KhymChanur: I'm starting up this page to nail down how Alchemy will be implemented.

1) Potion mixing: Alchemists will be able to mix two potions to wind up with a third, different potion. The recipies will be randomized at the start of the game, to make alchemy not so predictable. Making very rare potions will require two rare potions, making a rare potion will require two somehwat rare potions, and so on, so you can't make a !oLife by mixing a Potion of Booze and a !oApple Juice.

Some questions:

1a) Will potion creation have a failure rate, with something happening on failure (like !oDetonations blowing up)?

1b) If you mix two random potions to see if it makes anything useful, and it isn't a valid recipie, will that just waste the potions, or will it have a chance of having bad effects on the alchemist?

1c) Will the list of recipies that the player gets as he/she advances the alchemy skill be randomized at all, or will it stay the same from game to game?

1d) Will there be potion recipie scrolls/parchments laying around the dungeon?

1e) Should there be some potions that are never randomly created, and thus only available to alchemsits?

1f) Will alchemists still need to wear gloves in order to do alchemy?

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2) Magic device charging: Alchemists will be able to recharge magic devices with potions, and extract charges from devices as potions.

Questions:

2a) Will the potions associated with each device be fixed, or change from game to game?

2b) Will alchemists be able to take a "Foo of Nothing" and turn it into a particular magic device? If so, will the quality of the item depend on the dungeon level it was made on (like in 2.x), or on the alchemy skill of the player?

2c) Will alchemists be able to make staves fireproof?

2d) Will charges be extracted into empty bottles, or will some liquid be required to accept the charge?

2e) Should the Alchemy skill increase the ability to pseduo-id devices and potions, to a greater extent than that caused by the boost to the Magic skill?

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3) Class type and stats: Will Alchemists be a Mage class, or a Loremaster class? And will INT or WIS (or both) affect the alchemy skill?

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4) Rod tip creation: Someone with the Alchemy and Runecrafting skills at 20 will be able to buy the ability to bind runespells into rod tips.

Questions:

4a) This will use of each rune used to cast that particular runespell, right?

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5) Drain proof sticks: Someone with a high enough alchemy skill will be able to buy the ability to make stick drain proof.

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6) Removing rod tips: In 2.x, alchemsits can remove rod tips from rod bodies, which is pretty useful. Will 3.x alchemists have this?

Chatter

FearofFours: I like these proposals :)

SimonSorc: what about using some mana to make the zombie/barbarian Troll alchemist less of a hack on the mage class?

I'd also be for a once-per-level creating of ego item - partly random and partly player-influenced. This sure puts a cap on scummy mass production as you can't do it more than 50 times per game (or whatever the level limit is)!

If ego item creation is truly off, adding one plus to one item per level (with reasonnable caps) could compensate. Because alchemy isn't pure potion brewing plus recharge spells...

KhymChanur: About ego creation, the fire-proofing of staves could be generalized to "treating" an item in order to change it's physical properties. For example, an "of Weightlessness" for armor, so an alchemist could walk around in a Mihtril Plate Mail without it slowing him down or encumbering him. Or "Hardened" for hard armor, using alchemy to make the armor's substance even harder than normal, thus increasing base AC (making Hardened Mihtril Plate Mail of Weightlessness really nice). And probably other things I can't think of right now. Of course, making wands electricity-proof would also be useful.

If we did it this way, we'd have to rig the ego costs so that alchemists won't be able to do the buy-alchemize-sell dance that let them earn insane ammounts of money, though we might want to let alchemists earn extra money from things like Elven Cloaks by adding egos to them before selling them.

About adding pluses to items, if 3.0.0 alchemists won't be able to create devices from Foos of Nothing, I think it would be more helpful to have the ability to increase the [X|Y] part of wands and staves. There would be a chance of destroying the item with every attempt, and there wouldn't be a guarntee of the increase happening, but if, say, you had several Wands of Essence of Speed [1|29], you could try to get at least one wand with a max level above the 29 you find "naturally" in the dungeons.

While I'm rambling, another idea: how about letting sticks be recharged via more than one potion type. For example, a Wand of Manathrust could be recharged from a !oCurLightWounds for 1 charge, or from a !oRestoreLifeLevels for 3 charges. However, extracting from a stick would have to be limited to a single type of potion, to prevent using a stick to turn one type of potion into another via charging-then-extracting.

And yet another idea: expand the ability to create rune-spell rod tips to include potions. Any runespell whose target is "Self" could be bound into a potion, using up runes in the process so that this can't be used to create limitless numbers of potions. While it could only be used once, the advantage over rods is that you can use it while confused, and you can dump all of you mana into a single potion, making it more powerful than a rod; you could dump all of your mana into a "Self-Life-Power Surge" runespell potion, and end up with a potion nearly as good as a !oLife.

Or you could allow creation of runespell potions with a "Sphere" target, and throw them at monsters like a !oDetonation.

Isaac: To avoid the "insane riches" problem, would it be effective enough to make new products of alchemy (at least ego-items) 90% off like the things created by Ammo Creation? Better though, if it can be done, is for alchemy to never increase any item's "value". The question is: should alchemists be able to gain any/much money by their alchemy?

Konijn : Since most historical alchemist were looking for converting lead to gold, I would say they have a knack for getting richer.

NeilStevens: As long as we don't add ways to make money too useful late in the game, I don't see that 'insane riches' are a problem.

KhymChanur: Do you mean that easily making money late in the game would be a problem? Or that alchemists should be able to make money from their skills earlier in the game?

NeilStevens: I mean making money is currently not a problem, at all. ToME 2 alchemy isn't considered broken because the people who use it get rich. Gold never won the game.

Actius: The biggest problem with the alchemist class in 2.* is the lack of danger. The alchemist is very weak overall, and must rely on the things they create or manipulate to make up for this -- but within the limits of what they can make they wind up spending lots of time making powerful things at very little risk to themselves. The changes above don't really address that issue. To some degree an alchemist winds up the same as before -- able to buy stuff out of stores and turn it into other more useful stuff. But I don't see much about any abilities to create scrolls, weapons, armor or jewelry ... I'm going to assume that all these can be made by the alchemist, but that mass production of powerful things isn't desirable for the game. One possibility is that when the alchemist makes powerful things (with "lots of powerful things" being more powerful than just one at that power level), that this creates chances that demons or other powerful creatures will be attracted to the alchemist once the alchemist starts moving around. To make this really dangerous they'd have to follow the alchemist from map to map until either they were defeated or until the alchemist managed to spend some large number of turns on a map with them present (losing them, in essence), or maybe using "ambush" logic, if in the wilderness (but low level alchemists who accidentally make something spectacular should probably find them less persistent than powerful alchemists). Another thing that could be done to alchemists (to protect them from this kind of problem, actually) would be to introduce possibilities of turning powerful stuff into cursed or useless artifacts (for example if a skill role was blown) -- if this happened it would offset the "powerful creation" effect.

KhymChanur: Since there will be wands/staves that can cast multiple spells, how about rods that can cast multiple spells? This would probably be too powerful for general use, so there couldn't be Rod Tips of Conveyance lying around, but it might be okay for alchemists, who have to depend on magic devices. There are several ways of doing this:

  1. Have a multi-headed rod "adaptor" to place on a rod body, to which multiple rod tips are attached. This would be like one of those electric power plugs which sprouts several power sockets, allowing several electrical appliances to make use of a single wall socket. Making an adaptor would probably need a bought ability, and use Rod tips of Nothing and/or junk itmes as a source.
  2. Merge multiple rod tips into a single rod tip with multiple spells. Arbitrary combinations could be allowed (Recall and Healing, for example), or only similar rod tips could be merged, so a Rod Tip of Detection, Rod Tip of Perception and Rod Tip of Probing could be combined into a Rod Tip of Knowledge.
  3. Allow multiple runespells to be bound into a single rod tip if the spells all use the same base rune. This would let an alchemist build up their own Rod Tip of Knolwedge using various runespells based on the Knowledge rune.

Stormcrow:I'm a little wishy-washy with the whole Alchemist thing. It sounds like you are moving away from the creation of super-weapons and armor a little (Which is good, because I think of an Enchanter not an Alchemist when I think of creating or enhancing weapons and armor). On one hand, you have the Alchemist, who by classical definition tinkers with potions. You've added, now, messing with rods and staves and magic-devices more. On the other hand, you have Enchanters who enchant armor and weapons. Why not seperate these two? Enchanters would rely a little more on melee, their magic would boost their combat effectiveness by making (or just altering already existant) weapons and armor. Alchemists, though, you are taking down the road of creating potions and staves/wands/etc. Maybe take this a step further and call him a Savant and Scholar or something along those lines, and add in Inscription or Penmanship for scroll creation. Then you'd have a character who has a much clearer purpose; make powerful potions, staves, wands, rods, and scrolls to use. On a slightly seperate note, I'd like to see potions be able to 'stack'. As in, you could augment a potion of healing with a potion of speed, making "a <color of speed's unidentified potion> of Healing". Speeds effect could be slightly diminished, and maybe two or more potions could be stacked onto one, at increasing difficulty. So instead of just potion A + potion B = potion C, you get two options. To really combine potions (A+B=C), or to stack them (A+B=[A/2+B]). And on a last note, how about a risky but possibly powerful ability to spike or otherwise interact with fountains? You find a fountain of healing, which has 5 remaining doses left in it (maybe alchemists should have inherant fountain-ID?). You attempt to combine another potion with it, which would otherwise make a potion of *healing*, say. If it works, which isn't all too likely, you get 5 doses of *healing* left in the fountain. If it doesn't, you get 5 doses of something nasty that is labeled as *healing* but isn't, if you don't notice your mistake while combining the potion with fountain. Oi, I ramble.

JohnGilmore: I have a thought on Alchemy, that ties into larger issues in the game, so it probably can't be addressed directly. But I'd still like to bring it up.

One of the defining features of the Moria/angband derived roguelikes is temporary levels. Going up or down stairs regenerates everything, allowing you to skip special levels, search again for fountains, get another chance at getting a greater vault, etc. It has minuses as well - if you don't clean out that vault NOW, you're screwed. You can't go back to town to grab that ring of resist foo that would make it so much easier.

This has implications for the alchemist, mainly in that it's easy to generate endless piles of usually crappy objects. It's actually this ability that makes the alchemist class able to create powerful objects without much risk to themselves. Chain summoning, Necromancy "raise dead", and probably also other abilities can be abused to generate massive piles of crap as well.

One way to directly address this might be to make a hard limit of say, 5000, objects that can be generated on any particular level. Once that many items have been generated on that level, monsters are created without any objects in their inventories.

Another, less direct way would be to rethink the object distributions, and recalculate all of them to make most objects worthwhile. You'd have to also drastically reduce the number of objects dropped by monsters as well, but it could work. Somebody somewhere made a comment about SteamBand - a gaslamp fantasy based angband derivative. They said that it was proof that you could play an entire roguelike game without ever needing or even wanting an autosquelch/automatizer feature. It's food for thought. It would make alchemists less powerful and make everybody elses life easier.

Still another approach might be to limit the techniques that allow endless generation of items - limit chain summoning so that monsters can summon only less powerful monsters to their aid, for instance. Also getting rid of breeders that have object drops, and so forth.

All of these are major changes, but I think they are all less arbitrary than the 'summon powerful monster' side effect spoken of above. The fact is that any skill which uses objects as fuel (archery's make ammo ability, for instance) is going to be strongly effected by the 'piles of crap' syndrome, and the broader the range of objects which can be useful the greater the effect will be. I think that this is an issue that, like the endless money thing, needs to be addressed eventually.

Neil Stevens has said repeatedly and in many places that we don't dare make money useful in the late game because there are too many ridiculus sources of endless money. And that any effort to make money useful would then have to go and re-examine all sources of cash in the game in order to bring back the element of balance. 'This is true.' I think that it is something that needs to be done. I think that when it is done, it will make the overall game experience that much nicer.

This really long comment should probably be put on a seperate page, and maybe too seperate pages. Oh well, maybe later.

JohnGilmore: To sum up what has gone before - Alchemy, Enchanting, Penmanship, and Carving (not sure about that last one - making staves/rods/wands) become subskills of the magic device skill? Essences are gone, with Alchemy becoming potion combining according to random-each-game recipes, Enchanting still undefined, Penmanship requireing only a scroll (maybe something for ink? blood? potions?), and Carving based on mana or potions or something?

I like the idea of alchemy. How about make Enchanting based on gold and/or specific locations, Penmanship require wand charges (like nethack's magic marker/using a wand of fire to engrave "Elbereth" etc) and Carving require scrolls? (recharge, fire, ice, etc)

KhymChanur: Now that wands, rods and orbs (formerly staves) all use gemstones for their power source, how much will the above plan for alchemy have to change? The change to gemstones means two things:

  1. There will probably be a lot less types of gemstones than there are types of wands/rods/orbs, so in any one game there'll only be a few different potions an alchemist will have to be concerned with.
  2. Once some good autocharging gemstones are found, an alchemist won't need to mix potions in order create the potions needed for charging up their devices. Thus, towards the later stages of a game, an alchemist would be a device-using/making character who just also happens to be able to create Potions of Life out of more common potions.

#1 could be fixed in a number of way, like having egos change the potion associated with a gem (so a red gem, a vampiric red gem, and a red gem of cheapness would all have different potions associated with them). #2 might not actually be a problem, but it feels strange to me, that the alchemical abilites of device usage and potion mixing become disconnected as the game advacnes.

So, any thought on this?

KhymChanur: An idea for #2 occured to me: at higher levels, alchemists can make special gems, or add special egos to gems and devices, which can't be found in otherwise in the game, are really good, and also prevent auto-charging. So towards the end of the game alchemists would have very powerful devices (and they'd need to be powerful to defeat Sauron and Morgoth), but they give up the benifts of autocharging, and thus have to continue mixing potiosn in order to recharge their devices.

NeilStevens: I planned on us having as many kinds of gems as we had rods. In fact, I was planning on basically porting them straight across, then just tweaking the ego types in order to fit autocharging into the mix.

And yes, if endgame alchemy becomes mostly about potion creation, I see nothing wrong with that. But I imagine as the whole game progresses, alchemists will constantly want to be creating higher and higher level sticks, so it'll take a long time for them to get that far.

I'd hold off on alchemy at all, though. Alchemy is so dependent on what the final item list looks like, that it's premature to think about it much.

ElvishPillager: So will there be only one class that can do alchemy, and relies on it totally as that class's only advantage, or will it become weaker but open to more classes, leaving the Alchemist as another Mage with a variety of skills but a certain specialty?

NeilStevens: New, New alchemy should be able to be made available more widely than ToME 2's new alchemy and old alchemy were. Getting rid of the whole super item creation business will ensure that.

ElvishPillager: Nice.

Idea: Make Dwarves (or maybe Petty-dwarves) have a .1 or .2 bonus to Alchemy skill rate.

Schmendrick: I really like the idea of dividing item creation into different skill sets (though they should probably be governed by a "parent" item creation skill), and I also very much like the idea of allowing general access to those skills. Races would also be granted additional ability (in initial skill level and/or an increased multiplier); gnomes and goblins in alchemy, dwarves in weapons and armor, etc. Off the cuff, Alchemy (potions), Binding (scrolls, wands, and staves), Gemlore (amulets and rings), and Enchantment (weapons, armor, and tools) seem like good divisions.

Ingredients) "Essences" are a little strange; it would be fun to see them pepped up a little. Converting the current essence system into a series of potions (potions of poison, resist foo, infravision, whatever) would make a lot of sense, especially because then ingredients will serve a purpose to other classes, and can be less obnoxiously scattered through dungeon treasure. In addition to potions, powders would be cool, too (though I'm not sure how they'd behave in non-alchemical usage). Mushrooms have intriguing possibilities. And there should probably be some connection between magic school and magic items (for "casting" magic items, at the least). Other requirements could make things interesting, too, like a mana cost for item creation, or a racial requirement (why can just anybody make boots of Elvenkind?). Racial requirements would be sinister and interesting if a corpse (or meat) of the appropriate race could be substituted as an ingredient...

Recipes) Random is fun. Stockpiling ingredients for items before you know how to make them is a little odd. However, the recipes feel better if they have certain thematic ties; a wand of noxious cloud that takes poison essences (or potions of poison or a gem of venom or whatever) just makes sense. Basic information on each item, such as its thematic elements, should be easy enough to add to the current item lists (and possibly spells). Knowledge of any given recipe might be more easily stored as "essence proficiencies;" the system wouldn't have to remember that you *Identified* an potion of detect invisible, but that you had a level X understanding of the knowledge ingredient, level Y understanding of the darkness ingredient, and a level Z [alchemical] understanding of divination. *Identify*, decomposing an item, or even successfully assembling one, would increase your alchemical understanding of all of its components. Having actual points invested in a magic school would aid in this (possibly even serving as a sort multiplier in the formula, granting a practitioner of a magic field earlier access to school-themed items).

Balancing) The various themed ingredients can be separated into "tiers" of value/rarity, much like the Mana/Magic or Life/Extra Life essences in tome 2.x (perhaps this is a way the potion/powder - paste? flavoring could come into play). This separation, along with, of course, varying quantities of ingredients involved, can be utilized by the recipe generator (which would run at character generation) to enforce a certain conformance to item prices and dungeon depth (taking away some of the ridiculousness that lets 2.x Alchemists become filthy rich at low levels).

Orvin: How about adding environmental restrictions on making potions:

LordEstraven: That sounds like a very good idea, methinks.

IngeborgNorden: I'd like to re-implement the ToME 2-style rod system in my mods (auto-charging and all, except that the materials used for rod parts need some thematic tweaking). Does T-Engine 3 allow this currently?

DarkGod: Stop asking what the engine can do for you, ask what you can do for the engine! :> No seriously, yes obviously the engine can do such things, no worries :) And usualy if the engine cant do something, somebody can just create a new subsystem that does it. If the subsystem is well enough coded and generic enough it will probablyfind its way into a latetr T-Engine release, so go go folks, code, create, live!

Developers Corner/Alchemy (last edited 2006-09-11 07:51:50 by DarkGod)