[CF List] wraight (& fireborns)

[Steven Lembark]

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       the biggest and most important question is whether such a change will
     
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      make things more or less fun.  Its easy to say that right now that if
     
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      your strength is 2, carrying around food is not that fun.  But if the
     
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      change is made, and now the fireborn is hunting for fire or using all his
     
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      mana to create fire, that probably isn't fun either.
     
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       At a certain point, then need for fire is not a big deal - the real
     
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      question is if the fireborn can get to that point easily - most of the
     
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      very low dungeons don't in general have spellcasters, so the fireborn
     
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      will need to provide its own fire.
     
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       I still think it would be a neat idea to try.  I'm just not positive how
     
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      well it will really work.
     
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       I would say a fireborn with str == 2 has other problems, like just the
     
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      general inability to get much loot.  Of course, the str == 2 problem
     
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      should in general only be a fairly low level problem - at some point you
     
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      get the stat potions and raise up to something reasonable, and/or cast
     
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      strength spells.
     
     
You can cast str spells, which uses mana, which requires
food, which...  Low str is a general problem that makes it
hard to play. Not carrying food would be a plus...

Let's assume that mana regen > food use rate (this is
adjustable by character anyway). Unless they are regenerating
mana or hp, fb's don't use much food. At that point a single
flame spell (say "invoke burning hands") could be made equivalent
to enough food for a recharge (say 10-20 mp). At fairly low levels
they can also get "flaming aura" to charge up with, which doesn't
interfere with mp regen at all -- in fact the praying speeds it up.

As the char goes up in levels the mp go up pretty steeply, which
means that both food use and mp regen go up. Again, the food is a
fraction of mp regen. However much mp you use casting a fire spell
will give you more than that much "food". A single "large fireball"
or few rounds of "flaming aura" might be enough to feed you
fully. You'll also probably use fire spells in battle, which have
the byproduct of "feeding" you then.

At high levels you'll have enough mana to cast whatever you need
for food, and will probably be around fire-causing items in dungeons
frequently enough to get "fed" on the fly.

If we leave the char's "food" at zero and have it live on hp, the
code changes are minimal:

    (1) The damage caused by fire stat needs to be changed to a
        negative number in the struct (no code change required).

    (2) The number of hp may need to be raised (also no code change).

    (3) The hp cycler already has a max value limit (used for healing
        spells). This should prove sufficient for clampng the hp
        to a reasonable level when fire exposure causes negative
        damage.

    (4) The "eating" code needs to be adjusted so that non-flesh
        char's (fb's and w's) get no/miminal benefit from normal
        food. This involves one modification to the "food benefit"
        calculator to multiply a "how much benefit do you get from
        food" entry in the char's struct.


Net code change could be simple as changing a default value, adding
one constant to the char and multiplying by it when the character eats.

This assumes that the char survives w/ [near-] zero fp all the
time, living off slowly reducing hp that get regen-ed by fire
(in the case of fb's) or a "suck the life out of" spell/skill
in w's. Which in turns requires that they both get fairly high
hp to begin with (so that the slowly reducing value doesn't get
them killed every 10 sec).


--
Steven Lembark                               2930 W. Palmer
Workhorse Computing                       Chicago, IL 60647
                                            +1 800 762 1582