I need ideas for heroes abilities

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THEO
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I need ideas for heroes abilities

Post by THEO »

Hello,

I am new on the forums. I am currently trying to extend and redo DM2 using RTC and would like to give all 16 characters some 3 unique active abilities. Currently I am out of ideas and would appreciate some tips or brainstorming. What I have implemented so far:

- Ability to resurrect fallen comrade without having to go to the altar.
- Ability to recharge magical items.
- Ability to "reprogramme" tech-eye (will now be triggered by monsters instead of party)
- Ability to instantly grow, corrrupt and animate trees.
- Ability to summon wolfs.

Some ideas I am not too happy about:
- Ability to craft various items and potions (would need to be more useful and balanced)
- Ability to bargain better prices (is kinda one use trick...)

If you also have an idea on some cool spells, I would also be thankful, but this is not a priority.

Thank you
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terkio
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Re: I need ideas for heroes abilities

Post by terkio »

- Ability to unrust items damaged by rusters.
- Ability to make food, water.
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Jan
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Re: I need ideas for heroes abilities

Post by Jan »

Many of these ideas have already been presented by Zed in his latest dungeons (especially the Ravenhood series). Go and try playing them!
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Re: I need ideas for heroes abilities

Post by THEO »

Thanks for the tips guys. The ability to unrust items would not work unless I would have a rusted variant for each rusted item, which would require a lot of new graphics (I am not including any, because I am not capable of creating anything decent). Moreover in DM2 there are no rusters, but I really intend use the rust ability in some way :] The ability to make food or water would unbalance the game mechanics, I am afraid.

It is probably impossible to come up with something entirely original. Probably getting some inspiration from other mods will be the best thing to do. I will see what dungeons are there for RTC and play a few. Can never hurt, I guess :]
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Jan
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Re: I need ideas for heroes abilities

Post by Jan »

Oh, and welcome to the forums and good luck with your dungeon, Theo!

We've probably not given you enough ideas - from my side the problem is that I'm so bloody busy and I've got absolutely no ideas in my head except a wish to have a looong holidays. :wink:
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Seriously Unserious
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Re: I need ideas for heroes abilities

Post by Seriously Unserious »

Some different abilities I'm including in a custom RTC dungeon of my own include:
  • Bite: for characters who have a mouth full of sharp teeth, such as algor form CSB
  • Claw: for characters who have sharp claws, such as the avans from CSB, and could replace the standard Punch
  • Gore: for characters with large horns, such as a minotaur, or Dema from CSB
  • Roar: you could replace the normal War Cry with this and make it a bit more effective in causing fear then the War Cry
Basically, what I did was take a look at the portrait of a character and think about what types of natural weapons or abilities it should have, then think about how that ability could either balance or unbalance the game and then set up the ability so that it has some sort of difference to or advantage over the standard hero moves and how I can use them without upsetting the balance of the game. One trick is to give a move like, say bite more damage then a kick, but less accuracy or a longer recovery time so it has both advantages and disadvantages, and the user then has to also take the each character's natural move set into account when choosing a party.

So, using this strategy for a demon character, it might make perfect sense to have one of the natural move be say a fireball spell, or to have n half0dragon character have a breath ability such as a poison cloud or fireball, but if you choose to use anything that powerful as a special move be very careful that you don't accidentally create a "super character", unless you plan on all of them being super characters of some form or other and balance the dungeon difficulty for that. If I were to make a character with a powerful ability like breathing fireballs, I'd have that ability drain a sizable amount of both stamina, mana , or a very long recovery time, or any combination of these to limit how many times that character can use that ability.
THEO
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Re: I need ideas for heroes abilities

Post by THEO »

Thank you for your suggestions SU, I have already implemented some special martial-arts attacks for Equus, who is sort of a ninja character and Saros has an option to conjure the lightning ball in his hand, which he can later throw at enemies. But I would not like to add too many special attacks to other characters (the posion breathing sounds cool, though) as 1) It does not add to much tactical depth and greater variety to the game. 2) Duplicates the function of weapons or magical staffs / spells. 3) Is difficult to balance to be useful early in the game as well as later and not become obsolete. But thank you for your suggestions anyway, I would like to encourage all just to brainstorm anything at me here.
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Re: I need ideas for heroes abilities

Post by Ameena »

Could you not cause the special attacks to level up as the characters do? So, maybe a fire-breathing ability might be based off the Wizard skill, or even Fighter if it's the natural combat ability of a part-draconic creature or something. Stuff like clawing, dodging, tail-whip, or whatever could be Ninja, and so on. Maybe a "Lay-on-Hands" ability off the Priest skill as a one-shot heal, and then a "Harm Touch" as the opposite, either Wizzy or Priest-based for those of a darker persuasion. Maybe a natural "Fear" ability of some kind, someone like erm, Plague or whomever, whose face is a skull or something else creepy, might be useful to scare off mobs. But only certain ones, of course - undead you'd expect to be immune to fear, for example ;).
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Gambit37
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Re: I need ideas for heroes abilities

Post by Gambit37 »

For special attacks such as "Bite" or "Gore", you need to create a very different result from the 'normal' attacks otherwise it's just the same as Punch really - simply with a different name.

How will the effect of these special attacks be shown on screen?
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Re: I need ideas for heroes abilities

Post by oh_brother »

- Ability to see monster trail (i.e. tracking) so you can tell if monsters are nearby?
- Ability to sense if sense if traps/hidden walls are nearby?
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Re: I need ideas for heroes abilities

Post by Seriously Unserious »

Gambit37 wrote:For special attacks such as "Bite" or "Gore", you need to create a very different result from the 'normal' attacks otherwise it's just the same as Punch really - simply with a different name.

How will the effect of these special attacks be shown on screen?
I agree. What I did with the bite attack in my own WIP is to adjust the damage, chance of hitting and recovery time to fit with an attack based on a character's natural weapons (sharp fangs and powerful jaws in this case). for the Gore attack the party charges forward 1 space, then attacks the monster, and this attack does heavy damage for an unarmed attack, as one would expect with a large, horned character charging from a distance, but uses a lot of stamina and takes a long time to recover from this move, also as one would expect from a charging type move. One thing I haven't been able to solve yet is how to prevent this move from hitting if the monsters are already in the tile directly in front, so that this move would only be useful if there is some separation, to allow room for the charge. Oh yeah, and I also have the gore attack push the monsters back a tile if it hits.

When I mentioned balancing in my previous post these are the types of factors I look at when setting character specific unarmed moves and deciding what their affects should be.
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Re: I need ideas for heroes abilities

Post by THEO »

I will definetly consider adding some attacks, but make sure they have some unique features like pushing or charging. This sounds quite cool actually. Thank you for suggestions.

- Monster tracking.
That would cool indeed, but I am bot sure how I would implement this. How would I store data about previous locations of monsters?
- Ability to detect fake walls.
I was thinking of this before - all fake walls would be removed and all invisible walls swapped with real ones. But again - this would be one use ability, because I would not know how to swap them back after a certain period of time, without swaping real walls with them. Of course, using temporary and completely new objects like 'revealed fake wall' or revealed invisible wall would be a solution. I may have to think of that and perhaps I could pull this of.

With those suggestions I could already complete all the skill slots, but I would welcome any other suggestion that could replace some old skills, I am not to happy with.
But thank you again, everybody.
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Re: I need ideas for heroes abilities

Post by Seriously Unserious »

One way you could implement a detect fake walls ability would be to activate a relay that activates an action that disables all fake walls and another action that does a global swap of all invisible wall for a visible walls item that could be cloned from something like a pillar and have the graphic replaced with a normal wall graphic so the pillar should look and act like a normal wall in most ways. To change it back, have the relay also activate another relay on a time delay that activates an action to enable the fake walls and another action that swaps the visible walls object back to invisible walls. This would simulate the ability wearing off after a certain amount of time.

As far as tracking monsters goes, you could try having this ability activate a magic footprints spell on all monsters that are trackable (wouldn't work on non-material, elemental or flying creatures of course) and either let the spell run its course, or have it manually disabled after a certain delay. I'm not sure if this is possible but it's something you could try looking into. I think there is an action available though the wall item "Action" they may allow you to cast the magic footprints onto one type of monster. If so, you would just need to add one such action for each type of monster that you want to be track-able.
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Gambit37
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Re: I need ideas for heroes abilities

Post by Gambit37 »

It's been a while since I did any RTC, but I'm pretty sure you can't make creatures trackable the way you suggest. Footprints can only be left by the party and can't be assigned to other creatures.
Might be able to fake it by having the monster drop something everytime it moves, although I can't even remember if that's possible either....sorry!
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Re: I need ideas for heroes abilities

Post by Seriously Unserious »

That's too bad.

Actually I have another idea of how this could be done. Set up triggers on every floor tile that, when a monster steps on it it activates the trigger and it causes a floor decoration item that looks like footprints to be activated on the tile where the trigger was activated. This would be very labour intensive though and would consume a tone of objects to make it happen, so it would probably be more trouble then it's worth IMO, but if someone wants to take this one and give it a try go ahead.
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Gambit37
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Re: I need ideas for heroes abilities

Post by Gambit37 »

Use DSB for this sort of thing. ;-) It's far more powerful and flexible.
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Re: I need ideas for heroes abilities

Post by beowuuf »

For tracking, you could have the mosnter only drop a sign every once in a blue moon (so you don't need to create tracks) - or rather, a random long interval action that occasionally makes a monster drop a track. Could be targetted to all of a monster type.

So the party has to come across a sign, and that member could identify it.


More useful for a first play through when you don't know what critters are where, unless there is a random element to critter placement. Or signs decay, so if you find a sign you know its something close.



When I was thinking of abilities for a game, some weirder ones I had the idea of (mostly for beastly creatures)

- eat anything (not as game breaking as creating food, but still useful)
- smell anything (before eating it) - can identify poisonous or 'off' food/water/potions
- generate poison - spits poison on a weapon for a limited amount of time, though not sure if weapons are flaggable in RTC
- drain magic - can suck the magic out of a magical consumeable like a freze time, etc in order to regain mana
- twin power - if two linked characters are chosen, then they both are stronger (so both get a powerful version of an attack)
- parry / shield - actually have an ability to negate damage for a moment
- trip - spins a creature around for a moment to simulate a trip

Sorrym now I come to think about them I can't recall half of them!
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Re: I need ideas for heroes abilities

Post by THEO »

Well, I could give each monster a special on-move attack, that drops an invisible object with limited lifespan. Activating the skill would replace all those objects with footprints object or something. But this would work only with monsters that do not have any other on-move attacks, I am afraid.

Spinning monsters is a good idea, but would perhaps be better used for a spell.
Poisoning blade, I already have sharpening blade, but this could be used for other kinds of weapon.
Identification of objects and consumables is also good idea.
I should perhaps implement raw/spoiled/poisonous food similar to Ravenhood and use some cooking abilities.

Thank you guys.
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Re: I need ideas for heroes abilities

Post by MasterWuuf »

A transportation spell would be a nice feature.
DM2 had the transportation spots that caused me much curiosity the first time I played it.

I remember M&M had a couple of transportation features in it, as per spells.
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Re: I need ideas for heroes abilities

Post by Ameena »

Yeah, Town Portal and Lloyd's Beacon :).
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Re: I need ideas for heroes abilities

Post by beowuuf »

You can do the monster drops the other way, by having a separate action item say swap all instances of one creature to something else that could expire, dropping the temp item and the original creature again.

I forget if numeric properties by default carry when you swap items...I think they do...so hit points would be preserved doing that.


The idea would be monsters rarely leaving small signs of their passing, rather than always leaving trails. So more just a warnign thywe are around, rather than an ability to actually track their path.
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Re: I need ideas for heroes abilities

Post by Seriously Unserious »

beowuuf wrote:I forget if numeric properties by default carry when you swap items...I think they do...so hit points would be preserved doing that.
I believe so. I tried by making 2 clones of scrolls, call them clone1 and clone2, and put some text on clone1, then used a trigger and an action to swap clone1 with clone2 and clone2 had the same text as clone1. So if this works for the text on a scroll, it should work for other item parameters as well.
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