If you think about it... the degree of balance in this game is amazing

Nicholas threatened at one point to give grantXP an amountF. Did that ever happen?

 

Erm, no?

 

Bummer.

 

The problem with separate shrines per level with a fixed ammount is that then you could throw away dungeon lvl 1 trinkets for the same XP that you would get for big ones if you savee them till the later floors, and that would be just silly.

Now, if anyone could talk Nicholas into patching any of the following:
- Non skillbar stuff being able to interact w inventory
- Sacrificeartifact in particular being able to inteact with stuff outside of you inventory
- GrantXP able to use expressions (err, functions?) to calculate the XP scaling

This would be rather easy.

I've yet to see how RR does what it does.

EDIT: Looked throuhg the groves and shrines of Obsidia code in RR, but I can't seem to figure out wether they can boost you XP at all. They seem to work by giving you something for certain offerings, nice mechanic there - one reward seems to be a full refresh, one seems to be some kind of buff, and a custom, "special reagens" item called dragon skull.

 

So, I kinda skimmed over a lot of the back and forth over this thread (glad to see it's apparently been resolved), so I don't know if this has been touched upon... but going back to the first post, I believe I know why this game has a far more balanced skill tree system than all those games such as Torchlight II and Diablo III.

There are a number of various reasons, but first and foremost is that the roguelike style encourages experimentation. In fact, the bit that encourages this the most is also what makes roguelikes one of the more hardcore RPGs out there: Permadeath. In your average roguelike, permadeath is assumed. This results in characters being cheap, since they may die and need to be replaced at any time. Consequently, all the things that make up a character are also cheap. There is no endlessly farming to try and get that last set piece, no months spent leveling, and most importantly you're unlikely to hit your cap of skill points. This allows players the luxury to choose a skill that suits their immediate needs, or which sounds like it might be fun, without thinking "Well, picking this skill may mean ruining this character's build, and ALL that time I spent making them would be wasted."

An addendum to the first reason is that there is no dumping points into a single skill as in other games. Well, ok, you can dump all your points into Pyromancy, but that "skill" is closer to skill trees in other games. What I'm saying is, you can't go and dump 20 skill points into the "It Belongs In A Museum" skill to increase your xp return. Having a given skill, whether it's passive or active, is quite binary: Either you have it, or you don't. This makes it quite easier to balance: You simply have to balance a given skill against if someone has access to other skills, rather than needing to assume the player has maxed out their investment in it. This simplifies synergy between skills, as you just simply need to have both, instead of being balanced assuming the player has dumped plenty of points into both, and thus necessitating you to do so for the synergy to be useful.

The second big reason is that they've increased choice by removing it. At the start of Dungeons of Dredmor, you pick 7 skill sets to carry you through the game. For the player, after the initial difficult choice of picking skill sets, the subsequent choices of where to put their points is a lot simpler and easier. At any given level, they have a mere 7 options of where to put points, and even less as they max out trees. In addition, the player doesn't have to ponder in game whether putting a point in a tree may mean being unable to advance their other tree as far as they'd like: Assuming they live long enough, the player will get to max out all their abilities. On the balance side of the spectrum, having skill sets this way limits the possibilities available to the player. Most skill trees have some skills which are just flat out better than others. People usually pick Archaeology for turning junk artifacts into loot, repairing krong altars, and adjusting artifacts to better suit their needs. They generally don't pick it for Charlemagne. If all skills were available to the player, players would be able to just pick and choose the abilities they want, and we would actually likely wind up with the "optimal build" you see in all sorts of other games.

An addendum is that choice is straight up increased in another way. Those other games usually have you pick a class, and your skill choices are dictated by that. Dungeons of Dredmor does have three classes, but rather than having you pick one and sticking you with just that class's skills, you can mix and match to an extent. In fact, going as a pure fighter, rogue, or wizard is quite rare. Players are open for experimentation between abilities, but at the same time the need to pick an entire tree, instead of just the few abilities you want, means the player does not have absolute freedom. And this lack of absolute freedom keeps the player from optimizing the fun out of the game.

...anyway, I think I've ranted long enough, but I read the initial post and just had to comment.

 

I thought I remembered one of them giving me exp, but I could have been wrong. My bad

 

Ok, one more post here, as wrapup - the first iteration of the "IBIAM" shrine is in the modding section, downloadable fo your perusing and in need of testing. It's a room with a lever a textbook and a recepticle and looks lousy, but as soon as I put togather a flavourfull room design I'll put less doors on it and make it both more flavourful and more inconspicious. It's one use only, and the room can spawn 0 1 or 2 times per floor.

Anyone from any side of the oiginal argument - give it a test. I'd love feedback from both sides of the fence - for the IBIAM fans wether the game was as / more enjoyable without having actual IBIAM available, and from the other guys to see if having the room around interfeared with their peace of mind and vision of enjoyble expirience (and if it's related to the design of the room, that actually CAN be helped). It's a really concise mod and won't otherwise interfear with your game (no overpowered skills when you press random, no flavour-wise-displaced rooms, no unwanted item pool clutter).

Huge thanks to everyone who helped and got involved, this thing took both politics and work, and also let to a few modding related stuff becoming public knowlegde (I at least learned how to influence core skills via an outside skillDB, and give "secret" features to skills). You guys also got me modding stuff, and I owe an apology for my easily uninteligible expression of my stance on modding - I LOVE modding stuff, I just like the core game a lot and don't like the fact that it takes being a modder to pick stuff you like out of existing mods and not also get the stuff you don't. And having a bit of an eye for balance, I get really annoyed by the feature overload (anyone who likes interesting rooms, but doesn't like having Dungeon Delver come up when hitting random probably knows what I'm on about).

So, whichever side of the argument you were/are on, plese, give the thing a whirl, I'm fairly certain you won't regret it