Search • The Tavern

Welp, vine stalker is obviously the best choice here.

I only hope we can continue this imaginative streak and the other new trunk monsters and "essence havers" and "hot becomers"

Can we at least come up with a less generic name than 'vine stalker'? For example: How about mandrakes? This would be a pretty good name for a mana-hungry plant-man. There's a rationale here: Besides kinda looking like people, mandrakes have been traditionally associated with magic and mysticism. Be...

Sar wrote:ants are quite famous for being unable to teleport

Ever try teleporting an ant?

You don't see a problem here? So I logged on and saw Vine Stalkers, and thought "Plant people, cool - not sure what they'll do, but I'll check it out". I figured, you know, probably good at earth magic, probably weak to fire, maybe slow, "Stalker" implied stealth... still not rea...

Well, most stuff does have brains so a complete lack of food wouldn't be a problem. However, I admit fiddling around with how food works is more trouble than its worth. Seeing as this is only a small flavourful add, too much stuff would require balancing for very little gain. Besides, the food metag...

Agreed that "vine stalker" is a crummy name / flavour. How about theming them after illithids / mind flayers? They're well known from and are associated with strong unarmed attacks that drain mana (brain sucking tentacle mouths) and with mana as life force (they're psionic). The downside i...

The most complicated part of skills is the strategy to training them, and even that can be boiled down to a couple of sentences at most, so I don't know what awkward features you're referring to. If anything then having very concise explanations of the skills available from the skill menu (like say...

The OP is not asking why these things are the way they are, rather trying to point out that these things are not intuitive to new players. I don't think it's at all obvious that better fighting skill mean more hp. Especially since in most RPGs hp is more often tied to character stats, not skills. An...

Well, I'm not gonna fight it then. What I still want to keep away are explicit mentions to gameplay mechanics (e.g. "press 'o' to open the door") and references to the specific monster in question (e.g. "this one smells especially bad" -- use "they smell terrible" inste...

All I'm saying here is that there should be _consistency_, the worst thing is that there's a mish-mash of different styles or phrasings in the descriptions. That just looks amateurish. The reason I chose that style was mainly because it was the most prevalent among the descriptions, not because I th...

I've changed the goldfish description per the recent comment. There's a couple of new monster descriptions that don't follow the format of the others. This might be nitpicking, but I'd like to have consistency here. The description should answer the question: What is a [foo]? A foo is... For exampl...

I'm sad to see the Electric Boogie quotation has been replaced. It was one of my favourites. :( There's a few descriptions for uniques that could do with condensing, namely Xtahua, Sonja and Wiglaf, and perhaps The Royal Jelly. Uniques can and should have longer descriptions than normal monsters, bu...

Another noob question: I checked this thread again but didn't see anything. What's the right way to suggest/submit new speech? I fleshed out a background for Harold and added some speech to go with it (he's a bounty hunter still, and you're his last job before retirement, which he's greatly looking...

I don't think there should be tips for key binds in the descriptions -- Press 'q' to drink from this magic fountain. Expect magical effects, as long as it's still magic. A wooden door, cunningly hidden. It used to be a secret door but at least for you it's not a secret anymore. To open it, try simpl...

Grimm wrote:Are all draconian monsters yellow, per Gretell? Or can they be of any hue?

The latter, you can test this by typing f. ex. Red Draconian or Black Draconian in it, or by spawning them in WizMode.

As nice as the literary quotes are, the main focus ought to be bringing the descriptions up to date. There are still plenty of items missing from the items tab, for example, and the dungeon features tab is still very incomplete. Some uniques still have boring speech files and / or descriptions - fee...

Whose task is it to evaluate new content? Grimm's? It'd be nice to get this done for new (blue) stuff currently in the spreadsheet, so that a patch can be compiled and submitted. Also, googling the names of stuff to get the date and adding it yourself doesn't take much longer than just commenting 'd...

Expanded the items section substantially; still missing a bunch - all the artefacts are still absent for instance.

Remember that if you make any changes, be it adding text where there is none or altering text where its orange or yellow, change the box to blue. All the other colours are supposed to signify text already in game, with: Orange {top priority} Yellow {low priority} Green {no changes required} Blue {ch...

There's a bunch of uniques that are a bit boring. Now, there's been talk - in the dev. wiki at least - of removing some altogether, but as far as I'm concerned we should still strive to improve them. As pointed out by Grimm in the guideline , ideally an unique's description should tell their backsto...

I just got an idea for an alchemy spell: 'Touch of Midas' . Enemies you kill drop a pile of god instead of corpses. You would also do bonus damage unarmed as the enemies are slowly turned into gold by your touch. On a downside, anything you try to eat turns into gold so you run the risk of starvatio...

The colour code for entries is: Green - extant and good Yellow - extant but needs editing Blue - new submission, will be reviewed later Also, there's: Orange - extant and needs to be replaced / heavily edited Red - no description / quotation in game EDIT: In my opinion, quotes in languages other th...

"A very large and fat hairy bee." Seeing as the monster descriptions already in the game mostly use this format i.e. describe the monster's appearance, I propose we follow that one for the rest of them. So, monster descriptions should look like this: A [strange|ugly|vicious] [snake|creatu...

For consistency in style, should the descriptions for monsters read like someone is speaking to the player (i.e. the 'Pokédex / Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy style), like so: "One of the race of elves which inhabits this dreary cave. This one is remarkably plain looking." Or should it r...

Coolio, these are excellent. Thank you very much. I feel that we shouldn't accept the quotes for the eyeball, scimitar, necronomicon, or reaper, for reasons laid out in the Guidelines document. I'm not sure what exactly you are referring to, but in sourcing the quotes I tried to follow the example ...

Cool, here's a bunch of literary quotes I gathered a while back but never bothered to upload on mantis.

As long as were throwing OP weapon ideas out there, I liked the one someone proposed of a 'ballista', i.e. a crossbow that uses javelins (or spears, even) as ammo. It would be very powerful, but as a downside it would be slow to fire and reload, limited in its ammo capacity and could only be used by...

"Welcome to Hell! Please enjoy your stay."

"Thank you for visiting Hell. Please come again soon."

I can't be the only one to notice this glaring error. As per the in-game description, Blork (the Orc) is supposed to have a pair of rainbow-coloured suspenders: A particularly fat and ugly orc. He seems to have scavenged a pair of rainbow-coloured suspenders from somewhere. They're not helping. Howe...

This is purely a flavour issue, but I find it really silly and a bit unintuitive that a race of what is essentially sentient housecats is more powerful (well, easier to play) than beefier races like ogres or, say, minotaurs.

Seeing as there's already boots of levitation, no.

Since 'cheating' player ghosts away is so trivial, there should be an option to switch them off completely.

Maybe just add more vaults that specifically appear on open levels to spruce them up? Especially the new serial ones that give the whole level a common theme.

Spiky monsters (porcupines, spiny frogs, hedgehogs) should hurt the player when melee'd - at least when the player is unarmed.

Jellies already do this and it really is what one would intuitively think that would happen (ever tried punching a porcupine? ouch!)

Also, devs: Add hedgehogs in the game

I never liked the view of evil as 'opposite of good' , i.e. the same as TSO but likes the opposite things. A 'devil' kind of a god should be manipulative, and dealing with the devil should be dangerous but offer great power. Well, anyways, here's some ideas of mine: The devil is manipulative and dec...

Does Crawl really need another vanilla race? Not all monster races need to have a player race devoted to them / vice versa for new player race suggestions. I guess there's some merit in the idea of making them inferior in all aspects and have them be a challenge race, but we have ogres already for t...

While blink frogs and spiny frogs have their own gimmicks and giant frogs are rather strong when they appear already and therefore don't really need a buff, giant toads are dreadfully boring and this ability might make them a bit more interesting.

Fix Giant ant so that it's in line with the other ants.
Preferably: Worker Ant ( / Soldier Ant / Queen Ant ) , not Worker Giant Ant / Giant Worker Ant or something stupid.

Alternatively, call them mega-ants.

Megabat sounds a bit extraordinary for such a mundane creature, it's what I'd expect a unique bat monster to be called more than anything

The original mimic tile:

Was based on this pic of a shark:

Rename giant beetle to goliath beetle

Yes, they're not really *that* huge irl, but neither are emperor scorpions and they're giant monsters in DCSS too.

EDIT: Seconding that carps should replace giant goldfish.

God no. it'll add tons of new starting characters. Not a good thing unless there's real variety - having a gazillion different combos for races would only make character creation needlessly convoluted without adding anything meaningful. Note that it's also inevitable that there would be an uber comb...

That's a million times better and you might want to work on the walls too while you're at it (although the lair has pretty good wall tiles compared to, for example, the old dungeon walls) Be sure to avoid the grid while you're making the new floor tiles. I see that you've done that quite a bit alrea...

Here's an unfinished Maurice tile I was making a while back but was unsatisfied with. You can use it to base a derivative Maurice from or something; personally I don't really like how it turned out.

Search found 45 matches