- Location
- Hell
Rituals, big consistent plan that hit the traits they want for min. 5 turns to help lower costs, eating other spirits.
Time of the Gods: Into the Amber Age
- Thread starter Powerofmind
- Start date
- Original
Powerofmind
In Madness Fallen
- Location
- United States
Despite the fact that when I wake up from a nap I generally have something like 10-15 things demanding my attention, I am not yet completely overloaded with questions.Hey, Pand--
...nvm
That's what i figured--as a general rule take any such requests/reminders from me with an implied "if you have the time/energy", and let me know if i ask too many questions
Combination of directed purchase and Accumulating Action. If you were faith and hadn't slept at all yet, you would probably have discounted all of the water traits that were open to you down to 1 legend several turns ago, along with moon, and at least one or two aspects. Overall, you'd have roughly the same number of traits and other buys as you do now, Faith would just get to aim for them, and then pull them all off at once for a dramatically reduced total legend cost of 4 instead of nearly 15.
Abby Normal
High Clerk of the Ymaryn
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Yeah, i admit i've been a little confused about how @Powerofmind 's new system both aims to prevent exponential growth but also has provided us with a trait a turn...I kinda assumed that fear buys would trend more towards skills on average... Of course, with the trait limit being so trait, its both less and more of a problem compared to this kind of growth in the original system--we can't just keep growing like this forever unless we randomly pick up shrine...but we also immediately hit the trait cap and are kinda stuck in growth unless we randomly pick up shrine or switch to traitlines that upgrade instead of affinities...
Powerofmind
In Madness Fallen
- Location
- United States
I'll be expanding the width of non-trait purchases in the future. I, too, was a bit thrown that even randomness can't stop trait trains (I was expecting statistics to be good to me, but forgot the sample size was too small).
Abby Normal
High Clerk of the Ymaryn
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Also, i've been rereading the original Amber Age, and aside from the omake its inspired*, i think a big problem in that system was all the timed discounts...it makes sense mechanically, but it consistently led to "let's take care of shit, thensleep for everything thats discounted, ignoring the aftermath"--so for the faith system i'd suggest cutting back or entirely removing timed discounts and especially timed unlocks
*Not even one based on something that happened in amber age...literally just read the update where we learn how talismans work and suddenly "Huh...what if a spirit used those for some Big Brother shit?"--might get that dont tomorrow if i have the time and creative energy
Powerofmind
In Madness Fallen
- Location
- United States
I was never going to make anything timed but quests. Accumulating Action was something that would pile up until you next slept, so you could prepare a big buy line and rush it down all at once, when it was safe to do so.
- Location
- Hell
I even had them all in haiku form
>.>
I'll get you next time. (Though I am curious, Why bless Navigation and not perform(Trickery)? I imagine a skill up there would have been preferable)
Anyway
That's actually the descriptions from Avatar 2, so it's actually out of date @Powerofmind What's changed from then and now, and what would have been the hypothetical change be for Avatar 3?
Never be afraid to be a little bigger, darling~ Inherent Night FTW!
+1 Would support
Powerofmind
In Madness Fallen
- Location
- United States
I am almost certain I made at least one change, but Avatar doesn't change up much with score, it changes more from aspects/spirits (humanity didn't do all that much for you, nor did waves).
- Location
- Hell
Size does though, so are we as tall as Saiga now or...?
I mentioned this earlier in response to another comment, but I can't accept "Rituals" as an answer to these sorts of questions, since ritualism is an advanced skill that most spirits don't have access to, especially in early game.
Do Faith spirits acquire discounts much more easily than Fear spirits? Because it would require a couple of points of discounting each turn to keep up with us, and we weren't especially exceptional up to turn 9 purchase-wise.
Okay, that answers my question; looks like Faith gets discounts quite easily; much more so than in AN's original system, for example.
The Faith spirit would still be behind since sleeping is for even 1 year per trait is slow compared to us, and I can't begin to imagine how it would upgrade attributes, but at least this tells me how traits get upgrades by spirits.
Again, neither of the proposals involve eliminating the upfront legend investment and potential for a net negative return on it. The legend sink is a curb beyond the original game, and one worth trying. The point is that the extreme form and the additional nerfs on top of it seem excessive. Even in the original game demis and monsters weren't that broken. Harzey was the most broken thing in the game, and he never spammed them. The character who got the most immediate use out of large numbers of them was only able to do so due to possessing an ambrosia reactor. Goatfucker eventually managed to turn the large number of demi offspring into enough legend to beat everyone else to ascension, but it wasn't a sure thing and it took him ages.
The workload concerns are real, but bowing to them does mean either forcing the players to play by different rules than the NPCs, or reducing the richness and variety of the game as a whole. I already raised several possibilities for mitigating the problem. Bluntly, they don't have to all be named characters, especially when it gets to the point where a spirit is strong enough to create large numbers of them and therefore so strong that few are ever going to end up ascending. The oodles of forest demis and goat demis weren't individually statted out and tracked. Inspired warriors were even more dangerous than demis, but weren't individually tracked. Having general groups, classes, or populations with set characteristic distributions from which deterministic quantities of needed compositions can be recruited or individuals elevated to named status through stochastic generation as needed can serve most of the purposes a spirit playing a high-r strategy will have for them. Saying that X number of the available squads have a demi commander of a certain loose template which gives access to certain spirit traits and prevents them from suffering a tier malus when facing spirits doesn't require each commander to have a name and personal character sheet. Saying that there are Y mobs composed of monsters of a certain loose template who have a standard set of collective characteristics doesn't require each member to have a personal character sheet. The fact that some will ascend can be dealt with by having a certain proportion be elevated to spirithood each year and generating at that time a character sheet for them by rolling for a certain range of traits and skillpoints to get results statistically indistinguishable from having tracked every single one individually from birth.
Last edited:
Forget the same size; take a closer look at the roll tables.
On turn 5, rolls of 18-100 gave traits.
On turn 6, rolls of 38-100 gave traits. We rolled again, but that was on a skill-exclusive table, so it doesn't count.
On turn 7, rolls of 36-100 gave traits.
On turn 8, rolls of 36-100 gave traits. We rolled on this table twice.
So. Before we exploded this turn, we rolled on tables with traits five times. The first time, our chance of getting a trait was 82%. The second time, it was 62%. The last three times, it was 64% each. Of these, we rolled traits all but one time.
To simplify a bit, we had a roughly 2/3 chance of rolling a trait each time (on average), and ended up rolling traits 4/5 of the time. This shouldn't strike you as exceptional or unusual.
Now, if traits were 1/3 of the roll table and we still got the same results, I would be surprised. But as is? The seems to conform to the odds.
- Location
- Hell
Aye but as we are now, it's not really sustainable and are currently at negative growth in a really small pop. and just had a Fear Glut. I can't imagine these are traits of your regular new born Fear Spirit
Powerofmind
In Madness Fallen
- Location
- United States
He's still bigger, but not by much. I prefer to shift the load of larger avatar sizes onto 'giant avatar' rather than make it something that increases quite as much from levels alone.
Look, if you want lots of kids, you have to lose the legend for it. If you want lots of kids that throw themselves at things where most of them die, you lose the legend for it. I'm not penalizing many-children builds. That's what non-boosted spawn are for. Yeah, they won't be as great as Ur-spawn, but thems the breaks. Your own suggestions basically relegate the Ur-spawn you want to have into a loosely templated form of basic spawn anyway. And there is no way in fuck that I am allowing ascensions based on a percentage value of the number of kids you have, because that way lies writing dozens of spirits if you happen to decide you want lots of Ur-kids.
The mechanical disincentives to spamming actually legendary figures and beasts are there for a reason. If you want a large number of specially-templated mortals, make broods and demi-races. I'm not budging on this.
The Unanimous Bonus would be...getting an update early!
More seriously, not something you want to encourage, conflicting plans make for more debate, discussion and finding of weaknesses(if only because you're trying to pick holes in the other guy)
Hopefully we can Innovate an Art skill out of the Amber.
Just to confirm, we're currently on these tracks for our Magic Stuffs:
-Mysticism
--Astrology - Unlocked. Trained.
--Omen Reading - Undiscovered. Access via Past delving
-First Magic
--First Perform - Unlocked(Perform: Trickery). Trained
--Second Perform - Undiscovered. Access via ???
-Second Magic(Theory! We have not reached it with Harzivan!)
--First Art - Undiscovered. Access via Innovation experiments.
--Second Art - Undiscovered. Access via Innovation experiments.
--Mysticism - Undiscovered. Access via Past delving
-Human Aspects - Pretty much. It's just handy because Leadership and Trade together are basically the "Human communication" skill, while Innovation is creativity. Though a monster/beast would have trouble using Innovation, because it can unlock new skills they can't learn. Immensely frustrating to them I'm sure
-Animal Aspects - As expected. They are a lot more substantial on a mortal or beast, especially since they break the 5 skill cap. People who think the goatlings are weak forgot that it was a swarm of goatlings facing Harzivan + Shadow Spider. On an open field, the minor quality buff would add up.
-Spirits - Also as expected.
-EAs - By especially well engineered, that basically means stacking a lot of relevant traits together or a bit more finesse? I could see getting a functionally waterbreathing aquatic human if I put in a true aquatic animal aspect together with a water EA..
Question.
@Powerofmind
Do Shrine Upgrades apply to Holy Place or is that one of the things we need to cap it with a shrine to get?
Because given our increase in power, it MIGHT be desirable to go with:
-Shrine in Saiga's village so we can get to him
-Shrine at Holy Place we put our 'wonder' shrine extension on.
If we hit Influence 3, we should be able to put our village in the overlap zone between the Holy Place and Saiga's village.
Astral Affinity - Stars - Cancer.
Yeah, figured as much. Faith is REALLY good at piledrivering towards specific traits. Fear is inefficient but fast, we'd be throwing out a lot of our Legend just repeatedly Despising stuff.
That's the point of Despising traits. Dropping redundant Elemental Affinities is how we can get out of the maximum capacity loop, because we can get them back easily enough, while they might actually be TOO powerful to use for regular fear generation without destroying the population.
Basically, we can drop Waves for now, and whenver it shows up. It will get a discount next time we roll it, so we only arm the Wave missile when we have an actual target.
We pick out say, half our cap in unique Spirits and Aspects to keep, which lets us incrementally boost them up to T3. Then we pick out the other half in elemental affinities, and recycle excess EAs.
Abby Normal
High Clerk of the Ymaryn
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Oh, @Powerofmind can you explain how exploding dice work exactly again?
Specifically:
1. do we roll 1 extra die, or 2?
2. how do we calculate the value with exploded dice?
Specifically:
1. do we roll 1 extra die, or 2?
2. how do we calculate the value with exploded dice?
At the time, we did not know just how broken they were. If I were replaying the Harzivan campaign, I would totally spam demis whenever possible, especially early on.
I challenge the presumption that enabling Ur-spawn-spam adds meaningfully to the richness or variety of the game.
You are asking our GM to run this a Age-of-Empires sim on top of everything that is already going on. I suspect that @Powerofmind may not be interested in such an endeavor, and your given reasons for requesting these features do not seem to justify the workload involved as far as I can tell.
Powerofmind
In Madness Fallen
- Location
- United States
EA's are especially designed for Ur-spawn, but regular spawn can get a little more out of them so long as you engineer the other granted traits to support their effects. You can make a race of fire-breathing sapients from demi-spawn, but EA - Fire isn't enough, you'd need to stick in a few synergizing elements to make it happen.
Only when capped. Shrine Extensions are shrine improvements. Holy Places are natural wonders.
1 at a time.
Each additional die changes the formula to include 10x more results (from 100 to 1000). Your result starts at 1% for exploded, and is progressively kicked up in 0.1% intervals to a 0.1% chance. This reads as 1 in 200 for a 22, and gets another small kick for being an exploded double value (22, 33, 44). The base success/DC system breaks down on explosions, and becomes more and more a judgment call the farther away from common sense it gets.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Would it be spoiling too much to ask how stuff like Aspect of the Mother/etc interacts with Ur-spawn/demi-spawn/etc?
That is why I was tracking relative to what happened before the current Glut; cause that kind of turn can throw averages quite a bit out of wack.
Art is nice; especially since it isn't something Saiga has, so there is Trade/Collaboration potential there.
Abby Normal
High Clerk of the Ymaryn
- Pronouns
- He/Him
...I just had a thought. You said originally that Confluences (like the great tree) were primarily intended to be capped with a Shrine right? Our Moonbeam is listed as a Confluence on teh character sheet iirc...does that mean that putting a shrine on our holy place would improve Moonbeam?
No, definitely not. Inherent Night is not beneficial, since it means we'd be greatly weakened at any actions in the day in exchange for dominance at night. It just takes an opponent capable of exploiting that to whack us while we spend the Long Day unable to act significantly.
Inherent Moon, well, Moon shows up in the day too, sometimes.
I figure Avatar size is mostly "scale up to Impressive Human of your aspects and stay there"
Again, look to mythology:
-Artemis is a Hunter goddess, but her apparent build is that of an extremely fit teenager. She's not weak or fragile by any standards, and is definitely Avatar focused.
-Nezha is a warrior god, and FAR from weak, considering he wrestled a dragon and ripped out the spine. He's also physically like, nine.
So I expect, until we pick up a trait that says otherwise, Gaerig will look like someone optimized a late teen/young adult because that's her concept.
Relevant aspects:
-Inherent Water - Blue/wet/cold looking.
-Spirit of the Sea - Seaweed in hair, curvier, wilder looking.
-Spirit of Mischief - Younger, more impish.
-OA - Sea - Bluer, curvier again.
-AA - Moon - Paler, gleaming eyes, figure gets linked to the lunar cycle, getting more mature at the full moon, slimmer at the new moon.
Etc.
Based on the mechanics as explained,a Faith Spirit would get the following:
Years 1,3,6
-Calm Water - Discount to Spirit of the Sea, OA -Sea
-Astrology - Discount to Moon, Stars
By the 6th year, we could buy Spirit of the Sea+OA Sea+AA Moon + AA Stars for 4 Legend at once.
Then we wake up on year 10, and start doing discounts on Waves, Rain and Ocean at one go from Water actions. Etc.
Faith can discount multiple things parallel with the same action. Their big limitation is having to uptech their Shrine.
Powerofmind
In Madness Fallen
- Location
- United States
No, not particularly. Spirit of Motherhood or Fatherhood reduce the expense in sustenance for individual traits down to a certain limit, and allow 'storing' children to add more sustenance later. There are more special actions unlocked by taking them not directly attached to the traits themselves that enhance spawns' ability to generate legend for you, or disseminate more easily into the ecosystem.
Peculiar interaction. Confluences only normally require shrines because, unlike holy places, their worth is artificial, arcane. The shrine cap is only necessary because you need some means of controlling and harnessing the confluence, and simply anointing it in your own name or claiming it from an opponent aren't enough. The Holy Place's 'shrine-like' effect harnesses the confluence effect of Moonbeam for you naturally.
- Location
- Hell
I'm hoping for paint, just feels right to working with watercolour doesn't it?
The thing is, I doubt we would be bumping out our current Inherent Affinity and would thus still have Water in our pocket. Stars also show up during the day too(Morning Star and Evening Star) and that would also be part of Night.