Re: Stats and Races

[Peter Mardahl <peterm@soda.berkeley.edu>]

>> cleric          hp healed * difficulty of level   wis, int
>> 
>> thief           opening doors, killing traps      dex, int
>>                 and active walls
>The cleric and theif skills would be harder to improve because at
>least right now most of the game is in killing things.

  True--as well as major code revisions.  This is not a small thing
that I propose, and this is something that many people should have
input on before anything is done.

  I truly can't think of any good way to have cleric skills advance
levels--killing monsters with magic and with a sword are very
straightforward ideas, and disarming things can go toward experience
in the thief area.  But cleric?  How do you credit things toward their
experience?  Casting number of defensive/healing spells?

  Having a system in which a monster kill is divied up equally is silly.
Why should murdering some poor monster with fireball improve your
thief ability?

  The best thought about how to advance clerics is this:
you track all the hp healed by magic, and multiply it by the level
of the nearest monster.  If no monster is in range, then no exp.
Also, if the monster is not threatening, no exp.  Hard to implement,
and easy to abuse.

  For defensive spells, you are awarded experience based on how much
hp the spell has saved you*the level of what tried to hurt you.  This
is very straightforward now:  spells carry the level of whatever cast
the spell since level dependencies on spell power were added.

  The thresholds for advancement in each category do not need to
be the same at all....


  This whole idea may be to complicated to be at all practical.
Certainly I don't look forward to coding it.  I might, though, if
people seem to think it's very worthwhile.

Regards,

PeterM