Jatopian
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Players of TCB will note that that there is much functionality in things called tokens. These tokens have significant effects on gameplay, with effects like force arrow rotation and fegundo activation, yet are not explicable in any way. Formerly, all elements in DROD had some sort of creative canonical rationale. Tokens, however, are these almost magical things that somehow do things. This is alright when the effects don't affect the game world, as with conquer tokens, but it bothers me when a floor square magically deprives Beethro of his sword somehow. I'd like, if I could, to get assurance that DROD is not becoming another abstract puzzle game.

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[Last edited by Jatopian at 06-05-2007 04:48 PM]

eytanz
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I was debating with myself on whether I should respond to this from my perspective as someone on the dev team, but I decided to hold off and see what more people think before doing so.

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[Last edited by eytanz at 06-05-2007 05:02 PM]

vittro
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I like tokens but I agree with Jatopian :

Pressure plates = They're a system of pulleys that open the doors.
Arrow rotator token = May be a pressure plate that rotates the arrows by a complex mechanical system.
Power token = May release a noise/profume that wakes Fegundos or monster that hasn't detected you.

And, that's fine... But :

Vision token = How come Beethro can magically see under tarstuff?
Disarm token = How come Beethro's sword magically disappear and reappear?


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eytanz
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What about the tarstuff changing tokens?

I'm curious, by the way, if the reaction to some of the tokens was different if they were potions instead - a disarm potion, and a tar visibility potion, for example.

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MeckMeck GRE
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I think tokens are just as abstract and unrealistic as potions. How can a chemical substance in your stomach create a copy of you? How can a chemical substance know where you want this copy to be?

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[Last edited by MeckMeck GRE at 06-05-2007 05:07 PM]

zex20913
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I think tarstuff tokens can be explained by the bio-engineers. Stepping on the token causes a chemical reaction, making the tarstuff switch consistencies.

Disarm token--oremite shower/cleanser?

Vision token--X-Ray glasses.

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Schik
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zex20913 wrote:
Vision token--X-Ray glasses.

I think we need a new Beethro picture for when he's got these on.

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Krishh
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Schik wrote:
I think we need a new Beethro picture for when he's got these on.

X-ray lens.

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[Last edited by Krishh at 06-05-2007 05:25 PM]

AlefBet
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For vision token, I'd recommend thinking of it as "architect's notes" instead. He finds some documents that the architect used to design the room and they give him more information. I always think of that token as the "information token" anyway.

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Yellow_Mage
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I feel that certain tokens are a good addition. I heard lots of people not liking Conquer tokens. I really like them for the fact that it makes rooms that don't initially have enemies, like a tarstuff field, have highscores. The interesting way I'd use them would be for sister(brother) green door switching after a "clean" room where there is less point with stepping on the token as quickly as possible but when you should on it. Digressing...

I understand what Jatopian is saying. It just doesn't make sense. Oremites - you conceal your sword because the oremite will eat it. Swordless beethro token - omg your sword has disappeared magically without any given reason. Everything else seems to make sense, or you can give a little leway (and imagination) to make sense of addition elements that probably existed rather than just spontaenously entered the world of Eighth, such as Reveal - architects can see what they are doing, Rotate tokens - not my favourite, but explainable. Probably the Power token was the most 'outthere' token, but what rule stipulates that Beethro has to have his sword "stolen"?

It's like the classic STOP sign in games. Except there are no cars around and they only work on your character as s/he is a law abiding citizen.

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mrimer
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Jatopian wrote:
I'd like, if I could, to get assurance that DROD is not becoming another abstract puzzle game.

Heh, heh. DROD is an abstract puzzle game. Danforth says so himself.

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silver
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MeckMeck GRE wrote:
How can a chemical substance in your stomach create a copy of you? How can a chemical substance know where you want this copy to be?

bioengineered nanomachines - it's not a chemical process, it's a nano-entity that invades your bloodstream and copies itself until it's into every cell (including all your neurons) - each entity then reads all the information it needs to copy the cell it was in, and uses quantum tunneling to go to the place you want (which it easily determined from your neural state). then it builds copies of the cells in the new location by extracting organics from the ground.

the clone potion makes a perfect copy. the mimic potion can be thought of as a less advanced version - the copy is insufficiently like you to attract monsters and has no "will", it just does what you were thinking of doing for the next few minutes, so is more like a deadly statue in that regard. the decoy is a different kind of imperfect copy - it doesn't attempt to imitate your brain at all, but does do a better job with your cell structure, so that it "smells right" to monsters.

of course, this science is mostly beyond us here on Earth, but we're not as advanced as the empire in the biological engineering sciences (despite being leaps and bounds over them in several other fields) -- and the empire was fortunate enough to find viruses that already did much of this naturally -- as an ultimate defense against anti-virals, the viruses had developed the quantum tunneling effect and cell copying as a way to make hosts for themselves elsewhere - which caused them not to get attacked because they weren't in a hostile organism anymore! the natural organisms just made a cellular mush, but the empire scientists spent generations modifying the viruses to a more controlled purpose, hoping to make versions which they could use to clone their best citizens -- thus instead of having to train new citizens, and deal with their varying degress of aptitude, once they had the ideal performer of a task, they could just duplicate that one. this subproject was ultimately successful, but by that time it had been "lost" by the bureaucracy that created it.

(answer is non-canonical)


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[Last edited by silver at 06-05-2007 11:08 PM]

Jatopian
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zex20913 wrote:
Disarm token--oremite shower/cleanser?

See, that makes sense. Well, except for when a mimic steps on one and the player still loses his sword; I'm still trying to swallow that one. But we don't have a square with a little showerhead in the corner, we have a token. And that's the essence of what bothers me here.

mrimer wrote:
Heh, heh. DROD is an abstract puzzle game. Danforth says so himself.

Tsk. One can't trust salespersons.

____________________________
DROD has some really great music.
Make your pressure plates 3.0 style!
DROD architecture idea generator

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[Last edited by Jatopian at 06-05-2007 06:29 PM]

Tahnan
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If you're wondering how he clones and speeds and other science facts (la la la), then repeat to yourself, "It's just a game, I should really just relax..."

No, OK, out of fairness, my own opinion is "oh whatever it's just a game"--there're so many long-distance effects already that I'm willing to write off most of it as "magic"--but I don't fault people for trying to make scientific sense of it.

silver
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I'm not trying to make it science because I think the game needs explanation (for example, I don't "scientifically explain" the grid system or the breaking of time into "turns" -- those things I consider artifacts of translation, and the "real Beethro" experiences a world as continuous as ours), but because it's _fun_.

there are other ways to have fun with the game than the game itself.

as for why I don't write it off as magic, it's because Erik said "no magic exists in the Eighth".


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zex20913
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Schik wrote:

zex20913 wrote:
Vision token--X-Ray glasses.

I think we need a new Beethro picture for when he's got these on.

Can they please be hypnotic, black and white, and swirly?

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Oneiromancer
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When it comes down to it, the big differences between tokens and potions are that monsters can move over tokens, and that tokens can be used more than once (well, most). So really, they are like potions crossed with pressure plates. I could even imagine the invisibility potion working better as a token in some situations.

Oh, and also, I think that most potions can't be used when you are in a different player role, but tokens still take effect. So that's another game-mechanic reason (regardless of their individual effects) to have tokens. Which wasn't really the point in general, but I think my opinion is probably pretty similar to Mike's.

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Tahnan
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silver wrote:
as for why I don't write it off as magic, it's because Erik said "no magic exists in the Eighth".

Yeah, but what with Clarke's Law, I'm still happy to call it magic. :-)

Monkey
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Jatopian wrote:

zex20913 wrote: Disarm token--oremite shower/cleanser?

... But we don't have a square with a little showerhead in the corner, we have a token. And that's the essence of what bothers me here.

Maybe the token showers you by shooting the oremites from the token. Wait... then there would be little holes in the token... oh wait, maybe the holes are in the black spots... yeah, if the explanation is a shower/cleanser thing, then that must be the reason.


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schep
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I'm with Tahnan. And, uh, also with silver's response to Tahnan.

The game comes first. As long as I can understand what the elements are doing, they don't really need to make sense. It never did make sense that if I play partway through a room, leave and come back, all the doors and trapdoors are as they started, and all the monsters are in their original positions, including the ones which died or ran into some inescapable dead end.

It can also be fun to invent / read explanations concocted to explain the game. There are plenty of nice ones about mimics and trapdoors from the old days. They can't all be true, but each individually might as well be true. Why not?

Yellow_Mage
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I thought the trapdoor one was true. It made so much sense because they had spikes at the bottom in the Webfoot DROD art.

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AlefBet
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Any sufficiently abstracted puzzle game is indistinguishable from Tetris .

Edit: Hey, I think I'll give that "law" a short stint as my sig line.

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[Last edited by AlefBet at 06-06-2007 01:43 AM]

NiroZ
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Is it just me, or is the eighth becoming more and more cyberpunk? I mean, we already have cloning vats of some sort, not to mention bio-engineering. The reason I bring it up is feels weird to be a man with a really big sword (tm) cleaning dungeons amidst all this technology.

eytanz
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That depends on what do you mean by "more and more". The story plan hasn't changed, at least not since I came on board during the development of 2.0. And the vats were mentioned back in JtRH, by the way.

However, the journey Beethro takes is one from the relatively primitive surface societies (which are not medieval, by the way, more like 15th or 16th century without gunpowder), to the technologically advanced Empire (which is on a different technological path than the real world so it's hard to judge - their biotech is considerably more advanced than ours, their physics, electronics and industrial capabilities are considerably less advanced; ballpark pre-industrial revolution 18th century). So in that sense, yes, the game has become more and more high-tech, but it's supposed to feel like Beethro doesn't really fit in well in the Empire - he doesn't.

It's far from being cyberpunk, though. If anything, it's sort of steampunk on a technological level, though not on the social level.

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[Last edited by eytanz at 06-06-2007 02:17 AM]

NiroZ
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eytanz wrote:
That depends on what do you mean by "more and more". The story plan hasn't changed, at least not since I came on board during the development of 2.0. And the vats were mentioned back in JtRH, by the way.

Well, by more and more I mean as the story is revealed. And yeah, it was mentioned in JtRH, but the point is honed in alot more in TCB.

If anything, it's sort of steampunk on a technological level, though not on the social level.

Yeah, that's a better word for it.

bodkin
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Going back to "unrealistic" (even though it's strange to think like that in a Drod world), what about the builders, who are immune to swords, even big pointy ones, but can be eaten by green snakes.

If the builders are not killed because Beethro chooses not to, then how come his nephew is killed in similar circumstances?

It makes no sense! (Yes, I know . . .)

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[Last edited by bodkin at 06-06-2007 01:51 PM]

silver
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that's almost too easy. parts of the strength spectrum are thus:

sword < builder < adder-digestive-fluid < red-serpent

builders are merely more impressive than other monsters, but not as impressive as serpents.


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[Last edited by silver at 06-06-2007 02:09 PM]

mrimer
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Builders wear oremite armor. Beethro won't touch one of them with his sword.

____________________________
Gandalf? Yes... That's what they used to call me.
Gandalf the Grey. That was my name.
I am Gandalf the White.
And I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.

MeckMeck GRE
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So if Beethro's sword is on a builder's square, it's above his head because Beethro dosen't want his sword getting eaten.
So if Beethro's sword is on a Halph's square, it's in his head because Beethro wants his nephew getting fragged.

Makes sense?

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[Last edited by MeckMeck GRE at 06-06-2007 03:17 PM]

Someone Else
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And everybody knows that mimics (and probably clones too) are made of ketchup and puppies.