The Tavern

Would a monster that has an effect similar to a scroll of immolation be interesting, bad, or broken? It doesn't need to a fire flavor, but anything that makes it problematic for the PC to be next to a monster when it dies. Whether it is also bad for monsters adjacent to the dying monster is also tweakable. I can see situations where it might help the player if other monsters can be hurt by it, and situations where it might greatly complicate a tactical situation, and situations were it would be fairly inconsequential. Has a monster like this been tried before?

It has; Necromancers used to cast Inner Flame. It wasn't exactly good for their mortality, or that of their allies. Might be saner in places like Gehenna or Volcano where most monsters have rF anyway.

https://github.com/crawl/crawl/commit/7 ... c848699ccc

Thanks. Yeah, the problem is that in Gehenna the character likely has rF+++ anyway.

There's definitely interesting design space here, although as stated simply adding the existing inner fire spell isn't really that effective. The theme of damaging you if the monster dies next to you is specifically anti-melee and would hurt heavy armor bruisers the most. They're generally strong enough that they can probably handle the damage, though. Incentivizes ranged/casters to create space before getting the kill.

I'd probably go with a non-elemental single target (ie only hurts the player, not other monsters) effect. Could make you want to delay killing the monster, so I'd probably have the buff be fairly short duration (3-6 turns?) to give players the option of letting it time out to avoid the damage. Kind of like a pain mirror, except it only triggers on death, not on hit.

Maybe have it be immune to fire, and come with packs of fire bats or something?

if the moth is immune to fire a player with rf+++ might walk around the dungeon with it in tow (unless its melee damage is sufficiently dangerous).

even if the monster isn't abusable, it would be super annoying because the player would have to reset the fight every time something got inner flamed (if inner flame is a threat)

why not give the monster fireball? is the 'point' of this monster to kill players who decide to tab through harmless packs by giving them all inner flame at the last second?

It was not a serious proposal, which is why it was in CYC. I thought of it, and didn't know how to evaluate it beyond knowing that it would complicate melee. Note please how the first sentence of OP was a question. And what i learned from this thread was that an elemental-based effect was not good, and that it was potentially abusable, and that the monster would either be boring or a dick move. So from my perspective: question answered, successful thread.