Dory: Early Dungeon Formicid Unique

[MainiacJoe]

Concept: An early melee-only threat that can’t be trivially evaded.

Stats: comparable to a gnoll sergeant with better equipment: Speed: 10* | HD: 4 | HP: 30 | AC/EV: 7/7 | Damage: 12 | weapons, items, doors, fighter, see invisible | Resistances: magic(20) | Size: Medium | Intelligence: human.

Starting Equipment: shield/large shield (possibly glowing); great sword/great mace/battleaxe/glaive (possibly glowing); +0 plate mail of ponderousness.

Abilities: Dig, Shaft, Sense Player: Always knows where the player is and will Dig (if on the same floor) or Shaft (if on a higher floor) to move closer. Will climb stairs to chase the player, but won’t enter branches.

*Concern: Movement speed. Ought it be 10, or slower? I think it ought to be slower, because I want the ethos to be remorseless tracking of the player instead of inescapability. It’s designed for the early dungeon where consumables and perhaps player experience are in short supply. I don’t know whether the armour ego is applied to monsters’ movement or just the player; if not, then just put it in regular plate and reduce the Speed. If ponderousness accomplishes what I want, and if accomplishing that is a good idea, then I specified that it be +0 so that it is less likely to tempt newbies who wouldn’t recognize that it’s a bad item.

Name: after Dorylinae, the army ants

[BabyRage]

Do we really need more early uniques?

[tedric]

a slow melee-only threat can pretty much always be trivially evaded, this would just force you to trivially evade it over and over and over until you enter a branch or decide it's worth killing

e: i like the flavour tho

[MainiacJoe]

Do we really need more early uniques?

Maybe, maybe not. It gets old for veteran players I suppose, but for many players, the early dungeon is all they see.

[Siegurt]

Hmm, i wonder about "trivially" though, if he always makes a beeline for you and can dig as fast as you can, and can shaft, he's going to be a persistent bugger until you dispatch him, the dungeon isn't going to cooperate with you running away in a straight line forever. Certainly it would take more foresight than say, a standard gnoll sergeant would take to avoid at least.

However he would rarely be a *challenge* even when confronted by him for a couple rounds of awkward moving around and taking some extra damage. You would be forced to retreat and rest upstairs, take alternate staircases and just kind of be perpetually aware of him, but you wouldn't be likely to die to him unless you did something really dumb.

And on the highly negative side, a wand of infinite digging that you can tediously lure around to dig out specific paths for an entire branch sounds pretty awful.

[MainiacJoe]

Hmm, i wonder about "trivially" though, if he always makes a beeline for you and can dig as fast as you can, and can shaft, he's going to be a persistent bugger until you dispatch him, the dungeon isn't going to cooperate with you running away in a straight line forever. Certainly it would take more foresight than say, a standard gnoll sergeant would take to avoid at least.

However he would rarely be a *challenge* even when confronted by him for a couple rounds of awkward moving around and taking some extra damage. You would be forced to retreat and rest upstairs, take alternate staircases and just kind of be perpetually aware of him, but you wouldn't be likely to die to him unless you did something really dumb.

This is exactly what I had in mind, especially the "persistent bugger" (no pun intended, I'm sure) and "perpetually aware of him" part. But not so tough that it's an instadeath when it finally corners you.

And on the highly negative side, a wand of infinite digging that you can tediously lure around to dig out specific paths for an entire branch sounds pretty awful.

I did not think of this, though, and you are right: this would suck. I'd noticed the lack of a formicid unique and wanted to tackle that. Would recasting the species as some ethereal being that can phase through walls instead of dig (think xorn from Nethack) work?

[Hellmonk]

Dory: early dungeon big fish unique.

[ximxim]

Needs to be able to steal your items for full nethackness.

[and into]

Just give fast movement, or maybe swiftness as spell if you want something a bit different and less dangerous. Better (but imperfect) ability to sense player might be interesting.

Early uniques that make you skip a level if you aren't sure you can handle them are good. Forces you to dive and then makes stairdancing back up to uncleared level at least a bit more dangerous.

This unique as proposed would be annoying and would lose one of the best things that e.g. D2 Sigmund does (makes you want dive a level and think twice about coming back up).

[MainiacJoe]

So the digging is the reason there aren't any Fo uniques. Makes sense.