Suggestion: ToME-like rods

[Derakon]

Rods in ToME are composed of a rod shaft and a tip, which are found separately. Rod tips have a spell and a cost to cast the spell (e.g. Trap Detection for 6 mana). Shafts have a pool of mana depending on their material type (e.g. wooden rods have 10 mana, while mithril ones have 160) and may have ego modifiers, which can decrease the cost of a spell, increase recharge time, etc. You can attach the tip to the shaft to get a functional rod, e.g. a Wooden Rod of Trap Detection (10 mana remaining).

There's two big things I like about this system:
* Transparency: it's obvious how much longer it'll be before you can re-use a rod.
* Inventory simplicity: you don't have to carry multiple copies of a single rod to be able to chain-cast it; just get a rod with a better mana capacity.

This was more of an issue back when rods would de-stack while charging, but I think it's still worth considering a similar system for Vanilla. I'd suggest getting rid of the shaft/tip distinction, though: instead, each rod comes ready for use, with a variable amount of mana (always sufficient to zap it at least once) and potential ego effects. So you might find a Silver Rod of Recall (cost 80, 100 mana) which can be zapped once, and then needs to recharge 60 mana before being used again (at which point it'll need to recharge 80 mana) or a Mithril Rod of Recall which you can zap twice in a row, or a Moonstone Rod of Cheapness of Recall (cost 60, 75 mana), et cetera.

Thoughts?

[Tobias]

Inventory:
Those 1000 combinations of rods don't sound like they stack. So you must hope for this rare big mana rod instead of saving up for a nice stack.
In the current system you can also always drop rods if you need the wight. Which is quite angbandy.

Transparency:
The rod recharge is randomized. And you could get transparency with a display that shows time spent recharging.

[JohnCW9]

Rods in ToME are composed of a rod shaft and a tip, which are found separately. Rod tips have a spell and a cost to cast the spell (e.g. Trap Detection for 6 mana). Shafts have a pool of mana depending on their material type (e.g. wooden rods have 10 mana, while mithril ones have 160) and may have ego modifiers, which can decrease the cost of a spell, increase recharge time, etc. You can attach the tip to the shaft to get a functional rod, e.g. a Wooden Rod of Trap Detection (10 mana remaining).

There's two big things I like about this system:
* Transparency: it's obvious how much longer it'll be before you can re-use a rod.
* Inventory simplicity: you don't have to carry multiple copies of a single rod to be able to chain-cast it; just get a rod with a better mana capacity.

This was more of an issue back when rods would de-stack while charging, but I think it's still worth considering a similar system for Vanilla. I'd suggest getting rid of the shaft/tip distinction, though: instead, each rod comes ready for use, with a variable amount of mana (always sufficient to zap it at least once) and potential ego effects. So you might find a Silver Rod of Recall (cost 80, 100 mana) which can be zapped once, and then needs to recharge 60 mana before being used again (at which point it'll need to recharge 80 mana) or a Mithril Rod of Recall which you can zap twice in a row, or a Moonstone Rod of Cheapness of Recall (cost 60, 75 mana), et cetera.

Thoughts?

There would be problem of such rods being destored because most of them don't resits lighting anymore, after protests a few rods where made resist again. This is one reason for stacking of Rods.

John

[tummychow]

If you can resolve the problem of stacking the rods then I think this idea is awesome. However if we really want to try it we can always just play ToME.

[Tatami]

So stacking the mana would be too much of a pain?

d) 2 Rods of Recall (160 mana)

[Marble Dice]

So stacking the mana would be too much of a pain?

d) 2 Rods of Recall (160 mana)

Yes and no. You could do that pretty easily, but without somewhat drastic changes to item stacking, you'd run into the same weird behavior you get with charged items sharing charges. If you had a rare and valuable rod of recall (220 mana) and it stacked with your common rod of recall (80 mana), then you'd be left with 2 rods, each having only 150 mana. There'd be no way to track mana individually for re-splitting the stack later (if you sold or dropped a rod, or had one broken or stolen). The effect would be to approach the average mana value as your stack increased, which defeats one reason to do rods this way.