So what's the deal with these magic divination dice? They certainly sound interesting, but the devlog was a bit vague on the specifics. Maybe you'd care to elaborate a bit on what they are and how they work? Unless it's a surprise, of course.
At the base it's just a random roll for fun-time effect, though we might still slip in a simple prayer-or-offering bit to tip the scales to favorable outcomes. There are dice, in the shrines, associated to certain deities, and you can pick them up and roll them. The face (or faces) you get is tied to a table of effects on a per-god basis, and you get one roll per deity per week generally, though the game gives additional information there when that isn't the case. There are a few more random details in other responses.
I forgot, regarding the dice - is their cursing going to be a hardcoded thing or will it be possible to add raw-defined boons/curses from them?
There was also the bit about the undead lieutenants having a push-back ability - is that another new interaction function or a non-syndrome dust attack?
There's no way to create a divination set from the raws. It uses a raw format, but it can't be attached to a historical deity, which is the only way it knows how to work. Still, at least having a raw format means that all the individual effects are available as usual.
The push back is a new PROPEL_UNIT effect. There isn't any source point control currently (this is also a problem with some of the older ones - there's a technical targeting issue there I haven't worked through yet), but you can set the force number and target, and the force is applied from the caster toward the target.
Is new stuff going into the interaction examples folder?
Are only demons able to spread evil from towers, or raws creature be given the power to do so?
Are undead lieutenant powers also raws-able?
Apparently dice can curse you into a different form. What types of creature can you turn into?
Folder: I have a note to that effect, yeah.
Spread: There's a tag for it.
Powers: All their powers are standard raws, yeah.
Curse: That particular curse turns you into any mundane non-predatory non-vermin creature. There may be other kinds. My only issue has been that some of the larger creatures are slower than humans, which makes them annoying to play. I might have to make a speed check parameter or something.
kinda worried if the modding potential for creatures that use the bogeyman token is now shoved to one region and or one randomly generated creature that needs to show up?
though regional/timed summoning interactions seems like a fun concept where creatures can just pop up out of thin air. really don't know about the bogeyman changes given uhh on one hand it might make playable bogeymen either a straight up raw dump custom creature file or dfhack thing and not entity animal token domestication thing the site just does, but having said region where the 'cackling' summons and kills them be in one area means if someone gets past the hurdle of making them playable in the new update they won't have to fear the night twice as harder than a normal adventurer
Will the new changes to boogeymen that restrict them to certain evil biomes affect all creatures with the [BOOGEYMAN] token? Or just the generated ones? Will we be able to choose whether to restrict a modded creature, and if so, are there any further moddable options (restricting to only GOOD biomes, only biomes connected to a certain sphere etc.)?
Rumrusher (op):
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8000958#msg8000958FantasticDorf:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8000982#msg8000982Rumrusher (op):
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8000998#msg8000998Regarding your top linked comment there, entire evil regions that have nothing to do with demons can still have them, and even in the evil regions with demons, there's plenty of real estate away from the towers. But more broadly speaking, certainly the new system does limit their breadth now. So that is changed, and there aren't new options to place creatures in broader regions. The 'primordial evil' regions don't even have sphere links, so it doesn't use the nightmare sphere as it does with demons. There's just a straight up 10% chance for starter evil regions to have bogeymen. Players really hated them. Like almost everybody, and they did make trying to play as a traditional single-character RPG basically impossible or at least silly. So they have been relegated away to just a few places now. Certainly more customization would be cool, though.
Now that bogeymen are restricted to specific regions, are you going to make it possible for them to show up during fort mode?
Do you plan on making these dice based divinations possible to happen in player forts, or is that pushing too far into the actual magic update for now?
Nope, that's not really related to region restriction. Though certain summoning powers will make them show up.
Yeah, probably not yet. The blessings and curses aren't as related to the life of the fort dwarf. Though at some point we'll want to continue unifying stuff.
With these changes to demons and goblins civs, will it (soon) be possible for playing as adventurers from goblin civilizations without modding? Or are there some other things that are a priority before that? Cause I'm at least partly wanting to make some adventurers who serve the demons leading the goblins with the new plotting system.
Any ideas what effects on the environment the various demonic spheres will have aside from those listed in the devlog? Anything that would be particularly drastic? Would a demon with the sphere of torture have a regional effect of inflicting constant (but just manageable) pain? Would the domain of a demon of lies whisper falsehoods into the inhabitants' ears? Will misery demons cause depression? Anything like these?
EDIT: A couple more questions:
With the expansion to polymorph-like abilities mentioned in the devlog, are these specifically expansions to transformations? And if so, what sort of changes are you planning on?
This one is more about organized religions and the prevalence of various religions in towns. But is there going to be a changed or added personality facet that influences the zealousness of a historical figure's/post-gen figure's beliefs? Or is it still going to be up to chance that a certain person has a certain level of belief?
Gob-civ adv: There's still not much to do there, but yeah, once we have adv mode villainy done (with the possibility of taking orders, though we haven't committed to that yet), we'll be a bit closer, and when we get to the army stuff that was possible before the Big Wait (but after the Steam/itch release), there might be enough.
Region effects: We haven't made new regional effects at all, but of course there are endless possibilities. We'll probably wait until we get to the map rewrite and the more broad magical lands before doing them, though obviously that hasn't stopped us from playing around a bit, so who knows?
Polymorph: That one didn't require any changes, if I recollect. It just uses a body transformation on a timer.
Religion and personality: It's still random, though some of the responses to persecution and the likelihood of initiating one take personality into account.
Can a particularly poor roll of the dice in attempting divination curse the adventurer permanently, or is it all temporary effects?
The regular bad rolls are all temporary currently, but you can really screw up if you don't treat the process respectfully. This will be clear before it happens.
What are some of the lucky dice roll blessings that you mention in the Steam update?
Item? Pet? Healing? Are those new interaction effects?
is there anything in the future for cavern exploring for adventurers? since all this talk about surface problems remind me that there no incentive to draw folks to the caverns in the recent update.
I'm holding off on any of that until the map rewrite. I want to do more with it, but the way the maps are stored makes it hard to get beyond isolated sites.
Will we have more UI warning information and pop'ups for players when embarking upon a corrupted land of what kind of sphere it is? Especially since in theory a fortress close to a tomb could come under range of a corruption spread offsite probably needs to know, if there aren't any noticable effects if reprecussions come up later. Like blight spheres killing crops etc.
This might have amusing/immersive implications when the creatures in [FORCED_SPHERE:DEATH] (as a example of explicitly needing a sphere instead of primordially existing, and receding when the corruption goes away) start appearing around necromancer towers and mummy crypts rather than explicitly just death-demon towers.
There's nothing like that at this point, but crops are safe currently. Later it'll matter more I suspect.
1. Will other backgrounds besides hearth person in adventure mode confer a special status in your starting site?
2. How many of the background skills will eventually be usable in adventure mode?
3. Will demon towers exist for all spheres for purposes of region changing or just certain spheres? If only a few which ones.
4. Will our player adventurers be able to use magic divination dice?
ZM5:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8001216#msg80012161. That's the only one. We've really just expanded out the peasant options so far, though we'll possibly do a bit more with it before it's out.
2. Eventually? We're hoping to get all of them in when I do the adventurer skills stuff that's been rotting away on dev forever. In the nearer term, I'm not sure, but probably not many.
3. Death, blight, disease, deformity and nightmares only, for now. Adding the tag to creatures without one of these currently does nothing - the evil won't even spread. You have to pick your poison so it knows what to do. Many demons do not currently spread a region for this reason; even in my ideal game, this would be true, since some of them want to keep a lower profile or it just isn't their style, though of course we want to have various effects for all of them over time.
4. Yeah. Only them, actually! Nobody else is yet so foolish or faithful, mostly because they don't have use for certain of the blessings, but that'll change as the system expands and townspeople have more to do at some distant point. Perhaps your non-party companions will get there first, though not even that happens currently.
Do or can summoned creatures have souls? Is it possible to summon something that becomes a permanent historical figure, talks to people etc without causing crashes?(a problem Ive faced with reanimated intelligent body parts)
They are generated as normal, so they all do, yeah. If the summon doesn't have a timer, they are just a person/animal/etc., though they don't have cultural links and so forth. Though of course there could/will be various issues to work through, it isn't the same as reanimation.
Will there be a skill associated with Divination, or maybe some other barrier to entry like needing to get someone to tell you how to do it?
There's nothing like that currently. Generally, it's just sort of strange and an odd cross-cultural element which'll likely undergo serious revisions as we head into and then out of the magic stuff. I agree overall that there should be some cultural learning associated to it, whether that's like the musical knowledge or whatever else. But we might not see that until we get to the customs stuff in the broadest sense, though certainly we'll get a bit before that with the magic traditions etc. etc.
How much effect do the gods themselves have on the divination? Or are their uh... structures still too barebones to do anything there? Are we also going to see stuff like card-reading, crystal gazing and entrails reading(proper necromancy ), will necromancers in specific do necromancy? Do you have any plans for divinations themselves to actually predict the future, or will they primarily be communications?
For some reason when discussing future-reading magic I always imagined trances, so the dice caught me off guard
Oh, oh, oh, can histfigs observe and tell each other about divinations/game outcomes? Because a lot of stories start with an (un)lucky roll of the dice Did you manage to have histfigs themselves be capable of rolling dice?
This is just the starting point with divination, so the dice are what we have. Of course it's very strange and there are too many dice and we'd like to diversify the methods, but stuff mostly begins this way, and it's fine. Though we're pretty close to doing some sphere-based stuff with the divinations themselves. There's almost enough effects for it, and we're still deciding if we want to split them up yet or not. Sort of a flavor vs. uniformity conflict with no proper near-term answer and which won't matter as more stuff is added (when splitting up by sphere becomes obvious.)
Ha ha, yeah, I was just looking at that Hellenic/Ptolemaic d20 right before I was doing shrines. Things often go like that. Would have been something else if I had been looking elsewhere (like the Liver of Piacenza; haruspicy is tempting with all the livestock organs we have available), but we'll eventually get to multiple methods.
Regarding necromancy and trances, I should tease a day in advance that ghosts have not wholly escaped our attention.
As with many things, your companions and others are completely ignorant of their surroundings when it comes to divination. Even if you turn into a cow or something. This will change, but I'm not sure when. Their awareness is such a large subject and easy to avoid, though it is important, eventually, to get to that stuff.
Are there any plans to change how ranged weapons work in adventure mode and in the raws before the big wait? By that I mean, being able to change the firing/reload speed on an individual basis, or being able to aim for specific body parts.
It's not specifically in the pre Big Wait notes, but I think there's a possiblity during the strength that runs through the Steam/itch changes over to the army stuff and other matter that combat could see a look. It's the sort of thing that could spring up with adv mode medical as well.
1. What if npc or player steals the divination dice/s from shrine? Will they get cursed if they wont return the dice/s in some days later?
2. Do divination dice's count as artifacts?
1. It doesn't care about that yet, though it might before release. I still have to set up a zone.
2. Nope. Any dice with the proper improvement can be used, but there's no way to make them yet.
What sort of activities prevent evil from fading from an area? Is it only evil activities such as evil clouds/rain? Could I theoretically be in an area as it becomes more good or does my presence there count as activity?
PlumpHelmetMan:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8001860#msg8001860Yeah, just activities that literally would increase the evil of the region (raising the dead, being an appropriate demon/tagged ruler.) If no such activity happens, the evil (slowly) starts to fade.
Will certain megabeasts be able to spread evil regions?
PlumpHelmetMan:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8002370#msg8002370EternalCaveDragon:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8002420#msg8002420None of them have the correct tag, nor can they become a civ ruler, which is the other required condition currently. At some point, I might relax the latter condition, at least for megas, though it wouldn't currently apply to any but certain titans possibly, or forgotten beasts if they count.
Swapping between Hearth person and Peasant is currently the only way to "select" your starting town in Adventurer (it skips to the next random town each time until you get someplace close to where you want to be). Presumably that's no longer functional with the new background profession selection? Will you add a location selection to the new interface? Or do you prefer Adventurers to always start somewhere randomly within their selected civ?
You can select your home town manually now, and it gives a little summary of the population. If you have multiple party members, then you can start in any one of their home towns.
Can demons start plots? Will they? If yes, in what conditions? would they have some special advantage to tempt people and make agents?
PlumpHelmetMan:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8003210#msg8003210They have a few new advantages they share with certain necros that'll come up next log, but mainly, their advantage is being relatively unassailable and having a civilization to call on, with (kidnapped) people from various other places (which already came up for regular infiltration agents/scouts.) And yeah, many of them are plotters, for the same personality reasons as others, and I think their generated personalities more often put them in that range as well.
Will certain creatures or entities be able to spread good regions?
PlumpHelmetMan:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8003283#msg8003283EternalCaveDragon:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8003322#msg8003322feelotraveller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8003650#msg8003650DG:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8003664#msg8003664ZM5:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8003699#msg8003699It isn't currently part of the tagging.
For the Myth and Magic Update, let's say there is a world where humans are created by a precursor race, and worship them. If another race, say the dwarves, are descendants of these precursor gods, will the humans revere dwarves, or generally be more prone to viewing them as religious figures? If humans are unaware of this mythic connection, but then they become aware of it, will their attitude concerning dwarves change?
Ha ha, I have no idea quite yet how all of that is going to work out. There are going to be lots of strange situations, and just getting the humans to recognize any potential gods, angels or similar beings living among them will be a first step. Doing attitudes and further degrees of separation would then become possible. The matter of the revelation of hidden world secrets is part of the idea, whether that's 'research' or something entirely theological or different, and having change in the world because of it, but much like the divination dice, the particular forms we get at first are up for grabs.
About the intelligent undead -
Do they look like corpses / talking zombies? If not does that mean you can only raise someone who recently died? Or does the spell repair their body during resurrection?
Could I go as an adventurer to my ruined/retired fort, resurrect all my favorite dwarves and start a fort of semi-immortal undead?
They look however they looked at the time; the syndrome grants them the usual undead sort of immortality, so the state of the body's wounds are not important, though it must be fit for resurrection (which just means it has an upper body that is not missing or pulped.) The spell does not repair them, which can lead to some unfortunates. It also leads to the ignorance of their fellow citizens being very strange at times, though world gen does not track rot states carefully for most purposes. It is tempting to healing them, though I have not yet done this.
I think you could create this fort, yeah, if you manage to integrate into a fort somehow. I don't remember the retirement rules but they don't seem to care about a lot of things.
Will there be sphere created semi/mega-beasts where appropriate emerging with the wildlife (within world costing), or will they always be resorted to world generation?
I was kind of hoping to have a greater muck monster for the evil biomes pop up when the conditions were right, or inversely to the quotation, maybe a Phoenix spontaneously appear over rebirth good areas to add some danger setting things on fire with the halves of a roc and a dragon together.
There's nothing like that coming soon. I suppose that's not exactly correct, as we've added some new bits over the last few days, but it's not exactly a creation of new megabeasts.
Will summoned creatures count towards a secret holders ability to build a tower, or is that still just raised dead?
Their summoned creatures don't last that long. Nobody else bothers working either.