Vikingefar Today 2:37 pm
I am in love with your little (sofar) Roguelike!!! It would benefit from some form of sanity system i think though (Is it maybe implemented and i did not notice it?). For example, it would be cool if when you get to the trapezohedron you could be so influenced by the old ones that you forget your mission and willingly use the trapezohedron for evil. A sort of bad ending triggered by the players insanity point count? Just a thought, hope i make sense :-)
Is the Necronomicon in the game? Can i learn spells from it?
Will definately be watching this gem in the making!!
re: This is good!
Tornqvist Today 4:15 pm
Hello
Thank you very much for those kind words
"It would benefit from some form of sanity system"
Yes it would, and it's of course a classic Lovecraft trope. It must be done right though, so if I do it- it shouldn't be rushed. If it's too penalizing (game over) it may be annoying to avoid encounters just because you're not allowed to look at another monster. On the other hand if it's just a penalty to rolls or whatever- it would be banal.
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"For example, it would be cool if when you get to the trapezohedron you could be so influenced by the old ones that you forget your mission and willingly use the trapezohedron for evil. A sort of bad ending triggered by the players insanity point count?"
Pretty cool ideas. Something like wilfully use it to doom mankind maybe. It could be seen as the false or semi-failed ending. Whereas in the true ending you merely use it for selfish reasons.
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"Is the Necronomicon in the game? Can i learn spells from it?"
No not yet. It will be a while before I put spells in the hands of the player (other than trough scrolls). I just finished the spell casting structure for monsters today, together with a couple of spells. Next version will have stuff like Cultist Priests. Perhaps in the version after that I'll add spell learning for the player, and various grimoires like the "Necronomicon" and the "Unaussprechlichen Kulten".
re: This is good!
Vikingefar 27 minutes ago
"It must be done right though, so if I do it- it shouldn't be rushed. If it's too penalizing (game over) it may be annoying to avoid encounters just because you're not allowed to look at another monster. On the other hand if it's just a penalty to rolls or whatever- it would be banal."
I totally agree with you on this! Maybe make it so certain horrific monsters that are garanteed to mess with the Players reality-sense, will replenish your sanity alot (but not completely) when slayed? to signify the player character calms down now that the horror is gone (or is it really? maybe the insanity meter should rise slowly in a no-encounter situation, signifying the player character has doubts about the different horrors mortality? or am i thinking to much about the psychological state of the @?).
It might create interesting situations where you run out of ammo and have to flee the abnormal thing with an allmost full insanity bar, causing all kinds of unwanted situations along the road.
To further augment that idea requires some fleshing out of the effects of insanity, and i must say its hard to come up with interesting mechanics that dont just bog down the roguelike gameplay. For instance i would think a scared @ would move a bit erraticly for instance, like a numbed down version of confusion? it could allso be so that each 3-5 (Or some more appropriate window, thats a balancing issue, and you will know this better than me) turn the insane @ does something insane, like curling up in a ball and repeating some mantra "this isnt real this isnt real this isnt real" or the RNG decides the @ should panick and start shooting at the hallucinations hes having, maybe have the hallucinations show to the player as ASCII so the polayer unknowingly does something insane like shooting alof of "d"'s that werent real at all? all of these things sound marginally annoying in the rogulike-gameplay context but really cool in the hpl ambience sense. I totally see why insanity could be a problem to implement. i will probably grind these probelms in my head some more...
"Next version will have stuff like Cultist Priests. Perhaps in the version after that I'll add spell learning for the player, and various grimoires like the "Necronomicon" and the "Unaussprechlichen Kulten"." this is sounding AWESOME!!
re: This is good!
Vikingefar just now
inspirational words from some CoC GM: "The (admittedly few) times that I got to run CoC, gradual descent was how I handled it. As the PCs dug deeper and deeper into the "truth" of reality, their mind developed quirks as a defense mechanism against things that it could not comprehend. The player still kept control of the character and had fun role playing them getting weirder and more unstable as time went on. And there are paths to recovery in CoC. They are slow, arduous and require commitment...which is part of what makes them fun. If it was easy to recover from madness, it would kind of lose meaningfulness.
This makes me think that insanity in inraarcana could be something unavoidable that constantly press you forward. feel like clearing the floor for more loot? be prepared to maybe have more insanity points than you bargained for. so it becomes a balancing thing. loot versus sanity.
i will stop posting now :-)