It occurs to me that if people are intending to extend the game mechanics in their dungeons, it might be a good idea to have a place to discuss that in a more general sense and possibly develop a shared set of changes to provide consistency between different dungeons. That is, I'd like to discuss what kinds of changes would be good to make and how to integrate them together so that they feel consistent, and so that they don't mess up things that a given dungeon might rely on.
The upside about doing it this way is that players don't have to relearn as much of the system for each separate dungeon - if three dungeons are all going to have a 'Wall of Fire' spell for example, then this way it can use the same runes each time, have the same skill requirements, etc. Furthermore, if we make those extensions imply a lot of different viable party combinations, then it might give people more inspiration to try a bunch of different dungeons to try out different party compositions (this, imo, is a bit of a problem with the current mechanics - there's not that much variation in what kinds of parties work by the late-game, and its mostly driven by weapon availability).
The downside is of course for those who want discovering the fundamental game mechanics to be a part of their dungeon's gameplay this means that players can import knowledge that they haven't earned in-game (e.g. rune combinations), but of course nothing is stopping someone from modifying parts of the system if its really important for them to do so.
I'd say the place to start is to figure out the basic assumptions underlying the gameplay that we should try not to violate. For underlying assumptions, I mean things like:
- We should not make spells that break certain kinds of puzzles - no spells that let you change elevation or teleport past barriers/pressure plates/etc.
There may or may not be other such things we'd want to directly exclude, regarding e.g. things which make food a non-issue, things which auto-detect secrets without requiring the player to notice them by eye, etc. Then we can look at filling in places that seem a bit sparse (earned traits for skills, Earth spells, etc), and then maybe consider new classes/etc once the existing stuff is more versatile.
There's also a question of whether we want to try to change underlying mechanics at a deep level, e.g. amplify the influence of Evasion versus Protection, change how the stats work to make them more broadly relevant (e.g. 1% cooldown reduction per point of Dexterity, Willpower reduces duration of negative status effects, etc).
What do you think?
-
AndakRainor
- Posts: 674
- Joined: Thu Nov 20, 2014 5:18 pm
Re: Shared game mechanics extension
It could be a good idea to gather those typical modifications and document them.
For each mod creator, it remains a design decision so we should discuss common modifications and optional ones.
I started recently messing with the dungeon editor, and the first thing I want to redesign is the spells system specifically. I have seen a few spells scripts by Jhaelen at viewtopic.php?f=22&t=8361, focused on healing spells and assigning them to the earth magic school. I think he did it because every one agrees that earth magic is weak and poor with 2 spells, 3 if you include the poison shield. In my opinion, it is not the best idea to add spells to the weakest school directly, I would prefer to upgrade its power and put it in line with the other spells before that. I was thinking about removing the poison aspect of earth school and try to put stones fall and earthquakes theme spells instead. The poison theme could be moved to a muliple schools build like "air & earth".
We also have a game were leveling is limited to more or less 15 levels for an end game champion. With mods this limit could be pushed a lot higher eventually. So we have a situation were a build is almost 3 skills maxed with 5 skill points, and another with more than that, up to possibly too much skills. Knowing this I think we should develop synergies between skills to keep leveling interesting and rewarding. For magic skills it would be based on the idea I proposed for the poison theme; air and earth requirements. Water Magic could be about water, and ice spells could require air + water magic. weapons / armors with unusual skills required would be more fair than in the original game I believe.
Filling the empty skill points levels is something I would like to achieve, and with combinations of skills levels it brings an explosive number of possibilities. This way Meteor Storm would not remain "the one spell".
To discuss the most exotic and possibly unbalanced spells, what do you think about levitation spells ? Water breathing ? Water walking ? It seems levitation would be an absolute game breaking spell unless it is limited to slowing the party falling down and preventing damage, may be preventing damage from some king of damaging tiles ? Do you think walking on water could break puzzles ? The water temple island comes to mind. May be those kind of spells could be documented here but clearly marked as optional for the more traditional mods. Also, powerful spells or abilities can be added, but sure the difficulty and puzzle design must match those accurately.
For each mod creator, it remains a design decision so we should discuss common modifications and optional ones.
I started recently messing with the dungeon editor, and the first thing I want to redesign is the spells system specifically. I have seen a few spells scripts by Jhaelen at viewtopic.php?f=22&t=8361, focused on healing spells and assigning them to the earth magic school. I think he did it because every one agrees that earth magic is weak and poor with 2 spells, 3 if you include the poison shield. In my opinion, it is not the best idea to add spells to the weakest school directly, I would prefer to upgrade its power and put it in line with the other spells before that. I was thinking about removing the poison aspect of earth school and try to put stones fall and earthquakes theme spells instead. The poison theme could be moved to a muliple schools build like "air & earth".
We also have a game were leveling is limited to more or less 15 levels for an end game champion. With mods this limit could be pushed a lot higher eventually. So we have a situation were a build is almost 3 skills maxed with 5 skill points, and another with more than that, up to possibly too much skills. Knowing this I think we should develop synergies between skills to keep leveling interesting and rewarding. For magic skills it would be based on the idea I proposed for the poison theme; air and earth requirements. Water Magic could be about water, and ice spells could require air + water magic. weapons / armors with unusual skills required would be more fair than in the original game I believe.
Filling the empty skill points levels is something I would like to achieve, and with combinations of skills levels it brings an explosive number of possibilities. This way Meteor Storm would not remain "the one spell".
To discuss the most exotic and possibly unbalanced spells, what do you think about levitation spells ? Water breathing ? Water walking ? It seems levitation would be an absolute game breaking spell unless it is limited to slowing the party falling down and preventing damage, may be preventing damage from some king of damaging tiles ? Do you think walking on water could break puzzles ? The water temple island comes to mind. May be those kind of spells could be documented here but clearly marked as optional for the more traditional mods. Also, powerful spells or abilities can be added, but sure the difficulty and puzzle design must match those accurately.
