Tomb Titivator
Posts: 838
Joined: Friday, 2nd October 2015, 04:47
Player Ghosts' Dungeon (actually Design suggestion)
Alternative version of Crawl.
1. All Uniques are replaced by Player Ghosts. Where a Unique would normally spawn, you get a player ghost instead. One or two other player ghosts could still spawn per level (and those others would follow the normal version rules for ghosts, except see #4). Each ghost will only spawn once per game (assuming ghost population is sufficient), except for the ghost that replaces Boris which may respawn just as Boris does (with a *of Boris etc. appended to that ghost's name). Ghosts remain eligible for appearance in this version for 60 (?) days from the date of player character death. They may be each be selected for use in games up to say, oh five (?? or pick a number) kills of player characters -- something a little more persistent than the current three kills in normal.
2. Where a player ghost replaces a unique, this ghost will be placed on a level of the dungeon that roughly scales with the character's accumulated XP at time of death. It doesn't matter what level they died on. Ghosts that replace uniques will also be controlled somewhat for apparent power: Those above the level of lair will have made 1 kill, those from the level of Lair to D15 and in Lair branches will have made 2 kills, and those in Vaults, Depths, Zot, and Pan will have made 3 kills in the regular game. There can be additional weighting to increase the chance for deeper ghosts to carry either a white weapon or increasingly high level offensive spells. Even weights for certain dramatic advantages (extremely high evasion, high speed attack, extreme training of some ability?) is technically possible if one wished to tune this more.
3. Since items are removed by loss of uniques such as Donald, Erica, Pixel etc., a ghost replacing a unique will frequently drop either an item or a rather small stack of consumables from its inventory when destroyed. This can be weighted to increase the chance of higher bonus weapons, relics, etc. deeper in the dungeon. If this sounds like a big potential bonus, bear in mind that every unique will be replaced with a ghost which may have all sorts of surprises.
4. There must be some balancing to deal with weapons of holy wrath and The Shining One. I suggest giving those ghosts with demon weapons of any kind, a buff which is the opposite of holy wrath. Against followers of TSO or characters carrying holy weapons, these ghosts gain "Demonic Wrath" damage bonus. This effective brand would also be applied to any standard player ghosts in the game who happen to bear demon weapons. Alternatively, TSO could be removed from this version and weapons of holy wrath removed or made exceedingly rare.
5. Some uniques have an entourage: Think, Robin's patrol of goblins and hobgoblins, or Nergalle's spectral orcs. Such entourages will be replaced by weaker player ghosts. The entourage ghosts will have fewer kills in regular game than their leader, and will have severly limited (if any) spell levels and weapon enchantments. They may also have physical abilities nerfed by a level or two of Drain equivalent. But who knows what else they'll still show up with. (I'm trying to think of how to replace Kirke's hogs or Pixel's slaves with some amusing after effect here, but drawing a blank so far...)
6. Ghosts replacing uniques may have some added resistance to Beogh's enslavement (which presumably could affect them at high power), and to Dispel/Control Undead.
7. All ghosts still cannot use stairs. (Is this too much? Should those replacing uniques get to use stairs too? I still feel like simply adding several player-developed abilities makes ghosts potentially much more startling than some of the uniques, already.)
It's a touch of Pan in the main dungeon: Sometimes a flop but often quite a whopper, too.
More runes! GnWn (11, 0.21), GhMo^Makh (15, 0.17)
And a Yiuf: (1.4.6, 0.20): ImpGl^Oka (3)