Rune definition

[jqmtor]

What has been called puppet parts until now, will now be called runes.

A puppet may be equipped with one or more runes. If the player does not equip at least one rune on the puppet, it will not be eligible for combat. It will probably be a good idea to define a limit of runes per puppet, but I find it difficult to determine at this point. I think we need to have a better idea

A rune adds up to any of the puppet's attributes (e.g. attack, defense, health, speed, etc.), or defines special properties (e.g. catapult attack - making possible for the puppet to attack enemies that are not on line of sight) and effects (deal extra poison damage to enemy for X turns). A rune can specify a set of restrictions or limits. If a puppet is equipped with runes with overlapping restrictions, the most constraining restriction applies. The same rune can the added multiple times, and its effects will be cumulative, unless it specifies a restriction to say otherwise.

I will try to suggest some runes just to get the discussion started, but feel free to suggest replacements and add more things :

Attack rune: +20 attack cost x

Mid-range attack rune: +10 attack +1 range cost x

Long-range attack rune: +5 attack +2 range cost x

Catapult attack rune: +5 attack +1 range Effect: ability to attack enemies that are not on line of sight cost x

Defense rune: +10 defense cost x

Healing rune: Effect: +30 health to ally cost x

I'd really like to continue this but I am too tired. I'll submit the RFC just to get it going.

[jqmtor]

I'd just like to formalize some things I talked with @donbonifacio earlier today. He suggested that we separated the runes into classes, to help us organize things. My suggestion is that we separate runes according to the combat role they are related to (they are quite similar to the ones suggested by @donbonifacio).

• Tank - aggro gathering, melee combat;
• Leader - all kinds or party support; healing, boosting, auras;
• Control - summoning, on-going effects (poison, slow), enemy control (confuse, paralyze);
• Striker - hit and run, damage dealing, area damage, ranged combat.

Having said all this, there are obviously many runes that cannot go together. An example would be having both melee and ranged attack at the same time. While I think the runes can have restrictions, I start to think that this will add a lot of complexity to the runes, as we would have to define a lot of restrictions for each rune and cover a lot of possibilities. Maybe this is one of the reasons why most RPGs have this responsibility on the character definition. What do you think?

[donbonifacio]

I agree. What if we categorize runes? You could have a main attack rune (melee/ranged/magic/etc), a main defense rune (armor/auras), and maybe support runes, like support attack (poison/bomb), support defense (strikeback, paralyse). On the supoprt runes we could add several ones.

[jqmtor]

This seems a good idea to me.

One thing I get the impression when I play Alien Star Menace is that we might be overcomplicating the game with all this stuff of building puppets with runes. There's a lot of stuff to worry about. Restrictions, categories, trying to avoid perfect combinations. Simple character choosing can make things a lot simpler, since we can build characters with both strengths and weaknesses by default. Also, it would simplify the user interface a lot, as we wouldn't need to provide a way to put the puppets together and so on. I know this is the core idea, and the thing that would make the game different, but I really think there's a lot room for improvement in combat and character diversity.