Broken limbs

[Calathon]

Hello everybody,

I have not been able to find a similar post in this forum, so I decided to create a new thread.

The manual says that your character could suffer from broken limbs, but this never happened to me (i.e. my character). So I ask myself if this is due to the fact that he was wearing heavy armor, which might protect him from that, or if he was just lucky all the time, though he has been on the edge of death a lot of times.

Did it happen to anyone of you that your character broke his/her arm or leg? If yes, how did you manage to get this limb broken and how did you cure this broken limb again? A potion of "Cure ailment" would not fit very well for that in my opinion, but as an atheistic character, there would not be any other cure (like from priests etc.), or would there?

Cheers!
Calathon

[BasiliskWrangler]

I'll answer this one...

In Book 2 and Book 3, broken limbs are technically possible (much of the code is in place, just deactivated). This was inspired by an old RPG called Phantasie III: Wrath of Nikademus where you could have limbs broken or severed.

The idea is that if an arm is broken, you can't hold a shield or sword (depending on the arm) or cast a spell that requires a lot of arm movement. A broken leg would mean significant reduction in your carrying capacity and movement speeds. Sounds cool, right? Well, implementing this idea turned out to be another rule that just made the game more difficult and was not fun.

Imagine: you are deep in a dungeon with a ton of loot and you break your leg. Suddenly, you have to dump 80% of your goodies in order to limp out of the dungeon. Or as a spell caster, you break your arm fighting Trolls and then, miles from civilization, you've lost your ability to defend or attack. Rangers suddenly can't use their bow.

The bottom line is that this worked well in Phantasie III because you had a party of characters, and so if one became incapacitated you could move him back and fight with the other party members. As a solo game, if you'd really break your arm while fighting trolls, you're just a standing dead man.

So, broken limbs are deactivated in the game code but the User's Manual obviously still reflects that we had this idea at one time.

[IJBall]

I'll answer this one...

In Book 2 and Book 3, broken limbs are technically possible (much of the code is in place, just deactivated). This was inspired by an old RPG called Phantasie III: Wrath of Nikademus where you could have limbs broken or severed.

The idea is that if an arm is broken, you can't hold a shield or sword (depending on the arm) or cast a spell that requires a lot of arm movement. A broken leg would mean significant reduction in your carrying capacity and movement speeds. Sounds cool, right? Well, implementing this idea turned out to be another rule that just made the game more difficult and was not fun.

Imagine: you are deep in a dungeon with a ton of loot and you break your leg. Suddenly, you have to dump 80% of your goodies in order to limp out of the dungeon. Or as a spell caster, you break your arm fighting Trolls and then, miles from civilization, you've lost your ability to defend or attack. Rangers suddenly can't use their bow.

The bottom line is that this worked well in Phantasie III because you had a party of characters, and so if one became incapacitated you could move him back and fight with the other party members. As a solo game, if you'd really break your arm while fighting trolls, you're just a standing dead man.

So, broken limbs are deactivated in the game code but the User's Manual obviously still reflects that we had this idea at one time.

Interesting.

This is another area where I hope someone licenses the Book III engine from you - while I wouldn't want to see a "full" (4) party version of Eschalon, I've often thought that a two-person party version of Eschalon (obvious choice for playing that: a two-person party with a Fighter or Ranger, and a spellcaster) would be a really cool (re-)iteration of the original Eschalon game. If somebody worked up the two-person party version, then you could probably activate that deactivated "broken bones" code in the licensed version...

(Another option, of course, would be a Game Option choice at the start of Book III, implementing "broken bones" as an gameplay option - while I'm pretty sure I wouldn't play with that option, I'd bet there are some "hard core" players around here who would!... )

[Randomizer]

If players are willing to do ironman play throughs with no saves, a broken arm or leg will only slow them down for a while. At least until they kill everything and camp.

[IJBall]

You can use the character editor created by community member xolotl to add four active effects on your character in Book II that are otherwise unavailable but they don't do anything.

I like the iteration that somebody around here (I think it might have been King_ov_Death...) came up for Insanity - it was not only the above, but that you would lose control of movement of your character for 'X' number of turns, with the character's movement then just becoming completely random (i.e. by a random number generator). Presumably if you were ambushed by a mob in such a state, you'd also lose the ability to wage combat...

[Calathon]

Thank you for your answers. I agree that it might be a little too frustrating when having to decide which items to drop. And the drawback of not being able to fight at all would result in loading a saved game, at least in my case.
Nevertheless, I think it would be nice to have the option of suffering from broken limbs, for instance via checking a box at the beginning of the game, like mentioned in a post before.