Saturday, 24th September 2011, 20:12 by Sjohara
To be honest, as interesting a concept as playable golems is thematically, I just cannot get excited about the prospect of yet another large, beefy, strong, equipment-restricted race with lousy magic. We already have ogres and trolls for that. Yeah, golems would have immunity to pain, torment, and mutation whereas the other large races wouldn't, but those attributes are mostly only valuable in the very late and post-game, where a slow, potionless, magicless golem would have almost no chance to survive anyway. Assuming they even managed to reach the temple with their slow movement and total lack of escape mechanisms. I just don't see any sensible reason why anyone would play a golem over a troll, naga, or mummy with those aptitudes.
A lot of people are assuming automatically that golems should suck at magic because they're inorganic or dumb, but I don't think that has to be the case. Magical energies flow through every part of their body, so they have a magical essence. They have a natural ability to understand and follow written instructions (at least in some stories), so reading a spellbook is no problem even if they aren't otherwise educated. Why not have them be good spellcasters? Balance is an issue, but since their odd nutrition mechanic is already probably the most interesting thing about them, it could be balanced by a fear of spell hunger. Kind of like spriggans, but the complete opposite in every other respect.
Here's my crazy idea. Give golems above average overall magic skills, maybe even an innate wizardry bonus of some kind, but have them not use the standard spell hunger formula. Instead, every point of mana they regenerate deducts a flat, non-trivial amount of nutrition which is completely unmitigated by anything, ever. The magic power that they're carelessly expending on these spells is their very essence, after all. Golems would be both allowed and encouraged to develop as hybrids, using magic to give them the edge in situations which would otherwise be hopeless due to their speed, but they're forced to use their spells very sparingly out of a constant fear of starvation. A golem conjurer who plays like an elf would burn out by D2, and unlike spriggans, they're never really "over the hump" as far as starvation fears go. The main downside is that it would make it that much harder to balance the amount of nutrition gained by each item, which was already probably going to be tricky.
EDIT: Maybe rather than healing from draining wand charges, golems could gain a big chunk of mana instead, capable of exceeding their maximum. Mana over their normal cap dissipates faster than it can be metabolized, but they gain a bunch of speed (enough swiftness to slightly exceed normal human movement speed, but considerably less, if any, true haste/finesse/action speed/whatever) and regeneration as long as they have some extra, or they can spend that bonus mana right away on spells without suffering the usual hunger cost for having to regenerate their own mana. That would help regulate nutrition flow between magical and non-magical golems a little better, as well as bring back the original idea of sped-up overcharged golems without clumsily trying it to tie it to satiation.
Alternate, much dumber idea: golems start the game with something like 200 unmodifiable maximum mana and it serves as their nutrition and magic pool simultaneously. Mostly just because it would be hilarious to stuff yourself in the Hall of Blades and then raze the entirety of Vaults 8 to the ground within like hundred uninterrupted rounds of terrible magical fury.
Last edited by
Sjohara on Saturday, 24th September 2011, 21:42, edited 2 times in total.