• Modules
• Glory

Glory

A module based in a new fantasy world. Lots of favourite cliche fantasy stuff; angels, demons, dragons, etc. All uniques, dungeons and artifacts will be unique to this mod. Well okay, I might rip off a bunch of artifact names and lore, as long as they're vague and translateable enough.

Design

First of all; some priorities. These are the things that must be fixed as they annoy me to no end in other modules.

• Clutter. This includes items, monsters, and the world.
  1. Items. There will be no corpses, except possibly for uniques. No monster, uniques included, will ever have more than a 50% chance of dropping even one item. No monsters will drop multiple items. Recalling to town to empty your backpack will not be necessary in Glory. Nor will slogging through piles of corpses to see if anything dropped a magic item of doom. Worthless items shouldn't drop. They should at the very least be very valuable to sell.

  2. Monsters. There will be no hordes of trivial monsters. The player should never feel the urge to just hold down an arrow button to slaughter a hallway (Or open room) filled with weaklings. Only summoner monsters will create such hordes, which won't be worth experience. (Instead the summoner will be worth a ton.) No chain summoning. No monster packs greater than half a dozen. No monster pits or vaults or anything of the sort, even on unique levels. No level should have more than two dozen monsters. Monsters will not spawn.

  3. World. Various aspects of the world need to be cleaned up. No more traps scattered randomly in dungeons; they will only appear on unique levels in specific (Nasty) places. Dungeons shouldn't have more than a dozen floors. Much higher ratio of unique floors to random floors is desired. Towns should be easier to navigate, so you don't have to waste time walking around a weird maze of walls just to buy some food or sell some junk.
• Uniqueness. This is the big thing.
  1. Permanent levels. This helps to prevent scumming, and makes each adventure more unique, since you won't be seeing as much of the game on each play through. If you encounter a horrible demon you can't kill, then fight your way past, sneak, teleport, or go elsewhere and return with more might. Also makes it impossible to lose artifacts. (Note to self; implement protection from stairclimbing abuses.)
  2. Slightly randomized characters. Nothing so unbalanced as to make someone want to reroll their character like in ADOM, but enough that when you select everything the same the chacter still does things differently right off the bat. Examples include equipment randomizing ala Nethack, and possibly something like a radom map to start the game with, or list of items/artifacts pre identified. (Note to self; implement artifact/magic item 'manuals' to ID them regardless of prior possesion or skills.)
  3. Extremely rare artifacts. Every random artifact in the game will be as hard to come by as Sting. Placed artifacts will be extremely difficult to aquire and only one may be used by any given character in their entire career. More on placed artifacts later.
  4. No generic magic items. There won't be any magic items you can feel guaranteed to get, ever. Shops won't refresh endlessly to supply you with whatever magic ring you desire, and there won't be piles to sift through. Not every character should be able to get slow digestion with starting money. Nor will they be able to get a stack of recll scrolls, teleport scrolls, healing potions, etc. Something much closer to Nethack is desirable (Minus the ability to scum monsters and create your own items!) Definetely not going to be possibly to find enough potions to max out every single base stat on your character.
  5. No guaranteed equipment. As above. Not every hero is going to have boots of speed, not every mage is going to have a staff of +80% mana, etc. Not even the most minor detail, such as permanent light, will be taken for granted. By the end of the game, your character will likely have some insanely munchkinned out gear and stats, but that doesn't mean you'll have everything. Items will have massive modifiers, not numeous (Or varied) ones. Certain modifiers, such as resistance and regeneration bonuses, will be common. Permalight, flying, see invisible, telepathies, etc. will be extremely rare. Having all of them will likely mean sacrificing major stats.
  6. Scumming impossible. I've already mentioned this a number of times. There will be no method of nudging the RNG in your favour. No rerolling areas, enemies, loot, stores, quests, nothing. No means of infinite experience, items or gold, no matter how impossibly contrived and difficult they may be. Player time spent will not be used as a balance against rewards in the game.
  7. Wide variety of attractive character design options. Players should be more than willing to try out new builds every time they roll a character. Even a hardcore magicless swordsman should try out different paths. To facilitate this, skills won't have caps based on your level, or growth restrictions based on your class or race. Swordmastery/stealth will be as easy to pursue as Sword mastery/healing. Classes will be balanced much closer to each other, so there should be more than 2 or 3 best races for any given class. Additionally, there will be the Legend system, (Glory's version of religions.)
  8. Non linear route through the game. Or more specifically, the lack of a linear route through the game. Some available dungeons will be randomized, with choices to be made to gain access to others. (Impossible to explore all dungeons, or do even half the quests in a single game.) A given quest to explore a certain dungeon might close off two others before you get a chance to see them. Goal of taking at bare minimum 5 full playthroughs to visit every place and kill everthing, given astonishing luck. Earlier dungeons will be more randomized in availability than later ones, so characters won't be as heavily impacted in the longterm.
• Engaging gameplay. More difficult, varied gameplay. Battles should require more serious thought, less spamming attacks and healing potions. Dungeons should be extremely different from each other, as should uniques and artifacts. Much faster gaming, faster levelling, shorter dungeons, more likely (and varied) deaths. I want people to die to a random monster they don't see again for 5 games, not die to a horde of monsters on quest X because it's the really tricky bit of the game. Additionally, the scarcity of equipment and the impossibility of getting more at will will make for situations to be handled differently based on your particular characters experience so far. Less "I can't go the dungeon X without resist Y. I'd better go scum for that." and more "Crap. Now I have to get past monster X without resist Y. I'd better think of something tricky".
  • Races. There will be very powerful, unique races. Angels and Demons with inherent flight and immunities (which can't otherwise be aquired, even by artifact.) Dragons. Vampires that actually have to feed off of living, bleeding monsters and rapidly gain/lose power based on that. Humans will be the equivelant of yeeks. Only worse, since all races and classes will gain xp at the same rate. Lycanthropes. Dopplegangers (New version of possesors.) Treants, gargoyles, golems, pixies, elven/dwarven royalty and pretty much any other race that is powerful enough and unique enough.
  • Artifacts.
  • There will be randarts again. However, I intend to make their creation and ranges very complicated, to prevent having every single ability on your character covered by half a dozen artifacts, and also to prevent weak artifacts from existing. Not that every artifacts will be useful for every character, but every artifact should be extremely impressive for at least SOME kind of character. As well, there will be handcrafted artifacts, with the same levels of power. Randomly aquired artifacts shouldn't be significantly better or worse than each other, with the exception that they will fall into 2 tiers.

  • There will be placed artifacts. Some will be quest rewards, others belonging to particular uniques (At a 50% drop rate.) Others will be found in certain dungeons, possibly hidden away in some difficult to reach vault. These artifacts will have incomparable power compared to the others, and each will be far and away the best item in the game for it's purpose. There will only be one placed artifact shield, perhaps with more AC than anything else in the game. Maybe an armor with insane resistances. I don't want to give away their exact strength or the level of munchkinism this point in the game will entail, but they will definitely make anything you made with the flame imperishable look like a trinket you'd rather sell than mathom. Additionally, each placed artifact will have an ability of some sort that cannot be found anywhere else in the game, by any means. An example would be ressurection of the character on death at long intervals, that no race, class, skill or anything else will provide. Abilities like precognition, reality changing (Risky!), wraithform, probability travel, extra limbs, sentience etc. will be under the singular rule of their own governing artifact. However, as I mentioned before, a character may only wield ONE such item, ever. (Although he might aquire others to use for the completion of a quest, or to mathom as a glorious munchkin treat.) These items will be unusuable until worn, at which point they will permacurse and prevent equipping, or possibly even carrying any other placed artifact in the game. They will also not reveal their true powers until equipped, although normal identification will reveal their lore, giving a hint as to their nature. Oh, and these won't be accessable until after you've "won" the game. Of course, you can't really win Glory can you? Or can you?

  • Dungeons. I want there to be an insane number of dungeons available. I hope to get a lot of help on this, because there will always be plenty of room for cool ideas. Nothing so simply as a ice dungeon or dungeon filled with monster X. Every dungeon will have some cool chunk of lore, and at least 3-4 types of monsters only found there, as well as at least 1 unique (Not necessarily always found there.) and possibly a type of magic item. (Even if it's just a scroll of something weird.)
  • Winning. Characters will become winners upon reaching level 50 (Yes, I'm aware that's no longer the level cap.) At which point they will no longer gain experience from killing monsters, and will aquire a trait reffered to as 'divinity' that will allow them to access the endgame, dungeons with such immensely powerful creatures and loot it'll be like starting all over again with a level 1 character. Placed artiacts will be here, along with 2nd tier artifacts to be randomly aquired. Although these artifacts still won't hold a candle to placed artifacts (I need a cool name for those, like 'relics' or somnething.) they will still vastly outshine the 'mortal' artifacts your character will have aquired up to this point. Mortal items won't drop in the endgame, which will be beyond the 'mortal' realm. Additionally, mortal items likely won't function. Scrolls of teleport will burn away and do nothing, healing potions won't avail you (Though at this point your HP should make them irrelevant anyways) and your wands will likely be too weak to impact anything. There will, at this point, be randart consumeable items. Potions of true full healing, scrolls of escape, wands that can tunnel through even the enigmatic ether that bounds the planes. However, these items will be just as rare as any other artifact, so don't count on getting anything to heal you aside from your own powers after level 50. Most of the innate effects of your equipment will still function, but your helm of magic mapping might not activate for anything anymore. Most places will be accessable in the endgame, unlike the mortal realm, however, you won't WANT to go to most places in the endgame. Mages won't last long in a realm of nullified magic, warriors in a plane where attacking physically is impossible, or either in Hall of infinite demons, unless they're specifically equipped to handle it. The range of these places that your character can face after winning will be the true test of just how glorious he (or she) is. A true winner will be one who defeats all of them, and slays every god. But if anyone ever did such a thing, I'd simply be prompted to add even more absurdly powerful realms. That is the goal of Glory. Strive for impossible legendary might, die trying, and brag about what finally killed you.

Charcter Growth

*Characters will start at level 10, and there will be no classes. (Maybe something like a class, but it would function as a subrace type effect and have little/no impact on growth.) You won't have to go through a starter dungeon before you feel like you're playing your character.

* My plan is this: Each level will grant the character X growth points and Y skill points. (Better names required for these.) So far I'm thinking 3/3 for this. The skills will be broken down into categories, such as magic, combat, stealth, etc. Not sure on the number of categories yet. I'll probably have to keep it small to allow for character variety in this system. Spending 1 growth point on a tree will increase the learning multiplier for each skill within that tree by .100. Skill points will be spent within trees. Therefore, character growth will be exponential. You could spend all your growth and skill on a single skill within a single tree and have that skill at 90 when you're at level 10. I'm hoping to make having a variety of skills essential enough that that won't be a popular choice however. And yes, you'll be able to make a stronger character in the long run by holding off on spending your skill points until after you increase your multipliers. However, again, I'm going to attempt to balance the game to make that very difficult. If I can't balance this aspect of the game well enough I'll be forced to scrap the whole system and make it differently. Maybe just with exponential skill points aquired. But I hope thats not necessary because that means a lot less thought and a lot more keystrokes. And yes, by level 100, a 'perfect' skill would be at . . . 30 x 300 9000. Ouch. Imagine having + 9000 swordmastery in tome. Of course, this would require going though the entire game with no skillpoints spent at all. I might make hitpoints only raised or primarily raised through a skill to help balance things.

Extremely primitive table idea:

Yeah I know some of those don't fit all that well, but hey, it's a roguelike, nearly everything fits into combat >_>.

Spell wise I'm torn between Thaumaturgy style random spells in each school and Fury style learn-to-access magic. I'm also unsure how many categories I should have, I think I'd like a lot to make spellcasters require some tricky decisions about which elements to choose, but that will be very hard to balance. But highly variable and interesting as well.

Abilities I haven't thought about a whole lot yet. There are a lot of options. Various stances could go here (Equivelent to running/berzerker mode etc. would need to be learned.) Useable combat skills would end up here as well. I'm thinking everything should cost only 1 point but have skill/stat requirements. Ability to read scrolls/use wands etc. goes here too. Door bashing, lock picking, tunnelling, all these things could have skill/stat requirements to enable to help spread out skill use and avoid single tree syndrome.

More to be added later

• Gods - Not sure yet. Will likely feature prominently in the end game. You know, when they (try to) kill you out of fear for their very being. Must definitely behave differently than normal monsters.
• Alignment - Not sure yet. Will resemble piety, and affect which monsters are your enemeies and which your allies, and to what extent (Unless you just kill everything without regard of course.) Will also impact quests and wieldable artifacts (Even ones randomly aquired.)
• Legend System - Not sure yet. Will be replacement for god selection in tome. Characters will select a facet of their character they wish to be legendary, and as they gain the equivelent of piety for this (Should be easy to implement like the former gods) they will gain benefits regarding it. I.e. A character with legendary stealth gains renown when stealing and backstabbing and sneaking past monsters, gaining bonuses to those abilities, and related stats. Might consider trying certain placed artifacts to the legends. (I have so many ideas for how to hand out those things I doubt I can implememnt enough unique ideas for them to accomodate all the places they could appear.)

Module Version

0.0.0

Need to learn how to code first. Or find a codemonkey to do it for me

T-Engine version

3.0.Updatetheengineplease

Author

StormIock. Not that I've authored anything much yet.

Last update

• Whatever it says at the last edited thingy at the bottom I'd imagine.

Chatter

StormIock : Speak, and let there be discussion and criticism of my mad ravings!

BucketMan: Hmm. Looks like my last comment was lost in the diffs. Basically: You probably won't be able to find a code monkey. There are already a lot more module ideas than people writing modules. I'd suggest you learn the engine. Fortunately there are lots of people willing to help people learn, but you should probably download the latest alpha and start tinkering with it. Fully a third of the changes you've proposed could be implemented in a weekend. Some would require more effort, but as you learn the engine and find out how to do more things you might think up other changes you'd like to implement. So I'd suggest less planning, and more coding.

Stormlock : Yeah, the codemonkey thing was basically a joke. I've always wanted to learn how to write this stuff, and I got a week off ahead of me, so I'm gonna bury my nose and try to create some sort of bug ridden mess to torture anyone foolish enough to test it for me. ^_ I'm hoping the lack of clutter will make this easier to write as well. More unique crud to write up to make all the dungeons, but few monsters, items, and spells will be necessary. I'm also going to be taking out quite a few skills to make their abilities available only to artifacts. Such as Mimicry, Necromancy, and Summoning. Before I start writing anything up though, I need to plan out exactly how character progression is going to work. I added some thoguhts for that above.

Sirrocco: Just a bit of feedback on your skills system. Skill points are a form of permanent power. You get a certain amount and no more, the things that you can buy with them are not available through any other means, and they are of significant importance. With a resource like that, if there is a way to delay using htem until later and by so doing significantly increase efficiency, people will do it. People will figure out how to do it. It may require being both lucky and smart to birthscum and scheme their way through the first ten levels with no skill points invested, but they will do it. Once they've done it, then, that will give them a significant long-term advanage over characters who have not doen things like this, and that advantage will seriously deform any attempts to balance difficulties. As someone who has, perhaps, a bit more of this tendency than most (You see? You see? This is why I kill the ninja!) I would say that my technique for the game design you describe would be the following. I would hold off on spending skill points and skill mods until, say, about level 10. At that point, I'm weeping openly from the difficulty of having to suffer through the first 10 levels without any skills at all, and my trail is littered with the corpses of fallen ancestors, but that's okay. The pain is about to end. I pick a tree that will be able to carry me through midgame, and will be useful in endgame, but is not my primary focus. Some form of magic works well - it'll give me damage-dealing and utility abilities in the short term, and general utility in the long term. At this point, I sink all of my skill mods into magic. I get a mod of approximately +3.000 in my magic skills. At this point, I can either spend all of my skill points in the magic tree, making myself far more powerful than any other character of my level (or any of the available content) or I can spend just enough to make levelling to about 15 feasible, throwing in additional mods along the way, and *then* sink in all available skill points. Regardless, this initial efficiency (far greater actual skill for given level) then lets me get to a *much* higher level without spending any further points - 40 or 45, say - at which point I can sink everything I have into the melee combat tree (first mod, then skill) and suddenly become a tremendously potent swordsman, who still has a healthy pool of magical effects to back him up. Of course, if I'm really pushing things, I can again do the trick where I buff myself up just enough to finish levelling to 50, spending the mod points int he appropriate place, and yet again get much better efficiency on my skill. This gets even *worse* if it turns out that, say, going with pure melee is better than going with a hybrid (and in an exponential investment system like this, it might be difficult to keep it from doing just that.) In general, the exponential system (mod points times skill points) is going to make it quite difficult to balance, and the moderately counterintuitive "cripple yourself as a path to godlike power" aspect is going to make it even harder, especially if you like the idea of people stumbling on your game as the first angband (or even first TOME) variant they play. In a game system like this, the sort of character they will build will die inevitably to levels of difficulty that won't even challenge the sort of character I would build, and the reasons they con't compete won't even make sense to them unless they actually come to the wiki and hang out on your discussion boards and someone explains it.

Just think of this as perspective. You will have players who are crazier than you are.

That having been said, your concepts are intriguing, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Stormlock: Ah, exactly the kind of feedback I was hoping for. I suppose I was underestimating the craziness of people. I can think of two solutions; one is to make spending the skill points at each level mandatory. That's kind of clunky though and rules out any craziness at all. The other is to make everything start out at a higher mod relative to the impact of the mod increasing points. However, I'm going to have to test things out first, since I did put in a few balancing factors already. For example, HP will be gained primarily through a tree with no offensive abilities. Since there WILL be ranged monsters, that will make getting around without extra HP kind of impossible. Especially if you can't make use of things like tunneling without spending points in the same tree. Also, the game is going to start you off at level 10. I realized how gimped everyone would be (Not just people trying to save points) at the start of a game like this. I hope that will lower the impact of initial efficiency and make more important the impact of long term efficiency (Being able to focus on one tree until you REALLY need 2 or 3 or even all 4.) You've definitely pushed me over in my decision to make magic highly multi schooled though. If you need at least 2 different elements (And points in mana, mana regen, and hp) to use magic to get to level 20, then there won't be nearly as much of a problem with overpowering via a single focussed school. Obviously however, this all bears much testing by people both crazy as we are (I like trying to go through 60 of 99 quests in ToME before spending most of my points for maximum FF efficiency, and my favourite class in Fury is a Mutant Rohanknight Sorceror- poor starting out but theoretically a god lategame with enough +spellpower\mana\hp gear thrown on.) and people with saner minds.

Derakon: One way to deal with players who want to hold off on spending skill/mod points is to make mod points retroactively improve the stat based on how many skillpoints were dumped into it. For example, if you've invested 10 skillpoints into a skill, then if your modifier is .1 then you have 1 skillpoint; if you invest another mod point in to boost the modifier to .2, then you suddenly have 2 skillpoints, and so on. This removes all incentive for holding off on investing your skillpoints, which may or may not be desirable.