dpeg wrote:It is absolutely fine to have "soft" DS mutations, like now. Powered by Pain/Death or Horns, Hooves etc. make excellent flavour, even if they change gameplay only a little bit.
For deeper changes of the game plan it would suffice to have just a few drastic DS mutations. We can use this space to mention ideas freely. Most likely, nothing will come of it, but just maybe we'll produce a keeper, and we will never know if we don't try.
Now that we have this conclusion on the 'why' side of the issue, it's open season for the 'how' side - i.e. time for idea brainstorm spam.
Stating also those ideas in the OP:
- You can no longer eat any food, you instead get nutrition by killing things (be it living, demonic, holy and maybe even undead).
- You can no longer eat any food, you instead get nutrition by eating magic items (wand charges, pluses on equipment, misc. items).
- You no longer naturally regenerate mp, you must consume magic items to reload it (excellent for 'sustained burst damage' but you'd normally melee threats).
- Sixfirhy mode! You get X moves at super fast speed then have a long delay where you stand still doing nothing. NOT a passive feature - you must activate it and it will give you Y cycles of Sixfirhy-ness.
- Fiend form! For a maxHP + maxMP price, you can temporarily assume the form of a Fiend. Complete with torment immunity and ability to cast torment.
- Self-flamethrower, for use with ignite blood: you spend some HP to shoot a spray of your blood that immediately ignites. This effectively means you have a "Bolt of Conjure Flame" up to say, range 3: every tile that the 'bolt' travels through gets a flame cloud.
- Self-spine shooter, for use with spiny: you spend some HP to shoot one of your body spikes at the target. In essence, casting Iron Shot for HP
but only if you aren't wearing any body armour. Maybe make the "no body armour" part mandatory if you have this mutation, and give innate +AC or +maxHP in exchange.
- Drain magic! Target spellcaster is hit with an anti-magic attack and you get to reload some MP. HD resisted. Now you too can be like a Neqoxec and feed on brains!
- Distortion overmode! Activate to get the following bundle of effects: distortion-branded FISTS (i.e. useless if you have a weapon), -cTele, blinkitis, auto-recasting lesser-Disjunction (because normally a blink cancels Disjunction early). 'Lesser' because otherwise there'd be no point in having those distortion fists as nothing would stay in melee range long.
- Breathe Mutagen! You breathe polymorph clouds.
And then a longer one: Adaptive Temperature (partially inspired by Lava Orc).
* No, you cannot enter lava.
* You have a temperature gauge that moves up or down depending on how much fire/cold damage you took.
* Higher notches on the temperature gauge act like multiple, innate rings of fire/ice. For example, at maximum hot temperature you get rF+++, rC---, x3 enchancers to fire magic, x3 dampeners to ice magic.
* Optional: you cannot USE your scrolls/potions at maximum hot/cold temperature. You do NOT DESTROY your own consumables but you are suppressed from using them until your temperature gets less intense.
* The temperature gauge rapidly falls back to neutral so you'll only have the effects of extreme temperature for the battle which induced that temperature change.