New Advanced Race - Gnomes

[continuumg]

I realize Gnolls probably have the seniority to take the Gn abbreviation, so if anyone has a better name, feel free. Some stats may need to change to account for the new flavor. Maybe Gnomes could just be Nm. Anyhow; the idea behind this race is primarily to allow for a new way to play artificers. They also make decent warpers, wizards, enchanters, or arcane crossbowmen.

Unlike the other tiny races (Spriggans and Felids), Gnomes move at the usual speed. They do, however have a good aptitude for translocations.

Gnome wands pack a little more punch, but cost 3 MP for use, meaning the player has to be more cautious when playing an artificer. This is slightly offset by their great Evo and Spl skills, which they can utilize to quickly increase their mana pool. Despite the -1 aptitude towards conjurations, Gnomes make decent blasters with Vehumet or Sif. Though they require a little more investment to cast spells reliably, they add a little more OOMPH while doing so. They are too small for armour, and thus don't have to worry about the spellcasting penalties incurred by it.

Attributes
Gnomes are Tiny (Sth++, EV+4, ShieldMod 9, No Armour)
Exp +1
HP -1
MP +2
MR +4

Mutations
MP-Powered Wands 1
Wild Magic 2
Acute Vision maybe?

Aptitudes
Fighting -2
S Blades -1
L Blades -3
M&F -2
Axes -3
Polearms -2
Staves -1
Unarmed -3

Throw -2
Slings -3
Bows -3
CrBows -1

Dodge +1
Stealth +1
Shields -1

Invoc -1
Evoc +4

Spellcasting +3
Conjur -1
Hexes +1
Charm 0
Summon 0
Necro -3
Transloc +2
Transmu -1
Fire 0
Ice 0
Air 0
Earth 0
Pois 0

[NhorianScum]

So... Spriggan blasters with no fast move?

[Shtopit]

About name seniority, I think Gn was gnomes (removed in 2009) long ago, and the abbreviation could still be in use on the servers. Is that the case?

[Hellmonk]

I think the potentially interesting direction here is with innate wild magic. MP wands is not a big enough deal to be species-defining imo. I imagine that wild magic 2 would leave you with annoyingly high failure rates in the very early dungeon, so it might be better to begin with wild magic 1 and increase to wild magic 2 at xl 7 (or 10 or 13 or whatever). Your proposal's missing base stats; I assume you're imagining something similar to spriggan there? Anyway I'd rather play this species than felid and you didn't add an incomprehensible gimmick, so good job on your species proposal.

To my understanding the gnome abbreviation was retroactively changed once gnolls were added.

[Leszczynek]

There's little point to -3 in Bows since small races can't use longbows.
If they are supposed to not wear body armor, you can call them Fairies instead of Gnomes and give them permaflight for flavor.
I can't comment on the concept in general because I only play melee and I'm disinterested in things that can't melee properly.

[continuumg]

Woops, yeah missed them stats.

Was thinking a little less dex oriented than spriggans. Either 5/11/8 or 4/11/9

EDIT - I do like the fairy idea, and the wild magic increasing over time; but I feel the faeries might be a cleaner design without the MP-powered wands, which was my main drive to make this. I'd also likely go with wildly different aptitudes for fairies.

[Siegurt]

Really I think spriggans should probably have been called faeries, or perhaps brownies.

I don't think dcss spriggans have much in common with the traditional spriggan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spriggan

[watertreatmentRL]

Adding a species like this, which is nothing more than a combination of existing game features (mutations, size, aptitudes), is not even a weekend coding project. It's a lunch break coding project. If there were a nontrivial chance of species like this getting into dcss, there would be hundreds of species already.

Now the natural place this line of thought ends up is "don't bother posting threads with proposals like this one," but I'll suggest a slightly different direction: There is an angband variant that has, I don't know about hundreds, but certainly dozens of species/races as well as mechanisms to produce further customized permutations of each at character creation. It's called poschengband. This game seems absolutely awful to me, but some people like it.

Instead of screaming into the void, you could reach out to other like-minded individuals and figure out how to add species and other such content yourselves. Get yourself an IRC channel, take over buzzfeed Hamilton slack, whatever, find yourself a way to coordinate and organize. Get github accounts. Bend your lunch breaks toward a common purpose. Before very long, you will have poschengcrawl.

As for how to add species: Search the dcss git repository for the commit that made the "bultungin" species. That's a somewhat fancy species addition and it's what an actual dcss new species would have to look like. Look at the changes to aptitudes.h, newgame.cc, species-data.h, and species-type.h. Doing what you want to do is a straightforward variation on those changes. You don't even need to know C to do what you want to do.

[chequers]

As much as I hate to agree with assholes, the differentiation of a species as "small and wild magic" isn't great. Is there some other way you can make casting better which isn't an existing mechanic? (Hunger less, wizardry, enhancer)

[watertreatmentRL]

I mean, there could literally be an in-game wizard that allows players to put together a species like this at character creation, give it a name and description and save it. You could have online servers where players share their weird new species and play them. This is true of a lot of dcss content, really. I'm pretty sure someone could make a name for themself doing this.

[continuumg]

I understand that these are already existing mechanics, but none of them are used currently in a new species. The Barachi for instance, may have 2 new mechanics, but the actual new gameplay created by that race's existence is arguably smaller than this gnome.

As an aside to watertreatment, I hardly see how the amount of code required is relevant. If you want an idea with more coding involved, you can look at my automaton post.

[watertreatmentRL]

Look, sorry to come off as combative here. Insomnia in a foreign country is making me bored and slightly more of a pain in the ass than usual. But...

The reason the amount and more importantly the nature of code is relevant is that it should give you an idea of what the barrier to getting this in the game is. It's not that no one has the time to do it. It's that this kind of thing is a soft "won't do" for dcss. Honestly, they ought to put an item on the "won't do" list that addresses species proposals that come down to aptitudes, stats, size, and existing mutations. There have been literally hundreds of proposals for species that meet this description.

Now you look at the species that are already there and it does seem like a pretty good number of them must've been the same at some point. The trend has been toward removing these species, e.g. the recent high elf removal, but more famously mountain dwarves, less famously sludge elves, grey elves, elves, gnomes, probably some other kinds of elves and dwarves I've never heard of. You need a really different angle on crawl to get people's attention with content proposals like this one.

[continuumg]

Fair enough.
No offense taken

[Lord Haart]

Rename them to Tomtenisser. That will teach the devs to support you.

[ion_frigate]

Wild magic seems like it could be adapted into a tier 2 Demonspawn facet, instead of its own species. The mutation could perhaps be enhanced, if people consider too negative, or it could be combined with something strictly positive (MR+ comes to mind).

@watertreamentRL: As for "species proposals that come down to aptitudes, stats, size, and existing mutations" never making it into the game, I would point out that gargoyles are a later addition that's largely based on existing mechanics, namely statueform resistances, innate AC, and low HP, all things that existed before them. Maybe they're a couple steps beyond this proposal, but you almost make it sound like anything short of a radically game-changing mechanic (like DD or Fe) has no chance of making it in. That's just not true.

[watertreatmentRL]

Four years is a long time and standards have evolved, but even if you count gargoyle as a success for the mut/apt approach to species proposals, you have to look at the hundreds that went nowhere.

I mean maybe it's not nice being that straightforward about it, but it's kinder to let them know what's up than to humor people and tacitly encourage a common error that nearly universally results in wasted time and frustration. Apt/mut species proposals are practically a format joke by now.

[VeryAngryFelid]

Gargoyle (Gr) - Added in 0.13
Formicid (Fo) - Added in 0.14
Vine Stalker (VS) - Added in 0.14
Barachian (Ba) - Added in 0.20

I really don't see many new mechanics here, it's all about existing mechanic applied to new species
1) +AC/-HP mutation
2) -Tele and shaft. Ok, shield with 2h weapon is a new mechanic
3) unable to heal with potions, extra regen, mana shield, vamipiric drain applied to MP instead of HP.
4) -speed, Jump/CBlink/Exh

[ion_frigate]

Was just about to point that out. The assertion that "if it's easy to code, it would have already been added if it were any good" is just false. Species don't just have to be coded, there's hundreds of hours of playtesting and extensive discussions about balancing that go into making them. There are very few proposals (with or without new mechanics) that have made the developers go "that looks like it's worth the effort of putting it in trunk and trying to make it work with the rest of the game." No one wants to have to ditch a feature after it's been in trunk for several months (RIP food reform, Djinn, and Lava Orcs).

Don't get me wrong, this proposal isn't great. There's no clear explanation of why it would add to the game, and the mechanics kind of seem thrown together. Mikee was probably right (in another thread) when he suggested that this person should have worked on their proposals more or taken them to CYC. Yes, it's probably true that there are more lazy proposals that are remixes of existing mechanics, since someone coming up with a new mechanic has likely thought about their proposal more. But there really is no visible bias on the part of the developers against using existing mechanics - if anything, there's a tendency to prefer that new species use existing mechanics.

[watertreatmentRL]

It is not merely easy to code this. It is absolutely trivial. It involves nothing more than setting data values. Less work would go into making the species in the OP than would go into writing a typical wikipedia page on an anime character. It would take less text than appears in the OP itself. The point here is to reason out why it is that there are not more species, when there very, very easily could be a whole lot more. The reason is that a new species needs to meet a standard of distinctness from what already exists and to add something valuable to the game, or at least show promise of meeting these standards with a certain group of people.

VS bite was a new thing that did not exist before and you fill a line of text with a highly abbreviated summary of its mechanics. The frog things have extended line of sight, didn't exist before, and a jump ability which is not the same as cblink, also didn't exist before. Okay, and that's ignoring the fact of hundreds of proposals that never went anywhere. Formicids, deep dwarves, octopodes, felids, gnolls -- these are typical late model crawl species.

What you guys are doing is bad. It is not true that people coming into GDD to make apt/existing mut species proposals are even slightly likely to get anywhere with them.

[ion_frigate]

Seriously, the problem with this proposal is not that it uses existing mechanics. The problem is that the OP didn't explain why it's a good idea. But I think it's silly to prima facie dismiss any idea that doesn't introduce some gimmick.

Yes, there are species ideas that are so similar to existing species that they aren't worth exploring. A "Viking" species that has rC+ and thematic aptitudes (+1 Axes, +1 Ice Magic, etc) is obviously a bad idea, being basically a human. But Wild Magic and Mana Battery are considerably more impactful mutations, given that they affect huge portions of the game in a very meaningful way. I'd say it's worth discussing the idea, or at the very least, asking OP to explain what it would provide that's unique and fun. Personally I think it could make for a nice high-risk, high-reward caster archetype, where you expect to kill things quickly but you also will find yourself in dangerous situations more often.

Would Wild Magic actually accomplish that? I don't know, but it's not something that should be dismissed outright. The discussion could even lead to ideas for altering Wild Magic to make it more interesting as the basis of a species, like making Wizardry ineffective on it, or giving it some sort of "get miscast effect but cast spell successfully" mechanic, or making it scale smoothly with total XP, or even making it fluctuate with XP. No, OP's proposal is not going to make into the game as-is, but it's definitely an interesting basis for a discussion.

I also want to point out: OP has made two other proposals that include entirely new mechanics (blindness and eat-items-for-HP). One of those proposals saw mikee telling OP to take it to CYC. This proposal saw the developer of a major fork say that its central mechanic is a

potentially interesting direction

Yes, it's wrong to let people think that if they come into GDD with a poorly reasoned proposal that it has any chance of making it into the game. But that has nothing to do with how new or complex the proposal's mechanics are.

[VeryAngryFelid]

Some combinations of mutations are quite fun, I still remember how I enjoyed playing Imp with intrinsic teleportitis and fast regen, it had really unique playstyle. Anyone who was lucky to get Poison Breath mutation (Naga-exclusive mutation) can easily feel how game changing and fun just a single mutation can be.

[watertreatmentRL]

You keep saying no to what I'm saying, but you haven't presented an alternative theory of modern standards for species proposals that fits anything that has happened in the recent past. You may think my idea of the standard is too definite or too blunt, but the fact is there are hundreds of proposals that fit the criteria I've outlined that never went anywhere, all but arguably one recent addition are far from it, almost all if not all species removals of the stone soup era had reasoning along the lines of what I'm saying, and even species that were briefly in trunk but did not make it to a release in recent years fit with my theory of species proposals. You can find explicit statements about "aptitude" species from developers if you care to dig through this forum (I do not for the purpose of this discussion).

The waters here are not as murky as you make them out. It is useful for people who are interested in thinking about things and making proposals to have a feel for the broad outlines of where things are. It is not useful for them to think combinations of stats/apts/mutations are how you come up with a species proposal that gets anywhere near a crawl release and talking like this promotes this widespread misconception.

[ion_frigate]

even species that were briefly in trunk but did not make it to a release in recent years fit with my theory of species proposals

The removal for Lava Orcs said:

When you strip away the fundamentally broken tension mechanic, you're
left with a species that is essentially "Hill Orcs WITH FIRE". No effort
has come forward with code to fix either aspect of them despite the
length of time they've been around in trunk, and the code is littered
with a very large number of special cases in their presence.

They were not removed because they were merely a combination of existing mechanics, but because they were too similar to an existing species and the new mechanic introduced to differentiate them from said species was an ungodly mess. The point that I and others are making is that a creative combination of existing mechanics can work very well, and has made it into the game multiple times.

As for Djinn, they contained a *ton* of new player mechanics in addition to the Spirit Shield (-wiz causing glow from spellcasting, fire immunity, weird interactions with water, weird interactions with antimagic). As I remember, they got cut because they were an unworkable and incoherent mess that wasn't fun to play, but certainly not because they used too many existing mechanics.

I know the developers don't want aptitude species. I know they don't want species based around mutations that are just simple numbers/resistances. I get that there's a line here - I just think you have it in the wrong place. Constant Wild Magic has the potential to produce a game fundamentally different from a character who doesn't have it. The mutation as it stands may be too boring/easy to work around, but it's a good starting point for a discussion, because the concept (increase both risks and rewards of spellcasting) is interesting. OP could have done more to actually start that discussion, but this proposal is not worthless.

[watertreatmentRL]

I can only assume this is a motivated misreading. I am not saying that lava orcs were removed because they were too apt/mut-y. Getting removed is a lot farther than the vast majority of apt/mut proposals get. Being in trunk for a while puts lava orcs in the top half of 1% of species proposals. Lava orc and djinn look like late model crawl species in my picture.

edit: You use the word "worthless," bringing with it the question of value. I suggested in my initial comment, which I guess was taken as entirely sarcastic, how the OP could create value with a proposal like this. I am not being ironic in anyway when I say that if a bunch of people got together and just threw in all kinds of ideas like this, they might get somewhere, if not good in my understanding of what that means, at least good in the view of some audience out there. They would probably do better by throwing out the baggage of existing crawl species and backgrounds and starting fresh. If your standard for species says stats/apts/mutations are enough, you can put that kind of content together quickly. And there's tons you can do with backgrounds, very easily. There is absolutely nothing special about most of the existing species and backgrounds other than that they are already there (which is hugely important). Given what's there already mechanically, anyone could rip them out and replace them with something maybe not totally different, but at least very new. Mostly it's a question of changing values in some hard-coded data structures.

If your understanding of value is so narrow that the OP has to be implemented in mainline crawl for it to worth anything, maybe I'm saying it's worthless. In my understanding of forum posting, it's not about particular proposals (which, by the way, also get implemented one time in a thousand if you only care about mainline crawl). Most value, if there is any, is dialectical and if we're lucky we get a better understanding of what is good and valuable in crawl, in game design, or whatever. "It's not the destination, it's the things we learned on the way."

[Siegurt]

Gargoyle (Gr) - Added in 0.13
Formicid (Fo) - Added in 0.14
Vine Stalker (VS) - Added in 0.14
Barachian (Ba) - Added in 0.20

I really don't see many new mechanics here, it's all about existing mechanic applied to new species
1) +AC/-HP mutation
2) -Tele and shaft. Ok, shield with 2h weapon is a new mechanic
3) unable to heal with potions, extra regen, mana shield, vamipiric drain applied to MP instead of HP.
4) -speed, Jump/CBlink/Exh

Fwiw: the original gargoyle had a self-petrify ability which was "novel" but eventually scrapped because it wasn't interesting or good.

Self-shaft at will and unlimited digging are at least slightly different than the other similar mechanics that existed at the time.

No potion heal was mildly different from existing mechanics as is mp vampirism.

Jump and slow movement arent new, but are unusual, personally i dont find barachians very interesting though.

I think a softer and more accurate form of "needs a novel mechanic" is really "allows for a novel type of game play" which is at least thoertically possible with some combinations of exiting mechanics, but is certainly more easily provably so if you are adding a genuinely impactful novel mechanic.

I don't specifically see any evidence that *this* race proposal provides that. Wild magic, in particular, is mostly low impact (slightly changing your skill training) it sounds like it it should make a significant difference, but it really doesn't (being most akin to a single resisance pip in terms of how much it impacts you.)

Part of the problem is that there are really a very limited number of things that you can effect that make a difference, most of which are already pretty loaded down (arguably overloaded in some cases), doing something genuinely novel and impactful that isnt stupid and doesn't suck is hard.

[duvessa]

Gargoyle also has the whole partially-nonliving gimmick. Even if you don't think it's a good gimmick it's still a "novel", "unique" feature of the species.
DCSS has never added a species that didn't come with any new mutations or special cases.

[Rast]

Vanilla species are OK.

Not every species needs to have a bunch of weird gimmicks like it was ripped off from the D&D Monster Manual V, you know, the one that just had all the leftover monsters that were too fucked up to go in Monster Manuals 1-4.