some12fat2move wrote:No background starts with a branded weapon or ring of slaying. The addition of one would create a pretty glaring inconsistency.
...How do you figure? No background other than Artificer starts with a wand. No background other than Warper starts with Dispersal-branded items. No background other than Fighter starts with a shield. In what possible sense is a unique benefit an inconsistency?
I think a weak Ring of Slaying is a pretty interesting idea, actually. Half of the problem with Fighters (and Gladiators too, to only a slightly lesser extent) is that their benefit is mostly in slightly-better-than-average equipment in a game where slightly-better-than-average equipment is dirt common absolutely everywhere. A slight plus on a weapon or armor still leaves you with something which you're as likely as not to replace within the first 3-4 dungeon levels with some glowing piece of junk you got off an orc or found lying on the ground (whereas casters use their books for the entirety of the early game, usually with at least a couple of spells which remain relevant
forever). A Ring of Slaying would give the background a martial bonus that persists across your first couple of equipment upgrades while also not being unreasonably strong in the long run.
Another idea which I always kind of liked (but I think might have ended up getting shot down for some reason I can't remember) was giving Fighters a couple of decent mid-value consumables, like a Potion of Speed and a Potion of Might or something. Apart from the trivially-replaced equipment benefits, the
other half of the reason I never play Fighters is that they have absolutely no responses to emergency situations in their starting kit. If you get put up against something too tough for you to autofight to death and you haven't both found and identified any worthwhile consumables yet, there's absolutely nothing you can do except run. Everybody runs sometimes, but the threshold for "decent chance to kill me if I interact with it in any way whatsoever" always struck me as being unreasonably low for Fighters. You're never more than a couple of bad rolls away from dying in combat against pretty much anything you wouldn't classify as "popcorn", and once those bad rolls happen it's too late to escape.
I think the main reason why a lot of people think Fighters suck but Gladiators are tolerable is the fact that Gladiators start with thrown weapons and nets. They have a
thing they can do to not die when things go south. It still sucks compared to basically any form of magic, but it's better than nothing. Fighters have nothing. Across all other backgrounds, I'm pretty sure the only one as bad off as Fighters in this respect (excluding Chaos Knights and Wanderers, of course) is the Monk, and the situation is solved for Monks the very instant they find their altar. I'm pretty sure I've had Fighters get all the way to the Ecumenical Temple (or, more frequently,
not get to the Ecumenical Temple) without ever identifying a potion more useful than Curing or finding a decent wand. Even if I
did have potions of Berserking, Haste, and Might when I died, odds are I only ever found one and didn't have enough scrolls to identify any of them, so I never knew it or had a way of knowing it. That kind of helplessness isn't very fun. Even if Fighters were arbitrarily strong and had no survival issues, playing through a large chunk of the early game with literally zero tactical options other than "punch" and "run" is extremely dull.
Here's a little thought experiment. Consider the religious warriors: Berserkers, Death Knights, and Abyssal Knights. They're all like a million times better than Fighters, right? Because, even moreso than Gladiators, they can Do Things To Not Die in the early stages of the game where IDed consumables are rare. Sometimes better than casters, even! The holy grail of background viability! Very few people would question the claim that their religions are better than the Fighter's shield and armor for surviving the early game. Thus, if there was a starting background for every non-caster god (with their starting equipment balanced relative to the early-game strength of their religions, using the existing backgrounds as a metric), I posit that nobody would play Fighter ever again. The
only sensible reason to pick Fighter over
anything is because you want to play as a heavy-armored non-caster of a god other than Trog, Yredelemnul, or Lugonu. I don't think there's even a balance-related reason why options like Makhleb (
god do I miss Chaos Knights of Makhleb; they were perfect for this) or Okawaru aren't offered as starting gods, but if you want to play a heavy-armored character based on them or anyone else not fortunate enough to be listed in the Zealot menu, you have to pay the Fighter Tax (up to 8-10 levels of abject boredom, most likely dying multiple times in the process). I believe that, in practical terms, this is the Fighter background's sole purpose as it exists now. And even
that is supposed to be done better by Monks, but every starting skill point Monks get is a waste in the long run for most of those kinds of builds. (For my part, I've given up on even
bothering to play non-magical warriors of non-starting gods, because the Fighter Tax is too high for me.)
Hell, maybe there's even some way to merge Fighters and Monks. Why does unarmed combat need to have a monopoly on piety, anyway? You could give the two-star piety bonus to Fighters and they'd
still be a weaker start than Death Knights or Berserkers.
Wednesday, 10th October 2012, 15:21 
I would freakin' love that.
