Gameplay: Movement Points

[pladdicus]

Hello, I was thinking on how AP feels so disproportionately useful, and how punishing it felt to explore or go in the wrong direction. There difference between 30 AP to cross a map vs 30 AP sitting in the library is pretty big for a character. I think this is a fine situation to be in, I don't think it's bad, and my suggestion's biggest weakness is 'if it ain't broke' but I thought I'd toss it out here.

Movement Points, probably renamed since we already have Magic Points (or is it mana?) is a resource that fills up like AP, however, it has a smaller max pool like 5 or 10 max. It is used first when a character moves. When you run out of Movement Points, you then begin to use AP like normal. This gives players a small pool of 'free movement' so to speak, to make moving around the map a little less painful. I feel this encourages exploration, removes a bit of the sting out of death, would help new players avoid wasting all their ap moving to a spot and dying and struggling to make progress.

[Repth]

I think balancing progress and exploration is a very difficult thing to do. Progress is pretty easy to value. Exploration, less so. In many ways, Cordillera is more forgiving than many other Valhallas with regards to exploration thanks to the quickway (charges 0.5 ap on move), portal network, and general connectivity of things. I think others will probably pile in here soon to talk about how movement points would inflate the AP cap and affect raiding dynamics.

[Nova]

If nothing else this sounds like a pretty cool concept for a movement skill a class could have.

[Alyss]

I'm with Nova. I think it could be a cool part of a specific class. The problem with having it generically apart from increasing the number of AP people arrive at raid locations with, is also just the dichotomy of it being a trade-off at the moment to make yourself safe while you're regenerating AP. If you stay in the Library you can use all of your AP searching, plus anything extra if you come back and you're still not dead. Whereas moving further away and/or hiding makes you spend AP now and lose some AP at the start of the next cycle in exchange for being much more likely to stay alive and therefore saving AP compared to dying, respawning, and walking to a Library again if your spawn was quite sad. Without this dichotomy everyone would just move as far away as movement points enabled and probably hide which would make combat progression for low-level characters basically impossible. But as a specific skill it feels more like a more predictable counterpart to MP movement, which could be good.

[Nayru]

in a different design of the game separate ap/mp like a lot of similar webgames i've played would prol be a better approach, as it stands pretty much stuck with this system and at best an unlikely free movement charge mechanic

it's magic points but i refer to it fluff-wise as mana and nobody can stop me from unleashing the mana nuke someday