The Tavern

So, this might be crazy, but I've been thinking about whether a species with permanent mark status would be viable. Here's what I'm thinking:

Permamark status
Regen 1
Can semi-controlled blink through (a)bility menu with exhaustion timer or hp cost or both
All aptitudes including HP/MP/experience +1.

Beyond that, any other species traits would depend on flavor:
* Wretched: This species is cursed. Reading ?remove curse disables the Mark status for a few hundred turns.
* Boastful: this species is absurdly confident and wants everything to come after them. Shout 1 intrensic, perhaps intrinsic reflection.
* Former holy: this species consists of holies that have somehow offended the gods in general, and those gods are spurring everything to hunt them down. rN+++, can still worship, but with half piety gain and altered flavor messages. Gods are once bitten, twice shy.
* Delicious: the species emits a delicious smell, but they have somehow survived the ravenous hordes til now. Might get some other scent/pheromone/inhalant-based powers that escape me just now.

So, what do you think: is this something that could grow into a species you might be excited to play, or is this being marked just too problematic, either because it's too crippling or because it warps crawl gameplay too much?

perma... mark....
oh god the pain and suffering! I would totally play this.

Well if we're going to give this species permanent mark, we might as well go the extra mile and make the smell variant inflict siren-class mesmerize on every enemy in LOS.

Perhaps it could be playable with reduced LoS (Nighstalker 3) and intrinsic digging (Fo).

Mark doesn't do anything until things wake up and very few things are generated awake, so with those apts, human slots (also human stats I guess), regen 1 and scblink they wouldn't be particularly hard I think.
Interesting to play, well I don't know about that one; they would probably have pretty annoying exploration since one would want to secure certain types of routes and gain some type of terrain advantages asap upon entering a level.

I actually quite like the idea of an incredibly noisy species/god or one with Permamark. Be like playing with the Singing Sword and Shield of the Gong cursed to your hands at all times. I say this mostly because it's a very different dynamic than other races. With most races, you explore the floor and find enemies as you explore, if everything on the floor is woken up at once...you have all the enemies come to you, which is a completely different way to play.

Well, yes it is but then every level is basically the same.
I mean I played three games with new gong and every level was basically the same, the difference with mark is that things wouldn't start charging your way the moment you enter the level and you could have more control over how much of the level you are exposed to, which is nice but still not very different.

I'd be kindof interested in playing a perma-mark species, but it probably does warp the core of Crawl gameplay too much to ever make it into the actual game.

What about an enemy that can self-Mark to summon floor creatures (who do not have the player in sight) to the location (as opposed to the new Guardian Serpent ability); this would tactically close off escape avenues as enemies approach the monster.

isnt it the same as making big noise?

I can't tell if this is true or not. I think an experimental branch should be made to test the permamark idea - Simply add a hack that treats the player as being marked all the time and challenge people to win a MiBe or some other easy combo. Then ask them if the game was interesting.

Even though a permamark species may not be interesting, I think the idea of Mark as a drawback is the interesting idea here.

Alternative proposal:

Magic Channel: this Sif Muna ability allows you to channel a great amount of magic power, but broadcasts your image to the world once it is over.

2 levels of spell enhancers, Ambrosia Level MP regen boost, and Ring of Wizardy spell success boost for 10 - 20 turns, followed by 20 - 40 turns being Marked (similar to anti-swiftness or post-berserk slowness).

Sif Muna doesn't have to be the one to grant this ability, could come from a ring/potion/artifact/other god/mutation etc.

I second the idea of mark as a draw back. It feels like an untapped resource, but maybe using it with trog worshippers would be more suitable than a species?

Trog seems so incredibly powerful to me, I feel like maybe giving him some kind of drawback using mark would be both interesting and flavorful. The god of war and bloodshed wants you to cleave through creature after creature and never stop until you are dead, so he marks you so all creatures will come to you rather than you coming to them.

I think permamark would be interesting to try out, but you should probably make them very stealthy, maybe even give prompts on noisy actions, because it can easily get them killed. Maybe give them a special ability to help them if they mess up, like dispersal or hd-based sleep/paralysis or something. Maybe a mass sleep ability with a permanent cost(hp or mp)/exp cost/draining.

My suspicion is that dck is correct and this would lead to not interesting gameplay.

I think it would be boring.

Shoutitis III

20-40 turns is less than the average (w)ait. Besides, if you were doing that kind of channeling, you were probably either doing some really noisy conjurations (which would broadcast your position anyways) or summoning a LOT of minions, (some of which would protect you for more than 40 turns after). Come to think of it though...isn't Ashenzari wrath the same thing as a Permanent mark and a LOT of draining?

I just think that it might be interesting to try especially if you can balance that with other abilities. Permamark will force you to not make noise(otherwise I'm pretty sure you'll die fast), not just encourage it the way the game does it, which might me an interesting challenge and a new experience. There is a possibility it won't work well, though.

Also, I think that a lot of noise and permamark are very different, and may just look similar. 1) Noise wakes up monsters - mark doesn't. 2) Mark accurately gives out your location - noise just attracts monsters to where it was produced. See, they are very different. As for just noisy species, I don't find that very interesting.

I was thinking something more like Gong.

In practice sufficiently loud noise is indistinguishable from mark other than in the ways of escaping the people it attracts (this matters of course but if half of the mechanic is just dudes charging at you then it's not very interesting) and in how it affects your exploration. That's actually the bit that worries me most since I think hitting o as the permamark species would be almost always a very bad idea (until your dude reaches the point he doesn't care how many things he has to kill, which again given apts and racial stuff suggested wouldn't be very long) and exploring the dungeon manually is painful and terrible.