Lair Larrikin
Posts: 27
Joined: Wednesday, 8th March 2017, 14:42
Don't make ogre a fat human
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Design goal:
Many different species
This is partly due to the skills and aptitude system. Similarly important are the built-in starting bonuses/handicaps of species; these often have great impact on play. To us, balance does not mean that all combinations of background and species play equally well! Some are much more challenging than others, and this is fine with us. Each species has at least some backgrounds playing rather well, though.
Ogres are a well defined species at the moment, they're fat, strong creatures who have a natural talent for clobbering things. Everything about them is intuitive. They are ogres. Like trolls but a little less nasty, but also quite a lot more talented in the art of clobbering.
Most of the ogres you see will be wielding giant clubs or spiked clubs. I assume this isn't a coincidence.
When you enter the dungeon, Just like a fat strong ogre off the street who can't wear armor or dodge things, you start off quite vulnerable, scavenging for a weapon appropriate to your particular talents, and unusual build. Well, or whips, but that's just a categorisation artifact, and always good for a bit of comedy.
Once you can start practicing your art, things start to flow more smoothly. It's a great rhythm to start a game with, and great thematically/in-universe.
Your intuitive grasp of basic magic manifests itself in your ability to train many low level utility spells at once via the 'spellcasting' skill.
Certainly more could be done with this, but just raising all of their individual school aptitudes is the absolute opposite, taking away flavour rather than adding it: They're supposed to be intuitive spellcasters, which implies more general ability and less ability to focus a particular domain. If their spell ability is buffed it should be in giving bonuses to their spellcasting skill, and/or (less preferably) higher aptitude, not giving them an increased ability to focus spell schools, i.e. studied magic.
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Ways to make ogres more 'distinguished' from other species
1. See title. Don't destroy this species just to add a generic fat caster. Nor even to add something new and brilliant. Ogres occupy a unique and flavourful niche. There's no reason to delete one awesome (and unique) thing to make room for another. Ogres are already a good race, and they have plenty of additional potential.
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Some other random ideas to improve flavour, gameplay, etc:
2. Ogres are lazy or slobbish, and are liable to misplace their precious clubs, hence their entering the dungeon without one. -Ogre's current gameplay and lore is wonderful, but it can't hurt to introduce it to the player more clearly. Could also put something in troll description to make it clear how central of an asset their claws are and to leave the clobbering to the maestros.
3. More can be done with ogre's 'natural talent' for basic magic. For example ogres could get an increasing affinity to a randomly chosen school or schools as they level, and/or level spellcasting, representing a school the ogre feels intuitively guided to to in their natural dabbling. (which they have no control over). Or increasing the spellcasting attribute could give ogres access to random spells at higher spell success rates, again representing spells they're drawn to in their natural dabbling and playing with magic and their strong intuition for, but poor understanding of, magic. Just two pretty similar examples, but hopefully it's clear that there's a lot more interesting things that can be done than just raising aptitudes, especially all individual school aptitudes.
4. High hp with low defences and no regen can make food conservation a bit harder. Adding a level or two of fast metabolism could exacerbate this and give ogres another thing to strategise about that makes perfect sense with how they are and what an ogre is. There's also something hilarious about the flavour of ogres having no levels of carnivore gourmand etc, basically being the gourmets of the monstrous races, but still having comparable (though lesser) need to eat. (due to their bulk rather than metabolism). Also flavourwise this could explain why ogres have such a high spellcasting aptitude: 'failures die fast'
5. To go with both the ogre's natural affinity for magic, and their love of clobbering things, ogres could gain the ability to imbue clubs with abilities and power as they level, or perhaps as the club is used. If this can't be made to work gameplaywise I think it should still be added for flavour's sake as a mostly flavor very high level ability. You could also do stuff like generating all clubs as negatively enchanted randarts which the ogre has some means to restore and level.
6. Ogres could have a special EV or other defence penalty beyond trolls. Savage troll manouverability>slobbish ogre. -Ogre is currently the 'mountain-of-health-with-no-defence' ..-iest class and could be made more so if desired.
7: small flavour thing, maybe questionable: given all the demons and so forth, Ogres could have some kind of minor but explicit relationship with sloth and gluttony. Or just sloth
One other thing worth noting is that the start of the game for ogres is great. If there's a point in the game where they lack flavour it's some time after they get awesome club and health mountain skills, and a club. I can't imagine it growing old for me personally, but there's a timing for you where ogres could have a bit more stuff going on if the simple pleasures are to be supplemented. And really please just don't forget or ignore that high hp low defence natural clobberer intuitive spellcaster is fucking distinct as all hell. Like the design philosophy, I'm not in favour of removing races anyway, but Ogres are absolutely nothing like high elves in this respect. Not that I'm saying high elves need the axe, but ogre is one of the most distinct races.
TL:DR Keep the clobbering. Keep natural magic natural. Ogres are cool.
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