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Ideas for PC advantages/disadvantages


Prince of Kitties

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I'm not sure if it's even possible to implement stuff like this without breaking compatibility with old save files. In case it is, though, I have some ideas...

 

Advantages

 

Faerie Blood (+20% XP): PC has faerie ancestry, incurring partial (50%) resistance to Magical type attacks. Does not incur any resistance to magical effects such as cursing.

 

Perfect Aim (+15%): When a target is within range, PC will never miss with missile weapons. Note that this does not imply that any damage will actually be done, only that the missile will always hit.

 

Fast Reflexes (+15%): PC has a 25% chance each turn of getting an extra action point.

 

Night Vision (+10%): Gives PC constant light of radius 3 squares, even without a light source. However, PC's eyes glow as a result, so creatures within the light radius can see them. Also, the light effect does not apply in light-sapping dungeons.

 

Disadvantages

 

Poor Spellcaster (-10%): PC's spell points regenerate at half the normal rate.

 

Weak Will (-15%): PC lacks the willpower to resist or maintain magical effects. As such, PC's chance of saving versus bad magical effects is halved, as is the strength of friendly magical effects such Bless and Haste.

 

...

 

How do these sound? Reasonable? Stupid? Am I beating a dead horse, seeing as no one is making new BoE scenarios?

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This is a pretty interesting idea. I'm not sure it can be added either without breaking legacy compatibility, but I'll leave that to the coding experts.

 

I'll add some of my own PC trait ideas.

 

Positive:

 

Great Wizard (-40% XP) - Essentially similar to the Natural Mage trait in the first Avernum trilogy. Increases damage bonus for the PC's Mage Spells and allows the PC to cast Mage Spells even when wearing encumbering armor.

 

Super Lucky (-50% XP) - Increases bonuses and effects from Luck. Which includes hit rate and damage, resistance to magic, and the chance to "luck out" of dying.

 

Magical Defenses (-30%) - Decreases damage taken from fire, cold, magic, and poison attacks. The bonus is 20%.

 

Disadvantages:

 

Unfortunately Hexed (+20%) - Acts sort of like a permanent Curse status on the character. Also increases damage taken from all sources and the effects of negative statuses.

 

Mentally Atrophied (+25%) - Increases likelihood of being inflicted with dumbfounding as well as permanently lowering the intelligence stat by 3 points. The character will also occasionally have his/her spell points drained time to time.

 

Lowered Immunity (+22%) - Decreases the chance of resisting any negative status effect inflicted. The chance is lowered by 20%.

stat of the PC by 3 points.

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I'll add a few more, but I'm not sure how to classify some of them, or what percentages to use.

 

Increased Focus (Advantage): Increases the effectiveness of all Mage and Priest spells (though not to the extent of the "Great Wizard" trait suggested above). Also allows the PC to cast Mage spells while wearing encumbering armor.

 

Hands As Weapons (Advantage, I think): This PC has been trained in unarmed combat. The PC is given a bonus to damage/chance to hit with no weapon equipped, and a penalty to damage/chance to hit when there is a weapon equipped.

 

Hotheaded (Not sure): You're always looking for a fight, and have little to no regard for personal safety when you find one. Gain a slight bonus to hit with a melee weapon, and a penalty to both your chance to evade attacks and your armor rating.

 

Easily Distracted (Disadvantage): Has an increased chance of being hit in combat. Also, if the PC can cast spells, these will have a lessened (if any) effect.

 

Chaotic Combatant (Disadvantage): All attacks have a 10% chance of doing either extra damage or no damage at all. Also, magical and non-missile melee attacks have a chance of damaging the PC, or anyone else nearby (friend or foe), instead of the intended target.

 

Poor Marksman (Disadvantage): All ranged attacks have an increased chance of missing their targets.

 

Then there's "Pacifist" from E2 (Disadvantage): PC can't attack in melee, fire missile weapons, or cast damaging spells.

 

Originally Posted By: S M Adventurer
This is a pretty interesting idea. I'm not sure it can be added either without breaking legacy compatibility, but I'll leave that to the coding experts.
It would depend on when/where/how the BoE engine checks the PC's traits.
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Um. I can't see any way in which something like this could possibly break legacy compatibility. It's not like there's any plan to make sure older versions of the client can load the new save files.

 

I'd be more worried about other sorts of issues, like game balance; new traits could make hard scenarios suddenly easy if you have the right ones.

 

Still, I do like the idea of adding new traits, so feel free to continue posting ideas!

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There has always been the ability to create a "God" Party and I'm sure we all have our own favorite version(s) available. I doubt that any "new" characteristic would jeapordize the quality of play, (any more than has quite likely already been done), if/when someone wanted to use these new characteristics on an original Scenario.

It seems more likely that creating additional characteristics might entice potential Authors and existing Authors alike to attempt a few new Scenarios utilizing these new characteristics.

Or, possibly, entice them to create follow-up Scenarios for ones that had already been established.

And that, I feel, would be a very positive effect.

(Hmmm... Blades of Exile II...)

me

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Originally Posted By: Celtic Minstrel
I'd be more worried about other sorts of issues, like game balance; new traits could make hard scenarios suddenly easy if you have the right ones.

I imagine that's more of a "let the player beware" issue than anything else. If new traits were implemented, they'd just have to be marked as new and potentially balance-upsetting.
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Actually I was thinking quite deliberately of potential effects on game balance, with "Perfect Aim" anyway. Particularly game balance in terms of what PC skills are actually useful. "Perfect Aim" would (I think) make dedicated archer PCs a more reasonable proposition, without making them terribly overpowered.

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I believe I understand your logic and I also feel that there could have been at least a bit more 'fine-tuning' of a PC's abilities, or at least a few more abilities available.

There would necessarily need to be a limit on the number of initial abilities or they would overwhelm the game itself. I'm sure that was considered when these games were originally created.

As time passes, the PC 'grows' to 'learn' just as it happens in 'real life'.

In many Scenarios Authors have created 'Special Items' to accomplish this purpose and there is a lot of room for a lot of Special Items. Perhaps the creators of the basic program, and others, deliberately minimized the initial abilities of the PCs to that of a 'Novice', but allowed the creation of 'Special Items' to accomplish the effect of 'growing'.

me

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Some of these would require changing the way statistics work. Most of the effects gained from Luck come from a single array of percentage values.

 

Actually, come to think of it, if Chokboyz really did change all the out-of-101's to out-of-100's, 20 Luck may now ACTUALLY make you immortal.

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I might be reading pc_record_type wrong, but it looks like traits are stored as an array of 15 chars, each of which can be 0 or 1. That means traits are being stored using 15 bits out of 120. It shouldn't be necessary to break backwards compatibility -- there's no practical limit to the number of choices you can encode in that space.

 

In the day, people used to offer packaged parties with skillsets suited to a scenario. It's worth considering that -- you could reserve a few hundred traits for players (more than you'll ever use), and then populate another set available for scenario designers which grant basic mechanical advantages. Hell, if you could get scripting nodes to check for the existence of those traits, you could do some pretty interesting things.

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Hmmm...some of those disadvantages look a little game breaking. I mean, getting XP bonuses for being a bad archer is a great "disadvantage" for characters that don't ever use archery, which is most of them.

 

Likewise, magic point regeneration being slower has no negative effect on people with no magic points, though high level fighters will be made into fighter-priests.

 

...

 

In regards to special items giving these sorts of effects, is there any way to have special items only affect one character?

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