Heart of Zot proposal

[KoboldLord]

Rationale:
In the current version, the post-endgame is exceptionally demon-heavy. Some game features such as the holy wrath brand and TSO are currently overpowered more because of this fact, and other features run out of value because they are not effective in Hells or Pan. Adding Shoals into the Lair roulette has proven that alternative branches can work impressively well, even if these branches are not identical in threat, xp, or treasure.

Requirements:
Pandemonium serves several purposes that the Heart of Zot must share.

First, it must present a meaningful challenge for characters that are already capable of collecting the Orb of Zot. Pandemonium accomplishes this with the heavy use of torment and hellfire effects, plus the inability to trivially return to the main Dungeon to resupply. The opposition has a variety of attack routines, which require at least some minimal attention to all of the cardinal defenses. The Heart of Zot can make extensive use of mutation and acid to replace torment and hellfire, which are debilitating effects that players have good reason to fear, without being just more of the same.

Second, Pandemonium is the in-game mythological justification for the existence of the Dungeon. In the current version, Pandemonium has a thematic link to the Orb of Zot culminating with the Pan Lords marshaling their legions against the player during the Orb Run, but already visible in the corruption of many denizens of the Dungeon even early on in the game. Whatever happened in the mists of time, Pandemonium is the ultimate source of the opposition the player faces. Similarly, the rapid evolutionary fecundity of the Heart of Zot warps natural animals into monsters, which issue forth to plague the Dungeon and the Orb seekers therein. If the Heart of Zot comes up as the post-endgame branch, the Orb Run will feature Heart monsters instead of Pan demons. As such, Heart monsters need a similar range of tricks.

Third, five Runes are available here, and they should be acquired in an interesting and evocative manner. Pandemonium has four special uniques for four of the Runes and procedurally generates Rune guardians for the fifth. These guardians are extremely powerful, and the player is strongly incentivized to secure the Rune without confronting them directly. In the Heart of Zot, the Rune guardians are megabeasts, powerful individual monsters that take up and can attack from multiple tiles, much like the kraken found in Shoals. Several of these can be named uniques, but the ones that show up on the Orb Run are shuffled between several different body forms. One feature that the Rune guardians must share is the ability to destroy the terrain underfoot; this is thematic because gigantic megabeasts should be wrecking the place, challenging because the player loses safe ground, and also necessary because we don't want them getting hung up on narrow gaps in the main Dungeon when they appear during the Orb Run.

Level Generation:
When a level of the Heart of Zot is generated, it follows one one of several existing templates from the various 'natural' branches. Overlaid on this background level are minivaults, which can and often should be wildly different terrain types. As time passes with the player on the level, new minivaults will appear in random locations, as if they were put in place by a wizard mode command or a Xom effect. If the player is currently inside the new vault, the player is blinked to a non-lethal location with a message such as "The sand beneath your feet rumbles and warps! You splash down into shallow water as the terrain becomes suddenly swampy!" The new minivault comes with monsters, preferably sufficient monsters to keep the player occupied for the duration of their stay here, but the minivaults also generally have no treasure.

Periodically, one of several vaults containing a 'Black Monolith' statue monster will spawn. Destroying the Black Monolith causes several serial vaults to spawn in unison across the level, one of which is a Rune Vault. The other serial vaults contain treasure to distract the player from the Rune, and the player is now on a timed mission to get the Rune and as much treasure as possible before the entire level warps, removing the Rune and all the treasure from accessibility once again. Destroying the Black Monolith also spawns a Rune Guardian, a high-powered megabeast that attempts to keep the player from stealing the Rune. Four of these are special uniques that only spawn here, but the others are random and can appear during the Orb Run. The Rune Guardians need not be practical to defeat under normal play (although of course we can expect players to do so just for the bragging rights) since they disappear with the Rune when the level warps, so their abilities can be invented with a much freer hand than normal monsters. The desired play experience is like stealing a dragon's precious treasure right out from under its nose and escaping with both the treasure and your life.

Standard monster set for the Heart of Zot includes all 'natural' monsters, including some upgraded versions of Lair monsters that appear only here. Felids should be the dominant intelligent race, since their lack of equipment will maintain the low levels of item generation, but rare forays by other species are possible in minivaults. Plant monsters such as Oklobs should be exceptionally common. Monsters should typically spawn as the population of a spontaneously generated minivault. Several monsters in each wave should be major threats, while others mostly serve as flavor. The player should feel unrelenting pressure even if the opposition is not overwhelming, and it should be fairly difficult to find a secure place to rest.

Heart-exclusive monsters should cover every genus of natural monsters, including fantastic ones such as dragons but de-emphasizing ones such as slimes that have a strong presence in a pre-existing post-endgame branch. They should generally speaking be more powerful than early-game areas, but each one should have some interesting special ability. Since relatively few of these monsters will have true spellcasting, it is even more important to ensure that new monsters can properly threaten spellcasters or evasion builds, who have significant advantages in the early game because few Lair monsters can effectively deal with them.

Periodically a mutagenic effect could hit the player and all monsters in line-of-sight, with roughly the frequency of a Hell Effect. The player gets affected by an rMut-piercing mutation that is, on balance, neutral, and nearby monsters have a high chance of being promoted to the next strongest form within their genus and get randomly polymorphed the rest of the time. The unavoidable mutation-shifting nature of the place will hopefully discourage players from dawdling or grinding, although the effect is actually as likely to wipe out bad mutations as give them. An amulet of resist mutation should not be adequate protection, if only because it would quickly become mandatory, but Zin's protection could be.

Example Megabeasts:
Jabberwock, the guardian of the Burbling Rune of Zot, whiffles through the woods around the Burbling Rune in search of foolish players who come to steal it. Jabberwock can pass through plants much like a worshipper of Fedhas, and in its footsteps plants grow on bare ground, and quickly mutate into player-impassable trees. Should the player take cover in impassable terrain, the Jabberwock will demonstrate its ability to Shatter walls with its burbling so it may run them down wherever they may try to hide.

Jormungandr the World Hydra guards the Quaking Rune of Zot, which shivers in anticipation of the player's attempted theft. The aquatic Jormungandr collapses sinkholes beneath the player's feet, potentially leaving them to drown in deep water if they can't escape in time. If the player doesn't drown on their own, Jormungandr will send heads up to get them, one after another. Individual heads have venom strong enough to pierce rPois, and acid spittle besides.

Leviathan is one possible guardian of the Burgeoning Rune of Zot. This truly massive sky beast breaks up solid ground around it as it passes through, leaving only standing air in its wake. A mighty storm radiates out in all directions, and Leviathan cares not if some fool gets in its way. When upset, Leviathan lashes out with ball lightning and pursues tirelessly.

The Magma Crab may lurk beneath the Burgeoning Rune of Zot, ready to drop interlopers into the very blood of the world itself. The player may search for a weak point in hopes of massive damage, but no one has found that weakness yet, if it exists at all. Even a player who scrambles free of the spreading magma will find that the Magma Crab can sling plumes of it after them.

Example Heart Monsters:
Elder Oklob: This massive Oklob plant is older and stronger than usual, and it can fire its acid from a much greater distance -- far beyond the edge of line-of-sight! They can also send tendrils out into their territory, from which spawn smaller oklob saplings, which eventually mature into adult oklobs. They start with some minions, and get much worse if left unmolested.

Blink Hydra: These hydras have been twisted by the power of the Heart, and will attack as speeds that should be impossible for beasts of that size. They prefer to blink past missile or spell range, get right in the player's face, and stay there while chewing it off. Potentially very nasty for casters who depend on emergency escapes to avoid melee.

Pyrohydra, Cryohydra, Alkahydra: More hydras, with attacks branded with fire, cold, or acid respectively. Also deal the same damage passively when struck in melee.

Winter Wolf: Palette-swapped hell hound. Ranged attacks are good for this sort of monster set.

Tindalos: This sort of wolf blinks frequently and always knows where the player is. When struck with a player-initiated attack, it has a 50% chance to blink instead of getting hit. Regardless of whether the blink kicks in, any projectile or beam that passes through the tindalos' tile will be redirected as if by reflection shield brand, but in a random direction.

Barghest: These massive wolves drain life energy from their surroundings. Drain-branded attacks, and they get a large passive buff to attacks, defenses, resistances, and/or regeneration for each nearby corpse. When encountered in the Heart, the player will usually be forced to convert many monsters into corpses, so they will get dangerous very quickly.

Slime Toad: Inflicts acid damage to surrounding creatures as if it was a wall in the Slime Pits, although other frog-class monsters are unaffected. It will draw the player closer to it with its tongue, which is effectively an irresistible blink effect that also deals acid damage.

Poison Dart Frog: Fairly fragile, but inflicts serious poisoning on contact. Also spits darts of poison, because we don't need this to be excessively realistic. The poison from either source goes through rPois, but only partially.

Felid Transmuter: Blade Paws are on permanently, because they'd never go into combat without that spell already up. They have a couple flavor miscast spells because of their buff, but they also have Polymorph Other. Which they use on the player. A lot. Better get in their face and give them something else to do.

Felid Elementalist: It's a post-endgame branch, so there's no reason not to be sadistic. They've got either Fire Storm or Ice Storm on their spell list, along with some lesser direct damage. Should be fragile enough to feasibly take down with wands or penetration-branded ammunition.

Felid Summoner: Good summoning spells, including Shadow Monsters. These summoned monsters are used to keep the player off the fragile caster felids, and the Felid Summoner has support spells like Haste Other to use on them.

Felid Hexer: This felid has jet-black fur, and causes misfortune for the player. Smite is a direct threat, but Paralyse is what the player really worries about.

Felid Berserker: Fills out the ranks of felids with something slightly less glass cannon, but still fragile.

Felid Stalker: Popcorn felids that are the felids most commonly generated in D but fills out the ranks here, too, in order to give the illusion of greater numbers of opponents without raising actual threat excessively. Casts Invisibility and a few minor status effects, like Slow or Confuse.

Plan for Going Forward:
The Shoals Kraken may serve as proof-of-concept for the megabeast Rune Guardians, and I would be very surprised if other megabeasts weren't already in the works somewhere. For the moment, it may be useful to add a Megabeast Cavern portal vault to the late Dungeon areas, which open up to a fairly small area with a single megabeast body plan. This megabeast need not be as strong as a Rune Guardian, so long as its parts can work together successfully.

For instance, an easy-to-implement first portal vault would contain a Storm Kraken, which is a regular kraken with a custom list of spells. Freezing Cloud and Ball Lightning as offense, Haste and Deflect Missiles for defense, and Ice Storm in the emergency slot to represent its pissy boss mode. The entire vault is under deep water, save for a narrow path of shallow water around the outside edge to the loot, all of which is in easy reach of the Storm Kraken. The eventual Rune Guardian version would be beefier defensively and would be able to flood land tiles in order to follow the player and remove safe areas, but this need not be implemented all at once.

Level generation of Heart levels should already be partially be written, with a combination of wizmode vault placement, Shoals tides, and certain Xom effects just needing to be generalized to arbitrary terrain types rather than specifically water or transparent rock. Adding more terrain types is inherently modular; standing air doesn't need to go in from the start if it hasn't been implemented yet, for instance.

Heart of Zot-exclusive normal monsters can be added at any time. The stronger ones are probably only good for intentionally-designed vaults, since they shouldn't be randomly generating in significant numbers before the post-endgame.

[KoboldLord]

Sorry if that got a little wall-of-texty. I tried to format it so it wouldn't be an eyesore, and I hope I was successful, but it is pretty long.

Anyway, I made an offhand mention a while back to this idea in an unrelated thread, and a couple people expressed interest. Thus encouraged, I bashed together something that I hope is detailed enough to actually be worth other people's attention. Honestly I'm not sure whether it's enough to work with; a Pan-equivalent super-branch is really ambitious, much more so than Shoals or Spider.

I think if it works out it would be worth it, though. The post-endgame is pretty monolithic right now, and while Hell is really good gameplay, Pan suffers from being kind of like Hell but easier in almost every way. I really like how the Swamp/Snake/Shoals shuffle affected gameplay, and I think it could help here.

[Galefury]

I'm not digging the timed runes and the acid and mutations. There are problems with the changing level, but it could be fun. The black monolith and megabeasts sound awesome. Megabeasts sound extremely awesome, but are probably a lot of work to implement, especially if they are supposed to look good in tiles (see kraken, with tentacle overlay flags and about a million tentacle tiles).

A bit more in depth:
Timed runes sound like a cool challenge in theory, but IMO they would just take away from the fun instead of adding more. If someone sets out to kill the jabberwocky and needs some time to do that, give them time. Someone who just wants the rune without getting killed will be under pressure anyway by the heart effects and spawning minivaults, not to mention the rampaging megabeast. This is extended endgame, people are here to test the limits of their character and playing skill or for score, or because they want to play a part of the game they haven't been to before. Taking the rune away from them because they took 10 turns too long to reach it is just no fun.

Acid and especially mutations have the nasty habit of not actually killing you (well, acid can, but is resistable), but instead slowly but permanently damaging your character. People who are thinking about going into the heart of zot might want to do a zig later, or maybe the hells. They don't want their character to be permanently damaged. Also unlike torment and hellfire these attacks are not inherently hard to resist, but easy to resist with an amulet. And mutations can be cured later. So this would force behavior like using backup equipment (compare slime), and would force people to wear conservation or rmut. If they don't have these amulets and some spare potions of cmut they cant go in. Besides, there's already slime for these attack types. Maybe instead make up some new kinds of irresistible attacks, like zotfire or something. I'm sure people can come up with some interesting effects that don't permanently damage the character. Acid is really much worse than the mutations, because it is less interesting and also varies in power depending on how much armor your species can wear, plus unlike mutations the equipment damage really is permanent.

About the changing level: without a way to know where the changes happened the player would have to reexplore the whole level multiple times to maybe find that black monolith in a newly spawned vault (strictly less risky and more boring than going to a new unexplored fully populated and equally lootless level). One way to deal with this is to blacken out explored areas that got changed, because the player character can somehow feel where space was warped (due to the mysterious ways of the heart of zot, or maybe it just rumbles really loudly). Without a mechanic like this reexploring the changing level would just be way too annoying. Another way to deal with it is to turn up the mutation rate or add some other nasty effects if you stay on a level too long. Combining both would be even better.

Having no loot initially, then spawning it in certain locations of an already explored level together with a really strong guardian sounds cool. But it's only interesting if the guardian is very terrain dependent, anything else would be a wasted opportunity. Also like I said above, the areas where the changes happened should be made obvious to the player, by big black splotches where previously there was explored area. Especially if there is a timer. Like I also said above I don't like the hard timer idea, I would feel cheated by the level warping back. Softly forcing the player off the level with increasingly severe environmental effects would be much better.

Not really much more to say about megabeasts. Hard to implement, but super cool. Your specific megabeast ideas sound awesome.

About the enemies: As you might imagine I'm not a fan of the elder oklob. Oklomycetes, ew, disgusting. Felids and beasts don't mix well with strongly acidic environments. They have no equipment that could get corroded, but also no equipment to cover up their body. The twisted lair theme with intelligent magical beasts added in could be really fun. Why stop at felids? Give me death yak berserkers! Give me blink frog warpers! Elephant crusaders!

Generally this sounds like a really interesting and ambitious idea. Pan is not annoying at all though, while mutations and acid and changing levels are. Be careful with that stuff.

[KoboldLord]

105 views, and so far only Galefury has commented? Even if you all hate the proposal, I'm okay with that. I'm just kind of hoping for some more feedback.

Timed runes sound like a cool challenge in theory, but IMO they would just take away from the fun instead of adding more. If someone sets out to kill the jabberwocky and needs some time to do that, give them time. Someone who just wants the rune without getting killed will be under pressure anyway by the heart effects and spawning minivaults, not to mention the rampaging megabeast. This is extended endgame, people are here to test the limits of their character and playing skill or for score, or because they want to play a part of the game they haven't been to before. Taking the rune away from them because they took 10 turns too long to reach it is just no fun.

Well, unlike Pan it isn't meant to be a one-attempt only thing. If you run from Jabberwock with your tail between your legs, you can find another Black Monolith and face it again. The time limit has two purposes: first, it makes the search for the Rune a race and prevents the player from trivially kiting an allegedly threatening megabeast around the level. Second, if you're in over your head you only have to stay out of its reach just long enough for the timer to kick in. So you don't HAVE to have an übercharacter armed to the teeth and with all skills maxed just to make an attempt.

Acid and especially mutations have the nasty habit of not actually killing you (well, acid can, but is resistable), but instead slowly but permanently damaging your character. People who are thinking about going into the heart of zot might want to do a zig later, or maybe the hells. They don't want their character to be permanently damaged. Also unlike torment and hellfire these attacks are not inherently hard to resist, but easy to resist with an amulet. And mutations can be cured later. So this would force behavior like using backup equipment (compare slime), and would force people to wear conservation or rmut. If they don't have these amulets and some spare potions of cmut they cant go in. Besides, there's already slime for these attack types. Maybe instead make up some new kinds of irresistible attacks, like zotfire or something. I'm sure people can come up with some interesting effects that don't permanently damage the character. Acid is really much worse than the mutations, because it is less interesting and also varies in power depending on how much armor your species can wear, plus unlike mutations the equipment damage really is permanent.

I specifically wanted something that the player would fear that is not just more torment and hellfire, and I don't think palette swapping torment and hellfire will really do the job. I'm not married to the concept of acid and mutation, but they're existing effects that cause the player fear I'm after that aren't already over-represented in the rest of the game. Tomb, Hells, and Pan all have lots of hellfire and torment, while only Slime has acid and mutation.

I believe it should be possible to make a happy medium between 'unplayable without amulet of rMut and cloak of preservation' and 'no mutation or acid allowed'. Most should be possible to mitigate; I want a slime toad sighting to cause the reaction 'Kill Kill Kill!' followed by a barrage of crossbow bolts of penetration while lesser monsters get their hits in, not 'I will never enter without full artifact gear'. If you go into the post-endgame without any non-ranged attacks at all, well I'm afraid you have nobody to blame for your corroded equipment than yourself.

About the changing level: without a way to know where the changes happened the player would have to reexplore the whole level multiple times to maybe find that black monolith in a newly spawned vault (strictly less risky and more boring than going to a new unexplored fully populated and equally lootless level). One way to deal with this is to blacken out explored areas that got changed, because the player character can somehow feel where space was warped (due to the mysterious ways of the heart of zot, or maybe it just rumbles really loudly). Without a mechanic like this reexploring the changing level would just be way too annoying. Another way to deal with it is to turn up the mutation rate or add some other nasty effects if you stay on a level too long. Combining both would be even better.

This is a good point. I'll have to expand on exploration before I post it on the development wiki. Probably following the stream of horrible monsters spewing forth from the new vault will not be quite good enough for navigation. Another alternative might be to do the full-map warp frequently enough that it isn't feasible to explore the whole thing.

Not really much more to say about megabeasts. Hard to implement, but super cool. Your specific megabeast ideas sound awesome.

I really like the kraken, and I want to see more stuff like them.

About the enemies: As you might imagine I'm not a fan of the elder oklob. Oklomycetes, ew, disgusting.

Xom thinks Oklobmycetes are hilarious! Totally unfair on normal levels, but part of the benefit I expect from the full-level warp is that nastier monsters are allowable because you can just run away until the level warps. That fungal morass that you couldn't burn down will not bedevil you for the entire game.

Generally this sounds like a really interesting and ambitious idea. Pan is not annoying at all though, while mutations and acid and changing levels are. Be careful with that stuff.

Thanks for your thoughts.

[7hm]

Will look at more closely later, but my initial response is that I'd rather have more endgame content rather than less / replacement content. I think another well developed endgame branch (not necessarily this one) would be nice. I'm not sure I like the idea of Pan not being there.

If you were to look at this one being a guaranteed branch with only a rune or two (perhaps a single rune replacing the abyssal rune?) rather than a replacement branch, that would let you cut back on the complexity initially to really focus on having a strong flavour / strong monster types / strong vaults.

[MrMisterMonkey]

I'm not so sure about a focus on acid/mutation, either; including it is fine, though.

Requiring a ranged attack, as you suggested, any more than current extended endgame areas seems a bit silly, so try not to do it. Having a different threat set is completely fine, but requiring adjustment of pre-endgame play to include training up ranged skills, in fear of the possibility of your branch, is kind of mean.

Unless it would require too much refactoring, or using ghost_demons for everything would carry too much overhead, it might be nice to have monster mutations and procedurally generate some of the heart monsters.

The megabeasts seem nifty but I'm not quite sure of how to implement them well as multi-tile monsters; if you have ideas, could you construct a diagram?

On timed runes, there would be sufficient indication of level warping, right?
I'm not too sure about encouraging stealing runes; Pandemonium already does more than enough of that, and even with hells it's usually easier to ninja.

I was probably going to say something else but I forgot it; I'll say it if I ever remember.

[joellercoaster]

I love lots of the proposal, and I'm glad it's here, but shudder to think how much developer time it would consume.

It also jibes with the part of my brain that thinks the runes of Zot don't serve very well as keys to the Realm of Zot... if you want to get into Zot, you use the two of the Lair runes that aren't Slimy, plus either Abyssal or Silver depending on how you like to roll. The others are basically just trophies, unavailable to characters who couldn't cruise through getting the others anyway.

I'd like there to be a wider variety of things to do for the post-endgame types, for sure, but also a wider variety of 3-rune wins too.

[MrMisterMonkey]

Well a developer only has to approve it for implementation; then anyone may write patches.

[KoboldLord]

Will look at more closely later, but my initial response is that I'd rather have more endgame content rather than less / replacement content. I think another well developed endgame branch (not necessarily this one) would be nice. I'm not sure I like the idea of Pan not being there.

If you were to look at this one being a guaranteed branch with only a rune or two (perhaps a single rune replacing the abyssal rune?) rather than a replacement branch, that would let you cut back on the complexity initially to really focus on having a strong flavour / strong monster types / strong vaults.

Pan sometimes not being there is the point. At the moment, 9/15 of the Runes are in areas with almost the same monster set, every game. Optimizing your character to deal with this particular monster set is one of those no-brainers if you want to do the extended endgame.

Adding more post-endgame content on top of the 11 post-endgame Runes we already have isn't a good idea. At this moment, a character will get stronger and stronger as they accumulate xp in the post-endgame, until eventually even this post-endgame content is no longer challenging or interesting. Adding more without cutting out or swapping anything would let you cherry pick the easiest parts to do first, and use the extra loot and xp from the cherry picked parts to trivialize the parts that are as hard as they should be.

More content is good, but it doesn't all have to be in the same playthrough. There's always another character to play with.

Requiring a ranged attack, as you suggested, any more than current extended endgame areas seems a bit silly, so try not to do it. Having a different threat set is completely fine, but requiring adjustment of pre-endgame play to include training up ranged skills, in fear of the possibility of your branch, is kind of mean.

Perhaps I overstated? I was meaning picking up a ranged weapon as an option, not a forced choice. It would also be fine if the melee specialist used evocable rods to kill the oncoming monster, or dropped some Brothers in Arms on it.

If it is indeed possible to clear the current post-endgame with pure melee and absolutely nothing else, I think this is a problem that ought to be fixed. The process might take a while, but there's no need to plan new content around a play artifact that's on the chopping block.

Similarly, many monsters should be capable of getting around casters who focus too much on one magic skill. If post-endgame conjurors can successfully shoot down all the really bad stuff before it can threaten them without having to broaden their build, that's also a problem that I'd think we'd want to correct. Fire Storm shouldn't work on everything.

Unless it would require too much refactoring, or using ghost_demons for everything would carry too much overhead, it might be nice to have monster mutations and procedurally generate some of the heart monsters.

This is a good idea. I don't know whether it would be feasible to implement or not, but this could be much better for the mutation Heart Effect than polymorph. The post-endgame probably is the best place to use procedurally generated monsters, since earlier on some combinations are inevitably going to be pretty unfair.

The megabeasts seem nifty but I'm not quite sure of how to implement them well as multi-tile monsters; if you have ideas, could you construct a diagram?

Well, my artistic skills are not good, so drawing actual tiles is far beyond me. But for an example, the Magma Crab would probably have a 2x3 main body, the design of which is implied to extend below the surface of the magma. The tiles would show its eyes, mouth parts, etc. This part moves around without changing shape in much the same way that random Pan Lords have a 2x1 body now, although it would probably be worthwhile to have a 3x2 orientation as well as 2x3. Two other detached tiles depict its claws, which are responsible for most of its ranged attacks, particularly the magma plumes it throws at you. They move independently of the main body but stay nearby. If you damage a claw, it disappears under the magma until it regenerates. If you destroy a claw, it stays destroyed. The main body doesn't regenerate as fast as the claws, but it has high AC and a huge bundle of hit points. Easy enough to handle in the Orb Run if you have a way to recover mp or can survive long enough to beat it in melee, but much harder to kill when you're also fighting the clock.

On timed runes, there would be sufficient indication of level warping, right?

In my head I was thinking about a series of labyrinth-style warnings as the clock ticked down, but that should definitely actually be in the proposal before I put it on the wiki. I'm glad you pointed that out.

I'm not too sure about encouraging stealing runes; Pandemonium already does more than enough of that, and even with hells it's usually easier to ninja.

It's partly a flavor thing. If you always steal Cerebov's Rune because it's too hard to kill him, relatively speaking, that means you can complete that section of game without ruining Cerebov's Credentials for Awesome. Compare to Mnoleg, who is statistically harder than most post-endgame enemies but is frequently mocked by the player base because the fight is usually manageable. Common advice to newbies is to sneak by Sigmund and Grinder instead of fighting them; I think it's appropriate to have some post-endgame uniques who it's still better to sneak past instead of fight.

I still expect players to kill them anyway for bragging rights no matter how powerful they are, and if these players are proud enough of the achievement to post screenshots of their victory on message boards, I'm counting that as a win for the design team.

I love lots of the proposal, and I'm glad it's here, but shudder to think how much developer time it would consume.

Well, the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step, you know? Shoals took a long time, and Spider is taking a long time… But they wouldn't move forward at all if nobody even tried to start them. I think diversifying the post-endgame would be worth the time spent in the end, although it certainly looks imposing from here.

It also jibes with the part of my brain that thinks the runes of Zot don't serve very well as keys to the Realm of Zot... if you want to get into Zot, you use the two of the Lair runes that aren't Slimy, plus either Abyssal or Silver depending on how you like to roll. The others are basically just trophies, unavailable to characters who couldn't cruise through getting the others anyway.

That's not quite true. That one Let's Play with Meepo the Kobold Earth Elementalist managed to get Cerebov's Rune after the player's cat jumped on his keyboard. So it's at least possible.

I do know that if Swamps, Shoals, and Snake all generated in every game, I'd definitely do all of them plus Vaults before entering Zot, because they're all easier than Zot and will give me extra xp and loot to work with. I don't know how we'd add more pre-post-endgame content without running into that problem, except by means of the system that's currently in place for the Lair branch rotation.

[MrMisterMonkey]

On forcing diversification, as long as the possibility of the Heart of Zot's existence alone doesn't drive character construction too far away from what it would otherwise be, I'm fine. If the current extended endgame already sufficiently encourages this, there's little need to worry.

On diagram construction, I meant with labeled ASCII, to clearly show the size, functionality, and interactions of each part and connection.

Further on rune stealing, sure; I was/am just a little worried about designing with stealing as intended play, rather than simply as one of a few viable options (and perhaps expecting players to choose it). (As you may have guessed, I think it's quite a bit too easy to steal from Pan.)


On adding more pre-post-endgame content without running into exp/loot inflation, my solution is to remove the middles of branches, leaving a more varied game with each of its constituent branches less drawn-out.