Re: CF: Playbalance

[swedel@Tymnet.COM (Scott Wedel)]

Personally, I like that a character is able to become good at whatever
skill regardless of starting class.  I think the real problem is that a
character can get good at *everything*.  It is possible to get enough
powerful items so that starting attributes are essentially irrelevant.
While it is relatively hard to always be good at everything, it is
not hard to be great at whatever designed skill by changing equipment.

I think if artifacts were generally unremoveable items except for a
remove curse and the remove curse reduced the power of the artifact
then it would be much harder to rely upon changing equipment to get
great at whatever.  This is not totally silly in terms of CF world
logic since a truly powerful item would have ego and would always want
to be equipped and the power invoked to unequip the item would make
the item a bit weaker.

Second, since maps are always recreating new items then there needs to
be a way to reduce the number of items or soon everyone has everything.
I can think of two ways to do this: (A) have an optional item existing
database which tracks how many of each powerful artifact has been created
and are owned by characters.  If that number is the maximum allowed for
that item type (a database definition) then no more are created.  (B) make
powerful items relatively vulnerable so they break and go bad too often
for a character to try to stay equipped in artifacts.  (or maybe the
character's god pops up occasionally and tells character to tithe 10%
of total items and wealth and thus help out the cult (and then maybe
set a limit of total wealth not far above that (return of god asking for
more) with limit increasing as exp is gained (in order to prevent players
giving stuff to phony chars and the taking it back)).

							sdw

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