ToME Wiki(Discussion moved from IdeaArchive/Monsters/New Monster Treasures Idea)
NeilStevens: Are you sure there will be a reduction in damage types in 3, though?
RavenRed: Fairly sure that stuff like shards, nexus and nether will be out (the last replaced by Darkfire). DG sent me a list a while ago consisting of:
- Fire
- Cold
- Elec
- Acid
- Poison
- Valinorean Fire (AKA Holy Fire)
- Darkfire
- Confusion
- Fear
- Lite
- Dark
- Sound
Plus or course the three melee damage types (SLASH/CRUSH/PIERCE) Don't know how much it's changed since then. Of that, I might ditch Sound and maybe Electricity and Acid (more for Medieaval authenticity than anything else on the last two though, I admit). For mine, Dark and Lite shouldn't do too much damage in and of themselves in any case.
ZasVid: Ditching Electricity and Acid for Medieaval authenticity? Well, I'm pretty sure that they had lightning in medieval times too (and alchemy for acid). Renaming it lightning would be a bit more reasonable idea. Besides, as for medieval authenticity, there are other things, which stand-out more than Elec and Acid, like, well, Spells and Magical items
RavenRed: Bah... details, details. I was more thinking in terms of moving things in a slightly more Tolkienian direction and away from the AD&D paradigms. AFAIK, Gandalf never called down either electricity or lightning upon the Orcs.
More seriously, Caustics aren't something that immediately spring to mind about mediaeval combat. (wheras spells and magic items were embedded somewhat in that culture). Don't forget it was "fire" that fell from heaven. <jk> PhoenixProphet: Ahem. I know you put a smilely on it, but ahem: Out jumped the goblins, big goblins, great ugly-looking goblins, lots of goblins, before you could say rocks and blocks. There were six to each dwarf, at least, and two even for Bilbo; and they were all grabbed and carried through the crack, before you could say tinder and flint. But not Gandalf. Bilbo’s yell had done that much good. It had wakened him up wide in a splintered second, and when goblins came to grab him, there was a terrible flash like lightning in the cave, a smell like gunpowder, and several of them fell dead.
RavenRed: Yeah, but only LIKE lightning...
NerdanelVampire: Remember also that Gandalf made real physical lightning strike Weathertop when he battled the Nazgûl. Also, artificial lightning was used as a signaling device between Barad-dûr and Minas Morgul.
NeilStevens: I think we need a thread on the Developer area on damage types, heh. Thanks.
And so we have it. I really don't think we should be removing so many. Going down the list from ToME 2:
Fire, Acid, Electricity, Cold are so thematically obvious I don't know how to defend them properly. These are basic elements of the western fantasy tradition.
RavenRed: I'd quibble on Acid, but not with any real force.
Poison is thematically sound (especially since the new monster list should be skewed more heavily toward animals) and includes an interesting game mechanic. This is a major reason one must carry healing potions around. It has to stay.
Light and Dark go together, so if we lose one, we should lose both. But light is useful for monsters like trolls, and artifacts like the Phial, so let's keep them.
Nether is being renamed, which works for me. The 'promotion' of Holy Fire to be its counter is nifty.
Confusion as a resistable damage type I think should be ditched, with confusion resistance becoming a binary trait like paralyzation resistance. I would suggest that Chaos take its place, and be 'demoted' to a specialty unresistable damage type like Time is now, though obviously with a lower cap.
RavenRed: I'm not fond of Chaos as a "type". It seems somehow out-of place.
NeilStevens: We need SOMETHING to cause confusion then. Since we seem to agree that it's a good idea to split effects from damage types as you say below, and that's why I proposed to move it from confusion to chaos, then we need SOME damage attack type that will confuse.
ZasVId: Well, what about having sound confuse as well as stun? In reality it can disrupt balance and can have confusing patterns (think of some noisy insect trying using some annoying sounds or ventriloquism-like ability).
Time should probably just go. Thematically it's weird (sounds more like science fiction than anything Tolkien) and it doesn't introduce any interesting mechanics. Drop it.
Stun resistance should probably become a first-class ability analgous to Hold Life, decoupled now from Sound resistance.
Sound itself should probably stay, because again I think it works well with animals. Think of a loud buzzing, clicking, roaring, etc. Plus it dovetails with stunning, which is a useful way to get that game mechanic used with ranged attacks.
RavenRed: Apart from a roaring "breathe sound" effect, I'm not sure how this actually works in a way that's better than "confuse..
NeilStevens: Beyond sound roars and auras, no, I can't think of anything else offhand. But so what? How many attacks do you need beyond a ranged attack and a combat effect?
Fear resistance of course is just a binary ability, and it has to remain if we keep fear attacks in (which I can take or leave, personally). The idea that warriors, which one would imagine would be the most fearless group of people, would be most adversely affected seems silly.
RavenRed: Unless we implement an additonal spell-failure chance for Fearful Mages.
Shards can go, replaced by an appropriate mixture of piercing and slashing.
Ice ought to remain, as a combination of cold and physical attacks. Nasty stuff ice would be: it could stun you (blunt), cut you (piercing and slashing), and freeze your stuff (cold).
Which makes me wonder: should be have some sort of immunity to bleeding, in the way that one can become immune to poisoning, magical stunning, and paralyzation?
RavenRed: For the undead, certainly. (if they remain as player characters)
NeilStevens: Well unless I'm mistaken, shards resist in ToME 2 also makes you harder to cut in that way. That's where I think equipment should be able to give cuts resistance, too.
ElvishPillager: Since holy fire is now called Valinorean fire, can we change Darkfire to Morgothian Fire?
Chatter
NerdanelVampire: You know, Zothiqband was originally intended as a simple but thorough flavor-change with some ideas like the soul-selling option that I hoped to add once the basic game was working. Now it's beginning to look like Zothiqband will have to be a fairly radical departure after all. For example, something like a Venusian aether-ship positively must not be forced into "Medieval authenticity". And I absolutely won't release a version in which weapons don't use dice.
The nice thing in the old damage system was that it was so versatile. For us module developers making non-Tolkien modules (I love Tolkien, but I want to give something else a chance for a change) increased specificity to the wrong direction means that there's yet another thing to take care of which makes things again a little more difficult. I would much prefer it if the initial 3.0 was just a port and 3.1 was where the radical changes went.
It sounds like me and Neil have irreducible differences in our item generation views. It sounds like the only way I can convince him of the obvious superiority of my approach would be to learn some lua and implement the {average} killing myself...
NeilStevens: On dice: The ToME combat code is strictly more flexible on damage distribution than the old way. You can implement literally any probability distribution you want. Already implemented in TomE (and ready to be copied into other modules) are uniform and binomal/XdY distributions (the latter was added by DG at my request).
On damage systems: What exactly is your complaint here? The NEW damage system is infinitely more versatile than the old system. The damage types and behavior that ToME uses have absolutely no relevance to the damage types and behavior of a module. Don't think that because ToME does things one way, that modules have to. The whole point of this long ToME 3 rewrite of half the game is to get module authors just that versatility.
As for item generation, you won't convince me even if you implement it. Hacking squelching into the engine shouldn't be necessary if your item generation and item list are written correctly.
RavenRed: I think we need to distinguish between damage types and damage effects. Damage effects are things like the gravity "warp" effect and confusion / fear / paralyse / slow (without necessarily doing any damage on their own). Damage types on the other hand actually do damage on their own terms (like burning, electrocuting, crushing etc). If they have an additional effect, fine, but that should a direct thematic result of the damage type, rather than a separate D.T. of its own. (Like Ice is currently)
NeilStevens: I agree. I thought I made that clear above, with my proposals to split out things like stun, confusion, and bleeding immunity from sound, confusion/chaos, and shards/slashing resistance.
CosmicGerbil Yay Nerdanel, I agree, we need dice based attacks Hope it won't be too hard to change over. Which makes me a little bit worried. How difficult will it be to add new damage types in. I mean, if Psy attacks are not included, I need to be able to add them into GerBand for the T3 Engine because of the mindflayer's mind blast attack.
ZasVid: No worries, everything looks to be relatively easy to tweak - adding new damage types should only a notch more difficult than adding e.g. new spells currently.
CosmicGerbil Yay 
NerdanelVampire: I hope the resistance section in the character sheet is easy to tweak too... All these changes in the ToME module add up.
NeilStevens: The whole "C" screens and character sheet are entirely rewritable by modules.
IngeborgNorden: I favor keeping more "core *band" damage types written up somewhere (even if it's only in a Lua script package) for module makers to download and add; not everyone has the time, skill, or patience to redefine nether and chaos from scratch. Furthermore, not every module will have a well-defined theme which justifies drastically reworking the damage-type list: Norseband, on one hand, should drop some types (like nexus, mind-blasting, rockets, and other "sci-fi damage") and rename others ("sunfire" sounds more magical than "plasma", for example). On the other hand, Freeband (my "generic setting" idea) will probably keep the same types as the average variant. I personally don't mind source-diving old code to restore a few deleted features, but other players are more easily frustrated and confused: they'd probably want a ready-made script package in the ToME library.
NeilStevens: We have enough to do rewriting ToME, and DG has enough to do adding to the engine, that we can't also write a bunch of things that we're replacing and removing in ToME, too. It's not a matter of just 'keeping' things: someone has to rewrite these.
NerdanelVampire: Lookie here for an interesting diff in the ToME CVS. Nuke and rockets were there but were removed. I hope the deleted entries can be used as-is (except for the player polymorphing effect, which appears to be unimplemented), as they look pretty complex to me.
NeilStevens: Yes, someone specifically took the time to rewrite those two, when we didn't want them in game. Don't hold your breath waiting for someone to rewrite nexus, chaos, nether, shards, and the like.
NerdanelVampire: Nexus, chaos, and shards are actually already rewritten and in dam_types.lua. I just made nether myself by editing it from the darkfire, and I can say darkfire is not in any meaningful sense nether renamed... The two have remarkably little in common, which is why I really should have used something else as the base. Also, I still haven't figured out how to implement experience drain.
-- Nether (without side effects) dam.NETHER = dam.add { color = function() return iif(rng(5)<3, color.GREEN, color.LIGHT_GREEN) end, gfx = 1, text_color = "#G", desc = "nether" grid = function(state) local y, x = state.y, state.x local c_ptr = cave(y, x) local f_ptr = f_info[c_ptr.feat + 1] if cave_feat_is(c_ptr, FLAG_PERMANENT) then return nil end if f_ptr.flags[FLAG_DEAD_TREE_FEAT] then cave_set_feat(y, x, f_ptr.flags[FLAG_DEAD_TREE_FEAT]) -- Silly thing to destroy trees when you worship yavanna inc_piety(god.YAVANNA, -50) end end, player = function(state) if player.has_intrinsic(FLAG_BLIND) then state.fuzzy = state.fuzzy or "You are hit by something ghastly!" state.obvious = false else state.fuzzy = state.fuzzy or "You are hit by nether!" state.obvious = true end end, monster = function(state) -- Compute how hard it hits if state.m_ptr.flags[FLAG_UNDEAD] then resist = resist + 25 end if state.m_ptr.flags[FLAG_GOOD] then resist = resist - 125 end -- Reduce damage based on resistance state.dam, state.resist = dam.apply_resistance(state.dam, resist) end, }
IngeborgNorden: Thanks for the diffs link, Nerdanel; that's code I can use! About "Morgothian fire": when I hear that phrase, I think of the flames of Udun (which suggest hellfire, not nether, IMO: Gothmog didn't life-drain his opponents). Nether could easily be renamed as "unlife" without breaking the Tolkienian theme; that name reminds me of the Nazgul and the life-stealing powers of the Black Breath.