infinitevox wrote:I'll just rename them to Gargantuan or Colossus then. Because it seems like a large number of your issues are basically bikeshedding, or comparing the monster version to the player version I'm cooking up. If it helps differentiate things or get rid of a preconceived bias, that's an easy fix.
My main issues are not issues of flavor, they are issues of gameplay-aka, this whole proposal seems to be based entirely on flavor when Crawl is a game that aims for good game design first, flavor second. When I say things like "why does it have all these resists? even monster giants don't have these", my main issue is still that it's super unbalanced, I'm just saying that it
also doesn't make much sense from a flavor perspective, so even if you are looking at it from that angle exclusively it shouldn't get a pass.
The slings/bows/xbows thing is a good example of this, there's not really a gameplay reason to give them those restrictions... and having slightly worse apts than ogres doesn't really balance this species. Ogres with more HP and gargoyle resists is bonkers, and that's before we even get to innate-everything-reaching and lower encumbrance.
infinitevox wrote:rN & rPois, once again, because sheer size. A creature that big has an incredible life force, draining it would not only be more difficult, but they're less likely to be affected if it were. And with a body that big, it would take a very strong poison, or a lot of it, to have any kind of noticeable effect on them.
This is again an argument from a purely flavor perspective, no thought for the gameplay implications(which are the most important thing in a
game, especially a game like DCSS...). Also, again it doesn't make flavor sense-it's just not an established thing in Crawl that big things are poison resistant or drain resistant. In fact, poison is pretty good at dealing with many giants, and drain is good against all of them... beating a big dude by "playing dirty" is a common theme in many stories, no?
Also wrt rPois, having more HP already means that "with a body that big, it would take a very strong poison, or a lot of it, to have any kind of noticeable effect on them"... you have more HP, so it takes more poison damage(or drain!) to kill them already! Adding rPois on is superfluous, the "requiring more poison to kill a huge dude" flavor is already represented by having extra HP.
infinitevox wrote:Your argument for allowing reaching to all weapons can also be used against Fo (2H+shield). That ability "removes an interesting situation" wrt weapon choice. I actually considered stipulating that they get +1 reach on polearms too, but decided against it as I was thinking that could cause some fairly degenerate tactics and interactions.
I'm also mulling around the idea of giving them an extremely limited "cleave-like" ability instead.
Sort of, in that you aren't making the choice between 1H and 2H, but you are still choosing between each of the different weapon schools. Your proposal is just a "don't use polearms" for reasons which aren't clear to me... why have a species that has innate reaching when a system for enabling reaching via choosing a specific weapon school already exists in the game? Perhaps an argument could be made for it if a species was built around specifically that, but I'm not seeing it here(and even then I'm a little dubious).
Fo's have a decently strong design niche in that they can't teleport/haste, so have to choose battles more carefully, but with digging can limit fights to 1v1 more easily, and "shields with anything" plays into this well because shields are strongest against 1 enemy at a time. So their weakness naturally leads you to take advantage of their strengths. The different design aspects play well with each other, where with this, it feels like you're throwing darts at a list of possible things a species could have. Or, more specifically, things you want a species to have, because you want to play an OP species that doesn't have to worry about HP, weapons, poison, torment...
In modern crawl, species have to have meaningful distinctions between each other to remain in the game. This is why mountain dwarves no longer exist but hill orcs still do, why there's like less than half the number of elves there once was, etc. You want a strong "idea" in a gameplay sense for a species for it to be good, not just something very similar to another species but with some other advantages plastered over it.
infinitevox wrote:I can see your hostility oozing through the screen... relax dude, I'm not murdering your first born, I'm just making a suggestion.
Remember, this is a very rough first draft, its mostly some ideas I had rolling around in my head that I thought could spark some discussion and maybe get some feedback on.
Here's the most constructive feedback I think I can give: focus in on one of the advantages you are interested in here. Just one, like "super huge HP" or "innate -encumbrance" or even "innate reaching". Then, without adding on any more advantages, try adding a disadvantage or two according to how strong the advantage is(perhaps no disadvantage if you think the advantage isn't very powerful). Try to keep aptitudes mostly flat.
After all that, think up the flavor for the species.