Class penalties/restrictions that make sense

[Nick]

I am all in favor of class restrictions that make for interesting decisions, ideally also while maintaining some degree of verisimilitude. I'm not convinced that the sharp weapons penalty does that. I'm sure we could have a long and productive thread arguing over what kinds of penalties/restrictions would make sense though!

OK, people, long and productive. Hop to it.

[Pete Mack]

Well, there are other variants which may be instructive. The most notable example is armor weight, which may have much more severe consequences. (CPB Ninja mentioned recently; also Sil stealth penalty.) Another is weapon weight, which makes rather more sense for mage casters than gloves. Carrying around a MoD will *really* make you clumsy. I suppose glove weight will too. (No steel gauntlets, but cesti and leather gloves are OK. But this doesn't make gameplay sense.)

[Antoine]

If there is a Paladin, he should not be able to backstab sleeping monsters and get away with it. I feel this very strongly.

I also believe that Hobbits should not be able to wield enormous melee weapons.

A.

[Antoine]

I also think at least one class (the priest?) should be strongly discouraged from using missile weapons. This should be possible using a malus to the launchers skill only.

A.

[Antoine]

Personally, I think the game needs a pure caster class ('Sorceror'?) that does most of its damage through spells. I know not _all_ fantasy mages are like that, but people want it and it should be an option.

The sorcerer could have:
- loads of SP and a good selection of attack spells
- lousy melee and missile skills (so that it simply cannot kill stuff effectively without spells)
- some holes in its selection of utility spells (to be filled with consumables)
- heavy SP penalties if encumbered (tending to favor robe-style armors)
- small or no devices bonus (differentiating it from the mage).

A.

[Whelk]

The priest sharp weapons restriction was mainly for flavor in the first place, right? If we want to maintain some "Priests are not trained combatants" flavor reflected by mechanics, maybe uh ... hrm. Melee as badly as a mage, but a weapon can be blessed (either found that way, or via a priest spell) so that when wielding it, the priest melees with it as well as they do in the current game?

Alternatively (but tricker to implement, probably): the longer a priest wields a weapon, the more "blessed" it becomes until it's at full (current game level) melee capability in the priest's hands?

Then they're not fighters swapping weapons on a whim with ease, but rather they depend on the "blessing" of the weapon to make up for their lack of martial training and prowess. When they pick up a new weapon, at first they -are- a martially-untrained priest fumbling with the weapon, but after some effort (and through the grace of the blessing) they can wield it effectively.

And if anyone is really attached to the blunt weapons for priests thing, BS something about maces and hammers being the preferred weapons of Tulkas or somesuch, so he blesses priests with enhanced affinity with them or something like that. Blunt weapons are more likely to be found pre-blessed, and/or gain blessing levels faster in the hands of a priest.

Yeah, I'm not sure how fun it'd be in practice, or how viable the "blessing levels" would be codewise, but it's fun to think about.

Afterthought: Count slays as "blessings" in their own right. Slay orcs is a weapon blessed to slay orcs. Priests can wield these weapons at full effectiveness immediately. Maybe even gain a small bonus to the slay brand when priests wield them. Does anyone actually use slay brands anyway, outside missiles? Could make them kind of fun as priest-geared weapons.

[mrfy]

Does anyone actually use slay brands anyway, outside missiles? Could make them kind of fun as priest-geared weapons.

I use them until I find something better. My current character, a 12th level Blackguard, is carrying a Tulwar of Slay Orc. It's pretty useful in the early levels.

[wobbly]

Same as above. Orc slay is actually pretty good around the depth the orc uniques start showing up. Sometimes even with with bad melee classes, if you can light beam away their packs

[Pete Mack]

Yeah, or just plain slay evil. That covers a lot of ground. Even the others tend to have higher damage bonus than ordinary magical weapons.

[Sphara]

I do not feel very strongly about the subject but I could see a priest being allowed using pointy weapons without penalties, reduced to 4 max attacks and getting +1 attack from a blessed weapon. This would of course mean that when playing with random artifacts, +attack and blessed brand could not be generated on a same weapon.

This would probably make early Holy Avengers quite strong but I dunno. Just threw this outta hat. Could consider something other than +1 attack for blessed weapons too.

[Derakon]

I also think at least one class (the priest?) should be strongly discouraged from using missile weapons. This should be possible using a malus to the launchers skill only.

A.

Ultimately every class should have a compelling story for how they kill things (or otherwise deal with monsters, if you want to make some kind of pacifist class that can scare/sleep/banish them instead). Right now the priest has Orb of Draining, and then an awful lot of not-great options. Their melee is unimpressive (second-worst after mage, and not by a wide margin), so is their bow skill (IIRC they are the worst with bows), their devices aren't terrible but they don't have Greater Recharging so it's hard to rely on them. Basically they get Orb, and then Healing means they don't have to worry about sucking at other forms of combat because they can just outlast everything instead.

Anyway, that's getting a bit off-topic and we're only 9 posts in. Back on track...

Armor weight does sound like it could be worth playing with. If you made the mana penalty scale much more aggressively for priests than it does for other classes, then you should end up with something roughly similar to how arcane casters view the glove penalty: it's something you simply ignore early on (armor is light / gloves aren't worth using anyway), is bothersome in the midgame (you can't afford the SP penalty / there may be nice gloves that you can't use), and usually becomes irrelevant in the late game (you have so much SP that you don't mind missing out on 50-100 points / all gloves have FA or DEX anyway).

That said, I'm not sure it passes the "makes sense" check for priests. The problem here being that for a lot of people, "priest" maps to "cleric" maps to "plate armor and a mace".

Just brainstorming here, but what if casting prayers provoked a temporary stealth penalty (or just a one-shot "make monsters a bit more awake"), as monsters are drawn to the sound and holy influence? You could even vary the sensitivity of monsters so that natural monsters didn't care, but evil and especially undead were very likely to wake up and come investigate if you cast prayers near them. Just give priests a "Praying" status effect that sticks after casting, lasts for a few turns, and has, say, a -3 stealth penalty attached to it. The practical upshot of this would be that it'd be hard to be properly stealthy as a priest, or at any rate you couldn't both be stealthy and make routine use of your prayers.

[Pete Mack]

Yes, priest mana penalty for armor weight is a good idea. I thought stealth penalty for rogues would be another.

[luneya]

I have no problem with the "priests only use blunt or blessed weapons" thing. Yeah, it's old-school D&D, but for thematic class differentiation, it's better than nothing. Especially since, at present, the penalty for non-compliance is fairly mild compared with the benefits of wielding a good (for your current level) non-blessed artifact blade.

If we wanted to be more thematic about things, we could specify (by race or by some option) which god each priest character serves, and have the requirement be to wield a weapon of the sort that the god favors. But that would be a lot of work, as we'd basically have to rewrite everything having to do with weapons in order to make Angband recognize more fine-grained distinctions than just blunt vs sharp.

As for some of the other suggestions, remember that there already are penalties for a lot of those things. Casters of all sorts take SP penalties for excessive armor weight. Arcane casters take additional penalties for gloves other than FA and Dex. Everybody gets a to-hit penalty for heavy body armor, and perhaps that should be increased for characters with low Str. Everybody also gets a penalty for weapon weight in that heavy weapons get fewer blows, and additional to-hit penalty for being really badly overweight relative to the character's stats.

Taking all these factors into account, it just doesn't make sense to change the priest penalty to any other basis besides sharp weaponry.

[Sky]

D&D has punishing penalties if you break your character rules. A cleric wielding a sword would lose xp and the ability to cast spells above level 3, a mage would simply be incapable of using a sword, a paladin committing a sin would permanently lose their spellcasting ability.

I would do as such.

1. Priest
Halve SP on wielding the weapon, halve the xp gained using it (as a debuff lasting a few rounds).

2. Mage
For armor, you cannot cast. For weapons, you simply suck.

3. Paladin
Massive debuff to everything for killing townies.

The more i write the more i realize that this isnt d&d and this whole thing is absurd.

[wobbly]

One of more interesting flavour mechanics from Halls of Mist is templars paying a tithe though there you have limited dungeon levels.