Some thoughts; please respond with anything these make you think of.
Disadvantages of alchemy compared to casting:
- It costs money.
- It requires getting someone to drink something (except poisons).
- It has in general a more limited range of effects.
Advantages of alchemy over casting
- It can be given to other people to use when you're not there, making it easier to sell.
- There are some effects that it can do that casters can't.
- It can be saved up - an alchemist can get the ability to do Lots Of Stuff one week by doing nothing much for the preceding ones.
General thoughts
- It is probably a feature rather than a bug that there are character archtypes optimised for not linearing, given that some players aren't able to and it's nice for them to feel that they're "getting something for it".
- What alchemists are limited in is "interactivity" or " buzz factor" - they have very few opportunities to use a skill in a crisis to make things happen differently to the way they would have done, compared to other classed.
- One of the best ways to get alchemists doing more stuff in uptime is to get them doing stuff against other alchemists - reactive rather than proactive stuff. I think that it would be good if there were lots of potions with antidotes, antidotes were relatively easy to make and use, and so on, because this would make both "administering a potion" and "administering an antidote" more of an Experience. We could potentially take this one step further by making e.g. "detect forgery" and some similar reactive skills available to alchemists.
- At present the system doesn't play at all with the interaction of alchemy and the supernatural. This is to a large extent a setting thing - the website says "it's not a fashionable research area". Can I suggest to the refs, and to people playing alchemists with relevant interests, that this would be a good area to expand IC prior to the rules rewrite, so that it can be included as part of it rather than needing to be added afterwards if it happens?
- Other "effects" classes have only one limiting factor: time (in the form of mana or spirits). Alchemists have two: time and money. My impression is that at present the former (i.e. time) is almost always the rate limiting factor, especially for the more advanced alchemists. Question: do we want to keep this this way, or do we want to make it more often the case that alchemists need more money more often? I favour the latter, because getting money is what alchemists are best at and at present it's not a terribly valuable skill, and this would make it more worthwhile, but I haven't thought it through much yet. If we do, making potion costs more steeply nonlinear would probably be the way to go.
- Several people are putting together proposals for how the system could work. Most of these are mostly changes to the back-end - descriptions of the skills or mechanics. What I think alchemy really needs is new ideas about the front-end - "what do/can alchemists *do*" - ideas for effects for things alchemists can make, and for things other than "make potion in downtime" that alchemists can do. The problem here is that there are only so many things it makes sense for "drinking a chemical" to do to someone, especially compared with "casting a spell". But what I think we need are front-end ideas, far more than back-end ideas. Back-ends are easy, and which one we choose will depend a lot on what we do to the front-end.
- Suggestion of terminology for use on all pages discussing alchemy: Venom = damage, Poison = effect. This will save everyone time.
- Poisons and antidotes: this is one area where the back-end is actually important to the front end. Lots of things that could be done here. Some of my opinions are:
- Things should be set up so that use of antivenoms and antidotes is common, because it gives alchemists something to do in uptime.
- That means we want them to be cheap and easy to make, not to specific, and not too impractical to administer, but not so easy to administer that doing so ceases to be a challenge completely.
- We also want lots of things to use them on.
- Ingestive poisons and venoms should be very cheap, very easy to make, slow acting, very dangerous if not countered and very easy to counter. On a realism level, I know far less about herbs than the average country-dwelling farmer, and I can point out any number of plants that will kill you in a day or two if you don't get something done about it, find them easily, and they don't need preparation. On a balance level, this works well with the above.
- I think the current "venom damage is permanent, an antidote doesn't cure it but does make it curable" system is ugly, involves needless memorisation of two separate damage counts, and doesn't add anything. I prefer "venom is delayed action in some sense, if you get an antidote before that it counters it entirely, if you don't it just becomes normal damage", which is simpler, easier to do, makes delivering an antivenom more fun, makes antivenoms worth having, and makes it easier to balance venoms. For poisons, clearly an antidote just removes the effect, because they'll be ongoing.
- The bit of the system that seems to be causing the most debate is rules for potion preservation. I'm inclined to think that this may be more trouble than it's worth. I like the idea of simply issuing each potion with a "use by" date whenever it's made, and remove the need for preservation. This would mean that you would actually *buy* potions from an alchemist, rather than hiring them with an option on using them if you need them, which is what happens at present and causes lots of faff about reselling them. If we wanted to, we could also have "extend use-by date" and "get extra benefit from using a potion with lots of use-by date remaining" skills, and others like that, but those would be strictly optional extras and might well be more trouble than they were worth.
- The main thing that this would do is require an entirely new approach to potion costs, because the reason potions are preserved rather than remade at the moment is that preservation costs only time whereas creation costs money as well. (The lifetime of a potion would have to be a week or they would pile up like nobody's business.) --Requiem
- We're pretty much certain to need an entirely new approach to it anyhow; I was visualising potions with a duration of about a month (to make buying one if you weren't sure you were going to use it less of a liability), offset by lower production rates than we'd use otherwise (people wouldn't need to be spending time preserving potions, so they wouldn't need as many of whatever the equivalent of PTUs we decide on is). --Jacob
- I am very much against potions with any sort of defined lifetime. Keeping track of them, particularly for occasional players, is going to be an absolute nightmare. I still can't see a solution to the problem of only ever having a few potions at once, or having a huuuuuge stockpile of doom, though. It's nice to be able to keep exciting effect potions (truth, sleep) around for emergencies without having to worry about them taking up a large proportion of your potion-space which you could otherwise use for healing. Perhaps have maintenance take a monetary cost rather than a time cost? Not ideal, though. --Pufferfish
- I am of the opinion that knowing 'all potions last a week unless otherwise stated', so a potion bought / found at one event can be used at the next, but not any subsequent ones, is easy enough to remember. Then you just have that the extended-duration potions only have that duration if you can store them under exact conditions, so alchemists can keep the odd exciting effect potion around. --R
- Actually, duration if done right could be considerably easier to keep track of than maintenance. A good approach would be to treat potions like shillings - have pieces of paper representing them, signed by the refs, with the details including the use-by date written on. This would combine neatly with having pieces of paper folded several times with different levels of information about how they respond to discerns on them in potion bottles. This isn't necessarily the best solution, but it's certainly one worth thinking about, I think --Jacob
- Players stockpile stuff. The ability to stockpile large numbers of potions would break that aspect of the economy. Conversely, there is nothing sadder than a newbie wandering around saying 'want to buy a potion?' when the answer is inevitably 'no - I can't use it'. --I
- And that is what will happen, particularly when people don't know when they will be linearing. And it's nice for elves and other people for whom spiritual healing is going to suck for whatever reason to be able to keep a couple of potions in their pocket at all times. We *need* some form of maintenance. --Pufferfish
- A possible limiting mechanism on powerful potions would be to have them require an investment of PTUs for several weeks in a row - you put in the herbs and most of the money at the beginning, but you've then got to keep them "on the boil" for several weeks.
--Jacob