Slap and stab wrote:Its almost like Dg/Vp/Mu/Gh/Ds/Normal should be a third option in the character creation menu
Actually it is more like Dg/Vp/Mu/Gh/Ds/Hu should just be species.
The point of choosing stuff at the beginning of the game isn't to provide for every imaginable permutation of various characteristics. I can sympathize with the fact that people really want to live their DCSS power-gaming wet dreams and play a GrBe with demonspawn mutations or whatever, but the species and backgrounds that exist are justified based on providing a more or less unique niche, not catering to these whims.
A "demonspawn kobold" of whatever background would not be very much different from a Ds Halfling or a Ds Human or a Ds Half Elf. There might not be a lot of current differentiation amongst Ko/Ha and Hu/HE right now, granted. But if you allowed players to demonspawn-ify them it would be much worse, because the whole mutation aspect of Ds would
completely overwhelm the subtle game play differences that do exist amongst these species. In other words, allowing for a third set of character building criteria would actually *remove* meaningful variety, since you would be taking away species that currently provide an interesting choice
when they are mutually exclusive with other species, and instead creating many hundreds more combinations that will feel and play very similarly.
If anyone can present a plausible argument for why some specific combination of "mummy-like" characteristics and "<other species>-like" characteristics would be fun, interesting, and novel, then you have a plausible argument for a new
species that combines those characteristics. But this would not be a good argument for creating a whole new axis to character creation, since you'd not only be creating this single new, interesting combination, but dozens of other combinations that are undifferentiated and lame.
In short, this is a really bad idea, even if we ignored that doing this 1.) would create a lot more complexity that new players would be confronted with directly right from the start, 2.) would be a nightmare to code, and 3.) would generate a large number of weird special cases you would have to deal with on an individual basis, adding even more opacity, ugliness, and counter-intuitiveness.