ToME WikiAfter all, ToME is still a game, too, so here one can list game improvements that could or would be done in 2.4, if we were going to have such a release.
- Tweak Essence of Speed's power progression. Right now it's a rip-off to non-Sorcerors, because +6 isn't worth the skill points needed to learn the spell.
- Tweak Yavanna piety. Charm Animal should be cheaper, yield more piety when successful, or both.
- Name the stars of the random quests, giving each separate princess and adventurer his or her own name (and presumably, race).
DONE Front-load the skill points. Let the player start with a level or two worth of skills at level 0, and reduce the skill points per level to compensate.
- Tweak Geyser's cost and power progressions to match better.
- Give Priests an 0.15 multiplier in Fire, for access to Globe of Light illumination
- Disband Mindcraft; put mind attacks in Mind school
- New Mindcraft could work like Angband Priests. Every N levels of Mindcraft, you choose a mindcraft school and get a random spell of appropriate level or less from it. No books, no duplication of school spells, but radically different game effects.
- Improve Bards. Make attack songs ignore friendlies; sell stronger instruments in dungeon stores; get more instruments in drops
- Adjust stats by class. Paladins differ from other priests, Necromancers differ from other magic users.
- Optimal play should not require withholding skill points from already-acquired skills. This slows the game down and is frustrating for the users trying to push the edges of the game.
- Remove un-fun, purely-cosmetic game penalties, such as gender change traps.
- Push Giant white lice a few levels deeper, because they're really difficult to deal with in forests.
This is different from the ToME 3 development To-do list, because that list is engine-oriented, while this list is ToME-module oriented.
Chatter
Anonymous: (about front-loaded skill points) Is this really a good idea? The Bree house quest gives you a bunch of levels and for me at least it's the mid-high levels before I've got a great kit that are the most problem.
NeilStevens: See NeilStevens/Lessons From 2.3
GreyCat: I'd like to see the Bards pumped up a bit.
The primary problem is that Bard songs affect everything in line of sight including friendly critters. That makes them completely unusable with pets of any sort, and I can't see any thematic reason why the songs should be this way. AD&D Bards often sing songs to boost their own party's morale (etc.) without those benefits accruing to the enemy as well. Bards should have songs that confer benefits to the Bard and all other friendly critters in line of sight, and they should have songs that affect all hostile critters in line of sight. They might also have non-discriminatory cone-effect songs (picture a trumpet).
The secondary problem is that there's a very large gap between the +1 instruments and the +2 instruments. A Bard isn't likely to find a +2 instrument in the dungeon any time before Mordor, so they have to scum Black Markets for them. This could be alleviated by selling "ordinary" +2 instruments in the minstrel buildings in the towns (e.g., "a Harp (+2)" instead of "a Harp of the Eldar (+2)").
RavenRed: GreyCat, see "Demonic Howl" in the demonology section of the CVS. A complementary style GF for Bards along the same lines would probably be a good idea. Also, Mindcraft re-entering the GUSS is excellent. SHould Necromancy follow?
ZizzoTheInfinite: I touch on some of the Bard issues in my Bard module. For the pval issue, I introduced the relatively common instrument ego Well-Crafted, which just increases the pval; with this, (+2) and occasionaly (+3) instruments aren't hard to acquire from the Bree minstrel shop. As for spells, a cone effect is currently AFAIK only available as a modified wave effect, as used by the module's Shockwave spell. And as for spells only affecting hostiles, I assume you're thinking of spells along the lines of the Drum spells (slow/confuse badguys), or maybe variants of some of the Harp spells (healing/hasting friends); as RavenRed suggests, those will most likely need new damage types that do a friend-or-foe check. In fact, that's a good idea, that I should probably add to the module at some point...
NeilStevens: I suggest you two head over to the IdeaArchive if you're going to go into this in depth.
TheFalcon: Errm, what does the last point on the list actually mean?
ReenenLaurie: My understanding is, that people tend to 'save' their skill points, and then spend them all at once. I think that the idea is that you spend them (or most anyway) immediately after leveling, and you should not really gain benefits from 'saving' your skill points.
NeilStevens: Right, but the multiplier bonuses from random, beastmaster, and god quests make that inefficient for someone trying to maximize his skill point potential.
GreyCat: The bit about saving skill points came after Neil and I had an IRC talk about my playing strategy with my current character, who's saving up lots and lots and lots of skill points while waiting with growing impatience for Fumblefingers to show up and cough up a Weaponmastery multiplier boost. Neil seems to think that this strategy is (somehow) detrimental to the game as a whole, to the point where he would prefer to remove Fumblefingers altogether to prevent players from using it.
I asked him point-blank whether Assassins were really expected to spend ten points just to get Divination level 1 for a level-1 Sense Monsters spell, and he said "yes". God quests do not give a multiplier bonus. The only way god quests would cause someone to hoard skill points is if the player is uncertain whether all five god quests will be assigned and winnable. The player might therefore save 10 skill points, with the intent of putting them somewhere other than Prayer if the fifth quest is finished, but using them in Prayer if the quest is not granted upon attaining level 50.
The beastmaster quest grants the Corpse Preservation skill with a multiplier of 0.800 if you don't already have it. Saving skill points to invest in Corpse Preservation would require a pretty unusual character strategy IMHO. (Perhaps a Melkor worshipper who doesn't have Corpse Preservation but wants to use the exploding corpses spell in the end game? Or someone who really likes doing beastmaster quests....)
NeilStevens: OK, at this time of day I messed up on the details but yes, saving points for Prayer depending on the *number* of quests you complete is a problem too.
TheFalcon: Ah, I agree with that then, but how would you go about solving the problem? change the "Lost Sword Dude" quest rewards?
NeilStevens: In part, yes. Exactly how, I'm not sure.
ReenenLaurie: Well, this is then part of new suggestions, and might need to go under IdeaArchive. One problem is the 'buying' of skills (like tree walking), make it a necessity to save points. This goes against what your current aim is.
NeilStevens: I specifically wrote "already-acquired skills" so as to exclude things like expensive abilities, heh. Can't get me on that one.
ReenenLaurie: Or even start at 4, then go down... then you have a certain max you can gain from lost sword rewards, but choosing a new one gives you a bigger advantage?
NeilStevens: Those are the lines I'm thinking down.
NerdanelVampire: I think we could let the raising of a modifier raise the skill investment proportionately, i.e. multiplying the old amount of skill points by (x + y)/x in which y is the amount of skill modifier improvement (usually 0.1) and x is the old skill modifier. If a skill rolls over the maximum the extra points could be freed, unless this is too cheesy for some. It would help with skill/subskill allocations and potential Prayer overage, though.
Bandobras: I think you idea (both, in fact) is excellent. Moreover, it is a very slight change, in particular, people can play in exactly the same way as before, if they are unwilling to use that feature.
Actius: What about making multiplier changes retroactive on skill points already spent? That said, I think I'd sometimes still hold back some skill points, even if my multipliers were fixed, because I often need to play the character for a while to figure out what weaknesses I need to address. This can be because of my luck with equipment, or opponents, or because I just don't know much about how a character will play. If I spent time carefully researching how the code works, I could probably feel comfortable always spending skill points as I earn them, but my knowledge of the game isn't that deep. In other words, there's more uncertainty's here than just "what will my multipliers be"...
TobiasParker: For the princess names, couldnt you just make a really simple code that takes the random name generator and apply it to the princess monster?
NeilStevens: Not in ToME 2, because the monster name comes from the race, which is predetermined.
- Have a lot of interactions between skills so that generalists can do things specialists can't.
Currently, I find MindCraft is what makes Eru Priests playable. Dump it and think through how to replace it.
- Reward skill development so that you get something significant at each increment. Integrate the special skills into the general skill list, perhaps as skill interactions.
IngeborgNorden: What do you mean by "front-loading" skill points, Neil? I'm used to the ToME 2 skill system, so changing it too radically (either the power level or the mechanics) will make ToME 3 and modules more difficult.
As far as Mindcraft is concerned, moving those powers into the Mind school seems like a mixed blessing IMO. On one hand, it guarantees some spells to anyone who learns the skill (even if they lose every book to a Scatter Items trap). It also makes more sense for standard ToME to treat mental powers as magical; the current system seems too much like the psionic powers in sci-fi/futuristic RPGs. I've seriously considered removing any Mind Blast/Brain Smash attacks from my new module projects (except the "themeless" Freeband, perhaps) precisely because those attacks feel as wrong in my settings as nuclear waste does in Arda.
On the other hand, splitting the same school into "book" spells and "bookless" ones might seem confusing or unfair to some players. Then again, I've added no-instrument ("vocal") songs to the Music school in T-Plus; of all the game-balance complaints people have made, almost no one brought up those songs. 
Speaking of Music spells more generally...the spell ideas and "generic" instruments above +1 sound reasonable to me (no pun intended). Perhaps musical-instrument shops should exist in a few towns on the standard gameworld map, as they do in a few modules: because bards are forced to find instruments in either a dungeon drop or the Black Market, they're usually unable to cast useful spells at mid- to high levels in standard ToME.
NeilStevens: What we do in ToME 3 will have NOTHING to do with modules at all.
And as for Mindcraft, the idea is that Mindcraft gives bookless ACCESS to schools. The schools will not be tied to books or not. So using mindcraft would give you bookless access to Globe of Light, Essence of Speed, and Stone Skin, perhaps, but using sorcery would still require books.
IngeborgNorden: Thank you for explaining the Mindcraft overhaul; I might not agree with which spells belong there, but that decision is in the devteam's hands. I apologize if my module references offended you; I thought that sometimes we might agree on similar changes for different reasons. Basically, these were the points I wanted to make:
- I shouldn't object to a school sometimes requiring books and sometimes not, if I'd used a similar idea myself.
- Some damage types associated with Mindcraft are just as inappropriate to a Tolkienian setting as they are to my own; if brain-smashing and mind-blasting powers feel wrong in Middle-earth, will Mind specialists need to rely on "outside" attack spells in ToME 3?
- Bards need better access to instruments and some spell tweaks to make the class both playable and believable. I don't know how ToME 3 will handle this problem, but ToME 2 made songs almost useless at any level. (Musical spells drained mana too quickly, even with maxed stats and powerful ego instruments: I experimented in wizard mode several times.)
P.S. Could you please explain what you meant by front-loading skill points? I've never heard that term used in either a gaming or a computing context.
NeilStevens: Your points are noted, but I'm not inclined to remove sanity attacks. Without them Mind school is rather weak, I think. They'll fit in nicely.
As for front-loading: What I mean is, giving more points earlier in the game. In practice, right now, that means a character at birth in ToME 3 is awarded 12 skill points. That's all.
Color discussion moved to Developers Corner/Adding colors