Make spirit score affect sleep

[mciul]

The spirit score seems a bit neglected since we've been moving away from initiative-based effects. I was wondering if we should change it (or maybe just add this feature) so that creatures with high spirit scores are more likely to wake up during combat.

Since that doesn't normally happen to the player, it could give the player an increased chance of having good or neutral dreams. I would say the Dream of Sleeping and the Dream of Briar Roses are bad, the Banquet and Monty Hall dreams are neutral, and the Tungausy dream is either good or neutral. Hm... I thought there was at least one solidly good dream, maybe not!

Do you think this is a good idea? Other ideas?

[VictorGijsbers]

Monty Hall is a good dream, isn't it? You can get a great shield from it, and I think the downsides are very small (if I remember correctly).

I think your idea makes perfect sense for monsters, since spirit is supposed to track some kind of attunement to the environment (which is why it improves initiative). The bonus shouldn't be too big, but a slight edge is certainly okay.

It seems a bit less crucial and natural to me for the player (and also more complicated, because it requires us to categorise the dreams as bad/neutral/good). One thing I'd like to have more of are items that unlock a special power or better mode of operation if a certain score is high enough; that might be a funner way to increase the usefulness of spirit for the player!

[mciul]

Sounds good!

The lion's shield is really great, but the downside (50% of the time if I remember the Monty Hall puzzle correctly) is that your current and permanent health are both reduced to 1.

[VictorGijsbers]

Ouch, that downside is worse than I remembered! But you're correct. Luckily, the probability of getting the shield is actually 2/3 (if you switch chests; if you don't, it's 1/3).

[mciul]

Perhaps I could go with a more specific definition of "bad dream" - one where somebody else wakes up before you do. The Dream of Sleeping is the only one like this.

(I think I saw some code that was supposed to randomly leave some monsters awake when a morphean grenade goes off, but it doesn't work.)