New Adventurer Background: Specialist

[dynast]

The specialist is a custom background, allowing the player to choose starting gear, skills and attributes. Because of that, the background is handicapped in comparison to the others. Here is how it works:

The player is given 8 skill levels to assign, but no skill can get past 3, for example you can have fighting 3, sword 2, dodging 2, armour 1 (species aptitudes is adjusted later).
Gear is then given based off the starting skills (so you cant have axes 3 and start with a longsword) special detail to the following:

Weapons - 1(+0) 2(+1) 3(+2);
Throwing - each level in throwing allows the player to pick a single stack of 4tomahawks, 3needles(+0 to +2 blowgun), 2javelins or 1net;
Armour - 0(robe) 1(leather) 2(ring mail) 3(scale mail);
Shield - 1-2(buckler) 3(shield);
invocations - 2-3(* piety upon choosing a god);
evocations 1-3(wand of magic darts[15],[30],[45]);
Spells - starts with a spellbook with the spells of his choice restricted by his starting skills(you must have at least air1, poison1 and conjuration1 to be able to start with mephitic cloud) and only one spell of each spell level, the number of spells is defined by the spellcasting level where 0(no spells) 1(2 spells) 2(3 spells) 3(4 spells).

Specialist starts with 2 strength, 2 dexterity, 2 intelligence and 4 extra points to freely distribute in between.

[tedric]

FWIW, I'm pretty sure the dev team will ignore this based on how much more complicated it would make the character creation process:

Third, regarding character creation: devteam concensus is that this should be quick. Thankfully, Crawl has never bothered to ask for gender, and over the course of DCSS, we have cut on secondary prompts. Another aspect of this is that the lists of species and backgrounds should not overwhelm new players (which will happen nonetheless) -- another reason why keeping variety for its own sake is harmful.
(viewtopic.php?f=8&t=15197&p=208506&hilit=character+creation+background#p208507)

Beyond that, what does this add to the game that isn't already accomplished by existing backgrounds? To be honest, what you'd get from this sounds less like a "specialist" and more like a "jack of all trades". It's essentially a Wanderer minus the randomness, and as far as I can see adapting to the randomness is the only thing that makes Wanderers fun -- or balanced. I imagine the spell selection in particular would lead to some very OP starting book spell sets.

[dynast]

FWIW, I'm pretty sure the dev team will ignore this based on how much more complicated it would make the character creation process:

FWIW This is CYC.

Beyond that, what does this add to the game that isn't already accomplished by existing backgrounds?

Its a background with a bigger variety of worse gear with a bigger variety of worse starting skills and less attributes. Other than that it just adds food for thought.

I imagine the spell selection in particular would lead to some very OP starting book spell sets.

Starting spells could be reduced to 1-3 spells and the level of the spells you can learn is determined by the sum of your skills of the necessary schools(which means you can start with fireball if you have conjurations 3 and fire 2).

I guess the main thing is that this background is only worth for its spell selection, so a scholar background that starts with a bunch of shitty randart books and no training in them might be a better option in the end.

[archaeo]

Yeah, dynast, I'm not sure I see where you can get anything different from Specialist that you can't already get from existing backgrounds. Is there a character you can make with this that isn't just a worse version of something already in the game?

[dynast]

Yeah, dynast, I'm not sure I see where you can get anything different from Specialist that you can't already get from existing backgrounds.

I can start a game with animate skeleton, corpse rot and inner flame.
A blowgun, poison dart and ignite poison.
A bow and sticks to snakes.
And so on.
I dont believe backgrounds are supposed to bring anything new to the game, they are just starting positions in the game, my idea is to basically start a game in a more specific but worse position.

Is there a character you can make with this that isn't just a worse version of something already in the game?

I guess you can say that because of wanderer any of the starts i mentioned above is just another possible roll(its unclear to me if wanderers can start with randart spell books that would have such spellsets).

If i were to ask something it would be a sprint that is just the regular game but you choose your gear before jumping in. The problem is that you still have to pick a background.

In conclusion, this is not a suggestion but a personal preference after playing for a while to be able to start a game with a more "versatile" setup. I guess i will just cross my fingers and hope for AM to be fixed.

[archaeo]

Sure, I can understand that preference. It's just at odds with Crawl's current design. If Specialist always ends up being strictly "worse" than the usual backgrounds, (i.e. I'd always want to start FE or Ne instead of splitting the difference with the skeletons/corpse rot/ignite pois build you suggest above), then it's pointless. If it's always stronger than the current backgrounds, then why do we bother having them at all, instead of just having players select a starting inventory? I suspect it'd be a little of both, which, if anything, is a little more problematic.

I think a better approach would be finding un-filled niches in the current background list, or proposing changes to existing backgrounds. A make-your-own-background is a bit of an interface screw, would be fairly difficult to balance, and is at odds with the current way Crawl handles starting packages.

(the nice thing about backgrounds, of course, is that you can easily test out an idea via wizmode, which is also the easiest way to simulate starting as a Specialist)