Randomized Ghosts

[jejorda2]

Sometimes I see players advise that bones files should be deleted so that player ghosts won't be created.

Should there be a mechanism to create random player ghost-style enemies when there aren't any bones files or aren't very many defeated characters available? If pan lords can be random, non-player ghosts don't seem like much of a stretch.

I suppose a random background and species would be picked, with weight towards the recommended combos. Or use whatever the distribution of what's actually played on the server is. Then pick a character level based on the depth. Name it after a shop keeper. If it's a spellcasting background, give it some of the spells in the starting book that are a lower level than the ghost. Then give it 1dDepth/5 spells that share a school with a spell it already has. If it's a fighting background, give it better melee attacks and maybe a depth in 30 chance of having a branded attack.

Then it won't make much of a difference whether players delete save files or not.

[Grimm]

Why?

[jejorda2]

Without player ghosts, either the game is much harder because there aren't as many high-experience targets, or the game is much easier because there aren't cold and poison resistant confusers running around.

So if you tend to die a lot on early levels after learning evaporate or mephitic cloud, your next character will probably die to one of those ghosts unless you delete the files.

It seems like a bad idea to make deleting files the best way to play the game.

I guess adding a common unique undead enemy with evaporate or mephitic cloud to the early dungeon would accomplish the same thing, but sometimes the random unexpected spell that a ghost has really makes an challenge. You can't look up all the ghosts in the bots like you can uniques.

[nrook]

For NetHack, someone created a Hearse service, which would upload the player's bones files to a central repository, and download new ones. The same concept would be very helpful in Crawl, and would deal with these issues. (You get a lot less complaints about ghosts on the server, which is effectively the same thing.)

Of course, I'm not about to program it. But it's a good idea.

[MyOtheHedgeFox]

Erm, a daily or weekly ghost zip file scavenged from Webtiles or CDO?
"The strongest ghosts are to haunt offline weaklings!!!"