Species Proposal: Colossus

[Dauntasa]

Colossi are enormous metal constructs, imbued with life by ancient and forgotten magic. They are sustained by a magical core within their body, which is perfectly shielded by their thick metal skin. They can consume rocks and metal to repair their outer shell, but the knowledge of how to create Colossi has been forgotten, and with it any knowledge of how to repair their core. Any damage done to a Colossus' core is permanent and cannot be fixed.


Colossi would begin the game with a very large HP pool. However, this HP represents their core. It does not regenerate and cannot be healed, increased, or replenished in any way. A Colossus player has that much HP to get through the entire game and escape the dungeon with, and any losses are permanent and irreversible. What they do have, though, is the ability to shield this HP with their outer shell. While their shell is intact, it will absorb any and all hits completely and be immediately repaired from internal reserves of rock and metal. When those reserves run out, it breaks and the core is exposed to damage. Reserves are represented by Nutrition. Essentially, they take hits with Nutrition instead of HP until they run out(since obviously they can't have 12000 max HP this would be at an increased rate, and the rate at which HP damage would be converted to Nutrition damage would depend on their xp level). Colossi aren't really organic, so the kind of things most species eat have no value to them(potions still work, because they're magic). They eat rock, stone, and metal to feed themselves. Any metal or stone object is edible, with things like stones and ammunition providing tiny amounts of nutrition and things like Large rocks providing large amounts, with metal weapons in the middle depending on their size(EDIT: or maybe not weapons so as to prevent the player from accumulating an inventory full of junk). And the special materials contained with metallic artifacts provide enough nutrition to immediately engorge them, if they're willing to sacrifice something so valuable. Once the Colossus hits Starving and their shell breaks, they need to reach Satiated in order to turn it back on.

Colossi cannot mutate, rot, or be poisoned. They naturally have RN++, RF+, and RC+ but lose all of them while their shell is not up. They are Large and have everything that brings with it. They would have good strength, okay Int, and bad Dex, and gain experience slowly. They would have mostly flat fighting aptitudes with the exception of terrible short blades and bad dodging. They would be bad at most magic and unable to get much use out of Transmutations or Necromancy, but their metal bodies would give them an understanding of both Air and Earth magic. They would have positive aptitudes for Invocations and Evocations, and awful Stealth. They can't worship Yredelemnul, because they aren't really alive, Jiyva, because it can't alter them, or Fedhas Madash, because they're artificial constructs.


The core concept of this proposal is the use of Nutrition to absorb damage directed at a very vulnerable HP pool, which I think is an interesting twist on the usage of a food clock.

[TeshiAlair]

Fascinating idea, but with the potential to be immensely frustrating/disheartening. I love the idea of the shell though.

What if their HP works like a car battery- they regen HP very slowly over time if moving/fighting, but resting doesn't heal them at all?

[Lasty]

This seems like an interesting idea, but to be a fun race it would need to be designed such that it isn't just optimal to hoover up every metal item in the dungeon, because 1) there are a ton of them, 2) most of them are junk you don't mind sacrificing anyway, and 3) they don't stack in your inventory.

TeshiAlair: you're just incentivizing walking back and forth over using the 5 key.

Edit: You could say that they can't wear armour of any kind, and automatically convert any metal armour they walk over into "scrap" items that stack and can be eaten. Weapons are harder to do with a clean interface, since you wouldn't want to convert all weapons, and you wouldn't want to have to designate which weapons to scrap, and you wouldn't want to have to carry around dozens of non-stacking weapons to eat. So, maybe don't allow eating weapons?

[Dauntasa]

Give them an ability that converts all metal objects in the square they're standing on into generic scrap metal they can eat?

EDIT: They're already Large so they can't wear metal armour anyway

[tedric]

I think this proposal puts flavor above gameplay concerns.

Sounds like this species would basically guarantee that you survive up to a certain point in the game, then as your core gets whittled away it would slowly but steadily increase your odds of an unavoidable death the closer you get to winning. Currently it's kind of the opposite, and for good reason. Unavoidable death is not something you want to force on players once they've invested hours in a character.

The shell is basically Guardian Spirit applied to nutrition, but the only reason to apply it to eating floor trash is the flavor of the proposal. But as has been discussed in many, many threads before, being able to eat weapons/armour would encourage hoovering and cause a lot of inventory annoyance (because those items don't stack). There's already plenty of permafood in the game. If that mechanic interesting enough to be worth exploring (minus the un-regen-able HP core), it could be implemented more simply -- e.g. as an amulet -- or the flavor of the species could be changed to say that you convert normal food into a protective shell, like a humanoid tortoise. And that would basically just be Teenage Mutant Ninja Crawlers and actually yes please make that species now please

[Dauntasa]

The reason for not using regular food is simply because it's so available and would lead to making things too easy. I've never had any trouble finding enough food to eat, and in this case always having plenty of food would allow for functional invincibility.

The reason to use metal food would be as something that's not as common as regular food but not so rare as to make this species unbearable to play.

That said, there are quite a large number of weapons around, so preventing the player from eating weapons specifically, and possible armour as well, might be wise.

[tasonir]

There's probably more metal objects then permafood in the dungeon. Especially if you weight sultanas as 1/10th of a permafood, strawberries as 1/5, etc. There are a LOT of weapons, and there's no good way to carry 300 weapons from the orcish mines with you into the later game.

You'd have to have a fairly radicial system to overcome these penalties, something like a 'p'ray ability that absorbs all metal objects on the ground in sight in one action. Even better if it just happened automatically. You'd probably have to have no cap on the amount of metal nutrition you could store, so that you could fully consume every object in the orcish mines and use that store to get you through a branch like spider, which doesn't have as much metal. You wouldn't want to force the player to stop spider 2-3 times and run back to orc to eat.

I'm not sure how this is terribly different from DD, although I suppose it does remove god healing. Being large is another difference, but you'd really have to work out how eating metal works without being tedious to have this taken seriously.

Edit: if you do use an unlimited amount of metal storage, this would have a unique quality to it: it would become the race that has no max hp limit. You could store several hundred or thousands of hp, and then it would wear down over time. This I think is interesting enough to merit a race.

Also I really want to see this have some sort automatic body slot called "metal shielding" or something, so you can use enchant armor scrolls on yourself for permanent AC

[tedric]

Look, the details of how you keep the shell up is not the point. The point is that for this race to be interesting to play, the player has to be regularly presented with situations that pose a real threat of knocking down the shell and taking some non-regen-able max HP. That means there has to be a reasonable limit on the amount of shell you can store up at one time -- and it has to be significantly less than the amount of damage most characters can take before dying, probably more like 25 to 30 percent, so that you maintain the ~75% HP threshold of "you should probably be wrapping this fight up or starting to escape already." Even with good play, many characters will run into situations where they dip one or more HP below that threshold a fair number of times during a game.

For most characters, you can do that as many times as the RNG will let you get away with it (which in practice with decent play is close to infinite). For Collossi, it is finite -- and it must be realistically finite, or else they will never die. The only way to hit that limit is to play long enough; and of course the more you play, the closer you get to winning. But with this mechanic, the closer you are to winning, the closer you are to death! So your tactics will, of necessity, become more and more and more cautious the further along you are, because eventually the cost of what for any other character would be a slight miscalculation (dropping to 74% HP) is for you an instant and unavoidable death. Which, in the late game, is anathema to Crawl's design principles.

In other words: you have proposed a species whose HP gets lower as the game goes on. Does that really sound fun to you?

[Dauntasa]

It shouldn't be along the lines of 25 to 30%. I'd say it should be along the lines of 70-80%, possibly even just 100%. They're meant to be durable. They should be able to take on a little more than other things without fear of death or loss of permanent resources.

There obviously needs to be a reasonable limit on how much they can tank with their shell, but there's no reason for it to be as low as you've suggested. There would be a real fear of permanently losing resources and death any time their shell dropped low. And of course, since it's based on Nutrition, it would be constantly dropping at all times. I'd say at Engorged the shell should be worth easily as much damage as a regular character can take before death, but that they shouldn't be able to keep themselves Engorged all the time.


Their HP is a finite resource that they cannot replace, and they should act throughout the whole game as if losing a significant quantity is the worst thing that can happen to them. Yes, if they blow all their HP before the endgame the endgame will be very hard for them, which is why they should be retreating from fights with their shell well intact.

[DracheReborn]

Their HP is a finite resource that they cannot replace, and they should act throughout the whole game as if losing a significant quantity is the worst thing that can happen to them. Yes, if they blow all their HP before the endgame the endgame will be very hard for them, which is why they should be retreating from fights with their shell well intact.

IMO your proposal is a lot like DD, just replace HP with MP as the finite resource. Deep Dwarves die when they run out of maxMP to recharge that wand of healing. So the only reasonable way to play DD is with renewable healing (Makh or Ely or Trog or vampiric), unless you're a masochist. This species looks like it's going to have the same problems.

Look, you could probably massively simplify your mechanics. But the core problem as tedric says is that no regen isn't very fun, and we already have plenty of species that explore that concept (DD, Gh, Vp).