Alchemy Front End:
Making alchemical effects different:
Drugs!
Um. What I mean by 'drugs' is 'things with both interesting combat powers and weird behavioural side effects, and possible future addiction and hidden side effects'.
For instance, the potion of DAC might make you twirl on the spot every ten seconds. The potion of natural armour might make you lumbering and unable to run. The potion of healing might make you unable to move your eyes without turning your head. The blade venom might make you smile constantly because of the fumes. The antivenom might be horribly addictive.
Obviously this has to be balanced somehow with the 'we don't like mind control' brigade. Personally I love mind control, especially if you know you're letting yourself in for it because you're taking drugs. If you don't want to roleplay altered mental states, don't take drugs!
- Despite being part of the aforementioned Mind Control Brigade, I actually quite like this, though some of the suggested effects would, I think, be hard to roleplay, ref or even remember. Things like "potion of armour makes you unable to run" sounds like a disadvantage you could have in NickTaylor's bolt-on system to take a level off the potion, which is an idea I like though think should be used cautiously for the same reasons we don't let Dark magic have large disadvantages for large gains. And also, there's nothing to stop an alchemist researching psychoactive drugs- it sounds like a half decent archetype to me and allows for the collection of interesting mushrooms on a linear. :) Again, obviously, the possible effects of these would have to be carefully policed, but *if* it's impossible to take them unawares I'm not *too* bothered about very gentle mind-control of the "you hallucinate X" type or the "you feel euphoric with minor non-mechanical weird side effect" type. I'll stop rambling now. --Pufferfish
Making alchemists fun and useful in uptime:
An alchemist being able to apply alchemical concoctions better. The alchemist who made them being able to apply them best of all.
Alchemical identification becoming really useful, like Recognise Spirit and Recognise Magic have been.
Alchemists wanting more than just herbs - access to strange locations, needing to gather strange ingredients in just the right way (so they need to go on the linear to collect them), people to come and cast magic / do miracles at their concoctions to infuse them with power.
Field alchemy - with a handful of herbs or other useful ingredients, an alchemist can make a concoction, but it will lose its effectiveness in very short order, and probably have a larger quantity of unfortunate side effects later.
- I definitely want something like this. At the moment the new system describes a single Level 8 Skill Master Synthesis, but I'm wondering if that really should just be the end-point of a separate Field Alchemy tree. --Winterlove
- ''I'd be tempted to suggest Master Synthesis should be a separate Level 8 skill, with Level 8 prerequisites. Field Alchemy would seem to be a Wilderness-flavoured thing rather than an Alchemist-flavoured thing. --Pufferfish
- I'd quite like the Wilderness tree to have a levelled Herb Finding skill, and maybe some sort of last-resort grab herbs to use on people skill. Anything beyond that doesn't really feel that Wilderness-y to me --Androidkiller
Alchemy Back End:
/TraditionalAlchemy
/CombinatorialAlchemy
/ChemicalSynthesisAlchemy
/WhiningAboutAlchemySystemOne