New Background: Beastmaster

[and into]

I know this has been discussed before but I didn't feel like necroing a really old thread.

Starts equipped with a club and animal skin.

2.0 Maces and Flails
1.0 Fighting
1.0 Stealth

Before beginning you choose from the following as your starting pet:
1.) Adder
2.) Hound
3.) Iguana

Your pet "evolves," up to a certain point, as you gain experience:
Adder — Water Moccasin — Black Mamba
Hound — Wolf — Hell Hound
Iguana — Crocodile — Komodo Dragon

Exactly how much experience is needed for your pet to upgrade will vary. My instinct would be for Iguana to take a long time to get to crocodile, and then even longer to become a komodo dragon—however it is the most durable at start. Adder upgrades to water moccasin fairly early, on the other hand, but then has quite a while to become a mamba. Hound is somewhere in between those two in terms of evolution speed.

You aren't expected to keep your pet around forever, but it does scale in power up to a limited extent; cf. starting spell books. The pet is there to help you just get your character established.

Note that this background would require 1 total window after choosing your species and background, which is no more than what fighter, gladiator, abyssal knight, etc. require.

Also note that this background starts with lower skills and worse equipment than pretty much anything else—this is the trade-off for beginning with a pet.

[Azrael]

I think the main problem with this is that it gives one class a unique start/advantage/boost. If you start as a Conjurer or a Gladiator, you can essentially turn that character into something totally different depending on what you find in the dungeon. Background's are just starting packages; they're not meant to provide class features.

Note that I'm not opposed to the idea. Just pointing out a bit of a contradiction with Crawl tradition.

[and into]

I think the main problem with this is that it gives one class a unique start/advantage/boost. If you start as a Conjurer or a Gladiator, you can essentially turn that character into something totally different depending on what you find in the dungeon. Background's are just starting packages; they're not meant to provide class features.

Note that I'm not opposed to the idea. Just pointing out a bit of a contradiction with Crawl tradition.

Yes, I had that concern as well. 'm hoping that this bends, but doesn't break, the concept of backgrounds in Crawl. — I know dpeg has said he isn't averse to a background that starts with a pet, for one thing. This was my stab at that idea.

Note that some backgrounds already have semi-unique, background-based advantages. (Abyssal knight and Monk come to mind.) I agree it shouldn't be *too* defining or powerful. Maybe the pets I recommended would be too strong, but I think having the choice amongst those pets being somewhat interesting is important, e.g., one that is more powerful early on, or later on—if you manage to keep it alive.

I don't think there's much space for new backgrounds, outside of pushing the envelope a bit in this way, ya know?

(Another idea I proposed in passing in another thread was a background "Noble," which begins with extra money, much better starting equipment, but low stats and skills, plus a bad mutation or two—consanguinity in the name of keeping the family pedigree pure comes at a price, after all. )

[ackack]

While I think this is an interesting try, my guess is that it's going to be very difficult to balance. Being forced to start with a club and low skills means you really need that pet to generate huge swaths of your offense through at least D:1. Something like an adder seems like it's probably going to get waxed pretty quick, but a hound or iguana seems like it will just stomp out the level. The reliance on the pet will also encourage a humongous amount of 5ing to let it rest up so that you have it until you can find something else. That sounds pretty unpleasant.

[Leafsnail]

Snakes and canines seem like poor choices for pets, due to the ready access that transmuters and summoners get to them.

[and into]

While I think this is an interesting try, my guess is that it's going to be very difficult to balance. Being forced to start with a club and low skills means you really need that pet to generate huge swaths of your offense through at least D:1. Something like an adder seems like it's probably going to get waxed pretty quick, but a hound or iguana seems like it will just stomp out the level. The reliance on the pet will also encourage a humongous amount of 5ing to let it rest up so that you have it until you can find something else. That sounds pretty unpleasant.

Hmm... Could upgrade starting weapon to whip, but that only addresses some of the concerns. My idea for how to balance starting with an iguana is that it would give a lot of benefit early on, but then would take a *long* time to get to crocodile. So unless you are really good at keeping that dude alive it will mostly give you a big boost until temple, but then will probably die. The adder upgrades faster but is more frail, and the hound is in between. I agree that getting the exact numbers might be hard, and it may well be the case that iguana, and perhaps hound, would be overpowered at start.

(Maybe giant gecko — iguana — crocodile is more reasonable, if the first upgrade happens really fast; in that case you'd have to be very good and careful about keeping your pet alive for the first floor and a half, but then you get the fastest upgrade. I was thinking you get water moccasin by like, around end of D4 on average, the wolf on D6.)

[Abominae]

My biggest issue with this proposal is the fact that it would be much easier to give Su a spell similar to this. There are a couple of different ideas on the dev wiki for choice summoning spells to function in a manner very similar to this proposal. This is solely my opinion, but Su is an incredibly boring background and would benefit from this sort of variety.
Primarily, I just don't think energy should be focused upon making another pet background when the current pet background needs massive work.

[johlstei]

You could address the issue of giving the background a unique power by first adding in mercenary/pet shops, and then making a class that starts with one.

[1010011010]

It's too unique, there's no other way of getting a permanent hell hound ally.
If there was a pet shop that sold animal mercenaries, then maybe but currently I see something like this happening:

it would be much easier to give Su a spell similar to this.

Summon spirit guide, low level summon spell with a cap of 1. Always summons the same animal (different for each game), levels up and evolves.

[cerebovssquire]

I think the "this gives 1 background a unique advantage" is based more on principle than impact on the game. Yes, you can turn a Gl into a conjurer and a Cj into a melee fighter, but you can't do that in the early dungeon levels (especially the former), which is the only part of the game where the beastmaster's ally actually means something. It will be hard to get it to survive through Lair without risking your own life. Beyond Lair, keeping it alive barely gives you any benefit, and the difference between a character with a friendly hell hound and a character without a friendly hell hound beyond Lair is practically nonexistent. I would object to this if the ally could evolve to be much stronger than the current limit, but that just isn't the case.

Sure, it's unique, that's a good thing. I would be more concerned about balance here. Either you give Beastmaster weak initial allies, and their survival is very much based on luck (e.g. giant gecko), or you give them very strong allies that practically guarantee survival in the first levels (iguana). I don't know if there are monsters that fall between these two and also have sensible "evolved" stages.

[Brannock]

If mercenary/pet shops became a thing then Beastmaster wouldn't be unique compared to other backgrounds - they'd just get guaranteed access to a pet (similar to how Conjurers get guaranteed access to a spellbook, etc).

Not that I think it's a real issue.

[and into]

I think the "this gives 1 background a unique advantage" is based more on principle than impact on the game. Yes, you can turn a Gl into a conjurer and a Cj into a melee fighter, but you can't do that in the early dungeon levels (especially the former), which is the only part of the game where the beastmaster's ally actually means something. It will be hard to get it to survive through Lair without risking your own life. Beyond Lair, keeping it alive barely gives you any benefit, and the difference between a character with a friendly hell hound and a character without a friendly hell hound beyond Lair is practically nonexistent. I would object to this if the ally could evolve to be much stronger than the current limit, but that just isn't the case.

Sure, it's unique, that's a good thing. I would be more concerned about balance here. Either you give Beastmaster weak initial allies, and their survival is very much based on luck (e.g. giant gecko), or you give them very strong allies that practically guarantee survival in the first levels (iguana). I don't know if there are monsters that fall between these two and also have sensible "evolved" stages.

Yes, this is my line of thinking, too. Uniqueness is justifiable (so long as it applies primarily to early game and doesn't carry on too long), and I don't think there is much more room for a lot of balanced, sufficiently distinctive backgrounds that are purely based on slightly different skills, starting spell book, and different items.

I tried to come up with different "evolution" lineages that made sense, but it is somewhat difficult. Leafsnail's point about the overlap with existing early allies (sticks to snakes and summon canine familiar) is well taken though, as is Abominae's about possibly redirecting some of the ideas in this proposal into making the summoner background more interesting.

[truemonolith]

Not the best idea really. The pet will die too easily and the summoner already exists.

[Siegurt]

give them an enslavement wand

[and into]

give them an enslavement wand

Which would make them strictly worse versions of artificers, who get three wands (one of which is enslavement), and also start with scroll of recharging auto-IDed. (Apologies if I missed sarcasm here on your part...)

Not the best idea really. The pet will die too easily and the summoner already exists.

Starting with a pet is pretty different, I think the only overlap was with some of my initial choices for starting pet, which in retrospect perhaps weren't the best. Anyway the pet in this proposal is supposed to die eventually, probably fairly soon, but will help out early on, which certainly something like hound --> wolf or an iguana would do, the trick would be getting the balance right. In most cases I imagine the pet would last longer than a Fighter's weapon and armor usually does before it gets upgraded, for instance.

[Siegurt]

That was about 40% sarcasm on my part. I took "starting equipment" and "ally that's useful for a while" and came up with "Wand of enslavement"

I do think it might be thematically and balance-wise plausible to come up with some sort of starting kit that included a wand of enslavement, which one could label a 'beastmaster' as long as the other bits of their starting kit were sufficient to make it "about as good" as an artificer (Say, for example, better armour and/or weapons to make up for the lack of the other two wands and the auto-id), I'm not sure how interesting it would be.

[Tiktacy]

I love this idea, I think with a bit of testing and maybe playing around with ally options, this could be a very interesting option for a starting background.

Awesome idea, and into.

[DracheReborn]

I've proposed something similar before. But I've kind of changed my mind. One big problem for me is that there are no complementary skills to having a pet. For example, with another background you might start with a crappy hand axe but also some Axes skill, so that when you eventually upgrade that axe you still get some use out of your background skill. So you now start thinking about adding an "Animal Training" skill that makes your pet fight better or something, but at that point the whole thing might work better as a species or god ability.

Btw, I don't think the above is a showstopper objection to a beastmaster background, any more than uniqueness aspect is. But certainly it makes the idea seem less compelling to me.

The other thing is that there is already a whole bunch of other ways to get ally play, so permanent ally should have something new to differentiate. In the current proposal, the evolution thing seems to be the main difference, but a) evolution of lizard -> big lizard -> even bigger lizard doesn't seem particularly interesting; and b) Beogh's orcs already have a better evolution mechanic, e.g. able to branch out to warrior or priest or wizard paths (well, in theory, but with crawl's AI the differences are less interesting than I'd like). I suspect you'd have to design an entire new monster as pet for this background.

Sorry to be so negative, but I've tossed around this idea in my head, and well that's the result of my musings. I do think there's room for a god built around a special permanent ally (like that spirit guardian thing). Or even a species - something like a parasite that can latch on to different hosts, etc.

[Bim]

Having a one-off pet doesn't sound great as you'd probably want to basically grind it up until it reaches a useful form, but it'll probably get stomped pretty quickly. However, giving a beastmaster a summoning item (much like sack of spiders) which only spawns one animal (like the spirit animal proposal) would be interesting. This could grow in experience over a long period of time (somehow, I'm sure it's not too hard to add that) but could be reused quite regularly it could be made quite useful.

[1010011010]

I don't believe a single ally is a solid means to fill the starting equipment criteria "help you get to lair but help no further" (although that criteria is not defiantly predefined by anyone of authority on the subject, I think most would agree that's the role of starting equipment).

It's undependable since it could die and leave in bad stead and with the current ally management system keeping it safe wastes turns and possibly endangers you. It also syphon experience.

There was a box of beast suggestion a while ago which I though was fine.

[dck]

While maybe a class with a pemapet can work (probably only if ally shops exist) I don't like this particular proposal.
Leaving aside the fact they overlap with s2s and ccf (which are from two very distinct backgrounds), all of the pets proposed would be really overpowered in D: 1. The weakest one is an adder who can mostly murder anything in D: 1 but has HPs low enough that you probably have to play games of ta tr to keep it alive, effectively being an even more annoying way of poison kiting.
Also it would probably evolve rather fast since it's the weakest of the three, meaning you let it kill everything the first couple of floors and then have a friendly D: 3 moccasin (which is no longer annoying and just overpowered like the other two).

Aside from this, a problem that I believe all permapets would have and that would be most noticeable with a class that starts with a pet would be having to 5 extra to heal your allies.
Also, a way to keep a class with a permapet a bit less annoying is to make the player at least moderately strong himself so he can fight alongside the pet properly. I think for example the pets suggested would be comparable to As' blowgun with needles and cloak. A +2 club and say 2-3 dodging would help in that regard, assuming the background would have decent/good dex.

[Lasty]

I wonder if there might be some meat on the Animal Training skill idea. Here's a quick proposal for how the skill would work, and then presumably a "Beastmaster" class would start with some levels in it.

The Animal Training skill would give you two benefits: first, it would give you a chance to turn any animal coming into LOS into a permanent ally (Taming); second, it would give a passive boost to the animal permanent allies you have recruited via this new skill. (Boost).

Taming would be checked once per animal on the first time it enters your LOS. Chance would be derived from your HD, your Animal Training skill, and the amount of animal allies you already have. I would expect that the max allies would be something like one per 9 levels of the skill, round down, and the taming chance would be something like (extreme ballpark):

  Code:

3 * skill - (10 * number of existing allies) - mon.hd + you.level

Boost could be whatever, but I would assume it would be something along the lines of 3% damage boost per level, +1 speed per 9 levels, and +1 HD (on join) per 9 levels.

So, why this new skill? A lot of players seem to want ally play, and this proposal could address that with the following benefits:

* allows any characters to pick up some ally play without being restricted in god choice
* these allies do not need equipment management
* these mechanics allow for passive, permanent allies that are reasonably level-adjusted and don't have the issue of ally death ending the play style.
* provides an alternative the more-powerful but more active/mp dependent/spellbook dependent/less permanent Summoning school.

There's a lot that can be tweaked in this proposal, but I think the overall premise offers some appeal.

Edit: clarified terms, clarified that only the permanent allies tamed by this skill would be affected by the boost from this skill.

[DracheReborn]

Lasty: personally I don't like the idea of a single skill to do 2 different things (see Throwing).

But if we're serious about adding a new skill to the game, how about generalizing it to something like "Tactics" which basically gives a bonus for all ally attacks scaled by skill. A very basic (and boring) idea would be to simply give some slaying bonus to allies. A better one might be for allies to actually display better tactical behavior with increased skill - strong allies try to block, weak ones harass from the flanks, etc - but I have no idea how practical this is.

[Lasty]

If you don't like a skill that does two related things, then you probably aren't a fan of:

Fighting
Spellcasting
Stealth
Short Blades

Depending on how you define "two things", you might also lump in every other skill, since every other skill effects more than one type of calculation (weapons speed AND weapon damage; spell success rates AND spell power, AC AND EV penalties AND spell casting chances, etc.)

That said, I meant for the boosting aspect of Animal Training skill to apply only to animals tamed by the skill, not all permanent allies. I'll edit the post to clarify.

Edit: minor details for clarity.

[DracheReborn]

If you don't like a skill that does two related things, then you probably aren't a fan of:

Fighting
Spellcasting
Stealth
Short Blades

I can accept Fighting and Spellcasting since those are supposed to be general all-purpose skills by their nature. Stealth + Short Blades = Stabbing seems more like a hack that came about because characters who train Stealth and SB also tend to train Stabbing. I suppose your use of Animal Training would be likewise (not worth 2 skills, so lump it into 1).

I guess my objection here is that Animal Training seems like a really niche ability, and if T&D and Stabbing don't deserve skill status I'm not sure this does. Generalizing the skill so that it becomes more widely applicable seems to make sense to me, or maybe not.

[IronJelly]

What if the pet worked like the demonic aid mutation (one of my favorites), but with animals. In this case, a race may make more sense than a background.

But hear me out: this race, call them Beastmen, Druids, or whatever else you want. I'd consider making them small, and calling them Satyr (and not fast like Spriggan). Maybe even give them further on-theme flavor if you want.

They start with the ability: A weak animal rushes to your aid, and get a small mammal at high tension. At certain levels (though i'm no good at determining which ones) the ability gets more powerful, so that eventually, over time, more and/or better animals rush in at tension.

Is it the same as a pet? no. are the animals more reliable and more fun than a pet you have to keep track of and keep alive somehow (not all classes get healing, none really get wastable heals), yes! This takes a lot of the control out of the player's hand, but I personally think that's a good thing.

If you don't want this race to be the optimal spammals/summon-and-win-by-proxy race, all you have to do is give them a terrible Summoning aptitude (flavored easily as "(Race) is so much more comfortable with nature's aid, that they've long foregone their aptitude for artificially summoned help." They could probably have bad invo skill for the same reason)

This proposal lets us reuse a special ability not used elsewhere, flavored differently enough that it won't be mixed up with DS, achieves somewhat the mechanic you want without the tedium, and honestly is quite flavorful.

[TeshiAlair]

Perhaps, in parallel to how Artificer is similar to an Evo based Cj, a Beastmaster could use things like the box of beasts or bag of spiders to be an Evo based Su