Twisted Resurrection encourages tedious play


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Temple Termagant

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Post Sunday, 17th December 2017, 16:18

Twisted Resurrection encourages tedious play

Twisted Resurrection (the deep elf death mage version, not the former player spell) encourages tedious play -- namely, the practice of butchering every single corpse in any level where a deep elf death mage may spawn. Butchering all corpses prevents Twisted Resurrection from having targets to reanimate into abominations.

There are two solutions to this that spring to my mind:

1) create a fourth confirm_butcher option "all" which causes all corpses in a space to automatically be butchered with no prompt. This in tandem with auto_butcher allows for autoexplore to solve the problem and remove the tedium.

2) allow Twisted Resurrection to work on chunks/skeletons as well as corpses.

These two solutions are not mutually exclusive.

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Post Sunday, 17th December 2017, 18:56

Re: Twisted Resurrection encourages tedious play

Even if I grant the premise, both of those options are inferior to removing the spell.

If there's a confirm_butcher setting specifically to neuter the spell then why bother having the spell at all? It also leaves in stupid shit like butchering corpses with a mummy. Letting the spell work on chunks doesn't matter because you can pick up the chunks. Letting it work on skeletons makes casting animate skeleton on every corpse optimal for characters without animate dead, which is almost as bad as the status quo (though really this is a problem with animate skeleton). Given that twisted resurrection is almost never dangerous (in my experience) even when you make no effort to play around it, I think removal is the best option here.

Imo give deep elf death mages agony as a replacement. I don't think deep elf high priests need a replacement spell.

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Post Monday, 18th December 2017, 13:18

Re: Twisted Resurrection encourages tedious play

The _vast_ majority of times I have had this spell used against me, has been while I was engaged with multiple enemies. Stopping to butcher a corpse during a firefight isn't exactly a realistic option... If its otherwise an instance of killing a single monster, the mage walks into LoS and raises the corpse, well, it's not like it's the end of the world to kill the mage and then kill the abomination. Not really seeing the mass pull towards tedium here.

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Monday, 18th December 2017, 13:27

Re: Twisted Resurrection encourages tedious play

OP has good reasons to remove the spell yet in my last game I was blocked by those abominations in corridor which led to Elf 3 loot area so I couldn't attack other monsters which kept smiting and tormenting me (Animate Dead didn't generate in that game).

I think Twisted Resurrection is aimed to prevent killholes from being too powerful (if power of abomination depends on number of corpses in the tile).
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Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Monday, 18th December 2017, 16:42

Re: Twisted Resurrection encourages tedious play

The situation in your anecdote would've been prevented by using a killhole, though???

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Monday, 18th December 2017, 17:23

Re: Twisted Resurrection encourages tedious play

Last sentence of my post shows that I have no idea how Twisted Resurrection works in killhole. Can it be cast at the tile where the monster stands so the abomination(s) appear(s) in adjacent tiles?
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Post Monday, 18th December 2017, 20:14

Re: Twisted Resurrection encourages tedious play

Personally, I'm pretty convinced that if abominations actually constitute a legitimate threat, you probably shouldn't be in elf to begin with. Far from encouraging you to butcher corpses to deprive elves of corpses to cast twisted resurrection on, I would rather the elves cast twisted resurrection over almost any other action in their arsenal, having useless fodder between the actually dangerous things and me, means that many less dangerous attacks I have to deal with. Additionally, spending turns butchering corpses during combat is a far worse use of your time than pretty much any other action, and if you aren't in combat, then who cares? It's not like Death mages go around avoiding you and scouring the level for corpses they could use to accumulate a gigantic abomination army so they can then track you down with it and kill you.

While it *would* be tedious to butcher every corpse if it was optimal, I disagree that doing so is encouraged.

If you'd like to suggest that elves need a buff, and aren't dangerous enough, that'd be a reason to get rid of the spell.
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Tartarus Sorceror

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Post Monday, 18th December 2017, 20:44

Re: Twisted Resurrection encourages tedious play

For me this spell is mostly inconsequential scenery. I often don't even notice the little crawling things.
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Barkeep

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Post Tuesday, 19th December 2017, 15:45

Re: Twisted Resurrection encourages tedious play

Yeah, TR's main function has been to deny me blademaster zombies. It would be a more threatening spell if it spawned earlier (when abominations mattered more) but that still doesn't address OP's point; using corpses as monster spell reagents probably inherently encourages tedious behavior. TR would be mechanically better (though not very interesting) as a straight summon.

What if TR instead used *monsters* as reagents? Like, several lower-HD monsters would merge into one higher-HD one — say, an ogre mage could merge the other ogres in a pack into something that hit as hard as an ettin?
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Temple Termagant

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Post Thursday, 21st December 2017, 01:09

Re: Twisted Resurrection encourages tedious play

How did people possibly think I was talking about butchering corpses DURING combat? That's obviously stupid.

Aside from that, some good points and ideas raised in this thread. It does seems like drastically changing how the spell works or removing it altogether is probably the best decision, design-wise. It would probably be somewhat unreasonable for the spell to be able to turn chunks in the player's inventory into monsters, wouldn't it?

If the goal of the spell is to block the player from running away, there are probably better ways to accomplish that than raising un-butchered corpses. Casting Slow on the player would be a more intuitive way of showing players the real goal of the spell, but that seems to me like it would generally be significantly more threatening than Twisted Resurrection is currently. I dunno.

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Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Thursday, 21st December 2017, 07:53

Re: Twisted Resurrection encourages tedious play

What if it worked like death channel, so you get a status effect? When you kill monsters under this status, the corpses start to crawl.
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Post Thursday, 21st December 2017, 09:19

Re: Twisted Resurrection encourages tedious play

A very similar spell exist - the one of necromancer that creates simulacra of dead buddies - and actually is never seriously threatening.
From what I get you're proposing a hex on the player, but for sake of simplicity I wouldn't add another weird effect on a rare monster in a branch already containing 356356 different single weird thing not showing everything else.

That said I don't think a spell like that would be more dangerous of the actual one - if somehow death mage needs another spell agony or slow or whatever has already suggested is good, or just remove it as that would actually increase his dangerousness overall
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Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Thursday, 21st December 2017, 10:22

Re: Twisted Resurrection encourages tedious play

Actually, this could be better as a portal vault. "Cursed Graveyard" or "Pet Cemetary" or something which contains living monsters but then everything killed turns into crawling corpses...
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Post Thursday, 21st December 2017, 17:48

Re: Twisted Resurrection encourages tedious play

Chish wrote:How did people possibly think I was talking about butchering corpses DURING combat? That's obviously stupid.

Well, if combat is over, how is there a DEDM to cast twisted resurrection there? I mean I seriously don't understand, are you suggesting that it's optimal to butcher all corpses on those levels in order to avoid the possibility of a death mage wandering on screen while you happen to be standing around next to the corpses, while you're like resting or something? I mean If that's your concern why would you just not rest with corpses in LOS, just walk a couple steps back into cleared areas (which is optimal anyway, you shouldn't be resting where you just killed a bunch of stuff for noise reasons). It's not like DEDM can cast Twisted resurrection while you aren't in LOS.

I'm seriously not understanding what situation you are talking about in which it is optimal to butcher corpses that isn't "in combat" if you aren't in combat, then there's no monsters around to cast the spell, so it doesn't matter if you butcher the corpses or not.

Also there's two contradicting things in this thread:

1. It's claimed that it's optimal to prevent DEDM from having the ability to cast TR
2. It's claimed that TR is a sub-optimal action for DEDM, therefore you'd want them to cast it as many times as possible (over and above the other sorts of things they could do to you)

I assume that you disagree with 2. because if you agree with 2. that invalidates 1. which appears to be your premise (at least as I interpret it).

*but* if we assume that 1 is true and 2 is false, then it's more easily and less tediously accomplished out of combat by simply not standing around and waiting for DEDM to appear while standing next to corpses. I guess maybe if you have a particularly nice tactical area that you'd like to re-use and you don't need to rest then butchering corpses is faster than waiting for them to decay(?) Is that the crux of your argument here? That you've created or found killing zones that are helpful for luring large number of elves to, but in order to re-use them, it's optimal (presuming that it is, in fact, optimal to not let DEDM cast TR) to butcher the corpses to re-use that zone more quickly?
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Barkeep

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Post Thursday, 21st December 2017, 21:01

Re: Twisted Resurrection encourages tedious play

My take on the OP was that TR makes it bad to rest near corpses, or leave them anywhere you might lure a death mage to — if you have a killhole, you might want to butcher all the corpses on the killing square before going off to find monsters to lure back. Killholes are in principle about the least annoying case; if you're killing monsters with ranged attacks you might want to chop all your corpses before luring more monsters to the area.

I think that whether TR is a strong or weak action for a DEDM to take, it is silly that a monster spell can be manipulated this way.

There's also the "TR is a spell with a lot of mechanical complexity (there is an entire monster type used for this one purpose) that like two monsters cast and it's not very important when they do cast it" which is in contrast with "crawling corpses are kind of cool" so yeah.
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