[MoM] Drain overhaul + Power Maintenance overhaul, take 2 #69428
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The update sounds cool, but it doesn't really change this basic fact. The obvious solution would be to apply some sort of bonus to increasing Drain alongside the penalties. This is in the spirit of the fiction, as overusing psychic powers is often shown to result in increasing power at the cost of control. My first thought was a simple Int bonus, but that seems inappropriate as it increases your level of control. A cost reduction for psychic powers could work, representing the power flowing more easily. What I'd want to do is to increase the raw power level (damage, AoE, duration, etc.), but I don't know if that's even possible, especially not without tearing open every single power entry to scale everything with Drain. An Int bonus would do this for most powers, but you'd need such a significant bonus that people would end up intentionally Draining themselves so they can sit on 30 int while training proficiencies. You could also gate some of the stronger powers behind Drain; e.g. your mind just isn't permeable enough to Oubliette someone unless you've already got a significant amount of psychic lightning bouncing around in your head. I kind of like this option, because it creates a distinct gameplay difference between the cautious psychic who uses her powers responsibly to compliment her mundane skills and the Omega-level existential threat who flattens an entire shopping mall with her mind while cerebrospinal fluid dribbles out of her ears, and clear incentives to lean in either direction. I suppose this could even be a soft limit, if you made it so that Drain does increase your success rate at the cost of all those other penalties, which could make it so that higher-level powers are only possible (or at least practical) to cast with significant Drain. If this is the sort of direction you decide to go in, Drain should probably be renamed to something like Overload, since it would represent something building up rather than being taken away.
I just wanna say that I really like this mechanic, because it creates a very interesting risk-reward dynamic, particularly as int can drop as a result of pain. In the interest of that dynamic, it might be good if the penalty scaled with the difference between current and "intended" intelligence. E.g. having 3 effects active with 12 intelligence is perfectly safe, with 11 it's slightly risky, with 10 it's kind of dangerous, etc. |
Nothing is going to change it for people who don't want any possible penalty in their permadeath roguelike (a significant amount of people, I expect). I'm reminded of all the people who are absolutely horrified at any possibility of negative mutations. The point here is to make Drain more like wounds or weariness, where as long as you're out doing things (psionically) the trend is for it to keep going up such that the player will need to decide whether to keep going and risk worse things happening or cut and run back to base to recover. A player in their base is never going to want to have any Drain, but they're never going to be cold or hungry or thirsty or have anything else bad happen to them if they can avoid it, and that's fine. The Drain-to-greater-powers (or something similar) is something I've thought of for the future (after I include more locations, or skill leveling speed slows down, or something), when I'll probably have a Tiering system for powers (off the top of my head, like Tier 1 is Difficulty 1-3, Tier 2 is Difficulty 4-6, etc), and then jumping up a Tier requires some kind of player action and choice. Like, you can stay at Tier 1 and be mostly safe (and probably have a cap on the amount of Drain you can get so it never gets too dangerous), or you can go meditate somewhere and unlock Tier 2, which means you can never have lower than X Drain. And so on with other Tiers. Like, in my ideal world, if you stay at Tier 1, maybe the Drain vitamin has a maximum of 70 so it never gets that bad. You unlock Tier 2, and now the maximum is 120 and the minimum is 10. You unlock Tier 3, now the maximum is 150 and the minimum is 20. And other paths' tier unlocks also increase this but to a lesser extent. And yeah, in this case it would need a name change because people would go berserk if they saw "Drained" on their @ page 24/7. That makes it more like mutations, where it increases your power level, provides drawbacks, and there are certain things you can never take away. This would be a good place for your idea about power scaling with Drain, too: Tier 1 you don't have enough connection to the Nether for it to matter, but Tier 2 and above? Galaxy brain (coming out your ears) time. And then if the psion wants to lower their risk, they can do it the same way that Project PHAVIAN did--with drugs. (This also may require new infrastructure--I'm not sure it's currently possible to change the decay or limits of a vitamin at all in-game or to set it dynamically using math) The reason I don't really want a charge-up system is then I'd probably need to make Drain less random, otherwise there would be complaints from people about needing to channel a bunch of powers they didn't want to use to get high enough Drain to use the big stuff and then meditate it all away once they got home so they would be safe, which people would definitely do in the same way they spent minutes every turn micromanaging their workers in Civilization so no production was ever wasted and then complaining about how much micromanagement the game "requires."
At the moment what scales is the chance of all your maintained powers failing, which is based on the ratio between (Intelligence / 4) and number of powers, so every power past the limit increases the chance of failure. The odds are pretty low (ratio * 5) but it's checked every time you use a power and every time any maintained power requires maintenance. |
What if you don't have a grace period? If any amount of Drain, or even no Drain, still leaves you with some chance of negative outcomes, you don't hit that psychological wall of "oh no! I have Crossed the Threshold!" that scares people into going home. If it's always on a sliding scale, it should become more about what risks you're personally comfortable with taking instead of pulling over the moment you see the "check engine" light Incidentally, my favorite thing about MoM is that it allows me to worry less about managing these sorts of things. I don't have to agonize so much over being fully healed and optimally equipped at all times, because fuck you I can teleport.
My gut feeling is that Tier 1 should be 1-4 because several iconic and useful powers are Difficulty 4 - but that's probably a strong indicator that 1-3 is correct. Tier 1 should feel a little disappointing, or you won't be tempted to take the Faustian bargain.
I think you could probably hack it with EOCs, but it would be... well, hacky. Run one every so often and set the vitamin to the minimum level if it's below. Probably build it into the Centering Meditation EOC as well so it actively tells you "no" when you try to get it below the minimum level. Ugly, and probably buggy.
You could have some sort of tool (drug, amplifier item, special crystal) that allows you to temporarily count as being higher Drain, but people would still do it if/when that tool isn't available and it takes the focus of the mod away from developing your psychic powers and towards a constant treasure hunt, which I don't like. I much prefer your idea where acquiring better powers requires accepting a minimum level of Drain. |
Hmm. I prefer the idea that there is a safe stage, because then when you choose to go up to tier 2 you're consciously deciding "I want power so much that I am okay with my use of psionics never being completely safe again." I'm happy at the moment with the chance of negative outcomes through other means (channeling powers in Nether-connected locations or during portal storms, failing to channel powers, etc).
Yeah, the counterpoint to the people who say "MoM gives you too much power! It should be harder!" are the people who say, "I love how MoM has opened up the game for me, I can finally explore and do quests instead of just lab-diving and then getting bored!" It's a difficult balancing act.
I asked on Discord and I did just get one option that might work. It'd require multiple recurring EoCs checking all kind of things, but it would be possible and might be what I end up doing if there's no better solution. Everything would break if people debug-mutated off the Adept or Ascended tiers after taking them, but that's why debug mode has warnings on it. Centering Meditation, at least, I could easily account for. (though accounting for that issue you made, I should probably have Centering Meditation tell you you're at Drain 0. It's a one-line change so I can easily roll it into this PR without scope creep).
Right--some level of treasure hunting is good, because people like finding cool loot. But we already have a mod where you need to treasure hunt to get all your powers and it's called Magiclysm, so MoM needs its own thing. My idea is that initial awakenings remain as easy and convenient as they are now, but then to do higher-tier awakenings you need to go to Project PHAVIAN locations (this is contingent on my making the various themed labs I'm working on, so you have some idea of where you need to go if you want Adept Biokinetic or Ascended Pyrokinetic) and loot their research, and then you go home and try to unlock it and then go through the process. Or as another option, maybe you find some hermit psion in the wilderness and ask them how to do it (slightly riskier), or maybe there's a (much harder, big chance for things to go wrong) do-it-yourself option too if you really just want to hang out in your base all the time. And then after the new tier unlocks, it's exactly like the original unlocks--you learn a couple powers, which you have to train and master to get more powers within the tier, etc. I can always make Debug Matrix Crystals for people who just want Awesome Powers and want to skip all that (plus for actually debugging) This would also let me do an idea I've had for a MoM scenario where you start as an actual mathematician with a bunch of powers already leveled--but you went crazy during the initial portal storms, and before everything collapsed Project PHAVIAN locked a psionic nullifier on you, so you're on a quest to get it removed and can't use any powers before then. |
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Okay yeah, that makes sense in the context of the tier system. Tier 1 lets you play in the kiddie pool and stay completely safe forever if you want to, or you can choose to step into maelstrom. |
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Summary
Mods "[MoM] Drain overhaul + Power Maintenance overhaul"
Purpose of change
Drain is a little too predictable. The penalties accrue in a linear and easy fashion, and since the penalties are so harsh, Drain is always bad, there's never any reason to live with it, and you should meditate it away as soon as possible. It's not as interesting as as it could be.
Also, I thought of a way to make maintaining too many powers riskier.
Describe the solution
Make the effects of Drain more random. Drain now has only minor penalties and doesn't scale at all. However, having Drain causes a chance of other effects when you use you powers, escalating depending on how much Drain you have: headaches, small amounts of extra Drain, nosebleeds, weariness, sudden fatigue, muscle weakness, and eventually the chance of suffering overload even if you succeed at channeling your powers. But this is all things that might happen, so there's never an immediate disadvantage to having some Drain.
For power maintenance, you can now safely maintain a number of powers equal to 1/4 of your Intelligence. If you go over that, your powers have a chance to be disrupted when you use other psionics, causing you to drop all your maintained powers and accrue some Drain. This makes maintaining more powers riskier, but if you're in your base and just want to have 6-7 utility powers on, it should be safe (unless you're a Teleporter who refuses to use the stairs, anyway).
Project PHAVIAN might have developed ways to make maintaining powers easier.
Also, when in strongly Nether-connected areas--the monster corpse, Research Facilities, the Physics Lab, crystal formations, or during portal storms--there's a chance that your powers can attract the attention of...something out there. At the moment, all this does is have a chance to give you nightmares. It'll be expanded in the future. Telepathic shield protects you from being noticed. PORTAL_PROOF/DIMENSIONAL_ANCHOR do not, because there's a difference between passively existing on the borders of the Nether and actively using Netherum mathematics and expecting to go unnoticed.
Describe alternatives you've considered
Testing
Drain mishaps can occur and the various different mishaps all showed up. They're very rare at low levels of drain and get much more common at higher levels. Channels powers in a Nether location causes the Observed status, which causes nightmares. Maintaining too many powers can risk breaking them.
Additional context