7DRL: The Wakefield Paradoxist
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Ari Rahikkala
Mar 10, 2012, 7:18:03 AM3/10/12
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Yes, that's a working title.
I plan to take the concept behind the Paradox Mage class in TOME4 and supercharge it: Instead of just casting spells that have a vaguely time-and-space-ish theme and that depend on a resource that really feels rather abstract, you actually really go backward and forward in time. You can change the past but not your own past actions, and you have a device that ensures that your personal timeline always remains nonparadoxical, even if horribly improbable things have to happen to make things match up - but the more the device has to screw with probability to keep your history consistent, the more of a chance there is something will go wrong.
Specifically, I'm going to have a resource that's (still) named "Paradox" and that can in fact be used to empower "quantum luckworld wishes" (i.e. magic spells) just like in TOME. What the resource actually represents is a bit of a crazy scifi thing that's inspired by the Ensemble unit in Greg Egan's novel Quarantine. I'll see if I manage to write it up in an understandable way in the game itself. Paradox is increased by changing your past and by casting spells. It might decrease slowly over time, and I'm planning to put in some way to reduce Paradox a la TOME's Static History and Spacetime Tuning, because having too high a Paradox will cause deleterious effects.
Unfortunately I can't implement the game on the T-Engine, as I'm going to need to be able to look at the history of the game state. Instead I'm going to be implementing the game in Haskell, using persistent data structures for all of the game state, and just keeping around a list of the last couple of dozen turns or so. Will be using hscurses, and a couple of routines written earlier for stuff like pathfinding, FOV/LOS, etc..
I plan to take the concept behind the Paradox Mage class in TOME4 and supercharge it: Instead of just casting spells that have a vaguely time-and-space-ish theme and that depend on a resource that really feels rather abstract, you actually really go backward and forward in time. You can change the past but not your own past actions, and you have a device that ensures that your personal timeline always remains nonparadoxical, even if horribly improbable things have to happen to make things match up - but the more the device has to screw with probability to keep your history consistent, the more of a chance there is something will go wrong.
Specifically, I'm going to have a resource that's (still) named "Paradox" and that can in fact be used to empower "quantum luckworld wishes" (i.e. magic spells) just like in TOME. What the resource actually represents is a bit of a crazy scifi thing that's inspired by the Ensemble unit in Greg Egan's novel Quarantine. I'll see if I manage to write it up in an understandable way in the game itself. Paradox is increased by changing your past and by casting spells. It might decrease slowly over time, and I'm planning to put in some way to reduce Paradox a la TOME's Static History and Spacetime Tuning, because having too high a Paradox will cause deleterious effects.
Unfortunately I can't implement the game on the T-Engine, as I'm going to need to be able to look at the history of the game state. Instead I'm going to be implementing the game in Haskell, using persistent data structures for all of the game state, and just keeping around a list of the last couple of dozen turns or so. Will be using hscurses, and a couple of routines written earlier for stuff like pathfinding, FOV/LOS, etc..
Eric Wykoff
Mar 11, 2012, 2:19:01 PM3/11/12
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ideas that didn't make it in to the Paradox Mage class for one reason
or another in this thread http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=22109&hilit=chronomancy
and some more ideas that may make it into the game at some point
here... http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=28420&hilit=chronomancy
(specifically the sixth and seventh posts in that second thread have
some really cool ideas that may work well for your concept).
I look forward to playing this and wish you luck in finishing it :)
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