LOCKEZ'S PROFILE

Random conditional reads:

I think if Platinum is scum, then the other scum is probably Gourd. Conversely, I think if Pianotm is scum, then the other scum is probably NOT Gourd. Just based on who has been forgiving/antagonistic toward whom.

Complaints of remake?
Just don't ever release it
"Final" Fantasy

author=PlatinumAshes
Pianotm is difficult read. The wording of his posts always feels very town. It's just so weird that yesterday he proposed a team with YM in it and then voted to lynch YM in a post a few minutes later. That just feels so off to me, I can't figure out why he would do that. Actually he put his three most suspected players in a team together which is a horrible idea imho. One of them could sabotage if they think they have a good shot at framing the others. It could have disastrous consequences.

Anyway I can't make heads or tails of that, it could just be sloppiness I guess. For now my favorite is still Gourd.

This complaint about Pianotm putting someone on a team and then voting to lynch them kinda made sense, but still going on about it the next day doesn't make sense to me. It somehow feels less like scum hunting, and more like when scum just finds some random thing to latch onto so that they'll look like they're scum hunting. I'm not totally sure why it feels that way to me, but it does. I think mostly because Pianotm already answered it twice, and his explanation of "oh yeah that doesn't make sense, let me change that" seemed totally reasonable to me, yet you just keep bringing it up. Like, sure, it was sloppy, but how is it a scum move? It's just a bad play. Complaining about it today makes even less sense because we know that Yellow Magic wasn't even scum.

Also, calling a potential failed mission on day three "disastrous consequences" is a pretty gross exaggeration. At worst I feel like it's a wash compared to a successful mission. A failed mission would have told scum that one of ten people was not Merlin, but also would have told us that one of three people was scum. That seems at least as useful to us as it is to them.

That's not to say Pianotm is beyond reproach, but other people's complaints about him seem much more legit to me. Ozzy suspected Pianotm at one point because he's the only person Odd expressed suspicion about before he died, and Cap_H suspected Pianotm at one point for going after demonlord on day 2 for what Cap thought were weak reasons. Neither of those complaints were ones I really thought had much merit, but they didn't strike me as disingenuous like Plat's ongoing complaint about Pianotm's mission team.

...Huh. Maybe not. Especially if there are three other scum instead of just two.

I did solution 1 in Iniquity & Vindication and it worked well. The game was (essentially) CTB, and for simplicity to the player, I had 60 time increments be referred to in-game as a "second." So then for damage over time spells, it would say something like "Fire elemental damage. Power: 20 over 5 seconds."

Every 12 time increments, when one-fifth of a "second" had passed, the game would do the appropriate amount of damage for all damage over time effects currently in play. Which for that example spell would be magical damage with a power of 0.8.

I handled the durations of all other buffs and ailments the same way. They all lasted a certain number of seconds. And I made sure all of them lasted a multiple of 12 time increments, because checking every time increment for wearoffs/dots caused a lot of lag. The only exception was the defensive buff granted by the Defend command, which wore off at the start of the user's next turn.

The damage numbers for these dots just immediately popped out of the characters' heads with no spell animation, so it didn't slow the game down. The interface didn't even wait for the damage numbers to disappear before starting the next character's turn. If you have a more dynamic camera where not everyone is always on screen, then you might want to instead have the HP bars decrement without popping up a damage number over the characters' heads at all.

I will say one side effect of this is that, if the player's agility goes up far enough, then they can use their dot skills less often, assuming dots don't stack with themselves. If you double your agility, then that means you have twice as many turns to do other things before your dot wears off. This isn't bad by any means, but it might affect how you design certain player skills. For example, if a player skill inflicts a damage-over-time effect and also a powerful immediate damage effect, then early in the game that might be optimal to use every 4 rounds because that's how long the dot takes to wear off. But later in the game, as the player becomes faster, it will become optimal to wait 5, 6, or more rounds before using it again, because the dot won't have worn off yet.