Rokurokubi (a multi-tile species proposal)


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Post Thursday, 19th January 2017, 08:30

Rokurokubi (a multi-tile species proposal)

TL;DR: Slow species with a long neck, can extend head. Multi-tile creatures are fun, and this would give players easy access to them.

Rokurokubi Are humanoid monsters with supernaturally long, stretchable necks. They keep their necks coiled around their deformed bodies, ready to launch their fanged heads at their victims, and occasionally to peek around corners and drink oil from tall lamps.

Good apts: Hexes, Necro, Poison Magic, Ice Magic.
Neutral apts: Fighting, Spellcasting, Unarmed Combat, Staves (they need them to walk and counterbalance the weight of the neck), Charms, Summonings, Stealth.
Bad apts: The rest.

  • Int *****
  • Dex *
  • Str ***

Innates:
  • Deformed: Can't wear body armour.
  • Slow 2.
  • Fangs 3. (With vampiric bite).
  • Can wear two amulets (their neck is long enough for their magical energies not to interfere).
  • They can extend their neck. See below.

Gimmick: Extendable Neck.

Rokurokubi get an active ability at level three that allows them to spring out their necks (this may need an enemy target to prevent tedious scouting uses). When active, moving in any direction will cause your head to move, leaving the body behind connected by neck tiles (similar to other tentacle tiles in the game). Essentially, the head becomes your character, while the body is left behind immobile. Enemies can hit your head, body or neck, but the latter two have some damage shaving and extra magic resist. At levels 6, 9, 12 and 15, your neck stretches further increasing the amount of tiles you can reach until a maximum of 9. Staying in this state for too long will start to cause drain. There are some limitations (and advantages!) to what you can do when stretching your neck:

  • Your head moves very fast (Cancels out your natural "Slow 2" and moves as if you had "Fast 3"). It also counts as flying, small, and gets an Ev bonus.
  • You can attack in melee, but it will obviously only use your vampiric fangs as an attack.
  • You can cast any spells, and the origin will be at the position of your head.
  • You can not use launchers, pick up items, or use your limbs in any way, because hand-eye coordination is difficult at that distance.
  • You can open doors, but not take stairs or portals.
  • Teleporting or otherwise changing locations will cause your neck to painfully snap back.

While in "extended neck" mode, you get an active "End Extend Neck" that terminates the effect. When you do this, you lose control of the character for a few turns as your head quickly snaps back to your body. It does so at a, excuse the pun, breakneck speed (3 move delay).

Conclusions:

Rokurokubi are my take on a slow species that gets to play around with speed in a different way. You get the opportunity to move fast and ctele back (through the neck snapback) in exchange for leaving all your valuable vital organs behind, which should force you to think of the dungeon a bit differently. Even though my understanding is that tentacles are a bit fiddly in the back-end, the tile support and general infrastructure is there to let players enjoy a very out-there and different species.

Gimmick aside, I wanted to make a non-undead species with some of the effects typically associated to the undead, and in particular focused on staves.
Last edited by Steel Neuron on Thursday, 19th January 2017, 10:37, edited 3 times in total.

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Slime Squisher

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Post Thursday, 19th January 2017, 10:20

Re: Rokurokubi (a multi-tile species proposal)

The gimmick of a very fast extendable neck and bad evasion seem to contradict each other to me.

Anyway, the way I understand this, it's a slow species with baad defenses who have innate "Portal Projectile" for their melee attacks, is that it? If you extend your neck, will you take several tiles like e.g. kraken does and will take damage from attacks on all tiles? Also 9 range is pretty ridiculous, and why 9 and not just the standard 7?

The biggest problem I see though is that the gimmick encourages tedious play - you will want to scout with your head all the time and snap it back at any sight of danger. Having to do it every several steps seems like a chore to me.

Slime Squisher

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Post Thursday, 19th January 2017, 10:30

Re: Rokurokubi (a multi-tile species proposal)

Leszczynek wrote:The gimmick of a very fast extendable neck and bad evasion seem to contradict each other to me.

You'd have better evasion when "piloting" the head, it's just your body that is clumsy.

Leszczynek wrote:Anyway, the way I understand this, it's a slow species with baad defenses who have innate "Portal Projectile" for their melee attacks, is that it? If you extend your neck, will you take several tiles like e.g. kraken does and will take damage from attacks on all tiles? Also 9 range is pretty ridiculous, and why 9 and not just the standard 7?


Sort of like this... But not really. I see the head as your character. LOS is centered on the head. You get a set of buffs/debuffs in exchange for having a dead weight behind you that you have to protect (your body).

Leszczynek wrote:The biggest problem I see though is that the gimmick encourages tedious play - you will want to scout with your head all the time and snap it back at any sight of danger. Having to do it every several steps seems like a chore to me.


You make a good point. A possible solution to this would be for the neck extension to need an enemy target (the motivation for a bloodthirsty neck-lunge), or a cost that justifies not doing it for scouting.

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jwoodward48ss

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Post Thursday, 19th January 2017, 12:03

Re: Rokurokubi (a multi-tile species proposal)

Ah, it's good to see Youkai lore being drawn upon.

The main issue (from the front-end) seems to be scouting concerns. You've proposed 'needs target' but then what happens if that popcorn mook is killed? You're still extended so you can scout afterwards before returning to body. This scout concern exists only because it's natural to expect the eyes to be on the head.

I like the idea of Playable Extension species. Given the scouting concerns, what of radical alternatives like "the eyes are on the torso" or "vampiric mouths on tentacle arms"? Some way of justifying "your LoS does not change when you've extended out".

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Post Thursday, 19th January 2017, 12:05

Re: Rokurokubi (a multi-tile species proposal)

Psieye wrote:Ah, it's good to see Youkai lore being drawn upon.

The main issue (from the front-end) seems to be scouting concerns. You've proposed 'needs target' but then what happens if that popcorn mook is killed? You're still extended so you can scout afterwards before returning to body. This scout concern exists only because it's natural to expect the eyes to be on the head.

I like the idea of Playable Extension species. Given the scouting concerns, what of radical alternatives like "the eyes are on the torso" or "vampiric mouths on tentacle arms"? Some way of justifying "your LoS does not change when you've extended out".


I mean, if we were to get really crazy, the species could always be with the neck extended, and the body following behind. Waiting would allow your body to catch up until you're only one tile again, but any action other than waiting would keep it in place.

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Post Thursday, 19th January 2017, 13:07

Re: Rokurokubi (a multi-tile species proposal)

It would be crazier/more fun if the head wasn't a target.
Or if the body didn't follow the head.

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Post Thursday, 19th January 2017, 13:38

Re: Rokurokubi (a multi-tile species proposal)

I wonder what kind of technical restrictions would wind up applying with this. If you go around corners or just travel far enough or use a scroll of fog, you can keep your body and most of your neck out of sight; with reciprocal LoS that could lead to a lot of weird edge cases. The obvious example is "dangerous ogre in melee range, extend head around corner and read tele", especially since your body would probably still block movement.

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Steel Neuron

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Post Thursday, 19th January 2017, 13:43

Re: Rokurokubi (a multi-tile species proposal)

milski wrote:I wonder what kind of technical restrictions would wind up applying with this. If you go around corners or just travel far enough or use a scroll of fog, you can keep your body and most of your neck out of sight; with reciprocal LoS that could lead to a lot of weird edge cases. The obvious example is "dangerous ogre in melee range, extend head around corner and read tele", especially since your body would probably still block movement.


That's a tricky one! Still, sometimes you have your summons fight out of sight, so if you think of your body and neck as summoned allies (which is the route I'd take if I were to be silly enough to actually code this) the engine should already cover that case I think.

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jwoodward48ss

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Post Thursday, 19th January 2017, 16:40

Re: Rokurokubi (a multi-tile species proposal)

Steel Neuron wrote:sometimes you have your summons fight out of sight

Meaning "they get beaten up without fighting back while out of sight".

Back to point, more posts boiling down to "where are the eyes when in extension mode?"

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jwoodward48ss

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Post Friday, 20th January 2017, 01:54

Re: Rokurokubi (a multi-tile species proposal)

I kind of wonder if all the complexity going on here is necessary. It seems like your goal was to create a multi-tile species, but personally, I feel like the main gameplay idea here isn't the multi-tile thing, it's the fact that you can quickly move your head but slowly move your body. So essentially, you get fast movement in a limited zone, but it's slow to move that zone.

To some extent, this actually feels like it has a lot of overlap with the Frog species in trunk. Like this species, frogs are slow, but can get bursts of mobility at strategic times. It's not the same mechanic, and this race adds a lot of other complexities, but in some ways there's a pretty strong similarity to this species' "retract neck" ability and frogs' jump - both give you some distance from enemies very quickly, but afterwards you move slowly and your enemies will catch up to you. The big difference seems to be that this species requires you to plan in advance, leaving your body in a safe spot while you extend your neck to fight with your head, but in exchange your head gets to move quickly so you're better at doing small amounts of tactical repositioning while your head is out.

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Post Friday, 20th January 2017, 06:58

Re: Rokurokubi (a multi-tile species proposal)

This gimmick would be better as a monster than a pc race imo

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Leszczynek, Steel Neuron

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Post Friday, 20th January 2017, 08:18

Re: Rokurokubi (a multi-tile species proposal)

lethediver wrote:This gimmick would be better as a monster than a pc race imo


You're right. I don't think this is a strong proposal. It could be fun as a monster though.

We could salvage this thread to brainstorm ways that a playable species could use multi-tile tentacle goodness.

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