The Veins of the Earth development feedback BETA 13

[Zireael]

Beta 6 was released only three days ago, and I've already fixed some oversights. Castler has contributed a fix for the pseudo-ID and auto-ID not affecting worn items, and also reworked some talent dialogs.

All this means there will probably be a beta 6.1 before Oct 1.

[Zireael]

I have migrated all the stuff from the GitHub wiki to the new wikidot site.

http://veins-of-the-earth.wikidot.com

Tell me what else do you want to see on the wiki? Sample character builds? Worldmap description?

[Zireael]

I've fleshed out the User Guide part of the wiki: http://veins-of-the-earth.wikidot.com/help:_home

How do you like the character builds? Players have oft requested a 'default' button for character creation, so there's five builds to pick from. Which one do you want as default? Probably not the drow , but which one of the four appeals to you the most?

[Aukustus]

Fighter seems to be the usual default character everywhere.

[reaver]

Fighter seems to be the usual default character everywhere.

Fighter tends to be the simplest/easiest to play in RPGs, and I guess the default class would be the one that you would normally start with as a new player to the game.

[Zireael]

Fighter seems to be the usual default character everywhere.

Fighter tends to be the simplest/easiest to play in RPGs, and I guess the default class would be the one that you would normally start with as a new player to the game.

The problem is, simplest/easiest does not necessarily equal most survivable. Currently, the most survivable characters are the ones who can cast healing spells - hence cleric or ranger on the list.

[Zireael]

Thanks for the kind words, Retropunch! I'll admit I stole a look or two at Incursion's online manual and at DCSS wiki.

As for the variant rules discussed upthread (money weight among them), I've decided to make them game settings - that is, you'll be able to set them once when starting a game and they wouldn't be changeable later to avoid abuse. One of said settings will probably be difficulty level, implemented in a way similar to BG/NWN (a percentile change to player's hp/damage dished out).

By default all of those variant settings would be off. The first one to go in will probably be defensive roll (roll d20 instead of having a set base AC of 10) and piecemeal armor.

Piecemeal armor would later go hand-in-hand with body parts option. More options would include training (spawn trainers you have to find and pay to learn skills & feats) and spellbooks (learn spells from spellbooks like in Incursion instead of automagically).

***
Incursion-style parry bonus would go into the base game, as I think it's not controversial.
After a week of research, I've finally decided on using Runequest prices (Google "Runequest SRD" and "Open Quest") instead of d20 ones. That means we're moving to using a sp instead of a gp as a basic currency.

[Zireael]

Defensive roll variant is now in! Piecemeal armor and body parts will take a bit more time...

Also, due to player demand, bleeding out now allows you to attack. Note you still can't move, though.

[Zireael]

Bad news for those players who wished for barter functionality - implementing it proved much trickier than I expected. Mostly due to strange engine behavior making it supremely difficult to access item prices in ShowStore dialog.

[TheCreator]

Bad news for those players who wished for barter functionality - implementing it proved much trickier than I expected. Mostly due to strange engine behavior making it supremely difficult to access item prices in ShowStore dialog.

I think it's not more than 3 days since you praised the engine as "incredibly easy to pick up" .

[getter77]

What if you interpret it under a framework of Quest (items) and Quest Prerequisites instead?   Something roughly akin to how the Alchemist quests are handled in ToME 4 proper for instance.

[Zireael]

Bad news for those players who wished for barter functionality - implementing it proved much trickier than I expected. Mostly due to strange engine behavior making it supremely difficult to access item prices in ShowStore dialog.

I think it's not more than 3 days since you praised the engine as "incredibly easy to pick up" .

It's easy to pick up, but some stuff isn't as easy as the rest - turns out I was going about accessing those prices in a wrong way
Actually, the store functionality is one of the trickiest parts of the engine, while adding new monsters/levels/spells/dungeons/worldmap is straightforward.

[Bear]

So do the item prices give away ID information?

[Zireael]

So do the item prices give away ID information?

Anything that's in the shop is ID'ed by default. I might change this behavior now that the friendly ToME folks showed me how to tweak the store code without ending up in a loop...

[Bear]

Well, yeah, it's normal for a shop that's asking you to pay for something to explain what the heck you'd be spending your money for.  I was asking about deals in the other direction, which only operates if people can also sell things to the shopkeeper.

One of the games people play with ID is to walk into a shop and say, "I went for a walk and I found this stick."  And if the shopkeeper offers you 342 zorkmids for it you know it's a pretty good stick.  Like a wand of bunny-flinging or something.   On the other hand, if the shopkeeper looks at you funny and says, "Dude, that's just a stick.  Are you mental?"  You figure, okay, so, it's nothing special. But if the shopkeeper offers you 7455 zorkmids for it, you know it's a really awesome stick, lke a wand of elephant-flinging or something. 

Anyway, in a lot of games it develops that the shopkeeper offers you money for it without telling you what it is, but you can cross-index the amount of money with a spoiler to figure out what it is.