Slime Squisher
Posts: 377
Joined: Friday, 1st February 2013, 21:08
Merge demigods into humans (serious)
What did Bart hide behind his hideous idea?
Story 1)
Imagine being a plain human, who enters the dungeon (as he did for ages already) both because of curiosity and stupidity. He wanders then through tunnels and caverns. Completely clueless about meaning of life, terrified and weak, attacked constantly by some monstrosities, he struggles for his life. At some point he sees a mysterious obsidian structure and because he is only a puny human, he lies on cold pedestal and begs for providence. Boring. Disgusting. Best case, he will become another indoctrinated champion of some not-giving-a-shit-about-him deity. More often, he will die behind next corner.
Story 2)
Once in a while there comes a pompous, arrogant guy who shows his middle finger to silly humans kneeling at altars and ventures forth relying on his own cunningness and pieces of junk lying around. This is a true hero on his way to a godlike entity.
Bart, get to the point!
I propose that human starts with stats just as he does right now. If you decide to worship a god, your gameplay is absolutely normal, human gameplay. If you decide to stay godless, you get (rough concept):
- one random mutation every 3 levels, chosen between +2 dex / +2 str / +2 int.
- robust and magical capacity mutations at level 14. Species name changes to demigod.
- second level of robust and magical capacity at level 21.
At any point of game you may decide to worship a god. If you do, you lose all godly mutations you've gained up to this point, can never regain them and of course lose access to future ones. You did not deserve them, you coward.
What? Why would this be fun?
-We like RPG and roguelikes because of character progress. It's more interesting and satisfying to see a character growing in strength, not being born with it.
-There's real freedom of choice. Feeling weak? Just take Trog's altar and you're set. Found an amulet of berserk? Try to become Trog itself! Mixed feelings? Why not struggle few levels more and decide later? All of the sudden - oh, these benefits are already so nice... No gods ever!
- Your character might become what you want it to be! You have 0 apts, you level up fast. No more struggling with old demigod crap. I really think that Dg deserves at least better apts. Fast exp gain is a lot, but I think that changing experience gain rate in the middle of the game would be dirty (and by no way humans should be victims of merging). Random god wrath as a downside after reaching 'demigod' levels is something I'd like to counter that - fitting flavour, not exploited yet. Potentially very deadly for less skilled players, but the list of wrath effects could be adjusted specifically for 'demigod mode' and be level dependent, too.
That's the dumbest idea ever!
If you feel so, I'm open to criticism. I see at the moment following drawbacks:
- Demigod might become stronger than it used to be (I'm not even sure if that's the case), BUT: this might be adjusted. That's what numbers are for.
- Human becomes not so vanilla, BUT: vanilla is also tasty with e.g. chocolate and nobody prohibits you from eating vanilla alone. Also: human is not the first rookies' choice anyway. It's usually Mi or Gr.
- Human must be vanilla, because there's human in every other game and he's vanilla there! BUT: you told me crawl is not like these other games.
- Not everyone wants to be 'human' demigod! BUT: The concept will not blend with any other species. Mechanically, it's the same case as now, except you can't pretend you're Nosferatu.
- The demigod will lose it's uniqueness without poor aptitudes and very slow exp gain. If you belong to the group believing in that, too bad. There's no chance for me to get another member of my sect.
Hey Bart, actually I like the idea of merging human and demigod. Is there a chance to see it in game?
Probably low, but it was nice for me to continue the dream of more interesting demigods.
Thanks for reading and (semi)polite comments!
- For this message the author Bart has received thanks: 5
- Arrhythmia, Bloax, Hirsch I, rockygargoyle, Sandman25