Elder Game: The dangers of a too-statistics-driven treasure generator

This Blog Post was part of the Elder Game blog. It was posted by Citan on October 1, 2012.

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[ Just an anecdote today, as I'm still working on the Kickstarter preparations. I've got Sandra heavily involved now, and she's helping slog through a bunch of remaining tasks. If the Kickstarter succeeds she'll be able to allocate a portion of her time each week to the game, too, which will really improve the robustness of the game -- a single person's vision can get myopic on a game this big. Anyway, expect the Kickstarter very soon! ]

I was testing some combat changes, so I grabbed some random equipment and started fighting monsters. After a bit I noticed messages like this one in the chat log:

I vaguely recalled writing that, but… what? Ah, it’s my pants:

Emotional Capacity is an attribute for the Animal Husbandry system that partially determines their mating potential. But unless you were to tame this pig and then immediately try to breed it with another pet pig in the next 30 seconds, you would never see any effect from this.

When I made the prototype treasure effects, I went down the list of attributes and made modifiers for all of them, whether useful or not. But I only meant to add the useful ones to the treasure table.

But eh, I’ll leave it for now. I’m sure a pig’s emotional state will end up being important for something else down the road… maybe Combat Psychology somehow… or taunting or something. Yeah, probably taunting, I haven’t got that hammered out yet.

On the other hand, these pants will literal reduce the pig’s emotional capacity to zero. Not reducing it by a fixed amount, or by 10%… it reduces it by 100%! So when emotional capacity does have an effect, these pants will almost certainly be overpowered.

Another irritating bug: the pig should have a gender, but the message uses the pronoun “it”, meaning the gender isn’t getting processed correctly. Since Animal Husbandry is the one and only time a pig’s gender matters, that’s almost ironic.

Bonus Tsys Weirdness: I love the name on my random hat.

Also, what is with that crazy dithering on the white background? Gotta look into that.