He is a barbarian, and thinks the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
He is a barbarian, and thinks the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
I really like the open world roguelike Caves of Qud. It has intricate gameplay/sim systems, an interesting setting with lots of cool ideas, and a lot of the writing is top-notch:
In the wave graph of stone over time, where the world plates once vexed themselves into war, a quiet peace has settled.
Braids of roots and ribbons of fronds dimensionalize the flat loam. Something’s home a discarded leaf makes.
Descriptions for hills and jungle, respectively.
It’s not all perfect, of course. The Markov Chain-generated books are unsatisfying, and the game would probably be better off without them. (Maybe GPT can help?) And Q-girl is what she is. Still, overall, good stuff.
But this article is about a particular disconnect between fluff and crunch I noticed and was disappointed by, especially in a game with such otherwise great metaphysical interactions: psychic blades.
To explain: Caves of Qud is set in post-apocalyptic fantasy-sci-fi. There’s mutants everythings all over the place, sentient trees, and there are psychic powers (which are implied, by the fluff, to be linked to highly exotic mathematics). The game has interesting psychic power-related interactions- psykers that get too powerful find themselves hounded by intra-and-extradimensional intruders coming to suck out their brains, and there are plenty of cool ‘spells’ that are as flavourful, interesting and fun as they are useful, mostly because of their mechanical richness which feeds back into the rest of the game.
The ‘portal’ spell (they’re called mental abilities in-game) spawns
randomly wandering space-time rifts that teleport whatever wanders into
them to a random point on the world map.
This includes you and your companions.
In a game with permadeath, this is a really cool addition.
Or how about precognition, which lets you abuse risky strategies (like quaffing a potion that gives you a permanent upgrade at the risk of instadeath) as well as the standard death-cheating?
Well, now the disappointment- when I heard there were swords that cut at the essence of a being’s mind, rather than its body, I thought that sounded pretty cool- but it turned out they just damage HP, and are mitigated by mental armour rather than physical. Kind of lame.
I’m working on a roguelike now (name TBD) that’s written in Common Lisp, in the most stupid-simple style I can manage. This means that, for example, right now all entities are just as association list. You compose an entity out of tags and data (potentially including functions/lambdas). Clearly, this assembly of tags and data defines the entity, so call that their ‘soul’. Then we have a clear path towards weaponry that attacks entities on the conceptual level, rather than the physical: weapons that damage the soul by deleting tags, or inserting harmful ones. Alternatively, imagine ‘soulspace’, where you parse the AST of an entity to create a dungeon/room structure. Then mental attacks involve going into the (hallucinated) dungeon, where physical structures correspond to parts of the entities’ data, and destroying them deletes them.
What happens to an entitity without a hitpoint component? Well, the game system has to figure that out.
Now, we can also imagine mental/soul defences- perhaps tags that ‘take the blow’ for others, or lambdas that re-add damaged tags at the cost of some resource. Maybe a ‘defender’ tag/component translates into a difficult monster in the enemies’ soulspace. Who knows!