Make HD Visible

[Shtopit]

HD influences the game in various important ways. Some of them are reported through other stats (like maximum damage and MR). Others, however, are not (like susceptibility to Mephitic Cloud, power of spells, chance to cast spells, precision, blowgun effectiveness, difficulty of PC escaping from constriction, wand power, antimagic duration, effects of certain god powers). An old (2014) list of effects:

Spoiler: show

reducing HD reduces chance to hit

HD affects a ton of things:
-Chance to hit, as said
-Ability to use a shield to block and bypass a shield of its target
-Damage/accuracy done with a ranged attack, the accuracy bonus scales even faster with HD if they are an 'archer' tagged monster
-Damage/accuracy done with spells (Also some things you might not think it would affect, like monster summon forest damage and anything that explicitly checks a skill on the user - notable exceptions are hellfire and smiting)
-Nastiness of a blowgun
-Chance to succeed a stealth check on you (monster in your LOS spontaneously goes from sleep to wander or wander to seek after you make a turn, rather than you disturbing/annoying/damaging it yourself) (goes up with monster intelligence, HD and if they have sense invisible, and if they're wandering and their desired target is you, goes sharply down if you are invisible, down if sleeping if natural, up if sleeping if not natural)
-Chance to cast a spell (25% at HD 0, 40% at HD 30)
-Resistance to mephitic cloud and dazzling spray (and confusing touch?)
-How strong monster constriction is at keeping you from escaping (opposed by strength and how many attempts you've made to escape, teleporting out of a constriction adds an extra attempt to the attempt counter before rolling)
-How easily a monster can escape your constriction if it attempts to
-Tracers. When a monster is deciding if it can cast a spell at its target or not, it first fires a tracer that accumulates the HD (XL if the player) of all friends and foes to it along the way. It will decide to fire only if the comparison of the two indicates it will do more harm to its foes than harm to its allies, in a crude way. (This is why you might see an ogre mage cast banishment at one of its allies - it wants to banish you and thinks weak allies in its way are irrelevant!)
-Range of possibilities for polymorph
-Chance to apply hexes (MR is tied to HD)
-Spell power of a monster zapping a wand
-Monster skills (important for the monster using a rod or wand, holding a pain weapon, and general spells/skills whenever the game would ask about it, like casting spectral weapon, using an enchanter staff melee, etc etc, lots of esoteric stuff goes here)
-Duration of hexes (A hex's length is divided by (HD+N) where N is different for each hex, so as HD goes down, length of hex goes up. Effects pretty much EVERY negative effect you can put on a monster except for a few, see mon-ench.cc for details)
-How easy it is to convert an orc as Beogh
-How likely it is that undead slaves abandon you in Yred penance / orcs abandon you in Beogh penance (again, lower it is the more control you have)
-How long the block of ice lasts if you glaciate it/pillar of salt lasts if you saltify it with Zin
-How strong the added damage from AF_... melee flavours is (this makes fire elementals get stronger the more powerfully they're summoned, for example, besides just HP and the other stuff) (This also includes enemies that poison with their melee, not sure about how venom works yet, confusing melee, including from chaos, and antimagic melee on the player, drowning melee...)
-Resistance to the Crusade card
-Resistance to Cheibriados' Bend Time
-Duration of antimagic brand's effects on them (the calculation is 1d(pow*8 / HD) * 10 auts)
-Resistance to having weapon removed by player tendril disarming
-Stuff related to slime creature/abom merging that mostly isn't relevant
-Monsters that do a battle cry do a level 2 battle cry if their HD is 13 or higher (I am not sure what the difference is)
-How badly a lost soul will want to revive it
-If the monsters around a siren's HD add up to enough, the siren will not summon drowned souls, else it will summon them (cool, new secret tech learned...)
-The strength of a siren's drowned souls
-The strength of octopode crusher throws, mesmerising, lightning spire lightning, fire crab fire, dragon/draconian breaths weapons, oklob plant/sapling chance to shoot acid
-Convokers only bother to convoke if they can find enough combined HD of stuff to convoke
-Stuff to do with druid's call/druid's awakening/druid's final boon on death strength and targetting
-How well TSO/Trog's abjuration protection works (the higher the HD of the thing trying to be abjured, the closer it has to be to timing out before abjuring it is successful)
-How long monster Trog's Hand lasts and how strong monster Brothers in Arms is
-How Beogh spreads experience amongst your orcs (it calculates total HD of all orcish followers, then gives to each a share proportional to their HD)
-Strength of monster stoneskin/ozo's
-Chance for a shapeshifter to shift goes up with HD
-How hard it is to shield a boulder beetle rolling into you goes up with HD
-Regeneration rate goes up with HD
-Monster A and B must be related and A must have higher HD than B for A to be B's senior. Seniority is a requirement to swap places.
-Accuracy bonus from monster portal projectile
-Chance for the monster to appear in the abyss if you banish it and it's not a unique (uniques always go to the abyss)
-Monsters only bother with picking up wands if their HD is 13 or less. (rip wand of magic darts secret tech btw)
-Monster resistance to recite
-Apparently you can confuse a monster (foo is stunned!) if you stab them with a club and the damage done is above random2(HD), is this a thing that still happens?
-CHAOS_MISCAST gets more powerful effects if the defender is higher HD/XL

And finally things that aren't relevant to this topic (because the proposed new!Draining wouldn't/shouldn't affect them):
-The max HP
-The experience worth (ties into monster levelling up system too - it works even if you're not of Beogh, it's just most noticable if you worship Beogh)
-The strength of a CBL/prism exploding
-How much your god cares about the corpse/piety from the kill/conduct breach?/etc
-How much Makhleb/TSO/Veh gives back on a kill (also for TSO healing allies?)
-In cases where the undead reverts to a generic 'orc' or 'human' etc when raised, the HD determines how strong the new undead is, or something like that
-A monster must be 5 HD or more for it to get a top tier wand on generation - unless it's Ijyb. Go figure.
-It looks like uniques are more likely to have good equipment the higher their HD is or something like that too.

Also, a fun trivia fact: Hell beasts start with 4-7 HD, 2-6 AC and 7-11 EV randomly whenever generated.

This is the list from where I took the effects I listed. While I think that it's, for example, good that certain disabling spells use a different metric from MR to determine their success, it's also a hidden mechanic an unspoilered player has no way of using. This also makes it difficult to understand what the drain brand actually does, since it's very different from the player version.

My proposal is then that of making HD visible, for example under x v. The thing is, if a mechanic is too complex to be visible to the player, but still has enough influence on player choice as to actually change how you play once you are spoiled, then the mechanic should either not be there or be visible in-game. Visible HD could be used for added mechanics (the first one that springs to mind is that of HD determined number of permanent undead, from D&D). But even just the current situation is enough to make it important for them to be visible.

[duvessa]

Visible HD could be used for added mechanics (the first one that springs to mind is that of HD determined number of permanent undead, from D&D).

I like that after seeing that monstrous list of things HD affects, your first instinct is to make HD affect even more things

[VeryAngryFelid]

Ideal solution would be to display actually useful things like chance for Meph Cloud to confuse the monster, chance to be hit by the monster, chance for Bend Time to slow down the monster etc. but I realize it is very much work so displaying HD would be a good compromise for now: those who want to play tab game can just ignore HD and continue to do what they like, those who want to play a smart decision-making game instead of gambling will have more info for that.