The Tavern

One of my most used tiles-only feature is the ability to change my character tile. I know many people understandably don't care much about this, but I like giving characters that little customization touch like hair or skin colour before embarking on a run. Gives me another reason to want that character to succeed.

My problem is that, at the moment, the menu to make these changes seems a bit... Well, backend-y. I'm not sure I'll do a good job explaining it, but it feels weird to modify your skin colour in the same menu that you change the appearance of your gear and fields like "DrcHead" and "Halo".

I'm not saying remove that menu, I love it! But I would really like if, during character creation, there was an optional extra menu in which you could change a restricted set of appearance options, like skin colour, hair style, or if we feel adventurous, colour scheme preference (so your random-colour items appear with that colour scheme). This wouldn't add anything new that the player tile menu doesn't cover, but it would be more thematic.

Thoughts?

I'm also a big fan of customizing my character, and I suppose there would be no harm in publicizing this feature a bit more, assuming it wouldn't be too difficult to implement. I'm sure it's not a huge priority but It'd also be nice if one could independently customize the style and colour of the cosmetic options, so instead of having 10 book or cloak tiles which are identical except for colour, we'd have just one of each but with some kind of slider/colour-wheel to customize it's look. Applying this to all items would hugely increase the visual variety of characters.

Another thing I was always a bit perplexed by was why the game always defaults yo making you look exactly the same (at least on a per-race basis). Someone went through the trouble of making different skin colours and hairstyles, but whenever you start a character you are the same generic dude. Surely it'd be in the spirit of roguelikes to just randomize your appearance at the start? The tiles are already there, and it has no negative gameplay impact (and can be changed easily for those who want to), so why not just throw in some variety?

Oh noes crawl is getting dumbed down again

I'd be fine with a "Customize Sprite? Y/N"

RC file option seems best for this. Like character_tile= something. Not really workable though if you want to customize all the other stuff. Or maybe just an option which if enabled will allow appearance customization during character creation.

I like this, but I think I'm the one player who delved into Crawl for flavor.

Part of this suggestion is about flavour and the fourth wall. The problem with a solution like the .rc file is that, same as the "modify player tile" menu, it breaks the fourth wall.

Again, I know many people probably don't mind this, but for me modifying options so I can have the appearance that I like isn't the same as rolling a character in one way or another. One is in-universe, the other isn't. Only the fact of rolling your character in a certain way and then going into the tile menu and changing it feels a bit weird.

That's also why I don't like the override behaviour of the modify tile menu. I don't want to have my armour slot overriden by something else no matter what I'm wearing, I'd rather have a colour preference but still take what the game throws at me.