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gremlins

PostPosted: Thursday, 1st March 2012, 14:31
by wad
What about a new species?

There are for sure enough different monsters in crawl, but it wouldn't be bad to add some new, would it? :)
An idea that preyed on my mind was to design a gremlin-tile with attributes similar to goblins like:
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gremlin

A short, fragile humanoid subspecies with long and large ears. It appears harmless alone, but will inevitable gang up in groups. It isn't very good at melee combat but fast and agile in return. Gremlins were often opressed, enslaved and exploited by stroger orcish species and forced to work in their mines. They are obsessivly collecting items.

Speed: 11 | HD: 1 | Health: 2-5 | AC/EV: 0/12 | Damage: 3 | Resistances: magic(1) | XP: 1.
special behaviour: gremlins will pick up any item on their way through the dungeon up to an amount of 15 items.
they tend to flee.
the player might want to follow a gremlin an struck it down to receive these items.
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gremlin slavedriver

A gremlin that has learned to assert itself by supressing weaker individuals of his own kind. It is stronger and healthier than a common gremlin and tending to use magic.

Speed: 11 | HD: 1 | Health: 8-13 | AC/EV: 0/12 | Damage: 8 | Spells: magic dart| Resistances: magic(2) | XP: 4.
special behaviour: will pick up any item on their way through the dungeon up to an amount of 24 items.
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Thanks for reading!

I appreciate any comments, improvements, adjustments, changes or rejections.

gremlin title screen

PostPosted: Thursday, 1st March 2012, 14:33
by wad
just for fun - title screen

Re: gremlins

PostPosted: Thursday, 1st March 2012, 17:07
by Night2o1
hmmm neat, 24 items seems like a lot though :P

Re: gremlins

PostPosted: Thursday, 1st March 2012, 20:10
by TehDruid
Heh. Wad, I have to say I liked your idea on Flora variety a lot and this seems fun also. Please note, I'm in no way associated with the game's development so the following is merely an opinion.

The thing is Crawl already has a lot of small-sized buggers (kobold/goblin) loitering the early levels and not sure how gremlins would be much different. Monsters already have the ability to pick up stuff and use it against you. It's just that I'm getting the feeling that devs are trying to differentiate monsters quite a bit (Catoblepi, Shedus and Phoenixes are quite nice examples of "unique" monsters. And yes, there's a lot of vanilla monsters that are of the plain "follow player-attack player" behaviour but I'm not quite sure if Gremlins would add to the game.

Kudos on the tiles, anyway. Love them!

Re: gremlins

PostPosted: Thursday, 1st March 2012, 20:33
by XuaXua
This avoidance/fleeing aspect is nice. Follow along or skip to the tl;dr.

I used to play Advanced Hero Quest (Boardgame), which is a multiplayer roguelike boardgame. Much better than Warhammer Quest and much more abstract than Hero Quest.

I'm certain there are newer games like it.

Anyway, you and your friends would explore the dungeon and the game master would populate rooms. There were very long halls, and usually several doors, each of which led to a room.
You could have random encounters, etc.

A key thing to note is that monsters cannot explore; rather, they can explore passages, but they cannot open doors.

Except for The Sentinel. He can open doors and by doing this he can generate new rooms and encounters.

When you encounter monsters, one might randomly be a Sentinel, but you wouldn't know which (the game master would). A smart game master would try to position his sentinel near a door and would always open the door, run down the halls and open as many other rooms as possible to wake the dungeon against the player. This is what a gremlin should do.

tl;dr: When the gremlin flees or runs away, he should yell. Currently monsters only scream when they sight the player. I think monsters should yell for help when fleeing or scream when struck hard enough. I think a gremlin fleeing the player and screaming for reinforcements while swiping the loot would be extremely dangerous on any level.

Re: gremlins

PostPosted: Thursday, 1st March 2012, 20:41
by TehDruid
XuaXua wrote:I think monsters should yell for help when fleeing or scream when struck hard enough.

I second this suggestion.

Re: yelling for help

PostPosted: Friday, 2nd March 2012, 08:24
by wad
Thank you for evaluating ;)

The idea of yelling for reinforcements is great. I way like it.
The amount of items that could be picked up should be reduced perhaps as well.
Now those gremlin don't differentiate so much from kobolds or goblins, but I was not aiming to invent a champion monster class that can hardly be defeated ;) Just an additional minor enemy.
If the idea of a gremlin species gets acceptance, there are I think many ways to embellish.
Maybe gremlin shamans, marauders, ..ect

Re: gremlins

PostPosted: Friday, 2nd March 2012, 08:44
by galehar
XuaXua wrote:I think monsters should yell for help when fleeing or scream when struck hard enough.

Seems thematic. However, it would completely destroy fear as an escape option.

Re: yelling for help

PostPosted: Friday, 2nd March 2012, 09:02
by TehDruid
wad wrote:Thank you for evaluating ;)

The idea of yelling for reinforcements is great. I way like it.
The amount of items that could be picked up should be reduced perhaps as well.
Now those gremlin don't differentiate so much from kobolds or goblins, but I was not aiming to invent a champion monster class that can hardly be defeated ;) Just an additional minor enemy.
If the idea of a gremlin species gets acceptance, there are I think many ways to embellish.
Maybe gremlin shamans, marauders, ..ect


Yeah I have to say I love the different gnolls a lot since they were added to the game, just like I'v loved monster orcs for having different "classes", mage, warrior and priest.

Re: gremlins

PostPosted: Friday, 2nd March 2012, 13:31
by mumra
Here's my thought: they have extremely large ears, so give them a "Incredibly Sensitive Hearing" ability meaning they can hear you and find you from much further away on the map (and stealth will be much less effective against them).

Additionally, there's something else gremlins are well known for - breaking things. How about if when they attack you, there's a chance they'll "break" an evocable from your inventory (they'll also do this to evocables on the ground of course). So the next time you use the item it'll backfire, or maybe they drained charges from it, etc. So while they're a minor annoyance on their own, in combination with other monsters they become more of a threat because they're removing options.

Re: gremlins

PostPosted: Tuesday, 6th March 2012, 14:24
by Night2o1
mumra wrote:Here's my thought: they have extremely large ears, so give them a "Incredibly Sensitive Hearing" ability meaning they can hear you and find you from much further away on the map (and stealth will be much less effective against them).

Additionally, there's something else gremlins are well known for - breaking things. How about if when they attack you, there's a chance they'll "break" an evocable from your inventory (they'll also do this to evocables on the ground of course). So the next time you use the item it'll backfire, or maybe they drained charges from it, etc. So while they're a minor annoyance on their own, in combination with other monsters they become more of a threat because they're removing options.


Item destruction just issssssssn't fun. There is already a ton of consumable destruction that is horrible to deal with until you luck into conservation

Re: gremlins

PostPosted: Tuesday, 6th March 2012, 19:29
by mumra
Night2o1 wrote:Item destruction just issssssssn't fun. There is already a ton of consumable destruction that is horrible to deal with until you luck into conservation


I didn't mean permanent, you'll just get a random effect for 1 charge of a wand (which could even still be destructive). It just seems very thematic when talking about gremlins :)

Re: gremlins

PostPosted: Wednesday, 14th March 2012, 13:56
by MyOtheHedgeFox
galehar wrote:
XuaXua wrote:I think monsters should yell for help when fleeing or scream when struck hard enough.

Seems thematic. However, it would completely destroy fear as an escape option.

What about temporary Moving Silence on scared monsters? That is, do not allow them to scream if they were scared away with the scroll or the spell?

Re: gremlins

PostPosted: Wednesday, 14th March 2012, 18:57
by galehar
MyOtheHedgeFox wrote:
galehar wrote:
XuaXua wrote:I think monsters should yell for help when fleeing or scream when struck hard enough.

Seems thematic. However, it would completely destroy fear as an escape option.

What about temporary Moving Silence on scared monsters? That is, do not allow them to scream if they were scared away with the scroll or the spell?

So it means that the only monsters which would call for help are the ones that flee when wounded. But wait, only monsters with intelligence <= animal flee when wounded. And animals don't call for backup.

Re: gremlins

PostPosted: Wednesday, 14th March 2012, 19:58
by XuaXua
So it means that the only monsters which would call for help are the ones that flee when wounded. But wait, only monsters with intelligence <= animal flee when wounded. And animals don't call for backup.[/quote]

Why wouldn't some monsters with high intelligence flee when wounded, or at least back away and start using ranged again?

I smell a "Flee" branched thread coming up.

Re: gremlins

PostPosted: Thursday, 15th March 2012, 12:54
by Stormfox
Add a couple more AI elements and you have the Smart Kobold roguelike.

(Edited to add a quick summary...)

You enter the branch grossly overpowered relative to the strength of the monsters. (In the actual Smart Kobold game, you're a heavily armed and armoured tank with no ranged attacks.) The monsters know better than to engage you directly, so they run away from you, plinking you with ranged attacks and laying traps and gathering up the loot before you can. If you make a bad approach in cornering them, they'll destroy their ranged weapons so that you can't use them yourself.

Re: gremlins

PostPosted: Thursday, 15th March 2012, 14:41
by XuaXua
What's great is there is no weapon destruction in this game other than deep water if you're not a swimmer or mutually-assured lava.

Re: gremlins

PostPosted: Tuesday, 20th March 2012, 00:25
by Pereza0
I suggest a new player race

Spielberg Gremlins

Fluffy small creatures, proficient spell casters, but terrible figthers in their usual form.

Upon entering shallow water, hostile creatures of the same species might spawn next to the player.
They do not hunger, but if they eat, they will enter an unusually long beserk state in which they wont be able to cast spells of any sort or train magic-related schools but will give a noticeable temporal boost to their melee aptitudes and skills