Species Proposal: Turtlekin

[infinitevox]

Turtlekin: tl;dr - large bipedal with a big shell on its back that provides innate SH at the cost of irregular body mutation. Can crawl inside its shell

Stuff:
Actual Stats:
- Above avg Str, avg Int, below avg Dex
- Avg HP, -10% MP, avg XP gain
- Gains +1 str/int every 3 levels

Large: like Troll/Ogre/etc (Not necessary, but after reading what ppl have said about a more "normal" large species, I thought Turtlekin might be a good candidate)
Shell Shield: Starts game with 5 SH, gains +1 SH every 2 levels (Max +18 SH @ 27)
Irregular body: Can wear body armor but does not get full benefit
Cold Blooded: rC-
Corrosion Resistant: rCorr+
Swims: Deepwater Yes

Active Ability - Hide in Shell:
- Vision radius reduced to 1 tile, cannot move, cannot attack, cannot evoke, cannot quaff, cannot read scrolls, CAN invoke, CAN spellcast (maybe? good luck targetting with 1 tile LoS though, basically self only)
- Delays Teleports by 2 turns, EV = 0
+ Gains small dmg shaving, increased armor, and increased regen

Aptitudes (the ones that "matter" most for this species):
Dodging -2
Armor -1
Shields +2
Ice Magic: -2
Staves: +1
Polearms: +1
Stealth: +0, mostly b/c someone will want to play a TMNT, and IF(critter.large = YES) THEN a large critter with decent stealth is interesting to me

Reasoning
Hide in Shell - I think this may be controversial, where many people think it's useless. I think it could make for interesting tactical decisions, and is a potential boon to speedrunners. It has a fairly high risk/reward when used tactically, you can use it in a sticky situation to help save yourself, but there are costs...

Situation One: Read Tele scroll, use Hide in Shell, gtfo
Teleport will be delayed. Increased regen and defenses may help you live until tele kicks in, but you won't be able to see new bad guys who have you in their LoS, it does nothing to protect you from magic damage, confuse, etc. You still have to crawl out of your shell after you teleport, so you won't even know if you're out of the woods for an additional turn after teleport works.

Situation Two: 1 bad guy, Hide in Shell, hope to out regen bad guys dps
Combined with good SH, you might be able to regen more hp than you lose, and thus after a couple turns, come back out and finish off the bad guy. A worse threat could come around the corner and annihilate you though.

Situation Three: No bad guys around, Hide in Shell for faster heal & lower turncount
This is the situation I see it being used most. And tbh, I think this is a good thing. It lowers food requirements due to lower turncount spent healing, it reduces piety decay for the same, and would save potions of !curing if you were poisoned and wanted to wait it out.

Situation Four: Move to Deep water, Hide in Shell, cheese heal
I don't see this as any different from running to a staircase and healing, in fact, I think this would be less of a problem because while there are always stairs, there is not always a source of deep water. You're also not protected from anything that can fly or also swim, ranged attacks can still get you, as can spells.

Potential abuses: Quaz + Hide in Shell
The sheer noise alone is going to draw something that can break through your defenses and destroy you, clouds killing bad guys won't be enough to save you from every monster in the level coming down on you. This'll work on popcorn, but any actual threat or OoD monster is going to stomp you into shards and goo. And let's be honest, if you die to popcorn, you did this to yourself.

Overall:
I think this species would be interesting and provide different playstyle options the same way that Gr does. I would also like to play a species that has neat SH options, as I think there is the potential for some neat interactions. (Really high SH with Quaz and a large shield, amulet of reflection and high SH, and stuff like that)

Thoughts?

[Rast]

Thematically, a turtle shell is more like full armor than like a shield.

[kuniqs]

I'm afraid you misunderstood how LOS works in this game...

[phloomp]

I'm afraid you misunderstood how LOS works in this game...

Au contraire, OP was careful to say "vision radius", not LoS.

That said, casting blindly sounds as annoying as invisible monsters, so the range of all targetable effects should decrease to 1. Summons should not attack things you can't see even if they are in LoS. Starting to sound like a lot of work! But not a crazy idea.

[Deso]

Well the whole hide in shell passive could be done when you wait instead of being activated but then your effects wouldn't work... It could be simply be a mutation - "You develop a turtle-like shell"
Maybe removing body armor and shield slot but having AC and SH based on level would be more befiting - I think this is getting too similar to gargoyle and ogre.

--------------------
Tough this adds a good idea - What if waiting was a combat maneveur like full defense from GURPS or D&D.

[kuniqs]

"Vision radius" and LoS are one and the same. I think you'd have to code this "vision radius" in the game as a Turtlekin-specific thing, which opens a can of worms.

About the race: I see a Gargoyle who switches AC bonuses for SH ones. You get a nasty vulnerability, a marginal resistance, and Dex/Dodging penalties pretty much make them a Troll equipped with a shield instead of claws. SH is nowhere near as important as AC/EV, many things deal tons of damage and ignore SH entirely (think ice drakes in Lair, and that's just the beginning). Also please drop this 1-tile LoS shellform - not being able to move is a serious enough penalty.

Personally, I'd like a giant species that is not equipment constricted. A species which has, say, innate -ER mutations (think Goliath) and can wear every body armour (auxilary slots can be unavaliable) - good with armour without necessarily having an Armour aptitude. I just hate finding 90% of the armour loot I can't use.

[duvessa]

quit stealing ideas from tome

[kuniqs]

BTW. Aren't Formicids supposed to be a turtlesque race?

[Quazifuji]

I'm really not a fan of this at all. It has two main gimmicks, and I don't like either. Ultimately, I think this race would feel like a character who's extremely vulnerable to being attacked by multiple enemies at once and tries to make up for that by using extremely tedious hide-in-shell tactics. And that doesn't really sound like any fun to me.

Innate Shield, but Large and with a Deformed Body: In my personal opinion, trading one defense for another usually isn't super interesting. Usually, things just balance out one way or another depending on the numbers (for example, Gargoyles have high AC but low HP, but usually they just feel tanky). SH is more interesting in theory because it's bad against multiple enemies, so Turtlekin would feel super squishy against groups even if they felt tanky against single enemies, but I don't think that's interesting because the game already heavily encourages trying to fight one enemy at a time anyway.

Hide In Shell: You list five possible use cases for this ability, and literally every single one is terrible from a game design standpoint. In other words, I think the five situations you listed are all strong arguments against ever implementing the ability, not for it.

Situation one is boring. Trying to pick the best action for survival every turn while waiting for TP to kick in is a lot more interesting than hiding in your shell and hoping for the best.

Situation two is like pillar dancing, except situational but better in the cases where it works. There have been actions taken in the past, and discussions of further actions, to make pillar dancing less reliable, because it's tedious and uninteresting, so I don't think having an ability that simulated pillar dancing is good.

Situation three is pure tedium. There have been efforts specifically to reduce the amount of abilities that let you speed up out-of-combat resting because it's considered optimal tedium (press extra buttons for a small reduction to piety loss, hunger, and risk of monsters approaching when resting). This situation is the strongest argument against the ability's existence, in my opinion.

Situation four is also boring. Situation five is extremely problematic if it works and irrelevant if it doesn't.

And, on top of all of that, the ability would introduce asymmetrical vision to the game. This is a potentially massive coding headache (not sure, not familiar with the game's vision code), but it also increases the learning curve by adding an exception to an otherwise strict rule: "LOS is always symmetrical in DCSS" becomes "LOS is always symmetrical in DCSS, except for the Turtlekin's Hide in Shell ability." Some mechanics are cool enough to be worth adding exceptions like this, but not only do I think hide in shell isn't cool enough to be worth it, as I already explained it introduces so many cases of optimal tedium it might be bad for the game even if it didn't include the addition of asymmetrical vision.

[Quazifuji]

BTW. Aren't Formicids supposed to be a turtlesque race?

Formicids are ant people.

[Elitist]

BTW. Aren't Formicids supposed to be a turtlesque race?

Formicids are ant people.

They mean turtle in the context of "defense oriented".

[jwoodward48ss]

Also, "press a-a to regen faster" for a race gimmick is awful.

[sanka]

Can crawl inside its shell

I thought that the mechanic will be that it can start a new crawl inside its shell. If she wins, than she heals 10*number of runes hp, and comes out from the shell the same turn it went in. Of course she is still a turle in the inside crawl game, so she can start a new crawl inside its shell again.

[njvack]

The big question for me is: which shell? bash would be familiar to a lot of people but it's kind of awful, tcsh is a little better but much more esoteric. And for Windows builds would players get PowerShell?

I guess it could be ssh, and give extra defense against hacking-type weapons?

[chequers]

SSH isn't a shell.

[ZipZipskins]

Can crawl inside its shell

I thought that the mechanic will be that it can start a new crawl inside its shell. If she wins, than she heals 10*number of runes hp, and comes out from the shell the same turn it went in. Of course she is still a turle in the inside crawl game, so she can start a new crawl inside its shell again.

yo dawg i heard you like crawl

[Siegurt]

Can crawl inside its shell

I thought that the mechanic will be that it can start a new crawl inside its shell. If she wins, than she heals 10*number of runes hp, and comes out from the shell the same turn it went in. Of course she is still a turle in the inside crawl game, so she can start a new crawl inside its shell again.

Ah shahrazad, the most elegantly awful game design idea ever..

[infinitevox]

Can crawl inside its shell

I thought that the mechanic will be that it can start a new crawl inside its shell. If she wins, than she heals 10*number of runes hp, and comes out from the shell the same turn it went in. Of course she is still a turle in the inside crawl game, so she can start a new crawl inside its shell again.

Ah shahrazad, the most elegantly awful game design idea ever..

So elegantly awful, they paid homage to it with Karn!

[Zooty]

Can crawl inside its shell

I thought that the mechanic will be that it can start a new crawl inside its shell. If she wins, than she heals 10*number of runes hp, and comes out from the shell the same turn it went in. Of course she is still a turle in the inside crawl game, so she can start a new crawl inside its shell again.

It's turtles all the way down.