Started playing Darklands again...

[Hellequin]

I'm strongly averse to any kind of overt sorcery.  Bryce's suggestion of having them be meta-effects is IMO much preferable, aesthetically as well as practically.  If we happen to get access to Yoshi's code we might be able to do something with it; I can think of other workarounds now that we can have nonhuman agents on the scene, too, although they're all fiddly.  (Imagine a small, fast, invisible horse or scene prop which is "told" upon potion use to run to a point X distance in front of you and explode.  Could be doable, but I don't want us to be the ones to do it.  We have better uses for our time.)

No, I really like the idea that potions are covered in the description and so forth.  Honestly it's actually more interesting when it comes to the use of them by NPCs on the PCs - it makes fighting an alchemist into an interesting experience, since between each round of battles you face a chance of losing weapon skill to Fleapowder or Sunburst, or taking damage from a Thunderbolt or Arabian Fire, before we begin the next round.  So even if, normally, you'd have no problems with the alchemist's guards, suddenly it's a whole new issue, with new tactical constraints.

IMO we shouldn't necessarily feel limited to the standard potion list, either.  Maybe instead of Breath of Death we have Stench of Fear, whose primary effect on combat is to cause both sides to fight a round unmounted - it works much better on animal psyches than human ones - or to obviate combat against wolves etc. if we ever get usable nonhuman enemies.  Irrelevant in Darklands, priceless in Schattenlander.

There's also the possibility, already suggested, that alchemy have non-potion uses as well.  Using your alchemical skills to convince a credulous lord that you can make him richer than Croesus - that's period, that's cool.  Or determining whether a mad hermit is right about his foretellings of gloom from the stars, or whether he's merely cracked.  And so forth.

Oh, and in terms of the economics of things: if we can balance it so that alchemy is less efficient at generating wealth than pretenses to alchemy, I'll be a happy man.  One place where I'm considering suggesting we change our rule of thumb is in the selling of battlefield loot; that's always bugged me about the more realistic games.  "Oh, sure, I can always use another half-dozen bloodied military picks, I'm sure I can find a buyer."  Right.  How about, "Well, it's damaged, it's stained, and my customers come here for the high-quality metalwork, not for used garbage like this.  Tell you what, I'll give you five pfennigs, I can melt the head down and make something else.  Take it or leave it."  Ditto for alchemy; alchemy should be a money-making proposition in catering to extremely wealthy and capricious patrons, not in selling them down at the consignment shop.  If there's a local alchemist, indeed, selling off your own work might get you into a fight you'd much rather avoid!  A few touches like this could go a long way to making me happier about the game's primary economic forces; go do quests, earn fame, get people grateful to you.  Rob corpses, sure - of money, and weapons for your own use.  Or rob houses and don't get caught.  Make your money go further by being honoured with free or discount goods and services from grateful townsfolk, not by routinely hocking the shirts off dead mens' backs.  But that's a pet issue and I'll discuss it further once we're closer to ready.

 

[Kissaki]

2. You can only carry 4 potions at a time. This is if you're running around completely unarmed! Clearly infeasible. EDIT: Hmm. You can get around this by having a generic "combat potion" and hitting I to select the actual potion selected from your inventory, so you can access all the potions in your inventory. So not a big problem once people figure out how to use the interface.

Four different kinds of potions, you mean, if we give potions an ammo value. Each potion actually being three -- for example. And some potions can perhaps be given food status? Put one in your inventory and you'll heal faster or something.

 

[fisheye]

Imagine a small, fast, invisible horse or scene prop which is "told" upon potion use to run to a point X distance in front of you and explode.  Could be doable, but I don't want us to be the ones to do it.  We have better uses for our time.

That solves it. We could have the thrown "potion" be invisible or very very small, then spawn a scene prop at the player position, animate it to 20 ft in front of him (it'd even rotate along the way) then explode. We could even determine the range to the nearest enemy in a given general direction and have it fly in that general direction. That's totally doable thanks to the wonderful v0.8. No more disconnect between where the potion lands and where the effect occurs. I like menu-based potion use though - not the least because it's the only way to affect troop stats (i.e. before they're spawned). So we'll do menu-based potions first, then much later see if combat potions are possible.

Of course some enemies you'll meet will be demonic occultists, and you'll be feeling flying balls of hellfire when you fight them... that's no problem since we don't have to deal with an interface

 

[Kissaki]

Back to the original topic -- I just acquired Darklands for this computer, and I can add characters no problem. Must have had a buggy version before, because I did nothing different this time. This one is something.07. On the previous version I had sound, however, which now I don't!

Running on Dosbox, by the way. No other way to run it.

 

[Hellequin]

At www.darklands.net they have a patch for Roland sound cards; might that help?  Also, DosBox has some tinkering you can do to try and make stuff like sound work, look into its help files maybe.

 

[Hellequin]

One last post before I open an official thread.  Skills, revisited.

I realized that we have one, maybe two more M&B skills which become irrelevant in Schattenlander.  All troops are companions - therefore Surgery is by definition obsolete.  And, quite possibly, with the small PC party size the Tactics skill may also be obsolete. 

I'd like to test that latter; it may be that it remains relevant but we put in a caveat, "Schattenlander is designed to be played on a battle size of nine; please set your Options to this value and leave it there for best effect.  Note that this is largely for your sake!  Schattenlander's enemies are extremely tough to be facing in large groups.  But it is also used for the proper balancing of some factors in gameplay, so please do not use this to make play more challenging."  In which case the Tactics skill would be extremely useful, and would be one more way that the nastier enemies kick your ass if you neglect it.  But that would require testing to see how Tactics and party size discrepancies function in the extreme case.  Luckily, our PC's party size is essentially a constant, so we can test it fairly precisely.

Along the same lines, BTW, I'd like to seriously consider forking the mod once it's into Alpha or so, and maintaining two variants of the mod - the Standard and the Hard.  Main difference would be that they maintain quite disparate module_troops definitions, boosting both the bad guys and your companions (stat & skill values, not starting level) considerably.  I realized that at these small battle sizes, the difference between a relative newbie to M&B and an expert player will come through quite strongly.  I'd like to give the old hands a challenge, make them lose fights occasionally - I recall losing moderately often, when starting out a party in Darklands (and neither cheating, nor level-grinding on thugs etc.).  The implementation would be simply as two different mods which happen to be almost identical, or - even better - as an option in the installer.  In the latter case you'd have to reinstall the mod to change difficulty settings.  Anybody see any problems with that concept?

Anyway - this isn't what I meant to post here.  Skills, revisited.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Skills rendered meaningless by the mod:

• Leadership - no armies to lead.
• Prisoner Management - no prisoners to take.
• Surgery - your party is made up of companions, they don't die.

Translations in Schattenlander:

• Leadership becomes Persuasion.  Equivalent to Darklands' Speak Common skill.  In alchemists and priests, also covers Darklands' Speak Latin skill.  Used often as one tactic to deal with situations, it'll never guarantee getting past it but there's seldom a downside to trying.  Will be crucial, just as it was in Darklands.
• Prisoner Management becomes Larceny.  Covers Darklands' Stealth, Artifice, and Streetwise skills.  Some menus - though by no means all - may have a stealth-based workaround, just like they did in Darklands.  These are often tricky since they'll use the lowest Larceny score in the party.  Opening locks is the most important function, and players should note that Agility will assist with this task (since the skill itself is still Charisma-limited) but you'll be much better off using Larceny than even a high Agility alone.  Fixing things and convincing the underworld that you're on their side will be less common, but will again be occasionally used in menus.
• Surgery becomes Scholarship.  In characters labeled as "priest," this functions as the Darklands Religion skill - it affects how quickly you recover divine favour via confession, charity, etc., and whether you can identify true or false religious practices.  In characters labeled as "alchemist," this functions as the Alchemy skill.  In both cases, as well as in characters with neither label, this functions as the Read & Write skill, which comes up occasionally in menus and so forth.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

I like that much better.  It's clean, tidy, and explains well.  It'll gracefully upgrade if and when we get the ability to rename skills.  It leaves open the larcenous alchemist and so forth.

During our character creation process, behind the scenes, those selecting a priestly or alchemical career will be paying (in lack of points which other careers would get, mostly in combat skills), for the 'designator' which entitles them to the additional overloading of Scholar, and to the saint-calling or potion-making functionality in their dialogue options.  We need to make sure to communicate to players that their primary PC does not need to pursue these arts, they can be provided by companions if you don't invest in them in person.

Any comments?

 

[Kissaki]

At www.darklands.net they have a patch for Roland sound cards; might that help?  Also, DosBox has some tinkering you can do to try and make stuff like sound work, look into its help files maybe.

W00t!

 

[bryce777]

Can you change the text for skills?

 

[fisheye]

Regarding two variants of the mod:

No need. Just keep a global variable, set at character creation, for "hardness". Then modify the game parameters on the fly. Not hard. I've got encounters that scale in difficulty based on characer level in Extra NPCs mod, you just spawn different / more enemies at each encounter. Simple stuff.

P.S. maintaining two different versions of the same mod is an immense excruciating pain in the ass and you really really don't want to go there.

Can you change the text for skills?

Yes ... and no. Basically Data/skills.txt has the info we want to change: skill names, descriptions, and how they work (primary limiting stat - str/agi/int/cha, whether it's a party skill, leader skill or personal skill). BUT it's not modular.

But we can easily make available a skills.txt that works. And we can playtest it easily on our copies of M&B.

In any case I'm looking at possibly a year or two development time on this thing, so it's very likely that if we bug Armagan hard enough he will put that file into the modules directory before a beta of schattenlander is available (we're not the only ones clamoring for moddable skills). I do believe the plan is eventually for everything in M&B\Data to be in the modules.

 

[fisheye]

Sorry for the double post. I agree with the general approach for skills, I think it's very nice.

One more useless skill is Spotting. There's nothing to spot. We're not having visible parties on the overland map, just like in the original game, you can't see the goddamn bishop coming to collect your taxes. So we have one more spare skill.

I suggest splitting Scholarship into ...

(a) err, what's a good word for Alchemy+Latin+Read/Write+Occult Knowledge?
(b) Piety or Religion or Theology.

This way it's not so easy to double-class as a kick butt alchemist/priest.

 

[bryce777]

Well, you can also have skills ouside of the skills box - so to speak.  No reason not to.  This is probably better, because a 1-10 skill limit with skills tied to stats that have nothing to do with the skill is not going to work well. 

 

[Hellequin]

Note - an official thread now exists over here.  Consider this thread left open for discussion of Darklands, like the sound card thing and any other side commentary, but closed for Schattenlander topics.

I'll respond to Fisheye's posts above over there, with backtrace to here.