The Tavern

Giants will push popcorn out the the way to get to you. Why shouldn't you, the burly MiFi push rats around too? Let Big and Huge species push stuff around, as well as high-strength chars, and let Small and Tiny Species be pushed, with STR helping resist pushing.

This should do several things:

• Buff big melee characters, particularly vs. summoners, smiters, and buffers, and nerf spriggans
• Buff those big nasties who would like to be next you (your cloud of popcorn is no longer sufficient to hold off a Tentacled Monstrosity)
• However, it would add another less-than-obvious mechanic, since monster size is not normally important (except for those stupid whiff-inducing bees).
• Minor and bordering on completely irrelevant: Give STR a tiny bit more to do

Shift+Dir should suffice for movement, right? Also, in my mind, this should be fully reciprocal, probably just based on monster Size.


Is this reasonable, or is this merely change without purpose?

Dragon Form used to be able to trample opponents like dragons and elephants can do to you. I never tied it, but the impression I got was that it was rarely useful and ended up not being interesting enough to be worth leaving in, so it was removed. So unless I'm misunderstanding and giving trample to large species isn't what you're suggesting, this wouldn't really add much.

Meanwhile, making it reciprocal so more things can trample you as a small or tiny race sounds more annoying than interesting. Mostly, it just sounds really, really annoying.

Dragon form trample was actually a net negative, yes.

https://crawl.develz.org/tavern/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=10011

No they won't...

Everybody is very polite in the dungeon.

Yeah, you may think you want this, but you don't. Sometimes the tile you are attacking is a much more dangerous place than the tile you are on.

It would make a useful active ability, but I wouldn't want it happening all the time without my say-so. It almost makes sense for a weapon differentiator.

The way I read the proposal was like swapping places with a summoned monster. If you were surrounded, and wanted to leave, you'd just walk through the monsters and get out of there. You'd want to use a different command than just walking of course, and OP suggested shift + direction, but that's already used for longwalk, so I'm not sure if you'd want to overload it. An active ability could work, although it might be odd to gain a point of strength and suddenly be able to push things out of the way.

One way it would 'work', IMO, is as an activated ability that gives you a 'wrestling' status effect - instead of hitting monsters in meele, you swap places with them. You can't stop the ability at will, and it lasts 3-4 turns. 1/2 EV for duration.

One issue to consider is that this will require players to look up which monsters they can displace at the moment, and for strategic reasons will have to memorize STR breakpoints that enable displacing more relevant monsters and adjust stats for that purpose.

@roderic : Makes me think of Calvin and Hobbes; "This is such a great club!".

Anyways, I was unclear. I mean that STR/Size should let you move through hostile monsters as if they were friendly summons, not trample them. I agree that trampling would be awful.

I'm not sure that having STR breakpoints is necessarily awful, especially if the breakpoints are natural to most people anyways, like 5s or 10s. Still, if STR breakpoints prove too cumbersome, this idea could still be implemented entirely based on size.

I think something like this list below would be reasonably intuitive (and teach new players about sizes). Lets say that a STR breakpoint or being a larger size lets you displace smaller things.

• 10 STR or next size up = displaces -2 (felids) or smaller
• 15 = displaces -1 (kobolds)
• 20 = displaces 0 (humans)
• 25 = displaces 1 (trolls)
• 30 = displaces 2 (death yaks)

Giants and dragons cannot be pushed or pulled, (or filed, stamped, indexed, brief, debriefed, or numbered!)
Monster sizes range from -3(tiny, bees) to +3(Giant, Giants), and player species range from -2(Little, Spriggans) to +1(Large, Nagas) with forms providing the full range, according to LearnDB,.

Obviously you could shift the displaceable size if 10 STR - Kobolds is too strong to 15 STR - Kobolds.

As far as buttons go, Alt+Dir is unused. I completely forgot about long travel.

I'm not entirely convinced that full reciprocity would be totally annoying. My feeling is that it would be terrifying. Even so, if it is determined that it would merely be irritating, then players could remain immovable, and players and monsters could displace smaller,weaker monsters.

The easiest way to avid STR breakpoints would be to make the ability have a chance to succeed based on STR and relative size, rather than being either guaranteed or unusable. It could even show the success rate before using, like hexes do, so there'd be nothing spoilery.

I think an ability to switch with enemies is an interesting idea, and it would certainly make STR more valuable if its success rate scaled with it, but it would also be a pretty big change if it was just something every large or high-STR character could do and not tied to an item or god or anything.

The "swap with adjacent monster" effect is interesting, but implementing it as a low-level Translocations spell would be easier and simpler. I don't think giving everyone this ability is a good idea.

Actually, if Shadow Traps are going to continue to exist, I wouldn't mind all my characters having the "bully a rat out of its way" ability in order to escape the sudden D:3 ogre I'm now trapped in melee with. I'm cool with these shenanigans.