Ideas

You could have the petrification also deal damage to the affected body part, as you are moving while the petrification happens, it doesn't become perfectly smooth stone, but gets full of little cracks and tears before it's fully formed. Or something like that.
A medusa could have the same petrification effect on your whole body at once.
You could also have the effect work slowly, so that after the gaze, you start losing dex and agi (and cha?) (but gain a bit of end) until you get healed. If you don't get healed, and one of your stats reaches 0, you petrify into a statue completely. Or you can combine the two, and when your dex gets at a certain threshold, your arms CM into stone, agi for your legs, cha for the rest of your body, and if you're all stone you petrify.

http://nwn.wikia.com/wiki/Cockatrice

For anyone that doesn't really know what a Cockatrice is...
I only know it because it appeared in the game neverwinter nights.

although you never faced it early in the game..

Oh, the Wikipedia definition has the petrification happen through gaze, touch or breath, not bite.
Also of interest might be the next sentence in the article:
So, using cockatrice heads as a weapon?

What if the cockatrice's drops its head as an item and the player can use it like the holy banana?
Zap like 3-5 times before..."The cockatrice's glowing eyes stop glowing"...allowing the player to then eat it....for hunger or maybe an effect?




FEAR THY HANDFUL OF COCK
GAZE UPON IT!!!GO ON!! LOOK AT IT!!

I pretty much like the way they are in NetHack:

http://nethack.wikia.com/wiki/Cockatrice


And after all, pecking/biting does mean they have to touch you.

For me, the petrifying gaze thing is more for Medusa than cockatrice, but that's mainly because of hours of NetHack.

Still, it would be cool if her peck wasn't instakill here, the material changing possibility sounds very interesting and would differ nicely from all other games I know.

Gender -based ideas from the shoutbox and my magnificent mind:

- If we don't want misogyny in IVAN
* We might have to review the existing female characters as well (priestess of Silva, angels (?), mistresses, Sherarax...)
* Distinguishing sex when wearing armor becomes difficult -> long hair for woman PC should be visible under helmets

- Spells, god effects etc. to change sex during the game
* 3rd genderless gender, eunuch. Cannot be cured, severely limiting, hard to obtain, needed for just one thing to make it worthwhile. Maybe a special victory

- I'm thinking sex should change the game in more ways than appearance
* Female characters might train different stats better than male, for example.
* NPC's could react differently to male and female characters
* A female only dungeon of misogyny

EDIT: Added an important word, 'if'...

No. No no no. If we all decide that the females are "in poor taste" and need give them more modest clothes, or god forbid spare the women and children from dismemberment, then I'm leaving the community forever. IVAN doesn't need the only thing it takes seriously to be that.

For the record.

Wouldn't distinguishing sex below full body armor only serve to walk the line of misogyny anyways? Female PCs are fine, but it should consist solely of separate player sprites, with no other major changes (only pronouns used by NPCs and such, maybe some alternate dialog).

In any case I'm completely with Somagu.

On second thought, I'm staying out of this discussion entirely.

To clarify a bit, I'm not saying the female armors should be skimpy or fantasy-like, as it were. (Not that I would mind, but that's completely besides the point) I wouldn't have said anything to begin with, but most of the NPCs you mentioned were the ones with skimpy clothes.

IVAN is already full of inappropriate humor, but the even more pressing thing to me here is that it all makes sense in context. "Fixing" the problem by giving them more modest clothes seems poorly thought through, and more like being sensible for the sake of making the game more sensible, rather than addressing a serious issue. The game is obviously tongue firmly in cheek, and I think changing the mistresses makes for an odd and out-of-place moment of mixed intentions. The next thing we know, the banana grower encourager does not whip people anymore because somebody thinks it sends a racist message.

Hopefully, I've simply read too much into that little statement, but this is the way I feel about it, anyway.

OK. We're moving this conversation about genders to the thread 4zb4 made. It is here.

The bare-hands doctor from (C)LIVAN claims he was the one who made the eunuch guard... well, eunuch. Maybe there could be some special NPC doctor who could castrate you as a reward for a quest?

=P And maybe Legifer or some other badass deity could grow you some balls if you pray for them... =D

Or... well we could make it so you can (a)pply nuts?

Then death/victory summaries could tell you how many testicles you had when you died/won.

IvanGuy, became the new 15-testicled high priest of the Great Frog

So we can lost balls upon taking a groin scar?

Yep, and the character would drop a nut onto the floor. It would be surprisingly easy to code.

But... Can you make it so that it only happens twice? It'd be weird to lose the 3rd nut.

Or at least as many times as you have applied nuts.
That should be easy enough to code too, just got to check if the player's nut counter is > 0 when you receive a groin scar.

Hey an ideas thread!

I figured out it is currently not possible to dip a bear-trap in a bottle of poison. Might we add this feature to a next release?

Does anyone else think there should be a special easter egg reward for making Attnam's smith lose his hammer and have the player somehow make him take up a lightning hammer and begin smithing again?

As it is, it is incredibly difficult to make him lose his hammer without making him hostile, let alone make him take up a lightning hammer to begin smithing again. I feel like there should be a little somethin'-somethin' as a reward for going through all that effort. And besides if he's repairing things with a lightning hammer that has to do SOMETHING right?
...well maybe he'll just explode his workshop in a giant thunderclap but hey I'll have it.

... Thor?

I also feel it is important that we add nutrition values to ALL materials, given that the way eating works in IVAN it is technically possible to eat anything you can put in your inventory.
Even though I can't think of anything off the top of my head in the game that eats rocks, the functionality and nutrition gain should be there for future use.

This would be a simple script edit but we would have to put our heads together to think of what nutrition value every single material should have.

In addition, golems should be able to eat materials of which they are made and repair themselves in this way.

+1

Hey, now there's an idea. That'd give you a reason to use the weaker, common material golems.