net (Kevin R. Bulgrien) Date: Sun, 21 Oct 2007 21:28:43 -0500 Subject: [crossfire] Mover behavior? Message-ID: <200710212128.43383.kbulgrien@worldnet.att.net> Given a mover... Archetype mover_1, type Mover name = mover image = director.111 movement speed = -0.2 direction = north movement type = Walk Is it expected that spells/prayers are affected by the movement speed = 0.2? It has the very odd effect of causing the magic to "stall" on those spaces. I think this is not the intended effect on the map I see it on, but was not sure if it would be considered a bug that a non-walking item was affected? /scorn/houses/house3.bas2 (ailesse) Opinions? From mwedel at sonic.net Mon Oct 22 23:51:37 2007 From: mwedel at sonic.net (Mark Wedel) Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2007 21:51:37 -0700 Subject: [crossfire] Mover behavior? In-Reply-To: <200710212128.43383.kbulgrien@worldnet.att.net> References: <200710212128.43383.kbulgrien@worldnet.att.net> Message-ID: <471D7DD9.8060704@sonic.net> Kevin R. Bulgrien wrote: > Given a mover... > > Archetype mover_1, type Mover > > name = mover > image = director.111 > > > movement speed = -0.2 > direction = north > movement type = Walk > > Is it expected that spells/prayers are affected by the movement > speed = 0.2? > > It has the very odd effect of causing the magic to "stall" on > those spaces. I think this is not the intended effect on the > map I see it on, but was not sure if it would be considered a > bug that a non-walking item was affected? Looking at the code, it seems that player movers (which is really a misname, since they move more than players) are only meant to move objects with FLAG_ALIVE set. It would seem odd to me that spells would have that set. Also, looking at the code, it does seem that they should only work on objects objects if the victim move type is a subset of the movers subtype or the victim has no move_type (this later case is more prevalent as lots of objects are missing move_type information) So it does seem odd to me that spells would be getting affected, because just looking at the code, it would seem they shouldn't be. From mwedel at sonic.net Wed Oct 24 02:36:26 2007 From: mwedel at sonic.net (Mark Wedel) Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2007 00:36:26 -0700 Subject: [crossfire] Spell idea: Elemental skills Message-ID: <471EF5FA.3030902@sonic.net> If someone already brought this idea up before, my apologies. As has been discussed many times, the current spell skills really are not balanced, and there is sort of the problem that the wizard skills as defined may be very difficult to balance. And idea I had was to change the current spell skills into 4 elemental skills - fire, water, air, earth. The praying skill would not get changed. The pyromancy skill sort of corresponds to fire right now, with evocation wrapping up the rest. I think this is easier to balance - we already have fire/lightning/frost bolts (corresponding fore fire, air, water accordingly). Earth bolt might be a little odd, but things like magic bullet would fall into earth, and one could certain come up with some other spells (grenade would be like fireball - shoot something and it explodes into shards, etc). It also incorporates the summon elemental spells pretty nicely, as well as the create wall spells. Another nice thing is that this system does has conflicting elements - air is opposite to earth, water to fire. So one could see a system along the lines that if the character starts with fire, they can learn the air & earth skills also, but never the water (and the air & earth should be of lesser ability/quality than the fire skill). My thinking is 4 wizard classes would start with one of these skills as a major skill, and the two others and lesser quality skills. So in a sense, the 4 different elements are playable. One complication is that some spells should be generic - detect magic comes to mind, as well as perhaps identify and some others. A thought I had on this was to expand the skill field, so you could have something like 'skill fire|earth', and when it goes to find the skill, it parses that, and uses the best skill of the bunch. That could be useful in other regards - another thread had the idea of breaking weapons down, so the some classes can only use a limit of the weapons (so a mage can't pick up the battle axe) - if we followed an example of multiple combat skills, something like a dagger could have 'skill simple|complex' type of thing, but the battle axe just have 'skill complex' It could also be interesting, but harder to do, that some spells use multiple skills for the effect. Something like pool of chaos, which is really creating something from multiple elements, should perhaps take a look at the skills and adjust it accordingly - if a character is level 50 fire and level 5 earth & air, that pool of chaos would really mostly be fire, with a little bit of earth and air (things like para elementals are also a mix of two elements) Thoughts? I think such a scheme would make the wizards a bit more different - playing a wizard and not being able to cast ice spells could be quite a handicap (or fire or lightning and hopefully same for earth). And it makes some logical sense. From lalo.martins at gmail.com Thu Oct 25 05:38:51 2007 From: lalo.martins at gmail.com (Lalo Martins) Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2007 10:38:51 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [crossfire] Spell idea: Elemental skills References: <471EF5FA.3030902@sonic.net> Message-ID: Another possibility would be to go for 5 skills: the 4 elements, plus "sorcery", which would include things like "Detect magic", mana bolts, and all the chaos stuff. It would start out much weaker than the others, which might be an interesting challenge for some. Re Earth: I used to have a spell on my server which essentially throws rocks at enemies. It was intended as a way to do physical damage with magic. I never balanced it enough for submitting, but it might be a reasonable idea. best, Lalo Martins -- So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable. ----- personal: http://lalo.hystericalraisins.net/ technical: http://www.hystericalraisins.net/ GNU: never give up freedom http://www.gnu.org/ From nicolas.weeger at laposte.net Thu Oct 25 16:13:39 2007 From: nicolas.weeger at laposte.net (Nicolas Weeger) Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2007 23:13:39 +0200 Subject: [crossfire] tavern combat server, was Re: Project: Slow down combat In-Reply-To: <47085373.9070808@sonic.net> References: <46E64006.6020004@sonic.net> <200710060026.16734.kbulgrien@worldnet.att.net> <47085373.9070808@sonic.net> Message-ID: <200710252313.42245.nicolas.weeger@laposte.net> Finally got around to testing the modified server :) Choose a dragon/monk. Pretty easy, I must say - at level 1 I went into the 'dry well' in Scorn, and made it to the ogres and level 4, after which I decided it was enough testing, besides the ogres were slightly too strong - meditation would have helped, of course. So, some thoughts: * I kinda like the current speed (0.8 for a new char), gives some time to think and such * high hp (I had ~30, and 30 sp/gr - didn't yet use spells) means it takes longer to die * we'll definitely need to improve the monster's moving algorithm, so they are smarter :) Globally the changes seem ok, but need much balancing - monsters maybe don't do too much damage, things like that? Nicolas -- http://nicolas.weeger.org [Petit site d'images, de textes, de code, bref de l'al?atoire !] -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part. Url : http://mailman.metalforge.org/pipermail/crossfire/attachments/20071025/5fb0e4fc/attachment.pgp From mwedel at sonic.net Fri Oct 26 01:52:07 2007 From: mwedel at sonic.net (Mark Wedel) Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2007 23:52:07 -0700 Subject: [crossfire] tavern combat server, was Re: Project: Slow down combat In-Reply-To: <200710252313.42245.nicolas.weeger@laposte.net> References: <46E64006.6020004@sonic.net> <200710060026.16734.kbulgrien@worldnet.att.net> <47085373.9070808@sonic.net> <200710252313.42245.nicolas.weeger@laposte.net> Message-ID: <47218E97.7030700@sonic.net> Nicolas Weeger wrote: > Finally got around to testing the modified server :) > > Choose a dragon/monk. Pretty easy, I must say - at level 1 I went into > the 'dry well' in Scorn, and made it to the ogres and level 4, after which I > decided it was enough testing, besides the ogres were slightly too strong - > meditation would have helped, of course. Just a note - the pixies and madman have not been modified yet, so are probably easier than they should be. I should make a quick pass on all the monsters to set up some baselines for their AC and the lie. > > So, some thoughts: > * I kinda like the current speed (0.8 for a new char), gives some time to > think and such > * high hp (I had ~30, and 30 sp/gr - didn't yet use spells) means it takes > longer to die Yeah, the higher HP slows down death. But at the same time, as someone else noted, it can be more dangerous to get surrounded now, as it takes longer to hack out. I don't know the tactics you used, but the dry well at least has nice 1 space wide bottlenecks for the monsters, so you can avoid getting surrounded to some extent. At some point, I think at low levels (<3), death should almost be something that is caused by carelessness or over agressiveness, and not unluckiness (presuming player is on beginning maps). It is sort of bad to die on a beginner map because you failed to properly disarm a trap or the like. > * we'll definitely need to improve the monster's moving algorithm, so they are > smarter :) All monster logic needs improvement. I also think some of these changes, and the balancing involved, open up more possibilities. By default, monsters are somewhat tough to hit now (its not a sure thing). But this really does allow more tuning possibilities: AC - make monsters harder to hit (or easier) HP - how many hits it takes - this also has some effects on spells damage - how monster damage the monster does speed - how fast the monster attacks All these were there before, but I think a problem with tuning speed is that the range of speed for players was really high before - now it is much more modest, so you start to get things like a 'speed 1.0 creature will mover faster than the player' I didn't do a dragon character - I just did a straight fighter, but did find that with the orcs in the beginners dungeon, one still had to be somewhat careful. I think they are probably a bit less dangerous before, so more adjustments are needed. It might be interesting to write up some sort of formula that takes all of those variables into account and gives a proposed difficult/exp rating for them (this would be really imprecise as it couldn't take into account things like spells the monster may cast), but could be useful as a quick dump to see things like 'this monster is way out of whack - either its combat stats needs to be adjusted or its exp adjusted > Globally the changes seem ok, but need much balancing - monsters maybe don't > do too much damage, things like that? Yeah - I'll have to play a lot more with tweaking. Another thing to look at while doing this, which I don't think anyone has done yet, is archery - these changes likely have some effect as to the effectiveness of using bows, either for the better or worse, but not sure which way right now. From mwedel at sonic.net Fri Oct 26 02:07:46 2007 From: mwedel at sonic.net (Mark Wedel) Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2007 00:07:46 -0700 Subject: [crossfire] Spell idea: Elemental skills In-Reply-To: References: <471EF5FA.3030902@sonic.net> Message-ID: <47219242.7060309@sonic.net> Lalo Martins wrote: > Another possibility would be to go for 5 skills: the 4 elements, plus > "sorcery", which would include things like "Detect magic", mana bolts, > and all the chaos stuff. It would start out much weaker than the others, > which might be an interesting challenge for some. I thought about a fifth skill which covers the leftover stuff. I'm just not sure there are enough spells to make it worth while. I sort of fear it could go the way of summoning - could be useful, but would be a lot of work. That said, taking a quick look at the current spell list, and trying to categorize them: Level 1 Armour - earth/air (creating force around to reduce damage) Burning Hands - fire Create Missile - earth (creating solid substance) Detect Magic - ??? Icestorm - water Magic Bullet - earth Magic Missile - maybe air (electricity) Marking Rune - ??? (earth maybe - its on the ground?) Probe - ??? Slow - air (presume it is a slow gas?) Small Fireball - fire Small Lightning - air Small Snowstorm - water Level 2 Confusion - air (same basis as slow) Detect Monster - ??? Earth to Dust - earth Firebolt - fire Paralyze - air (same basis as slow) Poison Cloud - air (same basis as slow) Strength - ??? (maybe try to associate stats with the elements?) Summon Fog - air or water Summon Golem - probably earth Summon Pet Monster - should be unique for each element A note on strength - one could sort of come up with lore that basis different stats on different elements. EG, when man was created, the gods took some earth for strength and constitution, fire for power, air for dexterity, etc, and thus have some basis of different stat adjustments spells per element. That said, there are a fair number of spells which sort of fall out of categories. Elemental skills may not be ideal - I just think the current re-organization of how things are now really isn't that good either. > > Re Earth: I used to have a spell on my server which essentially throws > rocks at enemies. It was intended as a way to do physical damage with > magic. I never balanced it enough for submitting, but it might be a > reasonable idea. I doubt there would be a problem coming up with appropriate damage spells for all the domains. a slightly harder challenge is trying to make them unique. At one time, the only bolt spell was lightning bolt (now frost of firebolt) - this had some definite implications on when and what spells you use for different creatures. Now with the 3 main bolt spells, if a bolt spell is appropriate, you have your choice of best spell to use, instead of before having to decide if a lightning bolt, even though not most effective against that creature, is better than something like icestorm, which is highly effective. So along those lines, while damage spells are still needed to kill creatures, it might be nice to have other effects. For example, something like an earthquak spell, which sort of operates like destruction, but also leaves earthwalls scattered about to denote the collapsed ceiling. Or some of the water/ice spells leaving a layer of ice on the map which is slippery with some defined effects. In a sense, enough difference so that spells and playing actually is quite a bit different, and not just that instead of doing fire I'm doing cold, but otherwise things are the same. From kbulgrien at worldnet.att.net Fri Oct 26 07:03:28 2007 From: kbulgrien at worldnet.att.net (Kevin R. Bulgrien) Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2007 07:03:28 -0500 Subject: [crossfire] Spell idea: Elemental skills In-Reply-To: <47219242.7060309@sonic.net> References: <471EF5FA.3030902@sonic.net> <47219242.7060309@sonic.net> Message-ID: <200710260703.28861.kbulgrien@worldnet.att.net> > That said, taking a quick look at the current spell list, and trying to > categorize them: > > Level 1 > Armour - earth/air (creating force around to reduce damage) > Burning Hands - fire > Create Missile - earth (creating solid substance) > Detect Magic - ??? > Icestorm - water > Magic Bullet - earth > Magic Missile - maybe air (electricity) > Marking Rune - ??? (earth maybe - its on the ground?) > Probe - ??? > Slow - air (presume it is a slow gas?) - air density/wind > Small Fireball - fire > Small Lightning - air > Small Snowstorm - water > > Level 2 > Confusion - air (same basis as slow) > Detect Monster - ??? > Earth to Dust - earth > Firebolt - fire > Paralyze - air (same basis as slow) > Poison Cloud - air (same basis as slow) - fire as a result of volcanism. > Strength - ??? (maybe try to associate stats with the elements?) > Summon Fog - air or water > Summon Golem - probably earth > Summon Pet Monster - should be unique for each element Hmm... I just remembered... a GameCube game "Quest 64" uses the elements as basis for its magic A list they used can be found on various walkthru's. One link is: http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/n64/file/198386/3288 They also categorized the monsters into elemental groups. Some "new" spells based on elements... Fire Lava Shower Wind Silence Water Hail Storm Earth Gravity Decrease mobility? Landslide Rock Shower Earthquake Rolling rock / Rockslide (similar to "bolt" spells) The "fifth element" ;-) classification as a non-elemental magic class strikes me as a good idea as opposed to forcing everything into elemental classes. Kevin From mwedel at sonic.net Sat Oct 27 01:24:24 2007 From: mwedel at sonic.net (Mark Wedel) Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2007 23:24:24 -0700 Subject: [crossfire] Spell idea: Elemental skills In-Reply-To: <200710260703.28861.kbulgrien@worldnet.att.net> References: <471EF5FA.3030902@sonic.net> <47219242.7060309@sonic.net> <200710260703.28861.kbulgrien@worldnet.att.net> Message-ID: <4722D998.7070700@sonic.net> I agree that trying to put all the spells into one of the 4 elements probably is a bad idea. I see two real solutions to that: 1) Create a fifth skill, probably something like 'pure magic', which would cover the manabolts, detect magic, and other misc spells. Problem I perhaps see is that this dilutes the spell skills even more, and if does include some of the bread & butter spells (like detect magic), may be a case that every spell caster needs this skill. 2) have these general spells be usable with any of the elemental skills. In a sense, you could think of it as your best elemental skills becomes this fifth skill in terms of ability to cast spells. This means any spell cast would get detect magic, detect monster, strength, etc, at appropriate levels. But maybe this goes too much in the other direction of starting to make too many spells available to the general skills. But some other thoughts come to mind: -Just because the spell is available right now to players doesn't mean it has to be - some spells could be only available in wands, scrolls, potions, etc. - If we go the route that skills are much harder to gain (getting a spellcasting skill requires a quest, etc), then it becomes more likely that most players won't have these spells. For example, even my dumb fighter or barbarian will often learn sorcery at some point in the game, and thus detect magic, which is a first level spell. So instead of using scrolls or whatnot to do detect magic, he can just cast it. If the game is changed such that he can't learn magic skills, and thus by correlation, detect magic, that would force him to use wands, scrolls, and rods. This may not be a bad thing, making those a bit more valuable/useful. But likewise, the fact that some spell casters don't have detect magic shouldn't be as big a deal either - they can also use these other objects to get that work done. One issue with a general magic skill is how it interacts or is limited by the others. I said in my first message that the earth/fire/wind/water have diametric forces, so one can reasonably limit a character to 3 spell casting skills. One would sort of envision that pure magic is in the middle of that circle - does that mean if someone chooses fire as their speciality, they now have 4 skills (fire, earth, air, general?) And what about someone that chooses general magic - do they now get all 5, since the skill they take is in the middle? A lot of this can perhaps be limited by making the other skills hard to gain exp in, etc, but that has to be balanced carefully - if too hard (like summoning), it perhaps becomes somewhat pointless. But if too easy, for example, a fire skill in that you can still kill things quickly, then the reduced exp may in fact not be much of a penalty. From lalo.martins at gmail.com Sat Oct 27 01:47:32 2007 From: lalo.martins at gmail.com (Lalo Martins) Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2007 06:47:32 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [crossfire] Spell idea: Elemental skills References: <471EF5FA.3030902@sonic.net> <47219242.7060309@sonic.net> <200710260703.28861.kbulgrien@worldnet.att.net> <4722D998.7070700@sonic.net> Message-ID: Also spracht Mark Wedel (Fri, 26 Oct 2007 23:24:24 -0700): > 1) Create a fifth skill, probably something like 'pure magic', which > would cover the manabolts, detect magic, and other misc spells. Problem > I perhaps see is that this dilutes the spell skills even more, and if > does include some of the bread & butter spells (like detect magic), may > be a case that every spell caster needs this skill. That sounds good to me. > One issue with a general magic skill is how it interacts or is limited > by the > others. I said in my first message that the earth/fire/wind/water have > diametric forces, so one can reasonably limit a character to 3 spell > casting skills. One would sort of envision that pure magic is in the > middle of that circle - does that mean if someone chooses fire as their > speciality, they now have 4 skills (fire, earth, air, general?) And > what about someone that chooses general magic - do they now get all 5, > since the skill they take is in the middle? No. What I'd do is 4 elemental classes, each "attuned" to one elemental skill and "blocked" from the opposite one. All of them would start with the "attuned" skill plus what I'm calling "sorcery". Then they could learn the other two if they want, but not the "opposing" skill. Could we want a "sorcerer" class that starts only with "sorcery" (and maybe alchemy and thaumaturgy?), but can learn all 4, with the price of not having any attunement? Maybe. I think it would be reasonably balanced, by not having any bonuses. Specially if the elemental skills aren't easy to get. best, Lalo Martins -- So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable. ----- personal: http://lalo.hystericalraisins.net/ technical: http://www.hystericalraisins.net/ GNU: never give up freedom http://www.gnu.org/ From nicolas.weeger at laposte.net Sat Oct 27 09:49:45 2007 From: nicolas.weeger at laposte.net (Nicolas Weeger) Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2007 16:49:45 +0200 Subject: [crossfire] Spell idea: Elemental skills In-Reply-To: <471EF5FA.3030902@sonic.net> References: <471EF5FA.3030902@sonic.net> Message-ID: <200710271649.49456.nicolas.weeger@laposte.net> Hello. Replying to various mails at the same time. > And idea I had was to change the current spell skills into 4 elemental > skills - fire, water, air, earth. The praying skill would not get changed. Sounds good, if we can balance everything. The idea of a 5th skill, well, not totally sure it's nice. I'd rather see generic spells you can use with multiple skills. The issue you'd have with a 5th skill is how to level it - if it has enough spells to level correctly, why use another elemental? if it has only utilitarian spells, how can you level it? > That could be useful in other regards - another thread had the idea of > breaking weapons down, so the some classes can only use a limit of the > weapons (so a mage can't pick up the battle axe) - if we followed an > example of multiple combat skills, something like a dagger could have > 'skill simple|complex' type of thing, but the battle axe just have 'skill > complex' Or what about: * create 'axe weapons' as skill, and forbid mages to get it * put a cap to what mages can use in item power for weapons things like that? > It could also be interesting, but harder to do, that some spells use > multiple skills for the effect. Something like pool of chaos, which is > really creating something from multiple elements, should perhaps take a > look at the skills and adjust it accordingly - if a character is level 50 > fire and level 5 earth & air, that pool of chaos would really mostly be > fire, with a little bit of earth and air (things like para elementals are > also a mix of two elements) It could be fun, and I'd add: allow 2 players to combine their spell to generate a different spell - fire storm + wind => big spell (more damage? greater range? Also, you couldn't cast eg chaos fire+air if you only master fire+water :) > Thoughts? I think such a scheme would make the wizards a bit more > different - playing a wizard and not being able to cast ice spells could be > quite a handicap (or fire or lightning and hopefully same for earth). And > it makes some logical sense. And it gives more importance to wands/rods/staves. I never use charging scrolls, for instance, not worth the issue - now if you find a nice wand, you have a use for them! I would though seriously limit the rods, because they effectively have unlimited casting - the golden unicorn horn for instance is really powerful, allowing almost continuous healing. That seems too powerful to me. Nicolas -- http://nicolas.weeger.org [Petit site d'images, de textes, de code, bref de l'al?atoire !] -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part. Url : http://mailman.metalforge.org/pipermail/crossfire/attachments/20071027/a01fb203/attachment.pgp From mwedel at sonic.net Sun Oct 28 01:25:41 2007 From: mwedel at sonic.net (Mark Wedel) Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2007 23:25:41 -0700 Subject: [crossfire] Spell idea: Elemental skills In-Reply-To: <200710271649.49456.nicolas.weeger@laposte.net> References: <471EF5FA.3030902@sonic.net> <200710271649.49456.nicolas.weeger@laposte.net> Message-ID: <47242B65.6040203@sonic.net> Nicolas Weeger wrote: > Hello. > > Replying to various mails at the same time. > >> And idea I had was to change the current spell skills into 4 elemental >> skills - fire, water, air, earth. The praying skill would not get changed. > > Sounds good, if we can balance everything. Balance is always a hard part. But I think by doing it with elements, it in some ways becomes less important. For example, if each element had a bolt type spell (there are already 3 of need - just need an earth bolt type of spell), and each had the same level, sp, damage, they are in a sense balanced with each other. Now some monsters are more vulnerable/protected to different attacks than others - using any fire spell against wyverns is pretty pointless, and ice spells quite effective. And there are other monsters in the opposite case. So I think that for most all monsters, there will always be cases of this spell (skill) is better to use. And if a player who has fire can't get water (ice), that does have some limitations. > > The idea of a 5th skill, well, not totally sure it's nice. I'd rather see > generic spells you can use with multiple skills. > The issue you'd have with a 5th skill is how to level it - if it has enough > spells to level correctly, why use another elemental? if it has only > utilitarian spells, how can you level it? That's a concern I have - it perhaps just needs to be examined more what spells really fall out of this area. In a sense, most of them are likely to be non damage spells (things like detect magic, strength, identify, dimension door, etc). I'd almost seen that misc magic skill would mostly be a place where a lot of non combat spells are bundled, with some combat spells added just so you can get exp so you can cast the useful non combat spells. > >> That could be useful in other regards - another thread had the idea of >> breaking weapons down, so the some classes can only use a limit of the >> weapons (so a mage can't pick up the battle axe) - if we followed an >> example of multiple combat skills, something like a dagger could have >> 'skill simple|complex' type of thing, but the battle axe just have 'skill >> complex' > > Or what about: > * create 'axe weapons' as skill, and forbid mages to get it The weapon skills could certainly get broken down into more categories (axe, mace, sword, dagger, whatever). That also affects fighter, as now it isn't just one handed/two handed skill, but more skills, so if you're really good in sword and find a nice artifact axe, you're pretty crappy in that. I'm not saying this shouldn't be done, but need to think about its impact. > * put a cap to what mages can use in item power for weapons > things like that? Depends how it is done. One could base the item power of a weapon you can equip based on the level of the skill to equip it. But the real issue comes down to how easy/if it is possible to learn skills. The problem case I think of is this - if skills are very difficult to learn, you sort of want to differentiate weapon skills for mages vs fighters. IF a fighter gets combat skills but no spell skills, but that mage gets some spell skills plus the default weapon skill (1 handed weapons), there is only a minimal disadvantage to starting the character as a mage, but still play them as a fighter (you get the relevant fighting skills, as well as the spell skills). That is where the idea of more weapon skills come up - mages must be able to use melee to some extent (dagger lets say), but right now, there is no enforcement, so putting in new skills may be a way. Its just sort of seems that if you are fighter and know sword, you should also be able to use dagger with similar effectiveness, so it may be nice the dagger & swords use the same skill for fighter, but the mage just has a skill that limits them to daggers only. > And it gives more importance to wands/rods/staves. I never use charging > scrolls, for instance, not worth the issue - now if you find a nice wand, you > have a use for them! > > I would though seriously limit the rods, because they effectively have > unlimited casting - the golden unicorn horn for instance is really powerful, > allowing almost continuous healing. That seems too powerful to me. > True - way back when, rods didn't exist, and the only way to get some spells was via wand or scroll. I'd almost say that most rods should be artifact/quest type items. There are some limits on rods, like how fast they recharge - I suspect in many cases, rods are an item in need of balance just like a lot of other objects out there. From mwedel at sonic.net Sun Oct 28 01:34:37 2007 From: mwedel at sonic.net (Mark Wedel) Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2007 23:34:37 -0700 Subject: [crossfire] Spell idea: Elemental skills In-Reply-To: References: <471EF5FA.3030902@sonic.net> <47219242.7060309@sonic.net> <200710260703.28861.kbulgrien@worldnet.att.net> <4722D998.7070700@sonic.net> Message-ID: <47242D7D.3000706@sonic.net> Lalo Martins wrote: > > No. What I'd do is 4 elemental classes, each "attuned" to one elemental > skill and "blocked" from the opposite one. All of them would start with > the "attuned" skill plus what I'm calling "sorcery". Then they could > learn the other two if they want, but not the "opposing" skill. Note that while spells have attunements, they don't directly correspond to skills. While there are things like path_fire, path_frost, etc, not all fire spells are necessarily in path_fire right now. For example, protection for fire should be in the fire spell, but as of now would be in the protection path. Likewise, summoning and wall creation skills fall into different paths. Now the paths could get changed in the spells so they do correspond to a skill, and that may not be a bad thing - all fire spells have path fire (along with perhaps other spell paths, so talismans that give summoning attunement are useful for the non attuned skills, etc). That also makes other aspects easy - if the fire skill has attuned fire, denied water (frost), no extra work is needed to prevent character from learning the water skill - they can learn it just fine, but since all the spells in it are denied, they can't cast anything. OTOH, it would probably still be better to disallow learning of the skill (maybe a check in learn skill where if target_skill->attune & player->denied, don't let them learn it) - otherwise I'm sure we'd see a bug report of 'I learned this skill but can't cast any spells in it'. > > Could we want a "sorcerer" class that starts only with "sorcery" (and > maybe alchemy and thaumaturgy?), but can learn all 4, with the price of > not having any attunement? Maybe. I think it would be reasonably > balanced, by not having any bonuses. Specially if the elemental skills > aren't easy to get. As per other e-mail, my main concern is balancing the sorcery skill with enough spells, but still make it somehow inferior to being an element skill. One method might be that if you choose the sorcery path, you are repelled to all the elemental skills - instead choosing to focus on pure magic, it distances you from the elemental magics. The problem is that at first level skill, that causes some problems. I'd be more tempted to have different versions of the skills, such that the exp gain rate is quite a bit slower (50%) such that it is quite painful to go that route. From juhaj at iki.fi Sun Oct 28 05:14:46 2007 From: juhaj at iki.fi (Juha =?UTF-8?B?SsOkeWtrw6Q=?=) Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2007 12:14:46 +0200 Subject: [crossfire] Spell idea: Elemental skills In-Reply-To: <47242D7D.3000706@sonic.net> References: <471EF5FA.3030902@sonic.net> <47219242.7060309@sonic.net> <200710260703.28861.kbulgrien@worldnet.att.net> <4722D998.7070700@sonic.net> <47242D7D.3000706@sonic.net> Message-ID: <20071028121446.442f88bf@alnitak.juhaj.iki.fi> Hi! I will just chime in my own ideas about this topic, without directly replying to any of the myriad postings on the topic. The idea of elemental magic is a good one, but I am not quite sure it's worth while: we already have two divisions within the mana-magic: the division of summoning, sorcery, evocation and pyromancy plus the path-division. I think we would be better off using the existing division, just rebalancing them. Mark's notion of every elemental-skill having its own bolt (fire, frost etc - btw. lightning is decidedly different from other bolts, I would not count it here) can equally well be used with either current skill or path division: every current skill/path would have its own bolt: firebolt for pyro, frostbolt for evo, manabolt would naturally fall into sorcery I think (summoning is a rather difficult thing here, though) or different paths would have different bolts: fire and cold paths are obvious, but I'm sure we would figure out the rest as well. The main problem with paths is that they apply (at least now) to praying as well, so it might not be a good idea to make them skills instead of what they are now. Also, there are quite many paths, which equates to very many spells, which may not be an easy job to do. The main problem with current spell skills is that they are really very different from each other; they are not all meant to be used similarly. Evocation and pyromancy are the really offensive skills, while sorcery is a kind of general-purpose and summoning is basically non-offensive (directly, that is) in nature. Their balancing is thus quite difficult - unless we make them similar in nature, but then we run into questions like what is the summoning equivalent of fireball? Returning to elemental skills, then. What's the problem there? Well, judging from all the postings, the main concern is those spells that don't quite have anything to do with elements, like detect magic. Other than that, they would be quite easy to balance. I am not quite sure, though: there are currently quite a lot of monsters with high fire and cold resistance but not so many with high "air" resistance (thinking of air as lightning here). [A side note: would these spells, like current spells, do fire AND magical damage, so if there is high magic resistance, it's used instead of fire? I think this is a little confusing system, but this has nothing to do with the topic at hand.] My idea about general-purpose spell skill would be sorcery, as has already been suggested, but we can (again?) learn from [A]D&D here: it has "specialist" wizards and "general" wizards, with specialists given something extra for their speciality and denied some (arbitrary) opposing "school" of magic while generalists can learn everything but do not get any bonus either. Note that in the D&D system some specialists are denied even detect magic! We could do something similar, though. We could make sorcery a totally different type of magic: there is "old magic" (I'll call it sorcery for now) and newer "elemental magic". This old magic would be able to access all the elemental spells, but at a lower level, say half (round up for 1st level's sake?) the sorcery level and elementalists could use sorcery spells similarly. This is *much* bigger restriction than current "repelled" (which might be quite ok for fire and cold if you are an earth elementalist), but on the other hand, it gives us the possibility of putting some real offensive spells into sorcery as well - thus making it worthwhile as your primary skill. The kind of offensive spells that would go to sorcery would be manabolts and such; plus I'd put *all* spells that do weaponmagic damage to sorcery. On the other hand, I would give elementalist spells the advantage that they do not do magic damage at all! Fire elemental spells do fire damage, period. So beholder's magic resistance would be useless. This non-magic damage could also be easily incorporated into lore to explain the existence of elemental magic (and weaponmagic spells, too): The High Wizards of old were disturbed with some creatures being immune to their magic. They knew, however, that a dragon's breath - be it fire or frost - was magical but those same creatures were not immune to a dragon's breath, so they concluded that the dragons knew a way of using magic to create "real" things (i.e. the fire was real fire, not magical fire). They embarked on a quest to learn the ways of the dragons and eventually discovered elemental magic - and its limitation that anyone taking up the elemental skills forever foregoes the opposing elemental type (this could involve some kind of initiation rite where one's spirit is tied to the element in question, for example). Most of the High Wizards were happy with this, but some of them detested the binding of one's spirit, they wanted to keep their freedom and so they continued the quest and finally figured out a way of tapping into elemental magic without binding their spirits (although it was less powerful this way). They also figured out that the "magic element" also could be used to bring about non-magical things: the weaponmagic-spells. Hm.. perhaps we could even make that rite part of the game: every mana-caster starts as an unbound sorcerer, but later on they can do the rite if they wish. Similar to a dragon eating an ancient elemental residue. One thing that must be given a careful though here is that there must be some reason to focus on an element instead of staying a generalist. One reason would be to make *some* spells inaccessible to generalists (and even different-type elementalists?). This would be very easy if we made some spells level above 50th (if we use my idea of a sorcerer casting elemental spells at half level), but that might result in changing the type only after 50th level (which may not be bad, though: the rite may be so demanding that no low-level character can do it). Other solutions exist, too, I believe. Last thing I want to say is that I really think some generalist (i.e. capable of learning every spell, although at significantly lower level than specialists) wizard type is required. -Juha -- ----------------------------------------------- | Juha J?ykk?, juolja at utu.fi | | home: http://www.utu.fi/~juolja/ | ----------------------------------------------- -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mailman.metalforge.org/pipermail/crossfire/attachments/20071028/6c8fbbd4/attachment.pgp From mwedel at sonic.net Tue Oct 30 01:09:53 2007 From: mwedel at sonic.net (Mark Wedel) Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2007 23:09:53 -0700 Subject: [crossfire] Spell idea: Elemental skills In-Reply-To: <20071028121446.442f88bf@alnitak.juhaj.iki.fi> References: <471EF5FA.3030902@sonic.net> <47219242.7060309@sonic.net> <200710260703.28861.kbulgrien@worldnet.att.net> <4722D998.7070700@sonic.net> <47242D7D.3000706@sonic.net> <20071028121446.442f88bf@alnitak.juhaj.iki.fi> Message-ID: <4726CAB1.3080804@sonic.net> Going to try and reply relatively quickly and broadly, so I may miss some specific parts. Your point about spell paths also applying to praying spells is well taken - given someone denied fire would make certain prayers also impossible. There are a few ways to take this - one is to say, that yes, if your choose a magician type that is denied to fire, you can't cast those fire spells, even god given. Basis being that fire is really your antithesis, and you just can't manage to cast it, even if it is god given. I don't know if any classes start with talismans that give them repelled or denied, but that also would apply to cleric spells. Another approach would be to make the magic vs cleric spell paths unique. For example, one could create new spell paths that are used just for grouping within the magic skills, and thus don't mess/interfere with cleric spells. Perhaps not really clean, but could be done. While rebalancing the existing skills is also an idea, that seems harder to do and still keep them as is. Summoning is probably the most difficult skill to level, and one big reason is that most anything you summon can only attack one creature at a time, where as the mages get nice cone and bolt spells that can kill a bunch of monsters at a time. While similar type of offensive spells could be added to summoning, then it takes away a bit of that uniqueness - if as a summoner I get bolts, is that really much different than the other skills now? In retrospect, if I had to do it over again, I probably wouldn't have made summoning a distinct skills. And even the general sorcery one has problem - I put some spells in there simply because it needed some offensive spells, not necessarily because they fit. Now that could get changed if you could get exp for casting spells and not killing things - thus things like protection spells and stat improvement spells give you exp, making sorcery perhaps more interesting. While giving exp for just successfully casting spells can be done, doing it in a way that you don't get exp for it is difficult. In terms of electricity resistance - I should note that right now, the lightning bolt spell is available at relatively low level, so the fact that many monsters don't have protection against that doesn't really shift whether or not things move to elemental spells. I may be that lightning spells need to be tune differently than some of the other versions, and it may be that some monsters need to get adjusted. That said, I think that starting at some point, pretty much all monsters have protections against a variety of attacktypes, and if the monster is reasonably balanced, is more vulnerable to a certain attack type. You're not going to kill a titan with electricity for example. And it may very well be that some skills are better than others - in fact, I don't think that can be avoided. The more important point is to try and keep them at least somewhat balanced (if the air mage is clearly the best to play all the time, then some rebalancing is needed). But we know all the spells basically need to be rebalanced, so I don't see that as necessarily a stopper - in fact, by segregating skills, it may in fact be easier to spot balance issues - it seems pretty clear now that most of the summoning spells are underpowered relative to other skills, but before that was split it, you didn't see that as much. If the appropriate skills only have have spells of that type, and people say 'well, I got to level 20 in fire easily, and level 20 in water was a bit harder, but level 20 in earth was next to impossible', it makes it pretty clear that the earth spells - probably as a whole, need balancing, and not just individual spells - it would be a case that monsters are obviously more resistant to earth type magic than others. My thought for attacktypes is that at low levels, spells would still be magic | element - after all, it is 'elemental magic'. At higher levels, as you master the skills, you get some spells that are just the pure element - you've been able to master the skill enough that magic is no longer mixed in. As far as specialists and generalists - that is fair enough - a generalist that can learn every skill might be reasonable. The problem here is actual balancing of that - the current bonuses for attuned and repelled probably do not make up for the advantage of having all the elements available, so I'd think in most all cases, that is what people would do. You may get some people that specialize - a fireborn may very well be a fire mage simply for his own safety as much as anything else. AD&D balances things in a different way - specialists get a bonus spell in what they are a specialized in. But it uses a memorization scheme, so if you only get 1 second level, but as a specialist, you get 2, that is a big bonus. You're proposal is an interesting one - I take it you really mean that effectively, the skill level is half, eg, if I'm a level 20 sorcerer, than when casting elemental skills, I cast them at effectively level 10? And likewise, if I'm a level 20 fire specialist, I cast the general mage spells at level 10? The idea/plan to rebalance spells is there, which includes having spells going from level 1 to 100 (or thereabouts), so your point about some spells not being available would be true. (and the reverse is true - some powerful general magic spells would be unlearnable by the specialists) A question, however, is actual skills - such a method would sort of suggest that spell skills really can't be gained - if a fire specialist gets a scroll of sorcery and learns it, then that penalty is effectively lost, and some for a generalist he gets a scroll of fire magic. I have no problem with that in place, but it does mean that that what skills you start with is what you've got for the entire game - many other games already do that. While one could do the right at higher levels, whatever, that can cause problems in its own way - if I'm a level 80 generalist, is it even that worth while to get fire magic at level 1 at that point? And maybe more to the point, shouldn't we maybe really be suggesting that instead of doing that, such that all high level characters would have all the skills, that they should just start a new character and play again? Last point - I actually disagree that there needs to be a generalist class that has every spell accessible. If one takes that with spells, one could also extend that to skills (which I think causes some balance issues). And right now, on the praying side, that isn't really true either - there are certain unique spells for each god, some gods have certain spell paths denied, etc - there isn't any single character that can have all the cleric types available at the same time. What I would say, however, is that the generally useful ones should be fairly readily available in scroll/potion/wand form. From mwedel at sonic.net Tue Oct 30 01:26:33 2007 From: mwedel at sonic.net (Mark Wedel) Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2007 23:26:33 -0700 Subject: [crossfire] More general spells, was Re: Spell idea: Elemental skills In-Reply-To: <471EF5FA.3030902@sonic.net> References: <471EF5FA.3030902@sonic.net> Message-ID: <4726CE99.6020607@sonic.net> a while back, it was mentioned that it would be nice to reduce the number of spells to some extent (why have small/medium/large fireball? small & large lightning bolt, etc). I agree that cleaning that up would be nice, and that there should perhaps be certain points in the spell progression where things change more drastically. For example, one reason right now small & large lightning bolt exist is because the large one has higher damage & longer ranger, and the expense of higher mana cost. The incremental increase that is done by normal level progression can't do those large jumps, but they sort of need to be allowed. Another thought I had on this was exploding ball/bullet spells. Right now, there is a magic bullet spell, and also a fireball spell - for the first part of the spell, they use the same code/type (magic bullet), there is just the link that the bullet explodes for fireball. It could in fact be interesting to abstract - a first level fire magic doesn't get small fireball, they get fire bullet. At some point (level 5?), it now starts to explode, with that explosion getting bigger. But at the same time, if the character wants to cast a firebullet and not a fireball (save mana, and maybe only a single target), they should be allowed to. This allows the spells to be generalized, so not quite as many. Perhaps via key value in the objects or something, these notable adjustments can be made (eg, for bolts, it could be something that sort of states at level 5, the spell can do 10 more points of damage at the expense of 5 more mana points). The trickier part is how to interface this to the user. You could certainly allow things like 'cast firebullet mana=10 explosion=0' type of thing - that gets messy, but is doable. A better solution is probably for the client to provide some form of better interface and write those rules for them. But not sure if maybe this is more complication than there is benefit. But it does seem that if spells are redone so that the level range is greater, and one gets small lightning at 1, one probably shouldn't ge medium lighting until maybe level 20, and large until level 40 or something, but one may want to see bigger jumps between those points.