AG: New stuff and HT's From: Todd Woods <woods@cs.uiowa.edu> Date: Wed, 03 Jan 1996 00:00:00 +0000 Talked with Hugh recently about the possibility of allowing individuals to engage in magic item research and item creation. Currently Hugh has to do alot of manual work for item creation and research, so he's not prepared to have more then a couple groups working on a few projects in the game right now. He will try to get some of the work automated so that eventually individuals will be able to pursue alternate magic item research if they so desire, but this might take awhile. There is one bit of news, you can now commission storage devices from the same guy(s) that create magic weapons. They will cost 10,000 gold for an individual storage device. The use of storage devices are still being learned, i.e. Hugh said that nobody had learned how to store alot of MP's into a storage device then take it along on an adventure and use the stored MP's (i.e. possibly to cast more Magical Fury's then normal, or to make sure that a healer has enough MP's to cast Cure Party as many times as needed along with a couple of other MP spells). There is still alot that needs to be specified about magic item research/creation, even the Enchant an Item skill is still being hammered out. Hopefully when everything has been decided upon Hugh will come out with a Magic Item Research/Enchantment Addendum ;). Might take awhile though, so be patient. On another note talked with Hugh about Half-Trolls. One of the problems I see with HT's is that regeneration heals a flat amount per level. A HT already has a high price to pay with statistics (highest in the game I believe) but as a HT increases in power level (s)he can take more damage due to increase stamina and DP's. For the regeneration skill to have the same affect (i.e. heal the same number of wound categories per regeneration) as the character gains stamina and DP the level in Regeneration must go up. But this means that a character must dedicate more and more ep to the regeneration skill, which at a 25 ep multiple is not cheap. I thought we could do something about this. There are been several suggestions regarding this. 1) That every level in regeneration heal a percentage of health. Sounds nice but then once a character gets to a certain level they can cure all damage. Also at low levels the affects would hardly be noticeable, which wouldn't be good for beginning/low power level HT's. 2) That regeneration be tied into power level. This would solve the problem somewhat in that as the power level increases the regeneration skill would heal more damage. This in some ways is a "free" bonus, and could set an (unwelcome) precedence for other skills. Also there is no real rational for tying regeneration to power level other then the fact that it would help HT's. :) 3) The one Hugh like was that stamina and DP's affect the amount a HT's regenerates. Already stamina has a mild influence on regeneration, i.e. +1 DP/5 stamina points starting at 15 stamina. But this isn't to a very noticeable affect. The increased damage absorbing capability from raising stamina 5 points seems to be more then 1 DP, so the bonus isn't very noticeable. Also there is nothing to compensate for increasing DP's. As stamina increases and power level increases a character naturally gains more DP's. There currently is no bonus for higher DP's to regeneration skill. The bonus to regeneration could be based solely on stamina, but stamina doesn't always reflect a characters DP bonus. Sometimes a character can have a high stamina and yet low to mediocre DP bonus and sometimes a low-mediocre stamina and have a high DP bonus. Therefore both stamina and DP bonus should have an affect. Since Hugh seemed to like this idea above the others it would be nice to explore this idea some more. Basically I need people who have or currently are playing HT's to come up with some realistic figures on how much of an affect stamina and DP bonus should have on regeneration. I know this can be somewhat difficult in that we don't know the exact amount of increased damage absorbing capability characters have as their stamina increases nor the exact affect size and build and power level have on this, but try to give some sort of figure. As an initial proposal I'd say the affect of stamina on regeneration could probably remain the same, just add a bonus to regeneration from DP's. Could probably use the same guidelines (i.e. +1 DP/regeneration for every 5 DP's) but since a HT starts with 0 DP's could probably start the bonus at 5 DP's. This might be too much though, it's hard to tell the exact influence of all the variables. Any other suggestions? Later, Todd Up