Cybernetics

[Jaros]

Imagine you have at the end of your prompt a little white 'o'.  This represents your bio-augment.

Each time you take a hit it either turns red, green, or remains white.  If it turns red, it means your augment is vulnerable to theirs.  Green means it's strong, white means it's neutral.  The strength/vulnerability then affects the damage you take.  So if your augment is vulnerable, you take an extra 10% damage, if yours is strong it means theirs is vulnerable, so they take an extra 10%, be it melee or magic.

Now imagine you have three augments available to you to place in your augment slot: fire, water, and leaf.  Fire is vulnerable to water, strong against leaf and neutral to itself.  Pretty self-evident, I'm just using them because they're easy to follow, they could be anything.  The key here is that you can swap them at any point.  So based on what you have and whether it turns red, green or neutral, you can guess what your opponent has and swap your augment accordingly.

Now imagine there aren't just three possible augments, there are say 10, each with a strength and a vulnerability.  Now when you take a hit and your bio-augment turns red or green you don't know immediately what theirs is - at best you can narrow it down and guess between two or three.

Now imagine you don't just have one 'o' at the end of your prompt, you have three.  Maybe they correspond to speed, damage and accuracy; maybe you have five and their aggregate vulnerabilities determine the percentage change in your damage taken, whatever.
.. Maybe you have three 'o's affecting damage, speed, accuracy, and each one has a sub-realm that can hold five augments and instead of turning red or green you get a value from 1-100 to represent that subset, where 1 is total vulnerability and 100 is perfect strength.  I don't know, the possibilities are endless

The point is that regardless of how intense it is, the system is dynamic.  So now if you just sit there spamming behead or fireball all your opponent has to do is work out your augment setup and adjust, and suddenly you're getting rolled unless you can also adapt.

I wouldn't like to see augments with actual stats attached to them (IE this one has +5 against water and that one only has +3 so this one's better), I prefer the idea of simple types with a strength and a vulnerability so there is no perfect set like there is with equipment.  It should always be dynamic.

I also like the idea of letting builders create their own types and choose the strengths and vulnerabilities, so I could make a purple augment that is strong against fire and vulnerable to jacaranda, as long as it doesn't have more strengths or less vulnerabilities than anything else.  Then you get trends in which random augments from far away make for unusual setups that are hard to pick, or are strong against popular types.

I think that's enough for now.  Work in progress, help me out

[Jaros]

I know this is more like an elemental system than cybernetics but just go with it.  Hopefully there will be lots of things our future lab can do for us 

[Virisin]

This is the best idea 4d has had in a long time. I see potential to eliminate wear location imbalances, race imbalances, elemental system flaws and best of all: deal with the absolute monotonous of the combat system.

I am excited by this suggestion.

[Jaros]

Thanks man 

[Once]

To everybody reading this thread but not commenting: You're all completely useless . If we have a culture which ignores ideas like this instead of jumping in and commenting we're going to develop a culture where nobody posts ideas. Get your asses in gear with commenting and making ideas posts. Who knows, you might actually see one of your ideas come live and get credit for it in the helpfile.

[Molly]

Isn't this a bit similar to what we've been discussing about elements?

I like the concept, but I'd prefer to have 4, not 3 augments - (or elements or whatever you call them).

This is after all 4Dimensions.

[Once]

3 and 6 are important numbers for balance.  Namely because you can do A beat B beats C beats A which is a good form of balance seen in a lot of games. 4 makes things more complicated to balance against eachother with pros and cons, although it's still doable.

Can you paste in the part from old discussions about Elements that you think is relevant to this discussion? That'll provide some context and fodder for more ideas.

[Tor]

I see the cybernetics/augmentation as a being suited for only tied the future dimension. I mean a tribe in the old west might not accept an indian that has traded her feet and legs for a hovercraft with machine guns installed, or suddenly grown a tail. The fauns in prehistoric would make fun of one of them that had traded her tail for some non-faun body part. Showing up in medieval or prehistoric with a metal arm or hand could result in a stoning, or maybe being burned at the stake by the masses. Becoming part machine, is not the same as using a mechanism.

If this is implemented shouldn't there be an equality maintained for those that don't want to loose their... for lack of a more encompassing word, humanity, (no offense intended for the non-human players)?

[Jaros]

@Tor

Have you seen your equipment recently?  

I think you're more talking about the wear_loc swapping I was talking to you about a few days ago.  That's kind of a side-branch to the cybernetics thing now, the core being more like a dynamic elemental system.

The actual mechanics of this are more important than theme and appearance.  What we lack above all is engaging second-by-second gameplay, we can dress it up however we want.

@Molly

Yes this is a kind of elemental hybrid.  Say it was implemented with three augment types, do you have any preference for what types they would be?  Fire, leaf, water.. red, green, blue.. frox, gora, bello.. $, &, #..

Also if there were six types, what would the other three be?

I can do this myself but knowing what kind of a direction you'd be happy with would help  

@ everyone

If you have ideas for how the elements/augments should look, now would be the time to throw them in here

[Molly]

@Tor

Have you seen your equipment recently?  

@Jaros
Heh - good point about the equipment.
I've often thought that Roleplayers should get some kind of bonus, if they dress up in equipment from one Dimension solely. We even started out with the choices of becoming a 'citizen' or a 'Traveller' to support that.
Of course it's never going to happen, players will always use the best equipment they can find, no matter how ridiculous it makes them look...

@ Once
The convo about the elements was with Virisin, so maybe you should just talk to him... If he's forgotten, I possibly have a log somewhere that I could mail you.

I'll bow to the argument about uneven numbers, as much as I am obsessed with the number 4 myself.

So; six elements? Let's see:
Air, water, earth, fire, ice, dark
These are reasonably logical and would also correspond nicely with some already existing spells.

Oops, - I missed electricity and spirit... but maybe electricity could sort under fire and spirit under air?

The hardest thing would probably be to balance the skills and spells to the different elements.

[Tor]

Aye, my equipment is a rather shoddy conglomeration, all *donations of well statted equipment and tokens to have them perzed to better suit will be graciously accepted and appreciated. Items depicting the old west would best suit a gringo, I guess... Or perhaps medieval would go with the name better.
*(Donations are not tax deductible and will hold no sway on my behavior or choices.)

It's not my fault, the women in my life like to dress me funny.   

[Jaros]

Round 2, here we go:

You have three elements in your cybo-chamber, chosen from a total of six.  Each one has two strengths, two vulnerabilities and two neutrals.  You may augment one of these at a time to channel your attacks through.

You start out with fire, ice and earth in your chamber and fire augmented.  Your opponent also has fire augmented, but you don't know this.  You start a fight with zero knowledge of what's in your opponent's chamber.  However, all three elements in your chamber are sensitive to incoming attacks, so what you do know is that each time you get hit your ice element jiggles to indicate that it's vulnerable to something.  Ice is vulnerable to fire and air, so you know your opponent has one of those two augmented.  Air also targets earth though, and your earth element isn't doing anything so you can deduce that their augment is fire.

You now know 1/3 elements in their chamber.  Because you have no idea whether your fire augment is actually hitting something, you now swap it out and augment earth instead because you know that will do some damage.

Now it gets interesting.  Each element has a certain durability (HP) so as you target it, it gets weaker, perhaps channeling your opponents attacks less efficiently but more importantly: ultimately it will die.  When an element dies it can no longer be augmented and any incoming attack that would normally target it now gets a massive damage bonus (or perhaps the damage resistance inherent in using elements is now gone from that one).

This gives incentives to swap your augments around to weaken whatever is attacking you and prevent any of yours breaking too soon, but on the other hand you may have an interest in keeping your elements hidden so your opponent doesn't know what you've got up your sleeve.

Still a work in progress but it's coming, so do hit up the ideas / ask me to clarify anything.

Also this can be layered over / tied into any combat system, skill/spell tree, whatever.

[Jason Orsini]

you are all nuts

[Jaros]

I prefer the term insanely brilliant, but thank you.

[Virisin]

This has a real potential to make fighting immensely more dynamic.