Playable Species Suggestion: Slime


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Dungeon Dilettante

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Post Sunday, 29th January 2017, 18:42

Playable Species Suggestion: Slime

Newbie here. Wanted to submit an idea for a new species: the Slime.
*edited: the niche, some minor changes*

*I noticed that while playing DCSS you find a lot of items, but most of those items will not be used at all! This may not look a big deal at first, but moving on you will find yourself clearing a branch dungeon (with all the risks involved) and find stuff that you cannot really use.
The Slime is thought in order to use at full all the loot the dungeon has to offer. Of course it will do this in its own unique way.
I realize that Jiyva's jellies occupy this niche too, but they do this in a less efficient way by eating stuff while you are engorged and at max piety. Quite a waste of items!*


"A sentient slime created by a mad alchemist for a project on "smart garbage disposal". Having disposed of its own creator, ended up in the dungeon while traveling in search the meaning of its own existence"


Innate Abilities

-Having no real shape, the slime cannot wear anything (no armor, no jewelery)
-The slime has pseudopods equivalent to Pseudopods 2
-the slime pseudopods are barely enough to draw cards, evoke items and wield ammunitions (for Sticks to snakes and Sandblast), therefore it cannot wield weapons, throw items, or evoke rods and magical staves
-Gelatinous Body 3
-Acidic Melee Attacks
-Acidic Flesh
-Unbreathing
-Cannot memorize any spells that require wielding a weapon: Warp Weapon, Excruciating Wounds, Portal Projectile, Sure Blade
-Cannot memorize: Beastly Appendange, Blade Hands
-Cannot gain mutations that require a body with a shape: Fangs, Beak, Claws, Horns, Hooves, Talons, Fur, Antennae, all Scales (except Repulsion Field), Deformed.
-Jellies monsters are Neutral towards the Slime *on a second thought this not necessary and a bit overpowered*
-The slime gains piety 2x faster while worshiping Jiyva the Shapeless but also get 2x punishment
-Can eat items and cannot gain Carnivorous and Herbivore mutations (see the Tricky Part paragraph)

Base attributes: 3 strength, 8 intelligence, 6 dexterity.
The Slime is basically a living rubbish bin, so it shouldn't be particularly strong except for having human intelligence.


The Tricky Part

The Slime gains xp by eating but not by killing. Xp goes up along with nutrition points (e.g. xp gained = 1/10 Nutrition Points gained)
Can eat while engorged.
Meat Chunks give normal nutrition points and mutagenic chunks still have their mutagenic effect.
Eating items: it would be cool if rarer/stronger items gave more nutrition. The base nutrition should be higher than the one granted by Jiyva's jellies anyway (see the In Game Effects paragraph).
From level 5 spawns an ally jelly (level dependent maybe?) when eating while engorged. If attacked it will fight Back!
Attacking a jelly in the Slime Pits will turn ALL the branch's jellies hostile!



Level Bonuses

+1 strength or intelligence or dexterity (equal chance) every 5th level.
+6 magic resistance per level.
level 5: gain the spawn jelly by eating Effect
every 3 levels: gain a random good mutation

Skills and equipment:

receive the skills but not the equipment listed for their background
Any background that starts with a weapon skill gives them Unarmed Combat instead
Any Armour skill is replaced with Dodging


Skills aptitudes:

No weapon skills, no throwing. 0 in fighting, unarmed combat, dodge, stealth, invocations. +4 transmutations. +3 Poison magic. -1 everything else.



In Game Effects

The Slime is lacking in the defense department since it cannot wear armor and neither jewelery. Its shapeless nature can still give it a backup by gaining new mutations and actively shape-shifting into stronger creatures (transmutations).

Following Jiyva: the shapeless god will obviously be overjoyed to be worshiped by another sentient slime (since the only other one is TRJ) but will also take greater offense by your betrayal. Actually, following Jiyva may not be the best choice: its jellies will eat the items in the dungeon giving you passive nutrition and xp, but you will gain less xp than you would have gained by eating those items by your own!

A similar problem: leveling up quickly and spawn jellies or take it slowly? When you expect trouble you can overeat for spawning allies and leveling up! But the spawned jellies will eat the stuff you need for xp! Better keep your growth slow (good luck with that if you get slow metabolism :mrgreen: ).


Any thoughts are welcome.
Last edited by FelidSlime on Monday, 30th January 2017, 18:41, edited 1 time in total.

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Sar

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Post Sunday, 29th January 2017, 19:48

Re: Playable Species Suggestion: Slime

This race exists. It's called worshipping Jivya.

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Midn8, papilio

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Post Sunday, 29th January 2017, 20:44

Re: Playable Species Suggestion: Slime

lethediver wrote:This race exists. It's called worshipping Jivya.


This, sadly, is 100% true. The reason it is sad is because you can almost never worship jiyva.
I'm with tasonir on this one.
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Shoals Surfer

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Post Sunday, 29th January 2017, 21:09

Re: Playable Species Suggestion: Slime

Not really the same as playing jiyva.

- You get mutations. This should perhaps be replaced with some other mechanic or improved. But I do see the need for it, since it would be your only reliable source of resistances.
- You spawn a jelly. Not when hit but when you eat.
- The no weapons/armour/jewellery and the other gimmicks are kinda new.

It probably should hoover up the corpses/items automatically and without taking extra turns, just by walking over them. Otherwise someone will say it's tedious.
I wouldn't mind playing it as a challenge race.
make food great again

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FelidSlime

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Post Sunday, 29th January 2017, 22:54

Re: Playable Species Suggestion: Slime

No objective stated, just a bunch of detail. OP, start with saying why you feel this race is necessary. What empty MECHANICAL niche does it seek to occupy?

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duvessa, FelidSlime

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Post Sunday, 29th January 2017, 23:26

Re: Playable Species Suggestion: Slime

We already have two species with "needs to press c/e a lot" - troll+ghoul. I'd play it once, but never again because having to eat AALL THE TIME is so freaking annoying.

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Post Monday, 30th January 2017, 00:15

Re: Playable Species Suggestion: Slime

I think I agree with the other posters mostly, but to try to give a bit more information to the OP about the flaws of this design, since he/she is new.

There are two main components to this race: The long list of innate mutations, and the gimmick of getting XP through eating instead of killing. Both of these are extremely flawed, for different reasons.

Innate Mutations: This will be extremely similar to playing a Felid of Jiyva. There are some differences (more health, more mutations, no jewelry), but I don't think they're enough.

XP through eating: Most of the time, this wouldn't really change anything, since you get the most things to eat by killing enemies and eating their corpses and items. Ultimately, I think this would have two main effects: the race's experience would vary a lot more than usual from branch to branch (which doesn't sound interesting to me), and the race has to spend a lot of time pressing "c" and "e" all over the place (which is just awful).

The "eating stronger items gives more experience" concept sounds like it would create interesting situations in theory, but Nemelex used to have a similar system for piety (you got piety by sacrificing items, more piety for rarer items) and it was actually pretty awful in practice. Basically, you're not going to use 99% of the items in the game anyway, so you had more than enough piety just by sacrificing every item you didn't use and it never created an interesting decision where you had to decide whether you wanted to use a item or sacrifice it for piety and it mostly just meant having to run around pressing 'p' all the time. Since this race can barely use any items anyway, it would only make that aspect stronger. So rather than having interesting decisions about whether you want to eat or use an item, you'd just end up eating nearly everything.

TL;DR: This race would play like a Felid of Jiyva with experience based on Nemelex's old piety mechanic. It's already possible to play a Felid of Jiyva, and Nemelex's old piety mechanic was awful and removed for good reason.

I'd like to offer constructed criticism, but that's hard because, as others have said, you haven't really said what you're trying to accomplish with this race. So all I can do is tell you why some of your ideas wouldn't work. If you can say what your goal is with this race, then I could try to give suggestions on how better to accomplish that goal, but as is, I don't think this race would work well at all. It would be extremely annoying to play without adding anything interesting or new to the game to make up for the tedium.

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bel, FelidSlime, pedritolo
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Post Monday, 30th January 2017, 11:15

Re: Playable Species Suggestion: Slime

Quazifuji wrote:I think I agree with the other posters mostly, but to try to give a bit more information to the OP about the flaws of this design, since he/she is new.

There are two main components to this race: The long list of innate mutations, and the gimmick of getting XP through eating instead of killing. Both of these are extremely flawed, for different reasons.

Innate Mutations: This will be extremely similar to playing a Felid of Jiyva. There are some differences (more health, more mutations, no jewelry), but I don't think they're enough.

XP through eating: Most of the time, this wouldn't really change anything, since you get the most things to eat by killing enemies and eating their corpses and items. Ultimately, I think this would have two main effects: the race's experience would vary a lot more than usual from branch to branch (which doesn't sound interesting to me), and the race has to spend a lot of time pressing "c" and "e" all over the place (which is just awful).

The "eating stronger items gives more experience" concept sounds like it would create interesting situations in theory, but Nemelex used to have a similar system for piety (you got piety by sacrificing items, more piety for rarer items) and it was actually pretty awful in practice. Basically, you're not going to use 99% of the items in the game anyway, so you had more than enough piety just by sacrificing every item you didn't use and it never created an interesting decision where you had to decide whether you wanted to use a item or sacrifice it for piety and it mostly just meant having to run around pressing 'p' all the time. Since this race can barely use any items anyway, it would only make that aspect stronger. So rather than having interesting decisions about whether you want to eat or use an item, you'd just end up eating nearly everything.

TL;DR: This race would play like a Felid of Jiyva with experience based on Nemelex's old piety mechanic. It's already possible to play a Felid of Jiyva, and Nemelex's old piety mechanic was awful and removed for good reason.

I'd like to offer constructed criticism, but that's hard because, as others have said, you haven't really said what you're trying to accomplish with this race. So all I can do is tell you why some of your ideas wouldn't work. If you can say what your goal is with this race, then I could try to give suggestions on how better to accomplish that goal, but as is, I don't think this race would work well at all. It would be extremely annoying to play without adding anything interesting or new to the game to make up for the tedium.



I love this kind of posts - informed, insightful and, most of all, polite (which is in short supply in this forum).
make food great again

bel

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Post Monday, 30th January 2017, 13:27

Re: Playable Species Suggestion: Slime

pedritolo wrote:I love this kind of posts - informed, insightful and, most of all, polite (which is in short supply in this forum).

I know of one site where the guideline is the following: "Your post has to be at least two of three things: kind, true or necessary". All three are desirable, of course, but people are people.

Dungeon Dilettante

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Joined: Sunday, 29th January 2017, 18:02

Post Monday, 30th January 2017, 19:15

Re: Playable Species Suggestion: Slime

Quazifuji wrote:I think I agree with the other posters mostly, but to try to give a bit more information to the OP about the flaws of this design, since he/she is new.

There are two main components to this race: The long list of innate mutations, and the gimmick of getting XP through eating instead of killing. Both of these are extremely flawed, for different reasons.

Innate Mutations: This will be extremely similar to playing a Felid of Jiyva. There are some differences (more health, more mutations, no jewelry), but I don't think they're enough.

XP through eating: Most of the time, this wouldn't really change anything, since you get the most things to eat by killing enemies and eating their corpses and items. Ultimately, I think this would have two main effects: the race's experience would vary a lot more than usual from branch to branch (which doesn't sound interesting to me), and the race has to spend a lot of time pressing "c" and "e" all over the place (which is just awful).

The "eating stronger items gives more experience" concept sounds like it would create interesting situations in theory, but Nemelex used to have a similar system for piety (you got piety by sacrificing items, more piety for rarer items) and it was actually pretty awful in practice. Basically, you're not going to use 99% of the items in the game anyway, so you had more than enough piety just by sacrificing every item you didn't use and it never created an interesting decision where you had to decide whether you wanted to use a item or sacrifice it for piety and it mostly just meant having to run around pressing 'p' all the time. Since this race can barely use any items anyway, it would only make that aspect stronger. So rather than having interesting decisions about whether you want to eat or use an item, you'd just end up eating nearly everything.

TL;DR: This race would play like a Felid of Jiyva with experience based on Nemelex's old piety mechanic. It's already possible to play a Felid of Jiyva, and Nemelex's old piety mechanic was awful and removed for good reason.

I'd like to offer constructed criticism, but that's hard because, as others have said, you haven't really said what you're trying to accomplish with this race. So all I can do is tell you why some of your ideas wouldn't work. If you can say what your goal is with this race, then I could try to give suggestions on how better to accomplish that goal, but as is, I don't think this race would work well at all. It would be extremely annoying to play without adding anything interesting or new to the game to make up for the tedium.


Now, this is what I call a good feedback! Thank you!

Similar to playing a Felid of Jiyva: this is exactly how I came up with the idea, I just felt it could be improved (but that's just my opinion)...

About the mutations: those are necessary. Without armor and jewelery, your defense would be paper thin with no mutations.

XP through eating: I did not know about Nemelex's old piety mechanic and I see your point about it. Yet, I'm not sure if it applies to the slime. Eating too quickly will make you lose potential xp because of the "spawn jelly by eating" effect: items don't get respawned and not all monsters give chunks.
At last,I don't see why the pressing "c/e" is considered so much annoying, probably I have not played long enough to find it boring :D.

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Post Monday, 30th January 2017, 22:54

Re: Playable Species Suggestion: Slime

FelidSlime wrote:About the mutations: those are necessary. Without armor and jewelery, your defense would be paper thin with no mutations.


Well, I was including the "no equipment" part on the list of mutations. Really, it's just that the general concept of "losing equipment slots but getting some innate bonuses to make up for them" has been done before on other races. This race takes the concept to an even further extreme than Felids, the current race with the most equipment restrictions, but I'm not sure if cutting out jewelry really adds much. In some ways, you could argue that it takes something away, since the items you find are one of the things thatdistinguish different DCSS runs, so by limiting their item use so severely you're limiting how different different run are likely to be.

XP through eating: I did not know about Nemelex's old piety mechanic and I see your point about it. Yet, I'm not sure if it applies to the slime. Eating too quickly will make you lose potential xp because of the "spawn jelly by eating" effect: items don't get respawned and not all monsters give chunks.


Wait, so do the ally jellies appear instead of giving experience, or in addition to it? If you get both, then that doesn't mitigate the effect at all.

If it's instead, then you face that problem that the engorged status can easily be removed by pressing 5 a bunch. So rather than creating a delicate balance like you seem to intend, I think this mechanic would mostly just encourage players to rest until they're no longer engorged between fights so that they can get XP from any chunks that drop, which doesn't sound like much fun at all. Ultimately, this feels like a mechanic that would encourage players to sort of metagame it rather than make difficult choices.

At last,I don't see why the pressing "c/e" is considered so much annoying, probably I have not played long enough to find it boring :D.


While some people maybe do get a bit too focused on minimizing button presses in this forum, overall chopping up corpses does add a lot of button presses that the game doesn't really need, and overall it slows down the pace of the game if you have to spend a few seconds running around chopping corpses and eating items every fight instead of continuing to explore and do things that are fun.

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