[CF-Devel] Change in equip method.

[Mark Wedel]

     pstolarc at theperlguru.com
     
      wrote:


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      Nice idea here.  I would change it so that instead of being unable to
     
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      wield/wear/whatever the ego item, it would follow the AD&D rules,
     
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      which I'm assuming you got it from.  The weapon tries to control you,
     
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      which would translate in game terms as a confusion attack/reduced
     
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      confusion resist and paralyze attack/reduced paralyzed resist if their
     
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      is a large ego difference.  Also fear/turn undead if that code works
     
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      on players, though I've never seen it actually do anything.  The
     
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      lowered resists are constant, but make the attacks occur at the most
     
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      inconvenient possible time.  "You're low on HP, your bless just ran
     
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      out, and now your sword turns on you."
     
     

  I beleive that Peterm had originally envisaged the spellcrystal doing various 
special things.

  As a first pass, I would just make it so you can't use it.  Perhaps later it 
can be extended to have various strange effects.  I have a feeling for the most 
part they would just be very unpopular (being too nasty, eg, your sword takes 
you over in combat and you die), or the opposite side, in wich they don't have 
enough bad effect, so that side effects they cause just end up being nuisances 
(oops - became confused wandering to the next town.  Time to cast that cure 
confusion).

  But this could always become an option at some point.


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      Basically if a level 1 character tries to wield a chaos sword, they
     
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      will be able to hold it, but will have no control over their
     
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      character, and will probably die quite quickly.
     
     

  Its a bit harder todo this in a computer based game than in real life, in 
which that first nasty combat (and the DM knows it is nasty), the sword does 
something bad.  Its fairly difficult for a program like crossfire to really know 
how nasty that encounter will be (many factors - a combat could be easy or 
impossible for the same character, depending if he as the appropriate potions in 
effect for example).

  My personal thought is that ego should be public information anyways (if the 
item is identified, you know what its ego is).  So it should be easy for players 
to figure out the totals and decide what to do.

  OTOH, the amount of ego that the equipped items exceed the characters ego 
could have some variance in occurence and how often the effects something. 
Thus, if a character had a nice set of items that worked together and just 
totalled their ego and died, they could still use that stuff, and being only a 
couple levels short, things wouldn't be too painful.

  But in any case, all this ego could would still need to be written.


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      Also, make personality levels factor into this somehow.  "You convince
     
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      the chaos sword to do your bidding.  For now..."
     
     

  Yeah - I think physical level is used right now?  That doesn't make a lot of 
sense if all items and not just weapons are included (even for weapons, you 
could say it doesn't make a lot of sense, but I think that was done so that the 
pure fighters could use their good weapons.

  with something like the scripting code, you could even have the potential for 
some items having higher ego values based on the characters class/race/whatever.


 
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      Maybe with some playbalance testing, we could add resists to player
     
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      enchanted swords?
     
     

  That doesn't change too much of it - right now there are maximums on what you 
can enchant based on your level - if resistances added part of those, that 
wouldn't be much of an issue (eg, do you want that stat bonus or resistance value).

  Probably the hardest part of this is figuring out what resistance value is 
good enough (eg, does 10% resistance equate to something like a stat increase?)