BombermanBoard

Sora G. Silverwind · #11 Posted: Thu Jul 29, 2010 2:41 am

Smoke Bombs can definitely be used to confuse enemies, or to make a getaway (Bomberman did this in the Aquanet arc of Fateful Meetings). And perhaps if you did a little bombchemy, you could produce Steam Bombs, which could burn or melt things/enemies in the event that your fire-user is decapitated or otherwise unable to do the job for you, or if there were an enemy or obstacle that wasn't affected by fire but could be affected by steam (though I can't think of anything off the top of my head). (It could also be used for cooking!) Lightning Bombs at different levels could paralyze enemies for different lengths of time. Like, if you're at a low level, it might just be more of a Taser Bomb, where it paralyzes an enemy for one turn. But as you gain more and more levels, you could paralyze an enemy for, IDK, five turns or something. And, like in TSA, you could also use Lightning Bombs to jump-start electrical machinery or something...although since this is based on a medieval fantasy world, maybe not. (Hooray for anachronism stew?) Lower-level lightning bombs and fire bombs can be used as flash bombs as well, startling or confusing an enemy.

Dark Zaphe wrote:

This is a really cool idea! Being a D&D-based game, we would need some kind of documentation about classes and such. This would be totally awesome.

Okay, here I'm going to toot my own horn, because I've actually come up with my own system for this, sort of. It's not completely worked out yet, and I don't know how well it'll work in a game setting, but maybe it'll give y'all some ideas.

BOMB POWER
There's three power levels that I use: Low, Normal, and Super. They should be fairly evident, although I should probably mention that a lot of the alternate bomb types like Taser Bombs and Smoke Bombs fall under the "Low" classification in Soraverse. Steam Bombs are a different story: the hydrokinetics in general in Soraverse are kind of a hard breed for me to pin down because I'm thinking of splitting them into the water bombers and the ice bombers, and it would be the water bombers (the hydrokinetics) who probably produce Steam Bombs at S-levels, buuuut that's a discussion probably best saved for another day.

MEASUREMENT
The actual qualitative measurement for a bomber's power level is referred to as her Bomb Power Indicator(1), abbreviated to BPI, and colloquially referred to as her "damage". BPI is measured in units called destrudos(2), abbreviated to "ds", which is a general unit of measurement for a bomber's chi. The equation for BPI represents the average amount of chi present within the core of an explosion produced by a bomber's N-level bomb.

Explosive power is considered on two different levels. The Standard Bomb Power Spectrum, abbreviated to "SBPS", starts at 0 destrudos and theoretically extends into infinite destrudos, although obviously no bomber can have a BPI of that magnitude (unless we're going to count the Angel of Light and Shadow as a bomber, lulz). The SBPS is the more "objective" method of measuring explosive power. I have numerical measurements for this, but I'm not wholly set on them, and again, they might not work for a game engine...but here, have them anyway in case they might be useful.

-

0-10ds
Little to no effect. May possibly produce a slight breeze with the explosion, if that. Leaves no trace of its presence.

11-20
Still very little effect, but begins to leave traces of its presence (e.g., a fire bomb will produce a faint charred mark on certain surfaces).

21-30
The lower end of L-level bombs, where explosives begin to display certain characteristics of L-level bombs, but aren't actually effective L-level bombs.

31-40
Normal range for L-level bombs.

41-50
Higher range for L-level bombs/lower range for N-level bombs.

51-70
Normal range for N-level bombs.

71-80
Higher range for N-level bombs/lower range for S-level bombs.

81-100
Normal range for S-level bombs.

101+
Higher range for S-level bombs.

-

I really should expand those numbers to 10,000 just so I can have an "OVER NINE THOUSAAAAAAND" joke when it comes to Bomberman.

Anyway, in addition to the SBPS, there's also the Individual Power Spectrum, or IPS, which represents a bomber's L/N/S-level measurements, and are colloquially referred to as her "numbers". The numbers for the IPS measurements may not match up with the SBPS numbers; for instance, a half-bomber's - or rather, in this particular context, a certain class's - S-level number is more likely to lie in the N-level range on the SBPS, while Bomberman's N-level number lies in the lower S-level range, even without the boost of the Fire Stone.

That should be the bulk of it. There's also some other stuff I came up with, but it's mostly related to chi control and such, so I don't think it's relevant to this conversation.

(1) In the Real World(tm), "bomb power indicator" refers to something entirely different. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_Power_Indicator
(2) In the Real World, "destrudo" is a Freudian term that describes the urge to "destroy oneself and everything else". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destrudo