Idea: Drug Addict.

Discussion in 'Modding' started by OmniaNigrum, Feb 27, 2012.

  1. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

    This would obviously work well with and nearly require Alchemy and/or Fungal Arts. It should have a massively incremental stacking debuff that would flat out kill you by making you unable to do much of anything worth doing besides use some drugs to get back to "Normal".

    This would be offset by the massively overpowered buffs that can be achieved by using the drugs. It should have a few dozen different drugs and each should have a buff or even several as well as a debuff that is active alongside the buff. Once any of your drugs wear off you enter the debuff stage and are essentially sitting in a corner crying and itching for a fix.

    The items are easy to imagine and even balance. The hard part will be deciding what the skills themselves will do. Is it possible to have a skill double or even triple the duration of a buff from an item or would it require the buffs to "Convert" the craftable and findable drugs into the uncraftable and not normally found double or triple duration drugs? (By convert I mean that the item is consumed by using the associated skill and in return you get the new drug that has better duration and/or effects and/or lesser maluses.)

    Perhaps the capstone skill would be the ability to "Cold Turkey" and remove or decrease the debuffs you suffer from withdrawal?

    I have seen few drug items besides the nice "Pills" that we all know and love. And I have seen even less alchemy and fungal arts skill mods that are not exclusively dedicated to booze. (Rarefied Horse Meat be praised for your efforts there!)

    Thoughts? Suggestions? Insults? I am open to it all. Thank you for reading.
     
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  2. r_b_bergstrom

    r_b_bergstrom Will Mod for Digglebucks

    Umm... apparently I don't know and love the thing everyone else knows and loves. What mod has pills?
     
  3. I think the pills are from Roguish Renovation. Give it a go if you haven't RBB. It plays nicely with ID, from what I can tell.
     
  4. r_b_bergstrom

    r_b_bergstrom Will Mod for Digglebucks

    Sorry for the insanely long post, but people keep telling me that's better than double-posting.

    I'm on a Mac and so can't run more than 1 mod at a time. That Mac bug has really stymied my use of use of other mods.

    I'd like to try Roguish Renovation, but as I understand it he focuses on levels 1-10, so I know I'm gonna lose steam in the end. Let me explain further so I don't sound quite so arrogant. I find floors 11 to 15 basically unplayable in their current repetitive state - that's why the latest ID update really focused on those floors. When I want to try anyone else's mods, I basically have to resign myself to getting bored and losing enthusiasm in the Deeper Dungeon or Machinarium (not because of the mod, but because of the single-minded monster and treasure spawning of RotDG). I've considered just skipping the most narrowly repetitive floors, but if you're skipping two floors then you pretty much need to take Archaeology to supply the XP, which means the builds are more repetitive. Plus, my usual methodology is to explore every nook and cranny of each floor, and the one time I skipped an entire floor (Promethean build skipping the Lava floor) it was unsatisfying.

    All my play with other mods has been basically a quick test run of the first few floors. You can get a good feel for any one skill mod by floor 3, which is nice for a change of pace. If I'm not going to try to get to Dredmor, there's not much point in playing the character for much more than an hour or two, in my opinion. I'm a Going Rogue with Permadeath "eyes on the prize" kinda guy. The challenge and striving for a goal is what makes DoD fun for me. Without it, I don't invest in the character, and start taking suicidal actions (or just abandon and never load the character back up) after a couple floors.

    I'm eagerly looking forward to the 1.0.10 patch fixing this bug so I can see how the game plays with half a dozen mods active at once. Once that's up and running I plan to load up Roguish Renovation, Monstrous Menagerie, and anything else with a room in it for maximum variety and replayability.

    But, I digress. The point of this thread is a proposed drug addict mod, so I should comment on it.
    I don't believe that is possible currently, nor with the anticipated patch. I know of no way to have an item check for what skills you have. The opposite is possible, in a limited fashion only - you can make a spell consume an item, or you can make a skill only work if you're wielding a particular weapon type.

    As I mentioned, you can make a spell consume an item - and there'll be increased functionality for that in the 1.0.10 patch. I don't have much experience with it, though, so I can't really furnish you with the details.

    You could also go the full "Rune" route. Ruigi made a runesmithing mod that gets glowing reviews for the way it combines mechanics from different trees together with a slate of new craftable items. I'd recommend giving it a whirl and then looking at the code to see what you can learn from it.

    You'd want to set your higher-end drugs to special="1" and craftoutput="1" so they don't just spawn all over the place. You'll also need to be careful what item types they are. Foods or boozes would end up in vending machines. Mushrooms would be created randomly when using Fungal Arts, and could be transmuted as well. So you'd probably want to make the majority of them potions.

    This is easy to do, but tricky to balance. Emomancy level 2 and the final level of Killer Vegan will be the archetypes to examine here... but they're also the source of complication when it comes to balancing. Emo 2 can reliably remove in all your various debuffs for just a single relatively minor curse. You'll need to playtest the combo with Emomancy to make sure it's not broken. One way around that conflict would be to follow the structure of Necronomiconomiconeconomoconimics, where the debuffs trigger in layers over time so the Emo-Druggist would have to carefully gauge when to decurse.

    I've got a number of mushrooms, potions, and craftables on my to-do list for Interior Dredmorating, but it'll be a while. Not quite the same as what you're asking for, but intended to boost crafting and fungal arts.


    Your proposed mod sounds like it could be fun, especially if you work in some snarky humor into the flavor text. Given the subject matter, I'd encourage you to make it a complicated tricky skill to master that gets really good only in the last few levels of the tree, kinda like necronomicathingicantspellinomics.
     
    ElectricMessiah, Kazeto and OmniNegro like this.
  5. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

    Electric Messiah gave me a good idea. Nothing really useful for the thread, but here goes anyway.
    The Devil Does Drugs
    Warning, late 80s music. NSFW nor elderly devotees.
     
  6. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

    Sadly I am a long way from making a reasonable mod of any sort. If anyone wants the idea, by all means take it and take the credit for it too. If I ever manage to learn what is needed and get around to it I will make one, but I am less likely to finish an idea than some unnamed people are to be able to spell that Necrowhatevertheheck skill is. (Obviously joking, but Necronomiconomics is pretty tough.)
     
  7. Ruigi

    Ruigi Will Mod for Digglebucks

    if you want to talk about your mod idea, feel free to join us in the dredmor IRC channel on quakenet. Try to avoid posting about it on the forum until you have a finished product.
     
    ElectricMessiah likes this.
  8. Because I was/is an IRC Noob
    Come to the Darkside...

    type in: "http://webchat.quakenet.org/" into your web browser or just click link <---
    make up some name to type into the Nickname field/box
    enter "#gaslampgames" (no quotes) into the channel field/box
     
    OmniNegro likes this.
  9. Nicholas

    Nicholas Technology Director Staff Member

    I think I'd do drugs just as their own additional category, without them being tied to a skill line.
     
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  10. Essence

    Essence Will Mod for Digglebucks

    best out of context dev quote of the month.
     
  11. TheJadedMieu

    TheJadedMieu Member

    Siggied!
     
  12. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

    Awesome! That will save me a lot of time and effort. I may still make a skill mod. But I will have to figure out how to do it via buffs and debuffs until there are enough drugs present in the data to work with. I am thinking that the buffs will last a short time and lead to debuffs as they end that will last for a very very long time. Or at least until the buffs are activated again.

    And I need to work in the flavor text "Honey Badger Don't Care" for one of the buffs. (If anyone does not get that.... https://ixquick.com/do/search?q=honey badger don't care)

    *Edit* By the way, crazy off topic stuff here, Ixquick is the best search engine to use if you do not want the search associated with you. They log nothing in any way that ties to you. Google has zero privacy by comparison. I switched to them a year ago and have not looked at Google since.
     
    Essence likes this.
  13. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

    Is it a bad idea to discus mod ideas here? Or was there a rule about this that I missed somehow? I do not intend to step on any toes, but IRC is cumbersome by comparison to me.
     
  14. Essence

    Essence Will Mod for Digglebucks

    Gotta agree with OmniNegro -- there's no particular reason not to discuss ideas here AFAICT.
     
  15. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

    I think Ruigi may have intended that more as an invitation to IRC.

    Either that or he is like myself and setup a fire on sight macro to trigger a massive spam of jokes when someone says the phrase "Drug Addict" in the channel. :)

    I actually HAVE done that before. It got me kicked from the channel and my account suspended until the Admin reviewed the logs and saw exactly what I had done. He thought it was funny too. :)
     
    Essence likes this.
  16. Agree with Nick - not every idea needs to become a skillset, some make more sense as a suite of items (tasty drugs) or themed rooms (shrines and temples). Cool idea though! Reminds me of Binding of Isaac, which is a pretty sweet game.
     
  17. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

    I anticipate Rarefied Horse Meat may make a mod that adds throwable tears. :)

    Nicholas, would it help any if we started spewing suggestions of items and flavor text and even potential effects for the drugs? We can go into a drug crazed blab-a-thon here about it if it could be useful.

    I presume you would want proper names of trademarked drugs left out. No Viagra and such? Instead we could come up with names that hint at the true substance without actually saying it.
     
  18. Essence

    Essence Will Mod for Digglebucks

    Nicholas probably won't be involved if it's a mod thing. He tends to sit back and watch around these parts. :)
     
  19. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

    Since it is a "Strictly controlled substance in Dwarven Society", Powdered Aluminum will have to be involved in creating some potent and dangerous drugs.

    Dwarven Beard-Snuff:
    Dwarven Rot-Gut + Powdered Aluminum + Root of T'Char + Potion of Purity
    Alchemy level 4 or 5.
    Heavy melee buffs. Amazingly potent regeneration. Short duration.
    Flavor text: This is one of many reasons Dwarves control access to Powdered Aluminum. It can cause every type of beard sickness known. Addicts eventually look like short, fat Elves without pointed ears.
     
  20. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

    Elvish "Magic Tabs"
    Potion of Mana + Potion of Mana + Fairywodgers + ??? Are there any consumable paper items?
    Heavy mana regen and sight radius changing every turn. It lasts a long time. (It would be nice for it to produce drastic color changes too.) It could also cast very weak bolts of light all about that blind but do no damage.
    Flavor text: Those Hippy Elves love this stuff. They go on wild all nighters and cast stupid cantrips all about for no reason whatsoever. (Obvious LSD reference.)
     
    Essence likes this.