galehar wrote:[*]It limits us to -30%/+30% range. Currently, felids are -45% and trolls +34%.
I think you miss the point that my suggestion was trying to address.
Trolls are only +34% hp over humans at 0 fighting. If both the human and the troll train up to 27 fighting, this advantage shrinks to 15%. Similarly, the penalty for being felid or deep elf shrinks dramatically as they train fighting. Eventually racial hit points are a less than half of most races' total.
The significant point in my suggestion is that the race modifier goes AFTER fighting is applied, not before. The frail and robust mutations are an existing system that already does exactly that. Whether you expand the existing system or create a new system that has the same functionality is a judgment call for the person coding the change.
galehar wrote:[*]It limits us to just 7 scales for our 24 races.
Aptitudes were shrunk to a coarser scale, too, and only having 9 possible aptitude levels didn't seem to damage the skill system any.
galehar wrote:[*]It overlaps with the mutations.
Yes, just like all the other racial differences, like troll hunger and regeneration, or claws and teeth.
galehar wrote:[*]To conclude, it brings many limitations and some complications and doesn't offer anything. Also, it doesn't address the problem of the bonus from fighting which is actually the one we are trying to solve here.
It does address the bonus from fighting. Frail or robust gives you a modification to your fighting hp as well as your racial hp, because it applies at the end after everything else has been calculated.
galehar wrote:[*]Base the fighting bonus on the racial HP. Frail races gain less from fighting, so they won't bother training it if they are pure casters.
This is functionally identical to my suggestion.
galehar wrote:Great, now we have to change the mutation system to allow ones with more than 3 levels. What's the point of designing it as a mutation? It's just more work to code and is completely useless. Can we focus on the fighting bonus instead?
First off, there are already existing mutations that have more levels than 3. The +stat mutations go up to eight. Second, there's no actual reason that the game needs to give a bonus or penalty to hp more finely than increments of 10%. Does anyone care that a 25th-level grunge elf has 2hp more than a 25th-level eager elf?
Felid doesn't actually have a 45% penalty to hit points, because those felids all train fighting.
danr wrote:I'd put a refinement on the proposal though. The starting point for racial HP should be character size - that's what actually determines how much bulk is there to absorb blows, missiles, etc. Then you can adjust that up and down with the frail / robust intrinsics.
I know there's some support for linking various statistics to size, but I'd be very cautious about that. Making lots of regularly used statistics infer their value from other statistics can cause a lot of unpredictable knock-on effects down the line if those other statistics need to be changed for some reason.
Simplest way to put hp where you want it is to slap on a multiplier and call it a day. No change elsewhere in the monster-sized program that is Crawl can possibly mess with your setup, and if you decide you need to change it again it will be a simple matter of swapping out some variables. The number of races is unlikely to reach such high numbers that increased efficiency from inferred variables will eclipse the readability of the code in value.
danr wrote:Str makes the most sense as the factor to add in, because that is already a pre-existing difference between backgrounds. So the DEWz with Str 5 or whatever and the MiFi with Str 20 would have very different HP.
This also has the consequence that the game will actively resist attempts to create a race with low strength paired with high health or high strength paired with low health. It is open to question whether you'd ever want to do this, and if you don't then this is no problem. On the other hand, the current system has ogres who are good spellcasters but bad at every particular school of magic, so odd combinations like that aren't exactly without precedent.
MrMisterMonkey wrote:(hp gain from fighting is already lower for felids)
Is it? Then just extend that to all the races, putting their hp wherever you want them to be. Using frail and robust is more transparent, if transparency is desired, but fundamentally both solutions are the same.