So Sayeth The Creator

[Sradac]

OK we have lots of new people here arguing about whats possible in jade and oh TB wont put that in he dosent have time blah blah blah, apparently these people never visited the OLD adom central. Here are some ancient scriptures handed down from The Creator himself, I present them to you digging them from under much debrie and dust that has settle on it from this cyber world we are in.

"What plans do you have for JADE? "

JADE will basically have everything ADOM has and a lot more. Plans include:

-A complete world with continents, weather patterns, settlements, dungeons and strange places, either randomly generated at the start of each game or chosen from a number of preselected worlds.
-A quest generator for random quests. No two games ever will be the same.
-Dungeon and world size only limited by the boundaries of Java-technology and your hardware.
-No classes, but a detailed skill system, together with a guild system providing special benefits for guild membership.
-All the races from ADOM and a few more (mist elves, ratlings, hill dwarves).
-Complete freedom in what you want to do (e.g. explore dungeons, work as a caravan guardian, build your own castle, conquer cities, lead a life as a simple farmer, become a shopkeeper or whatever).
-Hidden plots. (Has Chaos been truly defeated in ADOM or is something lurking behind the scenes and waiting?)
-Monster inventories.
-The ability to transform into another being.
-A detailed system for morale values (on an Order...Balance...Chaos scale) and ethics (on a Good...Uncaring...Evil scale).
-Platform independence due to Java-based technology.
-Compressed save files. "

Some of these things SEEM to have changed from the JADE video, some say the skill system was scrapped and JADE is class based again. How do you know that wasnt set up for TB's ease of use for testing purposes, so he dosent have to hand pick all skills and abilities every time to test he has some basic classes put him just for his personal use.

[Sradac]

Another ancient text uncovered! THis one regards experience levels!!

Experience levels and professions
JADE will see a radical departure from the ADOM philosophy of experience levels and professions. In ADOM experience levels are very important because they allow you to increase skills, hit points, gain special powers and more. Professions also are pretty defining in giving you your core abilities and determining the best approach on solving the game according to your choice.

This will be very different in JADE. Here you won't be constrained to but one profession but you rather will be allowed to learn more professions as time goes by. Professions will guide how much experience you have to "pay" to advance a skill and will grant you certain in-game benefits (access to guild halls, access to specialized guild equipment and more). This effectively means that you will be able to become a guild member in as many guilds as you like - as long as you can convince the respective guild council that you might be a worthy guild member... which actually might become pretty difficult when facing the council of the paladins guild after having proven oneself a powerful assassin or a nasty necromancer!

Experience levels also will play just a minor role. They will give you a very minor hitpoint bonus (+1 hitpoint per experience level) and only serve as a general guideline for your accomplishments... it has no other effects. You profession powers will be guided by your reputation in your guild and your experience score in the respective profession.
General experience levels will be determined according to the following chart:
Experience score Experience level
0 1
100 2
300 3
600 4
1000 5
1500 6
2100 7
2800 8
3600 9
4500 10
5500 11
6600 12
7800 13
9100 14
10500 15
12000 16
13600 17
15300 18
17100 19
20000 20
... ...


Naturally this has some additional consequences:
In contrast to ADOM their will be no (real) experience level limit.
Monsters will yield a lot less experience than they do in ADOM.

An alternative I had considered to this is the following approach: use the table above to determine your rank within your guild(s) and calculate the overall experience level as the average of your guild ranks. I decided against this, because picking up a new profession at a later point will decrease your overall experience, which doesn't seem reasonable.

Yet another approach might be to only count experience points for your professions and use the total of those points to determine your overall experience level. I like this one very well, because it removes the need to have some abstract experience point amount, just for the sake of being able to calculate some abstract experience level.

The final (and most simple) approach might be to simply use the maximum guild rank as your overall experience level. This has one disadvantage: let's assume that guild rank is determined by looking at something I'll call reputation score for now. It is influenced by your deeds and increases if you behave appropriately to your profession (a healer tending the sick, a thief picking pockets, an assassin killing targets, a merchant reaping trade rewards, etc.). It decreases if you behave in an improper way (a paladin stealing things, a druid killing peaceful animals, a wizard engaging in melee constantly, etc.). This would pose some interesting challenges to be successful in several varying professions, something I find very realistic and very intricate. Since this possibility is not yet ruled out, the final approach mentioned in this paragraph won't be used for now, despite it's simplicity. These changes will permit a more variable, realistic and exciting approach to things, allowing you to play a very high number of very different characters.

[Sradac]

For much information that has been forgotten by many about JADE please refer to:

http://www.adom.de/jade/index.php3

[Grey]

TB has also said recently it will likely be at least 4 years before JADE is on the level of completeness that ADOM is currently at. He may change his mind about many of the features announced before, or may introduce many more. I imagine he'll be starting with a basic but open system, gradually building up complexity as he goes on (smarteset way to do things really).

[Nezur]

Have you seen this?

EDIT: As the Creator said things are subject to change. Hmm, what about collecting JADE-related links into this thread?

[reich]

I still hope for a classless open-ended system, like in Fallout.

The point is that the traditional player classes taken from d&d are suited for a team of adventurers, when they compliment each other. The players must co-operate to create an efficient fighting unit.

Roguelikes seem to have inherited this system just by tradition and it is quite unsuitable to PC-against-the-world model. Something less restrictive and more universal is needed! The notion of having a Healer who basically only heals himself is a little 'out there'!

[Grey]

Personally I prefer classes. It allows for different challenges and very different palystyles, with each character playing very differently. I like all the class powers ADOM has that separate them out more - a generic system would be quite boring in comparison. TB has stated he's having guilds in the game, and with what's been stated in Nezur's link I guess multi-classing will be built in like that (so I guess you'd choose a starting class and you can learn others as you find guilds). Not my preference (Omega has something similar and I didn't like it too much) but if it's done well it might be good.

[F50]

I would think that you start out non-classed, but you pick up classes by visiting guilds and such. You can gain class powers from being a higher-ranked member of the guild, but if you are a high enough member of one guild, you aren't going to be skilled enough to go far in other guilds.

Of course, this is all speculation/suggestion.

[Manu]

Thomas has exceeded my expectations with Adom in how creative of a working system he has been able to come up with - I don't care how it's all done as much as I'm excited about who is doing it all.

* random fan gushing.

[Sradac]

i agree. In alot of other roguelikes ive played either the classes were not very different at all or so different that there were severe balance issues. *bands come to mind, sorceres and fighterers were very overpowered where other classes like rogues archers and monks werent played much because they were so weak in them. Not weak in an ADOM merchant class sense but weak in a pathetic and under-developed way.