Werewolves, Vampires, Silver and Sunlight (and rot too)

I think this is a cool idea. Admittedly it plays into some fantasy tropes, but I personally am OK with that.

It might be interesting to add a high-level material akin to D&D adamant - that is, unbelievably strong, keeps an edge, but if exposed to sunlight it rapidly becomes brittle and weak (in-game: perhaps it starts to "rot"). Then, vampires would prefer this material for weapons and armor as they don't really go out in the sun anyways - and it would exaggerate their weaknesses if they did.

Speaking of "rot", currently it's a very linear thing: your ommel bone breastplate is fully functional right up until the moment it disintegrates. I would like to see this modified a bit - rotting items would become progressively less useful as they become more rotten. The simplest mechanic I can think of is a simple linear decay of material strength as a function of rot - something like

rotLevel = (itemAge / timeUntilRot)
itemStrength = materialStrength * (1-rotLevel)

which would cause, for example, an ommel bone helmet to decay from 100% AV to 0% AV as the item proceeds from brand new to completely rotten.
This does penalize the use of such items pretty heavily, so it might be reasonable to add an extra factor into the rotLevel calculation above - perhaps double timeUntilRot so that rotLevel goes from 0 -> 0.5, and an item of such a material will both lose usefulness slower and will never drop below 1/2 strength.

I echo your concerns that some of the changes being proposed are too closely aligned to mainstream Roguelike/D&D standards. Maybe make silver cause something akin to poison to vampires where by every so many turns they have a chance to take silver damage unless healed. Or make them aware of silver items and greatly increase your danger level in their eyes. They see you coming down the hall wearing silver armor dual wielding silver weapins and they run scared. Thats always my favorite moment when my late game char is super stacked and lower level monsters run in fear of me.

Make vampire bats able to steal light sources like magpies do, increasing the chance of you getting stuck in the dark and give vampires more damage or regenration or something when standing in the dark.

also i would like to see you lose you memory of the surronding area if you lose your light source in a dark area. right now its kind of silly, you can still see the walls and the marker where your player is so all you have to do is move back to a room, when in reality if you lost your lightsource in a subterranean maze it would be a lot harder to find your way back.

I've got to agree here; porting niche mechanics from nethack doesn't seem like a very interesting direction for IVAN development.
Awesome!
I don't think this would be a good idea. This is a turn-based game where the player can manually (if they really want) copy their map observations to paper or text. The game showing map memory onscreen is not just modelling the player character's memory, but also a courtesy to make playing IVAN less of a chore. Currently the map memory can be partially destroyed by taking a blow to the head, but this is rare and just a cosmetic effect - it's spread out, and doesn't affect your ability to navigate.
If the game has a mechanic that can wipe out map memory in an area, it's basically telling the player to spend time manually copying each level's map.

From the ideas thread:


This issue exists with any material we'd care to make a weapon from, it's one thing to add a special property to tin if it was planned by the original devs, but I don't think this is a viable direction to take the game in.

That sounds quite interesting. However, you would (probably) be able to get around that by putting the items into a chest.



These are not roguelike/D&D/NetHack standards. These come from the original mythology roguelikes/D&D/NetHack stole ideas from. Why do we even have vampires that suck your blood if we want unique and non-standard monsters?

Of course there will be some overlap, unless we want to make everything in the game completely unique, in which came it needs a complete overhaul and re-design to remove all the standard monsters aready in game. I don't want to go that route, because that brings us closer and closer to the terrible DCSS madness.


This souds great! I don't know about the regenerating-in-the-dark, but simply loosing your light source is good and dangerous attack.

About the minor special properties, do you really think it would harm the game? Some may add flavour, some may find an unexpected use, ebcause players are really crafty. And nearly no minor special property is useless. How did you first feel when you discovered that you can resurrect a banana or un/lock chastity belts with the right key? I was delighted at the amount of thought and love that went into the game.I love how the devs took time to add minor easter eggs.

Re: (non)standard monsters: I've got no problem with it. I'm not really concerned with avoiding *fantasy* tropes (note the emphasis). We already have goblins, kobolds, orcs, golems, ghosts, skeletons, zombies... But IVAN also has it's own unique flavor, with things like frogs, mushrooms, porcupines, frogs, the Enner, donkeys, frogs, gibberlings...

Where my concern lies is in heavily copying other *roguelikes*. We don't need an ADOM-style chaos mutation mechanic. We don't need to find the *foo* of Yendor. We don't need levels that re-generate each time you enter them (though a bottomless dungeon might be interesting at some distant point in the future). We already have a few unnecessary roguelike tropes, such as fountains and dungeon shops. Note that I don't have a problem here, as the former (fountains) are kinda fun and the latter is more a gameplay improvement than anything else, and is great as such. I don't have a problem with adding commonly-used elements of other roguelikes on occasion... it's just something to be aware of.

I didn't say it would be harmful, when I said it wasn't a viable direction I meant as a major mechanic. We've got literally hundreds of materials, we don't want to start adding special properties to each and every one of them, especially when it wouldn't make a big difference to the core gameplay (unless that's what you're aiming for). For it to become so we'd have to make some major changes.

It's true. I start to doubt this tin helmet thing. I can't see any advantage in it.

And ditto Izzy. I always hark back to this post as a touchstone whenever I wonder what to do next.

I remember SquashMonster saying something about IVAN already being feature-length. His thread about how to accomodate further development was really inspiring and I've tried to work in that direction as well.

Right now you can split creatures, items and dungeons according to theme, but there are some core mechanics that are immutable and make IVAN what it is.

The hardest thing to appreciate, is how balanced the game already is at the moment. So much of the game engine is buried in code. Things like the danger system, weapons families, material strengths and densities, items bestowing special abilities, all contribute to how the game is balanced presently.

Anyone remember the fruit bat from CLIVAN? (What fruit bat?)

I can see the value in the tin helmet actually. When your head goes critical you lose INT, perfect time to be ESP-invisible as you heal up without the need to worry about magical bombardment.

This, or when you have several mages behind some walls. I think that the tin helmet can have its uses.




Also, fruit bats were irritating and cool. We should bring them back. But vampire bats stealing your light source sounds like it would be even more irritating and cool.