Slime Squisher
Posts: 377
Joined: Thursday, 12th June 2014, 06:56
Abstract away monster weapons
- They create hundreds of meaningless decisions: Every worthless short sword or hand axe you see on the ground *is* a decision. No, not much of one, but in roguelikes that don't have monster weapons as actual items, I notice that the simplicity really does make the game run more smoothly. Even if you automatically decide "no" on junk weapons, they still cause visual clutter that most players are going to see a fair amount (both in viewing items on the ground and on the map).
- They create guaranteed items: You can pretty near-certain that you're going to get the complete set of good but non-rare weapons (like battleaxes) from Orc and Vaults. I think there's more of a potential for interesting decisions if there isn't an easy, guaranteed source of high-tier weapons - forcing players to adapt to what the floor gods drop is a good thing IMO.
- They impose a substantial tracking burden on the player: As in, you have to keep track of what monster has what weapon. Now, there's nothing wrong with the occasional monster that's randomly more dangerous than its fellows, but I don't think making the player keep close track of a bunch of identical or nearly-identical tiles/glyphs is a good thing. Especially since many weapon-wielding monsters appear in large groups. In particular, this is a nasty noob trap on D:1, where a goblin with no weapon will usually take at least four hits to kill you, but one with a club can easily do it in two.
- They create a lot of pointless variation in monsters: If I told you that I wanted to introduce two monsters, with identical stats except one had a base damage of 45, the other of 40, I think you'd tell me just to merge them.
- Monster weapon speed is weird: I've been playing Crawl since 0.4, and I still have no idea how it works.
So here's what I propose:
- Monster base damage is increased to compensate for the lost weapons: It should be based on the average weapon the monster would get. This would make combat swingier - if this is considered a bad thing, weapon-wielding monsters could have their damage split into two die (I think this is fairly intuitive to most people).
- Monster weapon speed is given three levels: Fast (.67aut), normal (1aut), and slow (1.5aut). Simple to put in xv, and the same for all monsters of a given type.
- Variant monsters can replace interesting brands: For example, there could be very rare "goblins of Lugonu" that have distortion-branded attacks. I don't think the basic multiplier damage brands are anything worth preserving, though.
- Variant monsters could also replace non-weapon wielding monsters: This is mainly to preserve the current state of D:1, while improving the interface. Instead of just goblins, you have goblins (same stats as now), and goblin fighters (with something like 9 or 2d4 base damage). You might argue that introducing more monsters isn't a good thing, but I would argue that this is the situation currently - a goblin with a club is a different monster than a goblin without, but right now they're very poorly differentiated in the interface.
- Armed uniques are handled slightly differently: The damage works the same way for them as for normal monsters, but on death they do still drop a weapon. If they would have gotten a branded weapon currently, they still get that brand, which would be indicated much as it is now (xv, comes into view message). I don't think it's too bad that players have to check the brand for rare monsters like uniques.