Vestibule Violator
Posts: 1591
Joined: Saturday, 3rd August 2013, 18:59
Discussion: Well Designed Monsters
What makes well designed monsters well designed?
What are some of your favorite "well designed" monsters?
What do all of them have in common?
What are some examples of monsters that lack this and how can they be improved based on the above details?
My two Cents:
In my mind, the most well designed monsters are ones that put you in interesting situations that require you to make choices. Generally speaking, monsters considered dangerous tend to be the most interesting(although not always). Another quality that makes up a well designed monster is having certain resistences, but not ALL resistences, and having a large effect on the game and therefore requiring you to plan ahead. Lastly, I think the placement of a monster is the most important aspect of what makes it well designed. In other words, a monster could be well designed if it spawns in lair, but poor designed if it spawns in depths(Centaurs are a good example of this).
Here are some examples of monsters I consider interesting:
Greater Naga's(Tele other)
Deep troll packs(Breaks through walls, very robust)
Flavored Vault Guards(especially sentinels, mark is scary)
Elephant packs(Pushes you off stairs, difficult to separate from the pack)
Hydra's(rPoi and require planning ahead to deal with)
Centaurs(Early range combat requires unusual re-positioning in order to get them into melee combat)
As for monsters that I think could use some improvement, I think many uniques have the same issues. They all have one specific weakness such as lacking see invisibility or rPoison and can be dealt with extremely easily at the expense of a single consumable. Perhaps offering more robustness to them and alleviating their weaknesses in addition to adding some more interesting powers to some of them would be a major improvement. Some uniques are good though, I like Saint Roka for example since he is so extremely robust and powerful if you find him in orc that actually killing him is an extremely intense and interesting challenge(even though ignoring him for most of the game is probably the optimal play).
crawl.akrasiac.org:8080 <- take this link to play online or spectate.