Wednesday, 19th June 2013, 21:08 by dpeg
There was a time when Crawl would roll some die before giving you your character, e.g. HP or number of arrows. Is it flavourful? Probably to many, yes. Is it meaningful? Probably yes, too -- meaningful enough that some players would reroll characters until they got good enough results.
Therefore, this approach was shelved and character generation is now deterministic, with the sole exception of Wanderers. I don't think randomised backgrounds apart from Wanderers have a chance to make it into the game.
DracheReborn: I like the ally idea and think it could work quite well. Flavour-wise, it is novel and cool, and also a little nod to Nethack (the starting pet is one of the best working concepts in that game, in my opinion). Gameplay-wise, the ally will be strong at the start (as strong as we like) but diminish in power -- that's exactly the behaviour we want. Furthermore, there tools and tricks to help your ally, so this could lead to different play. I don't think there is overlap with summoners or necromancers or death knights, as those all play around cheap and exchangeable allies. Finally, I'm sure that "noble" is not the correct mental approach but that doesn't really matter. (In particular, when I support a starting ally, I don't imply that such a background should have no skills or stats.)