New adventurer background: Deprived

[WalrusKing]

Starts with :

4 points each in sdi.

Cursed -2 ring of protection worn
No armor
No skill points
No weapon
Potion of experience
Scroll of acquirement
Used copy of Dark Souls 2

[tedric]

this actually sounds interesting to play, though i imagine there'd a lot of start-scumming to get a decent acquirement (or at least to get something better than what you're likely to find from D:1 floor drops)

[WalrusKing]

While this post was at least partially an unfunny joke made in a desperate and functionally unsuccessful attempt to ward off unconsciousness in class, I do consider the design space of "class that starts very nearly worse than a theoretical vanilla start but then gives some large benefit for it" something worth investigating.

And yeah, you're right in that any non-deterministic background almost immediately ensures the existence of start-scumming of the background.

There are several possible problems with the proposed background that I've thought of now that I'm out of the grasp of morpheus, one of which is that acq might be something that's too strong to start with, in the sense that starting minotaur and then immediately pulling plut sword or elec dwhip or something equally silly from the acq might provide too high a top end for the variance on the background.

Another problem is that this background might provide too much advantage as a melee start, due to the above mentioned high end of variance, but I tried to combat this by decreasing starting defenses with the ring to make things a bit tougher on melee oriented starts.

Races with good magic and shit melee might be screwed on this one, on the other hand, as you're starting with even lower defenses. The acq scroll was an attempt to provide the option to grab a book without taking away the choice not to use it on that, and this is a problem because a spell start could be screwed if they got anything without starting spells, and would not benefit very much at all from this start as a whole.

I'm unsure of how to fix these issues, but feel like the idea of a background that starts you with a malus in exchange for something else is a somewhat interesting one. Perhaps something more to do with skills and less with items would be better.

[xentronium]

Acq would cause start scumming for sure, but no skills+potion of experience sounds interesting...

[dynast]

i Think exp potion defeats the purpose, you should just start naked skill less and thats about it. Give those hyper accounts something to be afraid of.

[WalrusKing]

The more I look at it the more I feel like there's two potentially separate but interesting ideas here, that might each deserve consideration individually.

A:

Starting with cursed ring of bad stuff (or equivalent malus that can be easily applied to every character but isnt actually permanent) + something quite good. I don't think there's a background in the game currently which dips below a theoretical neutral start but gives you compensation for it, and I think that would be interesting.

B:

Starting with no skill + potion of experience + some stuff maybe? (You might need a little bit of help to leave early game). Do you chug the potion now to get a head start on life? Do you save it until you know for sure that you want 10 Conjurations, you want it now dammit? Who knows. (I'm guessing chug now is the better option)

Option B is actually maybe not the worst way to implement viewtopic.php?f=17&t=18026
as it provides the choice of not quaffing, starting a bit behind, but then getting to expend the xp resource later to slide into a discovered niche faster than another background might have.