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• Dragon Ball T
• Strange Ideas

Sirrocco: *This* page was *also* getting a bit long, so I'm setting up an archive page for it. Everything that's done and gone and implemented will be deleted. After all, with implementation, it's no longer a strange idea. Everything that's still unimplemented for whatever reason will be archived - it might be useful inspiration for later.

• /Strange and Old

Chi

As of V090 This section was added to the wiki pre V085, and since then pretty much everything that Sirrocco proposed has been implemented. Many thanks to him for having such terrific ideas! Here are a few straggler concepts:

Sirrocco:

• It would be cool to have a fusion power. No, I have no idea how to make this even remotely workable in game.

  • BucketMan: Fusion ability is planned: both ability and potara earings.

• Willpower (and intelligence, to a lesser extent) should play a deeper and more meaningful role. "Do you want to be a Spirit? No? Good. It's a dump stat. Otherwise max it." should not be the sum total of willpower-related strategy.

  • BucketMan: Those who dump willpower may suffer for it. It's the sole determining factor in mental and magic resistances. (Ranfan charming you, Buu turning you into chocolate, etc.)

• Suggested chi power: Zen Marksmanship: Like battle aura, but only affects firearms. Normal battle aura, obviously, would have no affect on firearms.
• Suggested chi power: A chi power to make duplicates of yourself (as summons).

  • BucketMan: Seems reasonable, but doesn't excite me. Open for discussion if anyone wants to try to convince me.

• Suggested chi power: A chi power (trainable under great duress by Master Roshi) that would allow you to trap anyone indefinately, given a rice cooker. It would, of course, cost you your life, but we have ways of dealing with that. The resulting rice cooker with capturee would qualify as an artifact.

  • BucketMan: Planned.

Technology

As of V090 Technomnancy needs love. Most of this discussion predates V085, but much of it is still relevant.

BucketMan: Technology has picked up a good chunk of power and usefulness in DV, and I'm thinking it may need some conceptual revisions as well. I'm toying with the idea of expanding the 'non-Technomancer' range to 20 Technology skill (thus a hefty 60 total skill points, and rework the Intelligence requirement) and then making Construction and Disassembly trained solely through actual use. As in, you build something, you gain skill. You dismantle something, you gain skill. Items can be flagged as 'already caused a gain' to prevent people from feeling the need to sit in town and scum build/disassemble. Unfortunately, I've a sneaking suspicion that this sort of arrangement soudns good on paper, but ultimately might end up aborted, like the xp-gain skill system was. Technology isn't as badly in need of revision as Chi was, but it does need something, and I'm not entirely certain what.

Like Chi, we probably need to wait for V085 to be released, but feedback is welcome.

Sirrocco: a few instant reactions...

• 60? That's 10 full levels. That's a significant percentage of overall power for anyone except an extreme endgame character, and fairly meaningful even then. For contrast, that much under the old chi system would get you 20 chi gung, 20 chi regen, haste, and the token 1 chi with a bit of change left over, from Korin.

  • BucketMan: Yes, Technomancy in lieu of Chi seems pretty reasonable to me. We don't want people to be able to do everything. Also, remember Technomancers don't have to invest in swimming, first aid, or flight. That's 15 skillpoints they don't have to spend.

• It would mean, essentially, that anyone who used much technology at all would have that as a significant facet of their character. It also makes it rather more difficult to play a competent technologist/marksman with a secondary combat style... and adding in any sort of Chi skills would make it far worse. It sounds like (from the things you've described) it would be essentially impossible to defeat Buu with a primary marksman, barring scumming the dragon or some equivalent.

  • BucketMan: Beating Buu with a marksman is more or less impossible as is, because he's immune to bullets, and tends to eat bazooka rounds. As to Technology, I still maintain that only a couple points of Technology is perfectly viable. Again, I usually stop at one.

• Seems to me that the better technomancers should have higher technology skill, even after they hit the breakpoint. I don't see that that's the case here.

  • BucketMan: They can...but at the moment it doesn't really do anything for them. Technology skill increases trap disarming abilities, but not enough to be worth investing skill points for. Laptops and jetpacks are the only thing I can think of with a requirement over ten. The range needs to increase. As is, there are some levels of Technology skill that grant access to five devices. we're picking up about half a dozen new device types with V085. 20 at least. Maybe 30, and drop the cost to 2 per point. Or maybe have a threshold-crossing cost of 15 or so to actually become a technomancer, and learn Costruction/Disassembly. Maybe generally taper off the relative 'value' of Technology skill so that it's not really worthwhile to invest in the last ten points of Technology to the threshhold unless you're goign to go all the way and become a Technomancer.

• note that taking the int out of the chi equation raises the cost of entry for technology marginally.
• I echo your feelings on Construction/Disassembly, but am not currently such that I can explore them well.

BucketMan: I think I have a general idea where I want to go. Technomancy is moving towards becoming viable as a primary profession. Simply one that isn't available in the early game. Similar to chi, and in fact, completely viable as an alternative to chi. But, differently cooperative with the skills of the existing professions. You can play a dedicated barehanded fighter. Or a dedicated weapons fighter. Or a dedicated marksman. If you want to take up Chi, you're probably playing barehanded or weapons in the early game, and then add chi later on to enhance what you already do. You could play a dedicated chi practitioner, but you'd have a tough time in the early game. (In fact, a dedicated Chi practitioner is probably the most powerful possible character in DBT. 10,000 damage chi blasts, anyone? Free, infinite heal-self for 1000hp per turn? Spending skill points on fighting skills will be the only thing that keeps you from doing this.) Just like Chi, a player who picks up Technomancy is probably going to play something else, in this case either a weapons fighter or a marksman, and use Technomancy to enhance themselves, in lieu of Chi. But, like Chi, I'd like to make a dedicated Technomancer (i.e. the gadget's wizard) a viable option (Stack of 99 oxygen tanks, lure a monster and toss a grenade, anyone?) Just one that's similarly difficult to survive the early game to be able to pull off as a dedicated profession. And finally, like marksmanship, but unlike Chi, it will only be viable for the easy 'Melkor' endings (i.e.: Dr Gero, Freeza, the Androids and Cell) but not through to the ultimate 'The Void' ending (i.e.: Buu.)

Dance Partners

As of V090 Most of this has gone official, and is either implemented, or pending implementation. Leftover concepts:

• Sirrocco: "Magical Girl Training" which doubles your chi capacity, but also tanks your stealth hard enough that you effectively have aggravate without the Hostile Allies effect.

• Sirrocco: Village Hidden by Ninja (It is so utterly surrounded by ninja pretending to be other things that it is actually pretty difficult to find.)

• Sirrocco: Finally, you get to the village, they summon some kaiju-class beastie and/or ancient wizened master, and you fight, with various magical girls (some in mecha) as unexpected backup.

  • BucketMan: Time and energy permitting, I'll add variant quest for technomancers who study dance. No mech support for non-technomancers. No need for the quest to play out identically for all builds.

• Sirrocco: They offer one chi ability - henge - once you've hit their stealth max. It massively pumps your stealth, but breaks as soon as you move. Still, it's really handy as a way to rest safely, as long as you can get out of direct line-of-sight. Intended effect is that as long as no one saw you enter it, all monsters are effectivly nonhostile until you break it.

• Sirrocco: Kawarimi. Kawarimi is either on or off. When it is on, it's a constant low-level drain to Chi (seems we have a lot of those). While under its effects, any damaging attack has a chance of being nullified and triggering a teleport max 10 or so. Higher levels of Chi Defense improve your chances.

• Sirrocco: The big thing that the Ninja offer is relatively efficient Will.

  • BucketMan: Hmm.

• Sirrocco: The Village Hidden By Ninja was also, incidentally, a bit of a nod to the Tick.

Skills and combat

BucketMan: TaeKwonDo could come back. (Again, it's a ridiculous omission.) We could gain Aikido to oppose Judo, and Greco-Roman wrestling or Jiu-Jutsu to oppose Sumo. Kungfu could be divided into into northern and southern styles. I've toyed with the idea of having two separate 'school' systems. 'Martial Arts' on one side, and then Ballet, Yoga, Pilates, and 'The Gym' on the other. Lots of possibilities. The issue ia having too many schools, and that's the only reason we lost TaeKwonDo. Unfortunately there kind of aren't enough basic skills to go around, and with too many schools it stops mattering where you study at because it all start to be the same, but with different names. There's also the issue of having the ultimate end-game skillcaps coming out in the right spot. As of right now, eight schools is the 'magic' number to get everything to come out right, and we're contorting slightly to make that number happen.

Sirrocco: Skills: one obvious place for skills is in the ninja strike-from-stealth realm. Split stealth in two parts. Normal stealth just lets you move around quietly. Assassinate lets you use that stealth for lots of extra damage and keeps your kills stealthy too.

• Durability: subtracts from the damage of every blow you take. It won't do much for the really big blows, but it'll let you laugh off the small fry. Might need a better name. Also protects against the effects fo stun.
• Boot to the head: Gives you a chance of causing a level of stun with every blow you land. A few levels of stun will do bad things to your to-hit and AC. A few more will incapacitate you. Higher-level foes recover from stun faster, and a number of the more significant enemies are simply immune. If you can afford to focus on one guy, and your skill is high enough, and you can hit him reliably, you can shut him down and whale on him until he falls over. This should probably be from a school mutually exclusive with "Durability".
• Grappling: New combat style. Requires both hands bare. No bonus to AC. Hit chance determined by dex and grapple skill vs AC. Hold chance determined by str and grapple skill, vs something appropriate. Hit only needs be successful once. Once opponent is grappled, opponent's choices are limited - can attempt to break free or fight from within grapple, but many are not so skilled at grapple-fighting, and most weapons are useless. Each round that grapple is held, does damage as function of str + grapple skill. May require more detail in monsters than we currently have or care about. Is also not terribly applicable to Dragonball itself - but having a school of judo that is effectively hard-style is silly. Other grapple skills might include "choke-out", which applies stun, or "disabling hold" which has a chance of dislocating, tearing ligaments, and so forth.
• Pressure point: for unarmed. Small chance every strike of doing something silly and unfortunate to your enemy. "Oh look! now he's vulnerable to fire!" Higher skill makes chance more likely (though absolute max shoudl be about 25%, or maybe not even that high). Might include ability that would let you focus on pressue-point strikes to the exclusion of all else - your strikes stop doing damage entirely, and your to-hit goes down a bit, but the chance and potential severity of a pressure-point hit go way up. Wonderful opportunity to throw in tons of flavor text. "Your enemy collapses helplessly in convulsive giggles." Also somewhat non-DBall, but not badly so.
• Disabling blows: style and/or skill. As style, reduces total damage done. Regardless, causes change for some blows to be disabling strikes - knees, groin, and so forth. There would be a small number of potential disable effects - mostly reductions in speed and damage of opponent. Might also harm to-hit and/or AC.

• What happens if you die when fused but have enough chi to survive as a spirit?

  • BucketMan: Good question. Barring any better suggestions, I'll probably just disallow un-fusing while dead.

• Random thought: perhaps you *ought* to have a weapon school based on two-handed weapons and overwhelming power. It's not like it's out-of-genre or anything. It would also help to evade that whole issue of, well... "How can I withstand such mighty blows? Simple! I study... Ballet!"
• Random thought subthree: have different fighting styles. This is somewhat mentioned above, but the idea is that you would learn styles as abilities, that would have some noticeable effect on your fighting. The "grapple" skill, from above, for example, could just as easily be "unarmed combat" with a "grapple" style. Most if not all dojos would teach one or more styles along with its core skills, and some might require you to purchase the style before training you in some of the skills. (others would require you to master the basics before you began the style.) Kickboxing, for example, might have a style that would actually give you extra attacks, but would also subtract heavily from your AC. Stuff like that. Styles would be managed in much the same way as run speed is currently. Pressure point skill would let you take advantage of pressure points when the openings were there. Pressure point style would be the focal thing.

  • BucketMan: I've toyed with this idea...but I've yet to come up with a way to implement it that I like.

    • Sirrocco: I'm not sure what you mean. It would be like the walk/run/search/sneak option. You start out with the simple "streetfighting" style. As you pick up styles from various places, you add options. Some of those options affect you in weapon combat, others affect barehand, some might affect both. You could even have a few styles for marksman - anywhere from "sniper" to "spray and pray".

• Random thought subfour: What's up with run speed, anyway? Seriously? At this point, I'm fairly convinced it doesn't add. Make the "run" effects default, let the stealthy types get "sneak", with appropriate modifications, and just make each individual search action take longer as the characters slow down a little fromt the hyper dash that is their normal existence. In original TOME, run speed and ferocity are meanginful (if somewhat cheese-laden) tactical choices, with a few abusable bits that require some annoying frobbing to do on the player's part (like being a coward at every moment you're not actively attacking someone). In Dragonball T, much of the abusability goes away, but so does almost all of the tactics. The only people who are going to care about stealth are going to be the ones spending skill on it, and they have a purchased ability that you can just make into a toggle.

  • BucketMan: Bring back tactics? Yes, that's probably a good idea. As to run speed...where does it look incorrect? Any and all speed changes resulting from equipment are displayed incorrectly (I don't know how to fix this yet) but the computations from movement mode look correct to me. For running, the bonus should be: (Speed + Dex - 8) / 4, with a minimum of +3 and a cap of +10. Slowdown from encumberance is not quite correct. I'm unsure about stealth. I haven't actually done the math, but at a glance it looks like it should be possible to get a stealth bonus from equipment equal to a stealth skill of about 50. Of course, the AC hit you have to take to do that makes it awfully prohibitive.

    • Sirrocco: You misunderstand. Perhaps I am not clear. I wasn't saying that the calculations were incorrect - just that pretty much everyone is going to immediately turn on "run" as soon as they start the game. After that, they likely won't trun it *off* again until and unless they either have something specific to search for or pump points into the stealth skill. Having "run" be the default state, and the "searching" effects trigger off of the search commands would simplify things and remove a bit of annoyance, without otherwise changing the game pretty much at all. Also, it would make life a bit more survivable for newbies.

• Random thought subfive: if you *want* to take the combat system much more complex, you're going to have to start making monsters a bit more complex. For example, disarming attacks are *totally* appropriate to Dragonball, and could very easily be one of the things that set a weapon school apart from its peers, but to implement them right, you'd have to designate which enemies were using weapons in the first place, how hard they'd be to disarm, and how well they'd fight without them. Trying to grapple a swordfighter is a far different proposition than trying to grapple an unarmed fighter. Actually being *in* a grapple with a sword-fighter is a very different proposition than being *in* a grapple with a knife-fighter. That's not to mention the difficulty of actually blocking bladed weapons as an unarmed fighter without the right gear. On the other hoof, there's a reason this is in "strange ideas".

  • BucketMan: I can conceive of flagging monsters whether they fight armed or unarmed, and changing grappling odds accordingly. Tracking whether monsters have been disarmed and having their AI's behave accordingly...well, it could be done, but it would be a lot of work. Probably won't happen.

Firearms

SkizzaltixZaxali: I made a new section for this, because it didn't seem to fit into anything else. Note that I posted this last week on the content to-do list, and then looked at the list of subcategories and noticed this page ; So, here goes:

• I was looking through your items script, and you don't have much variety with firearms... It's just pistol, rifle, machine gun(And the silencer--I like that. Have you gotten it to wear out after a number of shots? That would be really neat). I feel like you could have some more levels there, like:
• Jericho 941 (Subsonic handgun) -- Low damage, medium size clip, if possible, can be set to fire two bullets per shot, but lower damage (Like the K40 in 007 Nightfire)
• .338 magnum -- medium damage, small clip
• .50 magnum -- High damage, small clip

And then, to add another pop-culture reference to DBT:

• Golden Gun -- Very high damage, single(?) bullet clip

Then you could have shotguns:

• Break action shotgun -- High damage, spray effect if possible, slow reload(Can you do that?)
• Lever action shotgun -- High damage, spray effect, very slightly faster reload
• Pump action shotgun -- High damage, spray effect, slightly faster reload
• Automatic shotgun -- Lower damage, spray effect, medium-slow reload(Faster than the other shotguns by a fair amount).

Rifles:

• Hunting rifle -- Medium damage, small clip, normal speed reload
• Assault rifle -- Fires two bullets with every shot, large clip

Automatic weapons:

• AK-47 -- Medium-low damage, fires four bullets per shot, large clip
• AKM -- Slightly lower damage, fires three bullets per shot, same clip, lighter to carry

• Minigun -- Medium damage, very large clip, fires six bullets per shot, very heavy to carry (Maybe even immobile, but can be packed up and then set up again when you want it, but with devastating damage and spray.)

BucketMan: Differentiating firearms like this is not likely to happen any time soon, if at all. We'll be picking up shotguns and miniguns sometime between now and technomancer battlesuits, but I don't anticipate breaking down gun TVAL's into large numbers of unique weapons. They absolutely belong in the world, but it's simply not something I want to focus tremendously on. I'm also not planning on implementing variable reload times or variable capacity clips. Consider the current arrangement: ammo capacity is determined by gun, and clips are generic for all firearms. No basis in reality whatsoever. But I just don't see a realistic system adding very much to gameplay. Do players want to have to wait multiple turns to reload a gun? Do players want to have to juggle half a dozen different types of ammunition? Do players want clips and bullets to be different things? Do players want their firearm accessories to wear out and break from use? Do players want to be required to clean their weapons after swimming? I don't think so. And when you take all this away what's left is mostly just 'guns with different names.' So again, I don't think we'll go that way. Plus, some of the distinctions you've suggested above don't make a lot of sense to me. A "hunting" rifle is any rifle you hunt with. You can hunt with an AK perfectly well. And what's an "assault" rifle? Take any civil-war era wooden stock rifle, add a pistol grip, metal folding stock, scope and a tripod and poof! You have an assault rifle. We could do this...after all, silencers and ballistic plates can already be added to guns and ballistic jackets, but adding this level of detail would take a lot of time and energy away from other things...and what is gained by it? In the end it mostly comes down to damage multipliers and ammo capacity. So, overall the plan is to only introduce firearms in ways that allow them to be different. I am planning on importing shotguns from Zombie Horror, along with the two new ammo types, and miniguns primarily for mounting on technomancable suits.

BucketMan: Meh. I felt inspired. Guns are getting some love right now. Not quite what you asked for, but improvements nonetheless.

• SkizzaltixZaxali: It's true, guns aren't the primary weapons system for DBT. As for the silly names, the only gun here with a real name is the Jericho 941, which I learned about by wikipeding 'subsonic handgun'. But the 'hunting rifle' could be defined as 'any rifle which it is legal to hunt large game with in Denmark'. That would rule out anything with a silencer of course, but it's a pretty small class of weapons. My knowledge of firearms comes entirely from the Wikipedia page on silencers and 007 Nightfire (Which has no real firearm names, because of copyright issues). In retrospect, the multiple turn reload is a bad idea. But you could do the the multiple shots per turn, and that could be neat. I hadn't meant different kinds of clips. Maybe if you wanted to have .50, .338, and .15 (I think those are the three common ones), sure, but I say, keep it as 'standard clips'. Have each gun have a capacity flag and a shots flag, probably a damage flag too. It shouldn't take more than a simple call in the firearms script to work these out. You probably don't want the number of guns I had there, either. Maybe one or two pistols, say, a subsonic and a .50, maybe one shotgun, a manual or semi rifle, one or two automatic weapons, and maybe the Minigun (I like the idea of putting them on techy suits). Add to that a smoke bomb, a frag grenade, and maybe a flash bang grenade, and one or two kinds of missile launchers, and you have a fully viable class. Maybe you even want a sniper rifle -- Single clip, acts like binoculars when aiming and have very long range, but one bullet per clip. I don't think it would work very well, though.