Tuesday, 15th February 2011, 04:32 by mageykun
I have mixed feeling about bones. (This part is about nethack. If you don't care, don't read).
On the one hand- it's fun. You can tell pretty quickly when you find a bones level because of the messed up level gen- so you're instantly on the alert for whatever killed your predecessor. It can be challenging or interesting to overcome how the dead guy messed up the level (like rebuilding a broken temple, or a looted stash. Or finding a damaged shop, with angered shop-keep. Or a level with way too much digging). And I enjoy the identification minigame- especially in early bones (< ~D10), weighing the potential worth of unknown items against the significant risk of curses. I also like the forensic aspect- determining class, build, and trying to determine what they were up to (especially in the aforementioned damaged levels).
Keeping levels interesting maters with nethack's repetitive floor gen. Hearse helped keep it interesting.
Bones are also the best way to get Magicbane. Nearly every wizard corpse has one, and that little thing is awesome.
Later bones are boring, and pretty much serve only to provide a little boost to score- some more gems and gold to throw in your bag of holding, maybe another artifact for the list. Not that I mind collecting, but eh.
Bad bones are when you show up in minetown and find 20 corpses of the same guy, and the equivalent of 3 ascension kits stashed away. There's nothing to do but ragequit in disgust of save scumming contamination. If I wanted that, I'd mess up the game myself. >: (
...I'm not going to complain about the freak early demon lords because I've summoned them often enough myself. My chaotic characters do tend to get a little altar happy, and there's nothing like deliberately summoning and then cheap killing old Juiby with a wand of digging.
(This bit is directly relevant to crawl).
That said, I don't believe bones in crawl should supply character loot. A gravestone, telling you how the player died, could be flavorful and interesting though. Occasional mundane loot could be flavorful. An offering of a few arrows before an archer grave, an unadorned sword standing before the marker of a fallen knight. We don't have flowers as items, but we could make a few grave vaults. A grave with flowers. A dark lonely grave. A desecrated grave. We could have vaults for gravestones of specific races/jobs/religions. A shrine to a fallen paladin, a necromancer's crypt, a Fedoras-ite's tree, the blasted grave of someone under penance, a stonehewn dwarven marker, a temple of spriggan druids to honor one of their kindred? I'm thinking small sized vaults, around the size of overflow altars, mostly without loot and monsters. Maybe a few medium sized ones- ramp up from one grave to a graveyard- idilic with flowers, or abandoned with zombies. It would leave some interesting scenery to make up for the horrible player ghosts.
- For this message the author mageykun has received thanks:
- Stormlock