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Re: CF: Alchemy Spoiler



"Preston F. Crow" wrote:
> 
> Make alchemy work like spells.  When you find a book with a formula, you learn
> the formula, and the book goes away.  We would need a command like:
>         formula
>                 Displays all the alchemaic formulae that
>                 you have learned.
> Then alchemy could be done by:
>         invoke alchemy of water of the wise
> So you have to tweak the spell based on what you want to create.

    Sounds good to me.  Sounds like a formula object type, actually. 
Invisible objects in your inventory with a slaying field that names the
archetype of the result and a title field that names the title of the
result.  That would allow production of any basic archetype or artifact from
a list of ingredients in the msg field.  The exp field can set the
experience value of successful creation, to solve that little glitch.
    A more versatile solution, that would depend less on crossfire filling
in the blanks for the result, would be to include a definition of the result
as a sub-object of the formula object.  (See "Aligned Weapons" thread.)


> If you just did `invoke alchemy` without specifying the target, or if you
> didn't have the formula for the target, it would work as it does now if
> no formula matches the ingredients.

    I prefer the idea of generating worthless goo instead of potentially
valuable cursed items.  Perhaps a couple simple archetypes like the ones
produced by various diseases.  Give them their own object type, call them
"goo", "slime", "dirt", "fungus", and other such things, and then throw in
some "artifacts" of that type, just for variety.  Goo of horrible stench,
slime of various colors, dirt of absolutely no value, fungus of alchemical
waste, etc.  Then failed alchemy can just generate a random artifact of that
type.


> Perhaps if you discover an interesting random formula, it should be added to
> your list of known formulas.

    The problem is, how does the game tell the difference between
experimentation and using known formulae learned by previous characters?  As
long as the player is putting stuff in a cauldron and casting alchemy, I
don't see how the game /could/ know how the player happened to choose those
ingredients.
    The only solution I can think of is to have a seperate "experiment"
option for the alchemy spell, which drops a random number of random objects
into the cauldron before the spell goes off.  It would, of course, have to
tell the player what it's trying, since the objects would immediately
disappear.
    Perhaps a better answer would be to give the formula objects a flag
indicating whether or not it can be discovered without actually reading it. 
Simple formulas could work that way, but complex formulas might require
variations in the casting of the alchemy spell that are simply too
complicated and precise to guess.  Better yet, instead of 1 or 0, give each
formula a probability field, in some small units, like 0.01%.  That would
allow simple formulas to be automatically learned, complex formulas to be
impossible, and everything in between would require varying degrees of
luck.  Modify the probability by the character's Luck and Intelligence skill
level and it might almost start to make sense.


-- 
            -Dave Noelle,                 dave@Straylight.org
            -the Villa Straylight,  http://www.straylight.org
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