Draconian Colors

[Stigmas]

Would make much more sense to sync up the Draconian colors with that of the NPC Dragons.

Blue Draconian

Skills: +2 Air Magic, -2 Earth Magic
Resists: rElec
Breath: Wild explosions of lightning, mixing lightning bolts and orbs (powerful but uncontrollable).
Movement: Gains big wings at level 14.

Black Draconian

Skills: +1 Necromancy
Resists: rNeg
Breath: Bolt of Negative Energy.

White Draconian

Skills: +1 Invocation
Resists: rNeg
Breath: Bolt of Holy Fire.

[Siegurt]

Note while I agree about black draconians being reflavored as blue draconians, white dragons do spit cold (holy dragons are pearl) and i don't think there's much interest in creating a holy or unholy-colored draconians.

[bcadren]

Old idea that I'm unsure if I ever submitted:

Move Pale Draconians from 'Steam' to 'Mist' (+1 Ice, +1 Air) instead of (+1 Fire, +1 Air) to keep a balance (2 fire, 2 ice) instead of (3 fire, 1 ice). Mist can literally be fog, because steam damage is irrelevant past VERY early game.

[Pollen_Golem]

Dragons/draconians only slightly match up: there's no acidic dragon, nor are there constructed (bone/iron) draconians. A holy menace in Zot would make sense, maybe a pack of pearl draconians. While there no anti-undead measures in Zot, Holy/Demonic spawns alike try to thwart you on the orb run. A holy player character raises a lot of questions, especially if you get it mid-game - for example, what if you worship Kiku before XL7? Would DrAK even be allowed? Etc. Unholy dracs are dead dracs.

Is there any fundamental design flaw with having a very wide variety of Draconian colors, such as 15?

[ontoclasm]

Is there any fundamental design flaw with having a very wide variety of Draconian colors, such as 15?

"Why?"

To put it another way, the current colors are already painfully similar to one another; most have a standard breath attack (whose element rarely matters), one pip of resistance (again, which one rarely matters) and a hilariously tiny change in aptitudes. Things With Different Names Should Be Different, so why should we add a bunch of meaningless so-called options when we can't even differentiate the ones we have?

[Pollen_Golem]

To put it another way, the current colors are already painfully similar to one another

That's why I asked: if the differences were very big, too many dracs would be hard to balance meaningfully, hard to plan for, easily screwing over XL1-6 skilling, etc. But if the differences are small as they are now, I don't see a problem with having as many colors as anyone wishes to add (not that it would mightily improve the game or anything)

[bcadren]

most have a standard breath attack (whose element rarely matters)

The rest of your statement is pretty well true, but this is very false...No two of the breath attacks are that alike. Red and White are the only two that are that close and they still aren't.

• Red - Fire, leaves a single tile flame cloud (ranged Conjure Flame); cloud can be at first target hit or a . targeted location.
• White - Ice, knocks back the first target it hits.
• Green - Meph Cloud (almost identical to the spell); also gets a stinger (venom-branded aux attack).
• Yellow - Acid (irresistible) - halves target AC (we really don't talk enough about corroding enemies, but it's very relevant). Also gains acid bite.
• Grey - No Breath
• Black - Almost identical to a Disk of Storms. Probably worst breath because it's so unpredictable. Also gains permaflight.
• Purple - Dispelling energy (irresistible) - ends all buffs on the target. (Yes, you can remove Nergalle's DDoor, you're welcome). [Probably best draconian, breath stay relevant always and apts are the best +5 total compared to base, where most are +0/+1.]
• Mottled - Range 1 - Sticky Flame Randomly 'splashes' (spreads in similar pattern to Static Discharge).
• Pale - Cloud of Steam (Basically a targeted scroll of fog) [block LoS in one direction.]

4/9 have bolt targeted at all and the differences between the bolts are pretty relevant and far beyond (what resists this?). The apt differences though, I can see your point, Purple's +1 to Spellcasting and +2 to Evo is nice; while red's -2 to Ice probably hurts most characters (without armour, you probably want Ozo's Armour); but overall the apts aren't different enough to be relevant; BUT the breath weapons are pretty well differentiated.

[rockygargoyle]

Frost breath will only knockback flying creatures.

[bcadren]

A holy player character raises a lot of questions, especially if you get it mid-game...

A holy race might be interesting, but it'd have to be something more interesting than just 'holy character, lol' and significantly different than {foo} of Good God. IDK what's there in terms of practical design space...and in terms of flavour design space; it'd be hard to not have overlap with Demigods.