I'm including a message from a player who doesn't have forums access yet. It's intriguing in its complexity, though it's also complex enough I'm not sure I could do it:
Quote:
I am of the mind that clear effects are far superior, not only for the level of accessibility it provides your game to those that aren't computer literate enough to go seeking out a wiki, but also for the reassurance it provides, in a time-limited game such as this, that you aren't losing time in mistaken assumptions about potential effects, or losing even further time trying to figure out the effects more exactly.
My recommendation, however, is less to be 'clear' or a 'unclear'. By this I mean that I think it would add not only clarity, but also another layer of gameplay, if effects should be researched in the computer lab. Let's say you cast psionic reversion on yourself, you just got the power and you don't know what it does. You can then choose to load the a computer program (perhaps necessitating special computer lab equipment) that studies the effect for so many turns.
Say the intended effect of psionic reversion is to make PP act like HP and vice versa. Before the effect is studied, there is an unclear description, and you lose more PP than you would have HP when you get struck in combat. After the effect is fully studied, you get the most from it and suffer 1 for 1 loss.
Buffs, I think, should be dependent on the caster, and not the recipient. Items should be dependent on the user/wearer, so if someone else deciphers that an ostentatious cape adds the ability to fly but you always lose first strike because your enemies see you coming from 1.3 miles away, each user would have to study that as they receive the item, if someone researches the items powers and sells it, the new person should have to research the item anew (though ideally the old person should know the powers if they ever get the same item again).
This, of course, leads to a larger problem, what if the effects of an item or power do not have effects that can be scaled or set to probability? I suggest for that, a more simple solution, if someone wields that example cape without understanding it, they lose a certain percentage of some stat. Barring that, perhaps specialized 'not-knowledgable' penalties, for example if you don't know how to use the cape, there is a chance at the end of every adventure to get sucked into a jet engine while flying away from the scene, losing hit points.
Edited to add: specifically, using the computer as a sort of "identify item" feature is kind of neat. Both a good use of the computer mechanic, and also a way for people to engage in a spading process of sorts without having to do actual statistics stuff themselves.
The difficulty of the idea as proposed comes from inserting lots of variability into the results of effects, which is considerably more complex than the mostly fixed nature they have now. There's also having to track each player's discoveries/knowledge individually--that would be a huge mess of a challenge.
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