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[hermes]

Thanks for taking the time to answer questions again, Toady.  I always feel I ask stupid questions, but Toady always gives such great answers, to all questions, which makes the wait very bearable .  Really looking forward to this release, the complexity of some of the new systems sounds quite exciting.

[Poonyen]

First time poster here.

Just want to say I love DF and I'm as giddy as a schoolgirl about the next release.

Best game ever. That is all.

[Footkerchief]

Dwarves are still stupid. I can probably work on this and fire a bit during the bug-fixing cycle if I remember.  Scanning around in 3D for a flow event is a little expensive, but I think it can be dealt with.

FIRE AI OMG

Yeah, fire AI and fire bug fixes are way overdue, in addition to other basic stuff like extinguishing fires.  Fire doesn't get nearly enough respect considering its huge role in human history and fantasy worlds.

So Toady, will it be possible to mod in mutations that physically change the body of the victim through curses?
If so, we have the possibility of a mutation system!

Not yet, no. He said previously (in the context of frankensteinian monsters, but the same things apply) that actual body changes would require a potentially long-ish rewrite of the body system.

But isn't that what we have now with stuff like the were-wolves? I thought the major issue lay in correctly transcribing wounds. Since Shadowscales doesn't seemed concerned with that, we can just do what we currently do and make it go from one complete body to another.

No, werebeasts don't change the body, they get a whole new body for their werebeast form, with no relation to the actual human(oid) body. I suppose you could get a mutation system out of it, having a new creature definition for a third eye, one for a sixth digit, one for a third and and a sixth digit... for each race, but, well....

That said, I forgot one thing that probably counts as body changes as Shadowscales means them, which is changing non-color appearance modifiers (length, etc).

Here's a post I made that discusses the app modifiers:

You can change the appearance modifiers (and thereby the ingame size) of any body part, but that's it short of a full transformation to a different creature type:

Code: [Select]

[CE_BP_APPEARANCE_MODIFIER:START:0:BP:BY_CATEGORY:TOOTH:APPEARANCE_MODIFIER:LENGTH:150]
[CE:COUNTER_TRIGGER:DRINKING_BLOOD:1:NONE:REQUIRED]
So you could make a creature's eyes become huge, bulging and red, or transform a creature into twice its normal size, but you couldn't make it sprout extra limbs.

[ZeroGravitas]

NO_PHYS_ATT_GAIN - I noticed this tag in a couple of the entries in the new interaction based nightcreatures. Does it prevent future Attribute gains for the creature?

It certainly sounds like it does that. It does seem a bit weird that necromancers and vampires would have that tag, but the presence of that tag could be randomized.

Yeah, it locks attributes in place.  For some reason, I didn't imagine vampires being able to lift weights and load themselves out.  I dunno if that'll be randomized in the future.  As a general note, you can zero out the number of random vampires and use the example vampire to make your own work how you want.  I'm not sure when we're going to have parameters for how the randomization actually works.  I think the current plan was to do that first with random dragons, but I'm not sure what the format is going to be.

In almost every interpretation of vampires in every mythology, vampires gain power over time. The older a vampire is, the more powerful it is - including being stronger and faster. The more blood a vampire drinks, the more powerful a vampire is.

Why did you decide to abandon this fundamental aspect of vampire lore? It has nothing to do with working out, granted, but vampires being stuck at particular attribute levels for all time is absolutely bizarre.

[Yobgod]

There's a "clunkiness" penalty to rolls and an overall speed penalty, I think.  I'm not sure what the overall deal should be with armor weights.  We're missing things like padding under metal armor, and I don't know anything at all about how leather armours work with that or how much they should weigh or encumber compared to other armors.  There's kind of an RPG tradition there, but I'm not sure how it should actually work.

You've been pretty simulationist about things so far, so it would seem reasonable to continue in this instance.
Simple case: total weight carried reduces speed, metal armours add an appropriate amount of "noise" when moved.
Advanced: Leg armours primarily effect movement. Arm armours primarily effect craft skills and attacks. Head armours effect perception. Overall encumbrance also effects movement speed.

[Neonivek]

Older vampires tend not to get faster or stronger in most Lore I've read.

They just tend to develop additional powers and abilities over time and sometimes it is just from mundane old magic they learned over the centuries they lived rarther then pure vampiric power. Which Toady has considered (a Vampire only secret system).

It can actually play a dark picture if you think about an Immortal creature learning plenty of skills, secrets, and arcane arts over the years as a villain.

[ZeroGravitas]

Older vampires tend not to get faster or stronger in most Lore I've read.

They just tend to develop additional powers and abilities over time and sometimes it is just from mundane old magic they learned over the centuries they lived rarther then pure vampiric power. Which Toady has considered (a Vampire only secret system).

It can actually play a dark picture if you think about an Immortal creature learning plenty of skills, secrets, and arcane arts over the years as a villain.

Certainly you can find examples of every sort. But the overwhelming majority of vampire fiction points to "stronger with age" - http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StrongerWithAge

The only real exception I can think of to the "stronger with age" rule for vampires is.... Twilight.

[Neonivek]

Older vampires tend not to get faster or stronger in most Lore I've read.

They just tend to develop additional powers and abilities over time and sometimes it is just from mundane old magic they learned over the centuries they lived rarther then pure vampiric power. Which Toady has considered (a Vampire only secret system).

It can actually play a dark picture if you think about an Immortal creature learning plenty of skills, secrets, and arcane arts over the years as a villain.

Certainly you can find examples of every sort. But the overwhelming majority of vampire fiction points to "stronger with age" - http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StrongerWithAge

The only real exception I can think of to the "stronger with age" rule for vampires is.... Twilight.

Actually Twilight doesn't subvert this either. (Mind you Twilight is one of the few Vampire mythologies that support it)

But there is a difference between "Stronger" as in more powerful and "Stronger" as in Bench pressing.

I am only suggesting that a lot of vampire lore the vampires don't actually get physically stronger or faster (unless they enhanced it through NOT physical means)

As well remember Toady's problem is only that he doesn't feel vampires should be able to "lift weights" to build up strength. Which the vast majority of vampire lore supports. For example in World of Darkness a vampire CAN increase their strength, but they don't do it through lifting weights. He isn't against them improving or getting stronger.

[bombzero]

yeah i kind of got the vibe that he planned some other form of improvement for them, not sure why.

[ZeroGravitas]

Older vampires tend not to get faster or stronger in most Lore I've read.

They just tend to develop additional powers and abilities over time and sometimes it is just from mundane old magic they learned over the centuries they lived rarther then pure vampiric power. Which Toady has considered (a Vampire only secret system).

It can actually play a dark picture if you think about an Immortal creature learning plenty of skills, secrets, and arcane arts over the years as a villain.

Certainly you can find examples of every sort. But the overwhelming majority of vampire fiction points to "stronger with age" - http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StrongerWithAge

The only real exception I can think of to the "stronger with age" rule for vampires is.... Twilight.

Actually Twilight doesn't subvert this either. (Mind you Twilight is one of the few Vampire mythologies that support it)

But there is a difference between "Stronger" as in more powerful and "Stronger" as in Bench pressing.

I am only suggesting that a lot of vampire lore the vampires don't actually get physically stronger or faster (unless they enhanced it through NOT physical means)

As well remember Toady's problem is only that he doesn't feel vampires should be able to "lift weights" to build up strength. Which the vast majority of vampire lore supports. For example in World of Darkness a vampire CAN increase their strength, but they don't do it through lifting weights. He isn't against them improving or getting stronger.

In Twilight, "newborns" are stronger than older vampires because they have the most human blood in them and strength is normally a function of how recently they've fed (in that it determines the quantity of human blood.)

I understand that Toady doesn't feel vampires should be able to "lift weights" but since there's no "lifting weights" in the game as it is, I'm not sure why this would be a concern at all. As it is now, vampires have their attributes locked. Can't improve whether by "weight lifting" but also by things you'd expect from other lore - drinking blood, growing stronger with age, or simply learning.

The disconnect, I think, is that Toady seems to take for granted that if a vampire is improving his stats with practice, it's the same as "weight lifting". That's not the case at all. It seems entirely plausible that if a vampire becomes more powerful as he practices stats/skills (which is what "weight lifting" is about) it could be entirely due to his own honing of skills and and supernatural focusing. The assumption that it's weight lifting is sort of bizarre.

[Knight Otu]

Here's a post I made that discusses the app modifiers:

You can change the appearance modifiers (and thereby the ingame size) of any body part, but that's it short of a full transformation to a different creature type:

Code: [Select]

[CE_BP_APPEARANCE_MODIFIER:START:0:BP:BY_CATEGORY:TOOTH:APPEARANCE_MODIFIER:LENGTH:150]
[CE:COUNTER_TRIGGER:DRINKING_BLOOD:1:NONE:REQUIRED]
So you could make a creature's eyes become huge, bulging and red, or transform a creature into twice its normal size, but you couldn't make it sprout extra limbs.

Yeah, I meant to say that this sort of "body change" is something that can be done (though it's not a body change in the sense that the body definition changes).

yeah i kind of got the vibe that he planned some other form of improvement for them, not sure why.

Toady mentioned a generation counter for vampires for power dilution and similar things (which would be the inverse, weaker with youth, but pretty much the same end result), but he didn't get around to it for this release (much like the monstrous vampires will have to wait).
In any case, vampires are probably the closest-to-living undead in most myths and fiction (and in some rare fiction, technically are alive), and as such it seems that at least a few vampire types could improve in strength if they wanted. Similarly the necromancers, who seem to be mostly still alive, than some kind of undead lich (for liches again it would depend, but they are usually less close to the living).

Any plans for hereditary curses? "Your family shall suffer for seven generations" seems like a pretty common tropes, and it would be funny to see babies spontaneously combust because their parents had a nasty run-in with a mummy two years ago.

Also, and I know this isn't the question anyone wants to read, but is there are roadmap to the next release? Like, right after the mummies and tombs? Or is there another thing after the Mummies before release?

We don't have any specific plans, but it's a reasonable thing.  I think we were thinking of doing some kind of generation counter for vampires so that you could do things like power dilution etc., and that might be related, but it wasn't done either, so it doesn't matter yet.

[Urist Da Vinci]

Creatures that have "CRAZED" will attack anybody that isn't their race, and all of the werebeasts are generated with it.  There isn't currently a way to make them attack everybody or analyze syndromes.

I suspect modders will have fun with this token, probably making hostile wildlife even more hostile.

[Cerol Lenslens]

Is it safe to assume that the does_not_age tag has been applied to ghosts, so they won't die of old age anymore?

[CharlesPeter]

[CRAZED] carp.

[werechicken]

I always thought it wasn't so much the age of the vampire as how much blood they had drunk, so a vampire that's been around a while would have drunks lakes of blood and be very powerful, unless they'd been sealed away for centuries.

P.S. I refuse to accept twilight as a vampiric reference, it's almost a bad a using Anne Rice (the one who wrote interview with a vampire)

Bram Stoker would be spinning in his grave!