Thinking about the spanner

So, thinking more about the spanner I posted about last night, I’m trying to decide how to handle the beast that is invisibility. The easy answer (there is always an easy answer) is to make invisibility a combat only spell. Doing that also kinda takes away from some of the cool things you could do outside of combat with it. You could use it to reduce wilderness combat by say 50% for visual tracking monsters.

But how does it work when you walk up to an NPC to talk to them, or walk into a shop to buy/sell/trade??

Invisibility is a very slippery slope to deal with.

Posted by Stu on 08/06 at 10:17 AM
Filed Under : Computers • Development • Fishguts •
Comments are closed Commented on by (2) people.

Tags:
Share/Bookmark
  1. Picture of Simeon Simeon -- Aug 6th, 2009 05:52 PM

    Curse’s treatment of invisibility is the spell only has an effect in combat, but can be cast any time.
    This allows you to pre-cast, or use (dust of invulnerability) before entering combat. Which in it’s self begs a question of prior knowledge… but…

    This works because all spell/affects run off the same timing system. And combat and normal play, roll the clock at different speeds. Thus why poison works in/out of combat, etc.

    Lots of cRPG’s don’t handle invis well, and the shop still work, or NPCs react to you, even though they can’t “see” you.

    Curse has a problem with it’s spell system, as Monsters prime spells based on enemy count (which also if the whole party is invis does not make sense) and then once the spell is ready try’s target players, but can’t as they are a invis, so cancels the spell, and therefore wastes the spell.

  2. Picture of Stu Stu -- Aug 6th, 2009 09:23 PM

    Invisibility touches so much, but at the same time offers a lot of play opportunities for sneak thievery and other things, its also too easy to get wrong and can make balance a real nightmare.

    In the GB games, invis was one of those spells I wrote off (like slow, curse etc). Didnt realise it had that affect cast pre-combat (tho I did use dust of disappearance a lot, I cloned it, needed it for the beholder corps)

    3. Page 1 of 1 pages
Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.

Next entry: New Transport

Previous entry: Throwing a spanner in the works

<< Back to main