Eric S. Raymond wrote: > THoT exposes a design problem in the LEADERSHIP ability. > > For storyline reasons, the units in the campaign's Loremaster line > have leadership at a level one above their actual level. This > reflects the position and function of Loremasters in Dwarvish society. > This supernormal charisma is not a mere detail, but integral to the > plot of THoT; the defeat of the Masked Dwarf (in "Fear") and the > unmasking of Karrag both depend crucially on it. > > In order to express the Loremasters' special ability, I gave > the L1 Witness leadership 2, the L2 Annalist leadership 3, and the > L3 Loremaster leadership 4.
Well, quite frankly that doesn't expose a design problem in leadership, but in THoT. Leadership has, AFAICT, always been intended to work as it does. If Loremasters use the wrong level of leadership which results in the descriptions not making sense then that's hardly a problem with leadership. > This caused a problem in the help strings, which assume that the > leadership effect is proportional to the difference between the leader > and the led unit's level. That is, they nail the unit's leadership > level to its general level. Yep. That's leadership. > I fixed it by rewriting the help strings for the leadership abilities > (and the associated SPECIAL_NOTE) not to depend on that assumption, > but apparently having different strings for these abilities causes > problems in the help system because they all have the same ID. > > I still think fixing these strings not to rely on this assumption > is the right idea. All the other fixes that have been proposed > address symptoms, not the actual problem. Well, likewise changing the descriptions or special notes of the leadership ability is addressing the symptoms, not the actual problem (Loremasters using the wrong level of leadership). > For example, it has been suggested that the Loremaster ability be > packaged in an "inspiration" ability. Which would be fine, except: > what happens when a designer wants to create a unit type with a > different leadership-level offset than 0 or 1 (say -1)? This is not > an entirely theoretical case -- I've been thinking about giving > LEADERSHIP_1 to my L3 Barbarians. Welcome to another special-case > macro and having to make up yet another contrived term for it. > > Proliferating ability macros just so we can preserve the assumption > that leadership level is the same as level also has the disadvantage > of making more work for translators and culuttering up the help > system. > > Let's solve this problem *once*. If someone wants to use the leadership ability but change the simple and clear rules of how it works, then they would really be better off making a new ability. They're also not simply forced to make a clone of leadership (that is, damage boost depending on level difference) which differs only by name and how the level differences interact, but could actually create some unique new ability instead. If we'd need to decide which one of these options to encourage, I'd pick the latter. Leadership is clear and simple, and we don't need to mess with that just because someone wants to make a non-standard variation of it with minimal effort. It's a bit like if someone wanted to make a skirmisher ability that only works against ZoC's of units of lower or equal level. Would we want to change the mainline "skirmisher" to "skirmisher lvl x" because of that? Probably not, and we wouldn't think there'd be a design problem with skirmisher either. Instead, we'd tell them to just make their skirmisher variation into a unique ability with a different name and description. This seems like the exact same case to me. -- Lari Nieminen [EMAIL PROTECTED] +358443758373 _______________________________________________ Wesnoth-dev mailing list Wesnoth-dev@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev
