Underground BBS

So i'm building my item database for Underground TA, and right now i'm re-working weapons.

I;ve always felt that weapon effects (e.g. "use <weapon> <target>") were poorly implemented.
Looking at the stock TA Source, it looks like the damage which an effect can have is limited to the maxdam of the weapon * 3.
Which is why it seems useless! At best, one use will get you no more than three of your max attacks.

So, here's my thought. make the failrate higher, and then up the max damage. This would make it a gamble to use, but might net more damage than a normal mele round.

Or.. i suppose i could make other effects. Like, poison, or paralysis.

Or.. I could leave them the way they are, but take away the attdelay. So, you could throw off your mele attacks, and then use the weapon like any other item, without throwing you into resting.

Just some idea's i'm open to others, please give me some feedback.

i am sure that this was a problem that the original programers had... if the use function is greater than the attack than why bother wtih the attack... unless the fail rate is 50% or so...

as for other functions things like paralysis well it is really cool for monsters and such. it would suck for PVP. i know i would be pissed if i was paralysised and than killed without so much of a chance to run or fight back... unless paralysis is just for a round or two.

i have no idea what is possible to edit or what can or canot be done but i love to play. any way here is a small list of things i think.

you can increase the damage even to unprecedented proportions say 200-400 points but the item has a 10 or 20% chance of breaking and being unusable forcing them to buy a new one

other ideas
temporarily lower target stats
1 or 2 round paralysis
poision but more than 2 points every round
it could destroy target persons items (you use item on me causes minor damage but also destroys a potion or item that i have)
could summon
have same damage but as an area of effect

does an item have to attack how about
use wep and are returned to town (like a heartstone but without the exp loss)
use wep and target gets healed like a kusamotu amount (depending on what weapon it is of course)
use wep turn invisable
use wep drain opponet of mana or vit or stats until they buy restoring

and from my mean spirted D&D days i gave a player a
weapon of completely random effects
use of weapon could cause any of the following
damage target
weapon unleashes butterflies that blind target for 1-2 rounds
drain target
paralysis target
heal target
strengthen target
cause user to go blind for x amount of turns
blind target for x amount of turns
unleashes bees that attack user for 5-10 damage

and my favorite:
use of weapon causes user to break into song and dance causing him to lose his round

hope this helps or at the least made some one smile

neverwhere

yea, exactly, if theyre raised too high, then theres no point in attacking anymore, unless theres a chance you'll miss completely.
The other option is to set things so that using the weapon doesnt lock your attack delay.

Yea, effects like blindness, or paralysis would definitely need to be temporary. Maye dependant on the level of the caster?


Not sure if i can lower stats.. might be possible. destroying items seems like it'd be setting me up for user complaints..
Summoning could be cool though.


I've toyed with effects like this on other items. For example, i setup a set of armor that worked like a soulstone. When you died, you were treated as though you had a soulstone, but you lost the armor.
I like the idea of adding non-attack effects to weapons.
I'd also like to play with the idea of a "proc" like you see in most mmo's. Each attack has a chance of setting off the weapon's proc, which will then have some effect on the target.

Add some variety to the game!



Ahhhh the old DnD days.

I'm sorry, I never really got very far with TA, so I'm not all that familiar with the higher level weapons... I was an immortal on FL Mud for a few years and made a few areas/items though... Sadly, this is such a long time ago, some of it is pretty rusty. moreover, we had editors for these things, so there was really no serious coding work for area writers.

What we used to have on FL (and indeed most other muds) was a combination of three types of affects on equipment:

1 was stat effects. This would affect either the players stats, hps, mana or whatever. Most common was a + to Hit and damage. The latter has no relevance to TA. Stat effects like + int and str and vit WOULD have a use in TA.

2 was spell affect. This would add a spell affect to the players char. This doesn't seem to have any relevance at all to TA. On FL, there were around 20 or 25 different spell effects that were common with high level chars.

3rd was Weapon_spell. There was a proc for the weaponspell. Each time the weapon hit, there was a chance for the weapon to activate it's spell. Some of these were vicious and nasty. I had a weapon with 2 chances to paralyze and 2 chances to vampyric touch (like yilazi for necros) each time it fired. I was generally not harassed by PvP'ers...

I believe the weaponspell proc was split into 2 parts. One was a simple proc for activating the WS itself.

This factored in a few things which were true for all weapons with weaponspells.

Class was a factor - caster classes had a much higher chance to have a WS fire than 'dumb' classes like warriors and thieves etc...

Stats were _not_ a factor in WS

Level was a factor at some stages in the mud's development, but the way WS worked was changed a few times.

As an anecdotal example, when I made Trafandyr, when he was level 13, he had a weapon which had a WS. When attacked by a level 50, both attacks from my lvl 13 to the other guy's lvl 50 fired the WS. Player level was not a factor in the success rate, nor was saving_throw. A year later, the code was changed and with 20 attacks, a mage would get maybe 5 or 6 fires of WS. A few years later, it was nearly 80% chance for WS to fire on a pure mage. A warrior might get 30%. A multi-class might have seen 15% or less. All variants of the odds were used for many months. People tended to enjoy the WS heavy variants, especially the last one.

Once the WS chance was rolled, it was pretty simple to enact the spell. Damage was generally based on the level of the user just as regular spells were, but I can't see that it would have been difficult for the level to have been standardized.

Much like the sorcerors' horn/wand/rod in TA, WS didn't really have a 'fail' rate visible. If it failed the saving throw, it just wouldn't show up as an attack. In other words, there were no messages saying 'you confused the syllables', it just wouldn't show that it fired.


In that game, almost any spell was used as a WS. There was one particularly annoying weaponspell that conjured water barrels, one that reduced the opponent's movement points, straight damage spells, spells that affected armor...

In a similar way, drain spells such as are present in TA could be used... Once a drain spell is active on a target, it blocks cumulative effects... Rodani, tsudani, igadani, poradani, jinasudani...

Armor effect spells - novadidan if memory serves...

If you wanted to get fancy, you could have it reroll every time it was recast, but I think it would be fine as is.

I believe that this type of system would make WS effective and interesting. It should be possible to get rid of delay times and confusion in this way. Honestly, I feel the Sorc's weapon/rod type combat a bit ridiculous.
***
Another method employed is that of Moria/Rogue/Angband which uses elemental brands to increase the damage of a weapon unless it's resisted, but those games have a far more sophisticated elemental system... What is used in Angband is to have Using items in a different category of action from casting and simple combat. I think this wouldn't be a bad idea... Recharge times were worked into the items themselves rather than the combat system. Hence using a Power Dragon Scale mail to cast a ball spell would not freeze the character, but would render the item "discharged" and unavailable for use for a certain amount of game time. After the time was up, the item could be used again.

In a TA setting, both weapons and armors could be used in this way. Having a damage cap (which of course is totally nonsensical and irrelevant IMHO) wouldn't be a huge deal since it would all be bonus damage anyhow. There could be a little message that printed for the user, something like 'the levinblade hums in your hand' or 'your charred chain mail briefly glows red and fades' or some such to indicate 'charged' status...
***

I did have a number of ideas for simple effects that would make some intermediate (and perhaps with multiple effects for higher weapons) weapons interesting and possibly useful in mid-game scenarios.

mostly these had to do with staffs since most of the weapon-intensive classes have a decent bit of progression through the lower levels...

Most of the effects were of the nature of: + to a stat or vit or mana, + to spell damage either all or of a certain type (flame type, dark energy type, healing type, acid type etc...), + to regen...

Personally, I feel that it would be interesting to have a number of choices with weapons so that not everyone has exactly the same set of gear as they wander about... For this, there would need to be a few actual reasons why an acolyte might want to switch to a staff for example...

I'm going to put a bit of a hold on that idea for now.

PS. for those not familiar with the term 'immortal' on a mud, it refers to a lower level administrator-type 'character'. Kinda like the sysop account, but like a helper with certain restrictions on what they could do... For example, I was level 52 for a while, then became level 54. Level 52 could change the appearance of items and rooms, load items that were not maxxed and a handful of other things designed to help with debugging, playtesting and managing the players (could also cut their socket, watch from their activity and create log files of their actions). At level 54, I was given more priveleges such as @set which could edit characters' stats, @load which could load anything, even if it were maxxed and some other goodies. At level 56, you could ban ip's, and make other significant edits as well as being given direct access to the file system server... Since I was not a coder, I was not given level 56.

Anyways, I'm not a coder, but I have seen some games' codes, so here are some ideas that might helpSo for adding a weaponspell, or indeed a weapon brand/elemental bonus (which I don't think is really appropriate to TA, but could be used... it would be best with a good quality system of resistances and immunities), I believe that all that is required is to go to the do_violence procedure and add a check to see if there is a special_procedure flag or not. If yes, run the spec_proc.

Special procedures borrow the hit calculation and damage calculation from the primary game engine (either in calling it or just copying and pasting or whatever... I'm not sure how TA's code works and I'm not a coder), then spit them out in the form of a standard attack. The numbers of the standard attack could then be used to calculate certain other effects such as critical hits, weaponspells or other effects.

Three primary examples of special procedures that I can think of would include:
adding a poison effect/elemental brand
adding a weaponspell
adding a weaponspell via the 'charge' system seen in the staves idea.

So, in my clumsy non-coder way, here's a rough idea for the weaponspell effect for the staves idea that might actually resemble the way that it would need to be written (or not):
check for special procedure - yes -
spec_proc=charged_staff_proc
run charged_staff_proc -
check for charge>1 - if yes
roll chance to fire weaponspell - if yes
DO_Hit
If hit connects (glances off armor OR does damage)
then DO_spell
Do_spell checks staff inscription, runs 'cast <inscribed_string> <target>' with 0% chance of failure
Do_spell reduces current_charge_value by 1.


There's more than one way to skin a cat. The hit procedure doesn't need to be internal like above.
In a much simpler way, a simple weaponspell could simply be like this:
if the weapon hits or glances off armor, THEN run a check for spec_proc on the weapon
If yes, roll chance to fire weaponspell - if yes
Do_spell and give 0% chance to fail (confusing syllables)


This would require the addition of an additional flag on every type of weapon. Namely a spec_proc value. I guess you could make it 0 or 1. You could also make it an integer value. 0= no, 1=weaponspell, 2=magical staff

To do special effects like + to stats, it should be simple - just add a check in the equip/unequip procedure in a similar way.

Death also removes weapons, so if it doesn't use the standard equip/unequip procedure, you would have to add a check there.

It could work like this:
equip
do a check for spec_effect - if yes...

if it were me, I would just simply make the adjustments. For example, to have a sword of Power that adds +5 stam, phys, +2 agi, +50 vit_max, I would actually change those actual values (not like what a rowan or hyssop does).
Upon removal, I would perform the same in reverse.

If you wanted to get tricksy, you could also do a check on leveling which checked for equipment bonuses and removed them, performed level calculations (for example stat raises) and then restored those values back to normal. This would prevent two things: first, it would prevent the whole idea of 'leveling equipment' and it would prevent these items from blocking stat raises (bring your phys up from 21 to 26 and it can no longer be raised on a level). It would also prevent people from intentionally lowering stats so they could get more stat raises if there were cursed or 'balanced' items (imagine a Staff of Ether which raised casting stats and lowered physical stats)...

To be honest, I can't actually comprehend what benefit there is to capping the level-gained stat raises at 25.

We have looked at weapon effects. There is currently a form of weaponspell in the game. It may be getting tweaked, but that's low on my priority list since that is largely Venom's baby.

I have presented an idea for the tweaking of the way it works currently to allow for low 'weaponspell' damage or high weaponspell damage when compared to the weapon's standard damage.

Then it would be a fairly simple matter to design a weapon with either high or low weapon damage and pick the weaponspell type appropriate.

[quote-neverwhere]
other ideas
temporarily lower target stats
1 or 2 round paralysis
poision but more than 2 points every round
it could destroy target persons items (you use item on me causes minor damage but also destroys a potion or item that i have)
could summon
have same damage but as an area of effect
[/quote]

Shouldn't be too hard to add poison - the problem there is that poison is somewhat overdone in the game and it can easily get out of hand. Imagine trying to fight someone who keeps poisoning you every couple of hits, but even as an acolyte you can only cure poison once a round... seems a bit unbalanced. A warrior could abuse this by attacking 5 times, waiting for the aco to hit dobudanimaru or drink potions or whatever, then attack that last time... Serious PITA.

Yeah, poison weapons are cool, but they need a careful hand to remain balanced. Especially considering the number of attacks that are possible.

Summon has the same problem. Remember, there is a limit to the number of monsters in the game.

Area affect weaponspells are being considered as above, but that won't happen for a while since that's not my ball.

[quote=neverywhere]
does an item have to attack how about
use wep and are returned to town (like a heartstone but without the exp loss)
use wep and target gets healed like a kusamotu amount (depending on what weapon it is of course)
use wep turn invisable
use wep drain opponet of mana or vit or stats until they buy restoring
[/quote]
I'm afraid that given the number of attacks, i'm afraid that it would indeed be necessary to keep things largely to straight damage. You have to remember that weapons hit far more often than casters' spells, so you can't make them more powerful than that. Anything that normally isn't done every round (like invisible) isn't really appropriate for a weapon.

Currently the weaponspell proc uses the same effects as the USE weapon, so it would be nearly impossible to do both. It COULD be possible to have 1 or the other though. So the weapon wouldn't have a weaponspell, but it COULD be activated by a USE WEAPON. It's just a bit of extra work.

What COULD be possible of the above list:
USE weapon for healing
USE weapon for drain stats (like the dani spells) - Note this is pointless on monsters, but why not have PVP only weapons?
USE weapon for drain mana (this could be complicated since it could overlap some necro spells... or it could complement them nicely)

Even nicer might be ARMOR with USE effects... heheh... quite a bit more work to implement though.

[quote=nonotherenottherenotanywhere]
and from my mean spirted D&D days i gave a player a
weapon of completely random effects
use of weapon could cause any of the following
damage target
weapon unleashes butterflies that blind target for 1-2 rounds
drain target
paralysis target
heal target
strengthen target
cause user to go blind for x amount of turns
blind target for x amount of turns
unleashes bees that attack user for 5-10 damage

and my favorite:
use of weapon causes user to break into song and dance causing him to lose his round[/quote]
Random effects MIGHT be doable, but I don't think it really fits to TA personally. Angband featured Chaos weapons and spells and I think a couple of artifacts that could be activated for chaos effects. There was also a spell that could affect you that would make everything you did affected by a similar randomization. Actually more of an irritation than a feature IMHO.

Nethack (a similar game to Angband/Moria...) had loads of chaos effects. I lost interest after level 15. Something about pointless deaths that just takes the fun out of things.

I'm afraid that I'm also somewhat opposed to making any weapons give stat boosts any more than current potions because I believe it is more useful to have the chars actually get real progression in themselves. This could mean that a weapon could push stats over 100. I haven't even checked to see if it's possible, but I'm trying to avoid making it even possible to break the 99 cap. Even if your character is level 80+

Having said that, to have a weapon's use the same as a rowan or hyssop or something would be cool - but probably only for certain chars. Further, would you want to give up the potential for having a weapon that did area effect storms for one that gave you free rowan use? Maybe pre level 15. Probably not after that.

Multiplay seems to make it somewhat pointless. Although a straight Rowan is technically more powerful than a body boost. Could also help free up a spell slot. Could be fun to have an item that boosted a random stat with it's activation, but this would be abused with scripts. remember, at 15 seconds a round, it would be simple to set a script, grab a coffee and come back 2 minutes later for a full set of strong buffs.