Loonyland 2 Prospective Draft Rules

[Reality]

In honor of Mike Hommel releasing his old (very old) games as freeware, I thought I'd try to fish around for ideas

General

• 10-12 hour RPG
• Very Unbalanced Skill Tree
• Goal is to beat the Happy Stick Bird on Normal Mode from a new game file.

The obvious place to start a draft is with LL2's skill and possibly talent system.

Personally, I think the skill system is the better place to start, because they greater, immediate effects and the talent system (especially crafting) doesn't come into play much until new game plus (madcap mode) due to how slow it is to increase your ranks in them.

The skill system is composed of (Passive Skills) (Melee Skills) (Throwing Skills) (Fire Magic) (Ice Magic) (Wind Magic) (Nature Magic) (Death Magic)

However, availability of skills depends on fixed exploration and preset locations sometimes requiring defeating minibosses (near impossible for a non-skilled charather)

I see the best options for a draft to be either

• Draft by skill tree, with 8 choices between Passive, the five magic schools,  melee, and throwing
• Draft on a per-skill basis, with 60 choices allowing customization. 

This would probably lead to either a 4 player 2 "trees" draft or a 6 player 10 choices draft.

I think the latter would be more interesting. 

Certain skills only make sense if drafted together. This is because they have no effect at all without their dependent skill.

• Bonehead and Bone Bomb in the Death Magic tree. You cannot detonate your summons if you don't have any.
• All 10 Throwing skills. You cannot throw at all unless you have the first skill.

This poses the problem of changing the per-skill basis draft to a 49 choice draft for 7 players with 7 each

Or else the first skill in throwing (or the first rank of it only) can be made free to all players, allowing the rest of it to be drafted normally.

Another possible option is making the 10 passive skills free. This has the benefit of making the game less tedious (As magic users don't need to farm magic potions as aggresively with +50% regeneration and Melee/Throwing don't have to hit and run all the time due to having the strength skill (as opposed to likely doing 1hp chip damage to everything) 

This would lead to the revised draft rules of

• A draft of 7 skill trees with the passive tree given for free for 3 players, 2 trees each. 1 tree goes undrafted.
• A draft of 49 choices with all 10 passive skills and the first rank of throwing given free to all players for 7 players, 7 choices each. Bonehead and Bone Bomb are drafted together. The last 9 ranks of throwing CAN be drafted (due to it's massive fire rate increasing potential). All Talents are Free (not that anyone cares except for potion making)

Minor things-

Collecting certain undrafted skills is helpful due to experience from quest lines. However the amount of XP is very small and the skills cannot be used at 0 points invested so it shouldn't matter. However if you have a 0 pt skill AND a randomly obtained magic item that gives bonuses to it, then you do gain the ability of the skill (even active spells). This is strongly recommended to be avoided despite most skills being awful at 1 rank (see the exception in Berserk and status effect spells).

Run FAQ

Only a few skills are available before the game's first big chokepoint (The Toy Factory and the first boss)

Nature Magic and Death Magic in particular are very weak at that point, as the former only has Lifeberries(a healing ability) and Bramble(a poisoning ability) available, and the latter only has drain (a very weak spell with single target damage in a crowd control based game) and Bonehead (a weak summon spell without it's support spells).

Both of them gain area of effect spells soon after the toy factory, but actually conquering it in the first place is a very difficult proposition. 

The most overpowered options seem to be Wind and Fire. Most wind spells are terrible, but the very first one you get is Berserk (a massive buffing abiilty) which is arguably the best skill in the entire game and can easily overpower most story bosses on its own. Fire gets Toasties (a summon spell) and Ignite (A debuff spell) before the Toy Factory which is just enough to get through it with potions. One screen after beating the toy factory, they can claim Burninate - the best attack spell in the game. 

Melee and Throwing both have the option of stacking their fire rate, which is enough to get through the game.

Ice has pretty low damage output, but the strength of the freezing status effect, ability to heal,  and the literally immortal turret make it a well rounded option.

The Passive tree might is strange to be split up from the others. All other trees (despite the ingame tooltip) have better synergy with Passive than with themselves. The most prominent examples being the  skill Energy for magic users and the  skill Strength for throwing and Melee users (and wind users). Not to mention that the Defense skill itself is actually a huge deal in a game with such small numbers (the most defense  other people will have is 10, whereas someone drafting the defense skill will have 20-23). Even limited to the basic attack, the passive Stat bonuses and potions such as stamino/mad cow can put in a lot of work, especially given the much improved survivability over a normal melee/throwing/wind character.