Species Proposal - Giant Orange Brain

[Jeremiah]

Giant orange brains as a playable species! Yes, this is intended as a serious suggestion - here's how they would work.

Equipment:
As they have no normal body parts, they would use equipment differently than other species. Giant orange brains have an innate psychic force field that allows them to levitate themselves and move around (permanent flying) and also allows them to pick up and interact with equipment.

Items in inventory would work just like a normal species, however while they cannot directly wear or wield weapons, armour etc, they can focus on particular items, putting them in equipment slots similarly to other species.

As they gain in experience, their control of their innate force field increases, increasing the number of items they can equip at one time. I would suggest starting with 1 equipment slot at XL1, then gaining an additional 1 every 5 levels, resulting in a maximum of 6 at Xl26 - this is fewer than a normal species, but they would have greater flexibility on what type of equipment to use.

There are no restrictions on the types of equipment they could use. For example if they have 5 equipment slots, they could equip 3 shields and 2 pairs of boots, or 2 amulets, a weapon and two body armours.

Since they don't actually wear the equipment, they don't gain the base AC or GDR from any equipped armour. However, equipping armour does give them AC equal to the enchantment value of the armour - so equipping a +10 plate would give 10 AC. They also don't suffer any encumbrance penalties from equipped armour.

They are unable to train the Armour skill since they can't physically wear the armour.

They can swap any piece of equipment with any other piece of equipment in the same time as a normal species can swap jewelry.

They are unaffected by curses as they don't actually physically touch the equipment. (Alternatively, they could be affected normally by curses as the effects are psychological and not just physical.)

They can equip more than one weapon at a time. This does not allow them to "dual wield" - only the first weapon equipped in the primary weapon slot can be used for attacks, any other equipped weapons would just give effects like resistances etc. Similarly, only the first shield could be used for blocking.

Nutrition:
Since they don't have a mouth or a digestive system, they do not eat food. Instead they gain nutrition by feeding on the intelligence of defeated enemies. Whenever they kill an intelligent monster, they gain some nutrition, with more intelligent enemies giving greater value.

They can still use potions by absorbing the magical energy of the potion directly into themselves.

Restrictions:
They cannot use transmutations that affect body parts they do not have, eg Stoneskin or Blade Hands. They can use transmutations that affect the entire body, eg Spider Form.

Similarly they are immune to many physical mutations that would affect non-existent body parts.

Due to their innately weird and mutated nature, they are vulnerable to silver.

Religion:
If they are immune to the effects of cursed equipment, they would be unable to worship Ashenzari. Maybe Zin would also dislike them because they are weird and mutated.

Stats and aptitudes:
I haven't thought of the exact aptitudes for everything, but since they are GIANT BRAINS, they should be more adept with mental (magical) skills than physical ones and get better Int than the other stats. (Their str and dex represent the power and finesse of their force field since they don't have muscles etc.)

They cannot train armour as they can't wear it. However, they can still train unarmed combat, as their force field allows them to telekinetically "punch" adjacent enemies.

[bcadren]

This is...actually fascinating.

I'd say though: ALL good gods hate them (they are non-living/demonic) and Fedhas hates them (non-living).

Also rather than just you feed on the brains of those you kill...how about you have the racial ability to feed on other's intellect...Be like racial anti-magic beam for practical reasons and a source of nutrition as well...

Also, I'm not sure about slots being gained so...late. It would lead to a really hard early/mid game to have close to no equipment for the bonuses of using 'whatever' later...

[red_kangaroo]

I... wow, I want to play as a floating brain! I approve.

That equipment slots thing sounds rather harsh for the low lvls, but I'd definitely try it befor discarding it.

[duvessa]

I'd say though: ALL good gods hate them (they are non-living/demonic) and Fedhas hates them (non-living).

Giant orange brains are natural holiness, and it doesn't really make sense to make them demonic or nonliving IMO. Giant orange brain monsters are evil, because they cast brain feed, and I suppose you can go either way on that - although it still makes no sense for Fedhas to hate them, since he doesn't actually hate evil or nonliving, just undead!

Your suggested equipment system would both be very difficult to balance, and uninteresting in practice as it's presented - why would you wear a ring of whatever when you can get another 5 AC instead, and why would you ever not wear one shield? I'm pretty sure to make it remotely balanced or interesting you would need to add an awful lot more special cases, and that doesn't seem worth it.

Also, nutrition solely from killing monsters basically can't work in crawl because crawl has long travel and autoexplore and also Lair.

[godzilla]

Well, I really like the idea.
But, as duvessa pointed out, it has some serious issues. I like nutrition-on-kill, but hunger would have to be pretty slow due to the whole travel thing.
I wouldn't say that discouraging using rings is a bad idea; they're the easiest way to get resistances. Maybe giving them low HP/fighting aptitude or just fire/cold vulnerability would offset this. As for the shield problem, maybe give them Sp-style shield penalties (i.e. no large shields and increased skill requirements.)
Also, I don't think it makes sense for them to have any religion restrictions other than Ash, and silver vulnerability seems pretty arbitrary.

[duvessa]

I'm assuming he gave them silver vulnerability because the giant orange brain monster had silver vulnerability in old versions.

[jejorda2]

What if equipment slots are tied to STR? Either every 3 points of STR gives another slot (Maybe 3 is the wrong number), or you can equip so many aum of equipment with so much STR (1/5th of standard carrying capacity, perhaps?). It would make the STR-DEX-INT question more meaningful to some players.

Since a telekinetic brain would use mental powers to control weapons, there's no reason to think of weapon skills as less mental than magic skills, so no ironclad thematic reason to have poor weapon aptitudes.

Feel free to make it a Green Brain so nobody is tempted to make it too much like monster orange brains out of symmetry. There are good reasons we have player hill orcs and monster mine orcs.

[and into]

Aside from what duvessa pointed out, very fast swapping of all types of equipment would not lead to very fun game play. If anything I'd make swapping any non-weapon item take, say, 5 turns or something regardless of type. So you get more strategic flexibility but you can't swap around jewelry in the middle of combat like most species. That's better I think than carrying around some armor in addition to rings in order to optimize for each battle.

I'd also suggest stripping down all the special cases and what not. For example, I'd say all transmutation spells except beastly appendage should work on them, rather than a weirdly defined subset thereof. (Beastly appendage would have weird interactions due to floating brain's unique relationship to equipment, and since that relationship to equipment is really fundamental to the design of the proposed species, it makes sense to block that particular transmutation for them. Since blocking BA makes sense for game play reasons, its just a matter of flavor messages. You could play it as serious myth-building or just jokey, e.g., "You are already as beastly as they come!" Perhaps along similar lines floating brains shouldn't be able to get horns/hooves/etc. mutations from any source.)

We do make exceptions and special cases for monstrous species who worship Ash, but it does sound like it would get way too complicated with brains. So making curses irrelevant to them (doesn't block swapping) and blocking Ash worship is probably the most elegant solution.

Okay so here would be my suggestions to improve game play and make the species a bit more straightforward:

+ Floating brains should get sight-ID innately (like what a fully cursed Ash devotee gets). Would really help the "can wear anything" game play be a lot more enjoyable if you don't have to wear ID so much stuff, especially if +s and protection egos are your only way to get AC. Can easily rationalize that on the basis of the psychic powers and/or the inherent knowledge of an organism that is 100% brain tissue.

+ Some kind of psychic monster detection would be cool. To differentiate from other forms of monster detection: Upon generation, every enemy has a chance (scaling up with your character level) to be "psychically linked." You now know the exact identity and location of said creature. Mindless creatures are immune to this effect.

+ In addition to the above, perhaps some activated ability (possibly only available at a certain char lvl) that lets you assault and invade the mind of any psychically linked monster would be cool. What exactly happens after that I don't know, but some kind of ability to mind-control one psychically linked enemy at a time would be flavorful and could be a lot of fun.

+ For food, how about this: Normal hunger costs, maybe slow metabolism 1 as well. You do not eat and cannot drink porridge. Mostly you gain nutrition from killing non-mindless (doesn't have to be intelligent) creatures—doing that automatically adds to your satiation. In addition, all potions *except* porridge provide floating brains with a considerable amount of nutrition (comparable to, say, the satiation provided by beef jerky for a Human).

+ I'd slightly revise their equipment stuff like so:
- Two "arm-like" pseudopodia or whatever that interact normally with weapons and/or shields.
- As mentioned above, swapping anything that is not in your "hand" takes 50 (or so) aut.
- You get four slots that can equip anything except weapons and shields. I wouldn't have those slots open up as you gain levels, just make them available from the start. Unique equipment combinations would be one of the main things this species has to differentiate them, why make players wait until they are level 15 or whatever to start actually playing the species?
- Some measure to prevent stacking heavy armor is necessary, clearly. Your idea could work: just resistances and properties and + enchantment count. Another simple and straightforward solution would be that only one piece of armor with non-zero encumbrance can be worn at a time, in which case armor skill, armor penalties, and GDR function normally. I don't think wearing plate + 3 robes would be overpowered. However, probably you'd have to special-case steam dragon armor as still being too bulky and thus counting it as "encumbering" for these purposes.

I could see myself playing a species like this because 1.) food system is pretty streamlined and unimposing; 2.) weird equipment choices would be distinct and might lead to some novel, interesting decisions; 3.) if some sort of psychic component is integrated that could be a neat feature too.

[jejorda2]

I've found two robes of the arch magi in the same game (and two robes of resistance in the same game) it would be fun to stack things like that. But probably broken. There are probably fixed artifacts of the same type that should't be combined.

[and into]

Maybe stacking archmagi in late game would be just too absurd, but that's easily addressed by making archmage enhancer not stack with itself.

Two robes of resistance doesn't seem OP at all when you only have four slots for all non-weapon, non-shield items.

Lets say you got MDA, and get two robes of resistance (which isn't going to be a common occurrence, mind you). That gives you 10 base armor, same as a human in MDA and full aux slots (with helmet rather than cap/wizard hat), and the same potential for enchantment actually. With a ton of ?EA the orange brain would have 20 AC, just 2 more AC compared to a human who would have 18. Now the brain would have rC++ and rF++, but the human has more overall slots for armor and gets bonuses from whatever egos he scrapes together there, and the human also has two ring slots and one ammy slot, with the ability to swap jewelry tactically. The floating brain by contrast would have one slot open for jewelry (or whatever else), with no ability to swap jewelry around quickly. Altogether that doesn't seem overpowered for the floating brain I have to say.

[jejorda2]

Here's another way to limit it- what if brains start with spriggan speed, but lose some for every item they equip? Or let them lose a point (or three) of INT for every item equipped.

Say that they are beings of pure psychic projection (whatever that means) so they can reallocate their stats at will- give an ability to just type in any values that add to the same current values, and have it cost some nutrition and a few hundred turns of sleep.

[spudwalt]

+ In addition to the above, perhaps some activated ability (possibly only available at a certain char lvl) that lets you assault and invade the mind of any psychically linked monster would be cool. What exactly happens after that I don't know, but some kind of ability to mind-control one psychically linked enemy at a time would be flavorful and could be a lot of fun.

You could have some sort of innate enslavement ability with success rate tied to XL. We could have it work kinda like Yredelemnul's Enslave Soul. Also, would some sort of confuse/stun ability (mind blast) be too overpowered? We could tie it into a breath or exhaust timer or something.

Some measure to prevent stacking heavy armor is necessary, clearly. Your idea could work: just resistances and properties and + enchantment count. Another simple and straightforward solution would be that only one piece of armor with non-zero encumbrance can be worn at a time, in which case armor skill, armor penalties, and GDR function normally. I don't think wearing plate + 3 robes would be overpowered. However, probably you'd have to special-case steam dragon armor as still being too bulky and thus counting it as "encumbering" for these purposes.

We could limit the total encumbrance rating you could "equip" at one time (so equipping one plate armor would take up 19 of your armor capacity, which would leave only x amount left -- about enough for one leather or something). Also I don't know that being able to wear multiple steam dragon armors would really be all that overpowered; only the enchantment bonus would carry over to your AC, right? So, unless you found a whole bunch of enchant armor scrolls or an artefact steam dragon armor, your only advantage to wearing four of them would be having rSteam++++++++.

How would carrying capacity work for these guys? Would it still be based off of strength?

I'm guessing they'd be permaflying?

This is a pretty cool idea. I'd totally try playing as a giant floating brain.

[TeshiAlair]

I really like this concept, I'll probably post a more coherent response later, but right now I'm liking the suggestion of making shield/weapon done with a typical hand system and having all other slots being "floating"

[MiraclePrism]

Feel free to make it a Green Brain so nobody is tempted to make it too much like monster orange brains out of symmetry. There are good reasons we have player hill orcs and monster mine orcs.

Why would that be a problem, really? There are already monsters of playable races that have monster-only spells and such. (For that matter I don't see why HO and cave orcs need to be separate other than minor Beogh flavour.)

Myself I would suggest naming both the monster and player species just 'Brain'. Brain also naturally leads to the abbreviation Br, giving us two more word combos in BrIE and BrAE

[red_kangaroo]

Brainiac?

[Viashino_wizard]

Feel free to make it a Green Brain so nobody is tempted to make it too much like monster orange brains out of symmetry. There are good reasons we have player hill orcs and monster mine orcs.

I think it's a good idea to separate the species from monster orange brains, if only for player clarity. Otherwise we'll eventually have new players asking why the GOBs that spawn in the abyss never have any equipment.

[FalconNL]

Just tossing out an idea for a slight flavor change: how about Poltergeists instead of floating brains?
At least to me, floating brains stand out a little too much from the selection of predominantly humanoid species we have so far. Poltergeists would look a little less out of place, I think. Poltergeists are already associated with manipulating physical objects, so flavor-wise it appears to fit pretty well.

[tasonir]

Love the overall concept. I do agree with making equipment switching take ~5 turns. A pseudo 2 hand system I could go either way with, but it'd probably be easier to keep it more in line with other races and use it.

Poltergeists do make sense, but also add undead, which has a lot of baggage that comes with it in crawl. Also, they just aren't as cool to me, feels more generic. Let's keep them brains and work on mechanics first, flavor later, if possible (it never is)

I don't think anything has to be done for steam dragon armor, remember the 5 base ac does nothing, so it's just rSteam and up to +5 ac from enchantment. A plate armor would be twice as good, aside from rSteam, which isn't good in itself. If anything, this is going to mean that those +2 rF plate armors you find lying around by midgame make the ring of protection from fire worthless, since you +2 AC from the plate. But I don't think that's a problem. They can be the opposite of octopodes: the race that doesn't need any rings. Go stack 4 troll leather armor's and regen 3hp/turn!

[jworm76]

I love several aspects of this. I think it could be pulled off by allowing ANY equippable item into any slot, but nerfing it by limiting the slot count severely (I like the bound to strength idea). The brain doesn't actually "hold" items, since it has no hands, etc. It literally levitates all equipped items around itself through telekinetic action. A beginning character, for example, may only have 2 slots. Sure they could put two shields on them, but that's still very weak compared to another race which can have equipped rings, armor, etc. Maybe at full strength it goes up to 5, still far less than any normal character, but with much greater flexibility (they could have 3 rings and 2 shields equipped for example, and still be able to cast spells, or another player may equip 5 swords).

If they wielded 3 weapons for example, each melee attack would simply fire from one of them randomly . There would be a % chance that a second weapon would also attack, and if that succeeds another % chance that the third would attack. Example mechanics:

A sword, axe and dagger are equipped. The brain attacks a monster.
The axe is randomly chosen (or it could go in a player defined order, making it a little more strategic). It performs its attack. There's a 30% chance (based on dex) that another weapon will also be able to attack. That chance fails and the turn is over. The next time the axe attacks and the 30% chance succeeds, allowing the sword to hit. Then there is another 30% chance that the dagger will also get an attack (although maybe at reduced damage, like an off hand punch or a head butt?). So it basically allows you to add auxiliary attacks with possibly powerful weapons in exchange for giving up your ring / shield slots, or to have no weapons at all and use all of the slots defensively.

The armor issue can be eliminated by not allowing them to wear any kind of armor (which wouldn't make sense anyway, what would plate armor do for a brain?).

To make this distinct from other races who also can't wear much in the way of armor, I'd say that this particular race would NEVER have an AC above 0 (the protection brand for example would do nothing here). Basically they are a giant brain that can only move around through massive psychic kinetic power output, which negates the normal magical protection mechanism. Their dodging is relatively poor and armor nonexistent. They are giant and very easy to hit, which is balanced by their ridiculous amounts of damage they could potentially cause. To compensate for this, they would need to rely heavily on teleporting or other forms of spacial warping. They should have a decent pool of health though, since this is basically a giant mass of neurons. Regeneration should also be decent (maybe regen 1). They could have HP+2 and MP+2 aptitudes, but the armor limitation and speed limitations could be severe enough to counter balance this. Of course they would have the highest base intelligence of any race, and relatively low str and dex.

If they carried multiple shields you would get a significant benefit. This would effectively be several floating shields in front of a giant brain, which would certainly reduce the chance of it getting hit. However, since it is a giant brain, a buckler would do very little for it (like for an ogre). If the first shield doesn't block the attack, the second shield gets a chance, etc. Since the brain can't have any AC of any kind, I don't think this would overpower the race.

Giving them a special "psychic sight" ability could also help to compensate for their lack of defense. They could, for example, be able to see 2 tiles further than any other race, and can see through normal rock walls and doors (but not metal walls?). It would not be like the antennae mutation where you can sense there is a monster there, but with the superior psychic ability of the superbrain, it can actually see exactly what is on the other side of the wall as if the wall wasn't there. It would be logical that they would also have see invisible.

I think they should also have a chance (maybe 30% for a beginning character, going up to 60% for a level 27 intelligence, still giving some room for benefit of identify scrolls and ashenzari) that any item spawned will already be identified, the percentage being based on intelligence.

I think a cursed item will still not be able to be unequipped (like normal), allowing ashenzari worship. They could be considered "bound" if more than half of their equipped slots contained cursed items.

As far as eating, maybe they can feed off of magic from other monsters, while they are still alive. They get nothing from corpses or food (since the psychic energy leaves the body at death, and brains have no digestive system ). This creates the tricky situation of having to eat while possibly being shot at. So they would have a special attack to drain magical energy from magic users to not be hungry. In a place without magical mobs, they could starve to death (early game can be a challenge). They should be allowed to feast until they are engorged and have the hunger drain slow enough to compensate for this (which may just be the normal rate, accelerated by spell usage of course). Maybe they could start with a potion of magic to help them get through the first few levels where there are very few magical monsters.

The drain magic ability would always succeed, and half of the magic the magic user has remaining is transferred to the brain. Say the magic user had 30 points of magic. 15 would remain after a successful drain. After draining again, 7 would be transferred and 8 would remain, etc, until there is only 1 point left. Of course this draining process takes time, and reveals the brain to the magic user, leaving the brain vulnerable to attack in the meantime.

They should have very high stealth (since they are floating continuously, never touch anything (not even wielded items), and don't breathe or make any noise), but are immediately revealed to a magic user who gets his magic drained. Of course, how can a giant brain remain hidden for long? It must have some kind of camouflage ability as well to make sense. This of course is very different from any other large species which have very poor stealth. I believe it is necessary to make this playable because of the lack of defense.

As far as movement, I think they should have a normal speed, where they have their normal stealth level, and a slow speed (slower than nagas), where their stealth level doubles, rendering them effectively invisible. Switching between the two doesn't cost anything. Going out of camo/stealth mode is instant, but going into it takes some time. Any attack or spell switches out of camouflage mode immediately, possibly revealing the brain to all surrounding monsters (which is different than normal stealth, where you can kill one after another without waking anyone if your stealth is good enough).

This is just some brainstorming. I'm sure there tons of problems with these ideas, but I think we have something really unique with the whole giant brain thing that is worth fleshing out.

[and into]

Unintentional (?) puns in last line made me smile. (brainstorming / fleshing out)

On the downside I'd make a few general points:

1.) Having too much going on and too much stuff special-cased leads to a bad species. Introducing multiple new, overlapping mechanics at once—dual/triple wielding or shielding, the former of which the devs have decided is not going to happen in Crawl—would be really difficult to balance and it would be hard to estimate what, if anything, they'd really add to Crawl.

2.) Unless it had ridiculous HP, permanent 0 AC will be a major drag, it eliminates a lot of equipment considerations (when cool equipment interactions are what the species concept has going for it). Basically you are calling for an octopode that can't dodge and can't use rings of protection, a cap with enchantment, oz's armor/stone skin, etc.

3.) Species should have at least a few different roles that they can do well. It is fine if they are better at some things than others, but a good number of different backgrounds or styles should be supported. The Floating Brain you proposed seems very narrow however.

4.) Making food system matter a lot more with potential for starving is something you gotta be careful about. That can easily make a species very unfun to play. (The trend in development has been to make the food minigame less intrusive, though there is some room for variation amongst species obviously—ghoul, troll, kobold, spriggan, mummy have different things going on here.)

5.) Your idea for an activated camoflauge ability would actually be cool on octopodes IMO because frankly they could use something like that. "Doubling your stealth" is not the same as invisibility (just speaking mechanically, these are two different things in DCSS) though.

[Siegurt]

Yeah, I like the OP's version (Where you can get AC) better than a "Always 0 AC" creature, a lot of the suggestions jworm76 came up with are counter to the game's mechanic (For example SH is not a replacement for AC, creatures don't have magic points, multi-weapons is on the 'won't do' list) and seem to push the race towards a much narrower focus.

Referring to the earlier suggestions, I think 30 AUT (3 turns) of swapping time (Maybe 1.0 remove/2.0 wear) seems to me like a good compromise, it's not fast enough that you could swap several times in combat, but it's fast enough that it'd be worth it to swap an item or possibly two when a particular thing came into LOS, and a short removal time would allow you to ditch equipment that has penalties quickly at the expense of losing the utility of the slot for the combat.

While I think that thematically it makes sense to have GoB's eat defeated intelligent enemies psychic mana, I think it makes some things particularly awkward (Slime?) And I would hate to have the hunger mechanic become a limiting factor for playing the game.

Perhaps they could "eat" magic from items, Plusses, Brands, resistances, potions, scrolls, all become food consumables at that point, and you can carry them around (And if things get really desperate you can eat your equipment I kinda like the idea of sucking all the magic out of items as an eating mechanic. Of course that gets heavy in terms of carrying capacity, and a lot of those things don't stack well (Maybe branded ammo would be your most convienent source of portable nutrition at that point)

Anyway, I'm not sure this race needs a special hunger mechanic to be interesting, adding more than one special mechanic to a race at a time is really only good if they synergize in some special way (Like VS's no healing, regen, MP shield, and MP drain bite all work toward a common goal) Getting overly complicated just leads to too many factors playing against each-other.