Species Proposal: Proteans

[Noisewar]

Goal

Medium difficulty health-tank warrior-mage whose inventory choices have strategic and tactical impact. Also I've always wanted a "D&D gelatinous cube" kind of species to play.

Description

Proteans are a race of vaguely humanoid amoebas. Their mostly amorphous bodies struggle to maintain a consistent arrangement of the armor and weapons suspended in it. Their bodies love mutations and latent magical powers in items, and possessing these vastly increases their health and mass. Due to their protoplasmic flesh, they are adverse to temperature extremes and rot, but suited to other forms of magic.

Innate Abilities, Weirdness & Mutations

* Gains +5 max hp and mp for each acquired mutation and each artefact item carried.

* Enlarges by 1 size and +2 strength (but also +1 movement delay) for each 100 current hp, up to Gigantic.

* When attacking, uses a random melee weapon in inventory (includes unarmed) instead of wielded.

* As proteans gain experience (avg. 3-4 times per level), they may reshuffle all their armor and jewelry slots with random wearables from inventory (includes nothing). Beware that this reshuffling bypasses curses and warnings for harmful egos.

* Immediately digests corpses and rations they receive, or on tiles they move onto. Same eating mechanics as Ghouls otherwise. This counts as decay for Fedhas.

* At levels 3, 9, and 15 gains a rank of pseudopod auxillary attack that engulfs enemies 3 sizes smaller, dealing extra asphyxiation damage, and extracting nutrition from living creatures.

* Immune to self-transformations, and cannot gain mutations of limbs or skin.

* Proteans are Chaotic, and cannot worship Zin.

Stats

Size: Normal (initially)
Str: 9
Int: 9
Dex: 7
Stat per 4 XL: +1 random
MR per XL: 3

Aptitudes

+1 Fighting
-3 Unarmed
-2 Dodging
N/A Bows/Crossbows/Slings
+1 Air/Earth/Poison
-3 Fire/Ice/Necromancy
+1 Stealth

Design

Proteans face two major challenges: equipment randomness and hunger/hp management. While they don't really actively micromanage equipped or wielded items, they do need to consider how to balance their inventory... the fewer items they have, the weaker they generally are (as there's always a chance an armor slot is empty or an unarmed attack is made). Worse, their resistances and levels of AC/SH/EV can fluctuate dramatically at the most inopportune times.

Food for the ravenous protean is frequently a concern too. Even powerful caster proteans will need to occasionally attack tinier creatures to feed if they don't have another source of food. The bit of healing they get from digesting does makes it useful to plan escape routes along corpse trails (or even apport them). Fortunately, engulfing is strong against tiny creatures.

Despite these weaknesses, their power can really snowball if they can maintain size and health- a gigantic protean is a monster in melee and magic alike. For the player, the challenge is balancing the bonus HP and MP from mutations and artefacts against the increasing randomness of defenses from equipment, as well as balancing that against skill development for the artefact weapons you'll want to carry.

Last note is that proteans are designed to benefit strongly from Jiyva, but be very compatible with other non-necromantic gods as well.

[tasonir]

Randomly shifting your weapons/armor seems like a very difficult gimmick to wrap your head around. It may end up being very spikey if for example your rF+ body armor gets shuffled away and your ice dragon scales comes out, and suddenly you take triple damage from a fireball (50% with resist vs 150% vuln). This could be somewhat mitigated by them having high health so that spikes are more survivable than on a low hp species like gargoyle or felid, but even so, it's going to feel unpredictable and unfair. You could also attempt to mitigate this by refusing to use fire/ice dragon scales, but those are commonly useful powerful armors, when you can mitigate the downside.

Not knowing what weapon you're going to strike with would mean you have to train all weapon types you are carrying? I suppose the more efficient thing to do is to carry a selection of weapons which are all the same type, and hopefully have enough copies of them so that you don't get unarmed too often, since that's -3. Really the -3 is probably the only thing keeping you from just going unarmed and forgetting about the whole random weapon problem at all, because it is in fact a problem, and not a benefit for this race.

+5 hp per mutation will either be incredibly powerful or non-impactful, largely based on god choice. Xom/Jiyva will be go-to's, if you can find Jiyva at least.

I assume most people aren't going to like a mechanic which encourages inventory clutter.

[Sorcerous]

Shouldn't this thread be under GDD, or at least CYC? Feature proposals aren't exactly about advice.

[Hellmonk]

I don't think a species that wants to turn off autoexplore for food management reasons and carry 20 useless artifacts every game is going to go over very well. There are fundamental gameplay problems with the interaction between species size and equipment restrictions on a species where your equipment shuffles uncontrollably as well.

[Noisewar]

Shouldn't this thread be under GDD, or at least CYC? Feature proposals aren't exactly about advice.

Yeah sorry, posted in wrong place, I reported it as such to be moved.

[Noisewar]

I don't think a species that wants to turn off autoexplore for food management reasons and carry 20 useless artifacts every game is going to go over very well. There are fundamental gameplay problems with the interaction between species size and equipment restrictions on a species where your equipment shuffles uncontrollably as well.

Well the artefacts aren't useless, everything that is carried can be drawn upon. in addition to the passive buff. As for size restrictions, its lowest size is normal, so there isn't any it can't wear, and for weapons it simply depends on the size at the time of the attack. Probably need to clarify how something like reaching would work during autofight tho. Was there something I missed?

[acoolguy]

It seems like the too largest issues with this proposal are the random shuffling of artifacts, weapons and armor as well as the bonus for artifact buff are the main issues as it forces a lot of inventory management. The hp buff for mutations could be too strong or too weak dependent on god.

How about instead a weaker version of evolution would be given on proteans (with a larger bias towards bad mutations then the normal evolution mut)? Maybe give the species hellcrawl's Xom mutation (shuffling 3 bad and 3 good mutations). Not sure how well a gelatinous cube would work with equipment though and being able to wear no equipment may be boring. Maybe make it a bit more humanoid and have the species gain in size and slowness as its level increases? I do admit, that this suggestion may be a bit too similar to demonspawn.