ToME WikiKhymChanur: In 3.0.0, if you want to make the player more confused, you simply increment the duration of the confusion timed effected. However, its not so easy with timed effects that have parameters. For instance, the slowness timed effected has both a duration and a "power" parameter which says by how much the player is slowed. With the current way the 3.0.0 code handles this type of timed effect, if the player already has slowness with a duration of 10 and a power of 1, and then suffers and attack which wants to add a slowness of 1 duration and 10 power, the durations are added and the maximum of the two different powers is used, meaning the slowness effect is set to 11 duration and 10 power. To me this seems neither intuitive nor fair to the player.
One possible solution is for effects of the same type but different powers to act like separete spells which stack. Thus, for 1 turn, the player would have both a 1 power and 10 power slowness effects, for a total slowness of 11, then after that 1 turn the 10 power effect would go away and there would be 9 turns of slowness of 1. This solution doesn't feel quite right, but everything else I can think of seems even worse.
Orvin: Perhaps, for each type of effect, it should be possible to specify how effects of that type stack. Some might stack additively, while, for others, only the effect with the maximum power might affect the player at any given turn.
KhymChanur: Here's another solution that could work for some of the timed effects that have only a "power" type parameter: get rid of the power parameter and make the effect's power proportional to the efffect's duration. This is how stunning and bleeding work in 2.x: the more stunned you are, the longer the stunning lasts, and visa-versa. However, this solution would change certain game mechanics, like making the player get progressively slower the more times an Intertia Hound breathes at him/her.
Orvin: Making power proportional to duration makes sense for cuts, since the duration of cuts seems to me to physically reflect the amount of bleeding (due to cut depth, location), which seems like it should increase with cuts. I don't think this model makes sense in general, though (game mechanics aside).
JohnGilmore: It should also be kept in mind that for some effects the parameter difference may mean that it's essentially an entirely different spell. Telepathy, for instance. The fact that you just drank a potion of orc detection shouldn't effect the ghost sensitivity that you got from the NPC in town... In essence, they should be entirely seperate timers, with the recalc bonus code deciding what to do with them.