Race proposal: golems

[lethediver]

Mission statement: make an "artificial" themed race with unique, non equipment based, slow but strong indomitable playstyle

Key Attributes:

Starts with 8 str, 8 dex, 8 int
+10% more hp than average
-10% mp than average
5 innate AC
Speed 7
Size: large (-ev)
No shallow water move penalty
Can use large rocks and giant clubs

Gains:

+1 str Every fifth level
+1 ac per level (5 + 26 = 31 at lvl 27)
+5 MR per level

Restrictions:

Cannot equip any armor or jewelry
Cannot learn/cast any transmutations spells
Cannot cast: ozucobu's armour, regeneration, deaths door, bjorgnirs, sublimation of the blood
Cannot worship yred (non living)

Resistances:

Immune to: poison, rot, torment, stoning, mutation, weakness, polymorph
Gain rF+, rN+, rC+ at lvl 7
Gain rElec, rF++, rN++, rC++ at lvl 14
Gain rF+++, rN+++, rC+++ at lvl 21
Vulnerable to shatter, LRD
rAcid-

Aptitudes:

Fighting 0
Unarmed combat -1
Throwing -1
All weapons -1
Dodge -3
Stealth -3
Spellcasting -2
All elemental schools -1
Charms, translocations -1
Necromancy, summoning, hexes: -2
Conjurations: 0
Invocations -3
Transmutations N/A
Evocations -1
Experience: -2


Analysis:

This race offers a streamlined, annoyance free version of crawl:

-no swapping jewelry or armour
-no chopping, eating or hunger
-elemental resistances without swapping or activating stuff
-no toggling transmutations
-immune to torment, rot and malmutate spam
-lots of inventory space

in exchange for steep drawbacks:
-slow move speed (no luring, pillar dancing)
-tied for slowest EXP gain in the game
-bad aptitudes, can only focus a few skills
-mediocre attributes
-cant (eventually) equip a bunch of badass artifacts
-watch out for LRD (ghosts, troll earth mage, jorgrun) and acid (jellies, acid blobs, TRJ, yellow draconians)

Hidden bonuses:

No transmutation or armor, devs only have to draw one icon

[genericpseudonym]

Their fighting and weapon skills are still good/decent, and bad dodging aptitude is cancelled out by not having to spend XP on armor.

Level 7 is really early to get rF+ rN+ rC+ which is pretty much an acceptable-for-endgame set of resistances aside from OOFs on Zot:5. The inability to wear jewellery isn't a weakness if they're innately getting all the bonuses they would've worn jewellery for anyways.

Even with those slightly poor aptitudes they'd make very good spellcasters because of their huge AC bonus.

Basically the only serious downside here is the move speed (which is still very significant!). But what stops them from just being better nagas?

[Wahaha]

I don't know if this would be fun to play due to the lack equipment choices. But it's not a bad idea. It's fairly simple and yet different enough from existing races. I'd give it Slow (all actions take 1.5x time) instead of slow movement though, and balance their bonuses accordingly.
Also yeah getting rF and rC at lvl 7 is too early but that's just a matter of moving it to lvl 12 or whatever.

[Lasty]

I don't think I'd like this species, but it sounds more fun than our current no-equipment species, felids.

[Hurkyl]

The MP aptitudes are now just flat bonuses -- you get -1 max MP, not -10% max MP.

(you could use the low MP 1 mutation, but you'd need a good reason to make this race work differently, IMO)

[yesno]

"no transmutations" doesn't make a lot of sense to me. you can just disallow transformations and transmuter starting class, like for ghouls and mummies. but i don't see why they couldn't cast sticks to snakes, passwall, petrify, irradiate, etc.

[lethediver]

Their fighting and weapon skills are still good/decent, and bad dodging aptitude is cancelled out by not having to spend XP on armor.

Level 7 is really early to get rF+ rN+ rC+ which is pretty much an acceptable-for-endgame set of resistances aside from OOFs on Zot:5. The inability to wear jewellery isn't a weakness if they're innately getting all the bonuses they would've worn jewellery for anyways.

Even with those slightly poor aptitudes they'd make very good spellcasters because of their huge AC bonus.

Basically the only serious downside here is the move speed (which is still very significant!). But what stops them from just being better nagas?

Would:

L12 - rF, rC, rN
L20 - rElec, rF++, rC++, rN++

be more reasonable?

For aptitudes, I am thinking of changing to:
-2 for weapons (no change to throwing/unarmed)

-2 for elemental spells

Significant downsides compared to nagas:
Cannot transmutate (i'd argue naga is a made-for-transmutation race, so this is pretty significant)
No sInv possible
Very bad stealth
Very bad evasion/dodge
No poison breath or constriction
Slower attribute gain, lower hp/mp
Much slower skill game (-2 experience apt)

I'm also adding in next draft:
Change from low movespeed to slow (= low movespeed + also lowering dps)

[lethediver]

"no transmutations" doesn't make a lot of sense to me. you can just disallow transformations and transmuter starting class, like for ghouls and mummies. but i don't see why they couldn't cast sticks to snakes, passwall, petrify, irradiate, etc.

Oops, you are right. I should have wrote 'no transformations'

[lethediver]

The MP aptitudes are now just flat bonuses -- you get -1 max MP, not -10% max MP.

(you could use the low MP 1 mutation, but you'd need a good reason to make this race work differently, IMO)

Where did you see this? Where do I read more about this? Is this -1 max MP per level or at lvl 1 only? or at lvl 27 projected?

[lethediver]

I don't think I'd like this species, but it sounds more fun than our current no-equipment species, felids.

Thank you. I am pleased because I think Felids are already fun.

[lethediver]

I don't know if this would be fun to play due to the lack equipment choices. But it's not a bad idea. It's fairly simple and yet different enough from existing races. I'd give it Slow (all actions take 1.5x time) instead of slow movement though, and balance their bonuses accordingly.
Also yeah getting rF and rC at lvl 7 is too early but that's just a matter of moving it to lvl 12 or whatever.

Great suggestion. I agree with slow all actions instead of slow movement. They hit slow but hit hard, and are tanky. That's the feel I'm going for.

[Hurkyl]

The MP aptitudes are now just flat bonuses -- you get -1 max MP, not -10% max MP.

(you could use the low MP 1 mutation, but you'd need a good reason to make this race work differently, IMO)

Where did you see this? Where do I read more about this? Is this -1 max MP per level or at lvl 1 only? or at lvl 27 projected?

Just -1 period. The change has made it to the wiki (e.g. see MP).

Although according to the MP page, demigods have a high MP mutation, so Golems wouldn't be unique in that regard if they had a low MP mutation.

[HardboiledGargoyle]

The formula for MP has been XL + MP APT + highest of (spellcasting, evo/2, invo/2) since roughly 2015-03-30.
EDIT: then it got changed; see Lasty's formula below

[BobIsDead]

Whilst there are certain details about this proposal that might need to be worked on, I think the concept of it is a great one. A race designed to allow you to play a streamlined version of Crawl? There's definitely a certain appeal to it, so long as it doesn't make everything too streamlined.

[lethediver]

The formula for MP has been XL + MP APT + highest of (spellcasting, evo/2, invo/2) since roughly 2015-03-30.

Many wiki pages are still using percentage based mp apt, example:

http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Felid

It feels like a lot of work to review all the github notes since the beginning of time - if ones from beginning of 2015 still arent reflected throughout the wiki then who knows how far back in the patch notes i have to read to be current? Sigh...

[HardboiledGargoyle]

so you can find the relevant commits in the link I gave, since none of the commits outright states the correct current formula, and you asked where you can read more about this.

[Hurkyl]

The formula was easy enough to empirically determine when the change went in. Technically I only checked what Spellcasting did, but IIRC the MP skills have always entered formulas by way of Max(Spellcasting, Invocations/2, Evocations/2).

[lethediver]

so you can find the relevant commits in the link I gave, since none of the commits outright states the correct current formula, and you asked where you can read more about this.

Apologies, paranoia got the better of me.

[HardboiledGargoyle]

oh yeah, you're the one that thought people were mocking you by making similar threads

[Lasty]

MP = min(23, XL) + skill + min(4, max(XL, skill) / 2), where skill = max(Spellcasting, Evo/2, Invo/2).

(effectively, the last 4 XL's mp points get distributed over the first 8 XL, but only if you have matching quantities of skill)

Edit: fixed formula. Thanks, Spucery.

[Sprucery]

max(23, XL)

That should probably be min(23, XL)?

[Lasty]

Er, yes, thanks.

[HardboiledGargoyle]

hmm, that formula means players have this much extra MP (compared to just XL+Skill) for these values of XL and Skill:

  Code:

XL\skl 0 # 1.0 # 2.0 # 3.0 # 4.0 # 5.0 # 6.0 # 7.0 # 8.0+
 1   0.5   0.5   1.0   1.5   2.0   2.5   3.0   3.5   4.0
 2   1.0   1.0   1.0   1.5   2.0   2.5   3.0   3.5   4.0
 3   1.5   1.5   1.5   1.5   2.0   2.5   3.0   3.5   4.0
 4   2.0   2.0   2.0   2.0   2.0   2.5   3.0   3.5   4.0
 5   2.5   2.5   2.5   2.5   2.5   2.5   3.0   3.5   4.0
 6   3.0   3.0   3.0   3.0   3.0   3.0   3.0   3.5   4.0
 7   3.5   3.5   3.5   3.5   3.5   3.5   3.5   3.5   4.0
8-23 4.0   4.0   4.0   4.0   4.0   4.0   4.0   4.0   4.0
24   3.0   3.0   3.0   3.0   3.0   3.0   3.0   3.0   3.0
25   2.0   2.0   2.0   2.0   2.0   2.0   2.0   2.0   2.0
26   1.0   1.0   1.0   1.0   1.0   1.0   1.0   1.0   1.0
27   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0

If you're a spellcaster, you're realistically getting 1-3 extra MP in the very early game. If you're not a spellcaster, you're getting 1-2 extra MP on the first couple of floors, but you don't care about it. For most of the rest of the game, everyone has 4 more MP. The commit says that it's supposed to help casters in the very early game. Why not just give everyone 3 MP, by bumping their MP apt, instead of that formula? Simpler, and does functionally the same thing. Would there really be a noticeable difference, beyond a couple extra MP on the first two floors (i.e. a good thing), if you overwrote all values in the table above to 3? VS get a slight buff, but Tr still exist. I recall that several years ago, everybody got 3 HP for free.

[lethediver]

oh yeah, you're the one that thought people were mocking you by making similar threads

How do you know this? have you been tracking me?

[Lasty]

Giving everyone a flat +3 mp adds a certain amount of power creep -- 3 extra mp makes a big difference throughout the game, but particularly at very low XLs, and that's a bad thing. The current system encourages earlier investment in spellcasting, which is to my mind a good thing.

[HardboiledGargoyle]

well I tried the formula above and it gives a flat +4 mp for XL 8-23, am I right? That's 1 more than +3. You can't invest a whole lot into spellcasting before XL7, unless you train spellcasting exclusively, which you shouldn't. The difference would amount to 1-2 MP for the first handful of dungeon levels. Giving some extra mp at very low XLs is a bad thing... but the whole reason for the newer formula was to give some more MPs at very low levels, wasn't it?

[lethediver]

MP = min(23, XL) + skill + min(4, max(XL, skill) / 2), where skill = max(Spellcasting, Evo/2, Invo/2).

(effectively, the last 4 XL's mp points get distributed over the first 8 XL, but only if you have matching quantities of skill)

Edit: fixed formula. Thanks, Spucery.

We're getting off topic, but Can you help me understand the logic here? More maxMP% feels more "racial" of a change (long lasting, effects late game) than flat mP boost which, is only really felt early game (thus, feels more like of a "character class" change).

HP still works on a racial% bonus from what i can tell, too.

[Lasty]

Looks like I introduced a second typo up there: it should be:

  Code:

MP = min(23, XL) + skill + min(4, min(XL, skill) / 2)

Re: % versus flat racial modifier, we felt that the flat bonus would be more impactful.