From foo@bar Date: Thu, 7 Mar 2002 15:30:42 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: Path: qz!not-for-mail From: Eli the Bearded <*@qz.little-neck.ny.us> X-Files: Used for sharpening claws and teeth on your hawk and hacksaw X-Motto: "Erosion of rights never seems to reverse itself." -- kenny@panix X-US-Congress: Moronic Fucks. X-Attribution: EtB X-Usenet-II: Because it is time for October. Subject: Re: [YANQ] Priests Newsgroups: rec.games.roguelike.moria Encrypted: double rot-13 References: <960bfcc2.0203070231.338a296b@posting.google.com> X-Comments: "(Welcome to the desert of the real.)" -- eck@panix "... terrorism is open-source war ..." -- srini@unamerican Organization: Some absurd concept X-Newsreader: Sony Playstation 5.0MIPS To: undisclosed-recipients:; In rec.games.roguelike.moria, Dr Darth wrote: > I've recently started playing with priests rather than mages. After > many early deaths, it has become apparent to me that it is absolutely > vital that a novice priest purchases a shovel before descending into > the dungeon for the first time. This allows rapid collection of > otherwise inaccessible hard cash. That's one way. > The reason you need to get lots of cash quickly is that a priest needs > to buy a shed-load of stuff early in the game. The second and third > books quickly become necessary, and the third one isn't cheap early > on. You also need to rely heavily on hand to hand combat in the > period before you learn the OoD. This implies that a weapon upgrade ... > Is this how you are "meant" to play priests, or have I got the wrong > end of the stick? I always consider a shovel a required item for a low level character. But priests can be tough. I've been slowly working on a modification to my copy of moria to give a new spell to mages and a new prayer to priests. For mages I was thinking of clone monster or summon monster, as a level 10, 7 mana spell (in Book II; item c) . For priests I was thinking of identify, as a level 8, 7 mana spell (in Book I; item b). Rational: it is pretty much necessary for the priests and mages to have the same number of spells. Priests really lose out without identify, as that lets one pick out which objects are better to sell or use easily. Also the prayers are pretty heavily slanted towards infomation, so it makes sense to give them that most useful info spell. Mages already have a lot of powerful spells so one that isn't that useful for defense or offense, but would be used seems natural. As a added fun thing I was thinking about a Staff of Horror that combines beneficial and hazadous features: Light and Starlight Mass Polymorph Haste Self (speed) Heal > Related question - do priests suffer a penalty for using edged weapons > as they do in Angband? And if so why do they start with a dagger??? They don't suffer any penalty, but the Temple won't stock them. Elijah ------ moria hacker From foo@bar Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2002 15:51:57 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: Path: qz!not-for-mail From: Eli the Bearded <*@qz.little-neck.ny.us> X-Files: Used for sharpening claws and teeth on your hawk and hacksaw X-Motto: "Erosion of rights never seems to reverse itself." -- kenny@panix X-US-Congress: Moronic Fucks. X-Attribution: EtB X-Usenet-II: Because it is time for October. Subject: Re: [YANQ] Priests Newsgroups: rec.games.roguelike.moria Encrypted: double rot-13 References: <960bfcc2.0203070231.338a296b@posting.google.com> <960bfcc2.0203080357.2807d0c1@posting.google.com> X-Comments: "(Welcome to the desert of the real.)" -- eck@panix "... terrorism is open-source war ..." -- srini@unamerican Organization: Some absurd concept X-Newsreader: Sony Playstation 5.0MIPS To: undisclosed-recipients:; In rec.games.roguelike.moria, Dr Darth wrote: > Eli the Bearded <*@qz.little-neck.ny.us> wrote in message > news:... > > I've been slowly working on a modification > > to my copy of moria to give a new spell to mages and a new prayer to > > priests. For mages I was thinking of clone monster or summon monster, > > as a level 10, 7 mana spell (in Book II; item c) . For priests I was > > thinking of identify, as a level 8, 7 mana spell (in Book I; item b). > This sounds like a good idea - indentify / perception would seem > obvious for a priest. Clone monster would be good for mages - > although perhaps rather too useful when it come to gelatinous cubes! Yeah, clone monster seems good because it is a much safer spell. Summon monster can, after all, bring a AMHD right next you. But summon monster is a lot less likely to be a experience point mine. With clone monster, a high point immobile monster that doesn't drain mana, eg Shimmering Mold (~450 points for a level 10 char), could be repeatedly cloned and killed from a safe distance. One possible fix to that is to have it, eg 1 time in 10, summon a monster instead of cloning. There is also the possibility of Summon Undead: some of those are pretty nasty, but none can kill any character outright like the AMHD. Other spells I've been considering for the mage include See Invisible (lasting 1d10 + level turns) and Create Doors. Doors plus spikes, after all, allow one to build a safe haven. > > As a added fun thing I was thinking about a Staff of Horror that > > combines beneficial and hazadous features: > > > > Light and Starlight > > Mass Polymorph > > Haste Self (speed) > > Heal > > I really like this idea. Perhaps you could add aggravate to that > list! After the polymorph everything near-by would be aggravated anyway. > You use a Staff of Horror. > The staff makes a horrible wail. > You hear a sudden stirring in the distance. Heh. Good idea. Another thing I have been thinking about is increasing the items or quality of the items a player gets at the start, at least for high social class characters. But I haven't decided on what and for whom. One possibility would be to give things out the extra items by race instead of by class as how the normal inventory is selected. Rationale: new characters are hard to get started; many times one spends a bunch of time going through the stores to outfit for a first expedition and then ends up dead before returning to town. By starting out with more stuff, getting over that initial hump is easier. > 1. Does Orb of Draining become more powerful as your clvl increases? Yes. OoD is a very nice spell: damage is 3d6 + player level; area effect; doesn't damage things on the ground; extra damage to evil creatures. > 2. What are the key things you need to go beyond certain levels? (eg > was it FA below 1000 ft?) And on what levels do you start finding > those key items? When does FA appear? And speed items? Rings of speed are level 50 items, but footwear of speed can appear on any level (and the shops) though it is exceedingly rare. Potions of Haste Self can sometimes be found on level 1. As for free action, generally I keep the first DF I find for the dual advantages of FA and regeneration, then I continue to use DF weapons for the rest of the game (except to switch to slay dragons for particular battles). Offhand I don't have a depth I consider FA essential, except to say before 2500'. Although the Iridescent Beetles (typically found at 1850') can be pretty nasty without FA. Elijah ------ woohoo: just found a Katana of Slay Dragon (+5,+4) From foo@bar Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2002 19:19:32 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: Path: qz!not-for-mail From: Eli the Bearded <*@qz.little-neck.ny.us> X-Files: Used for sharpening claws and teeth on your hawk and hacksaw X-Motto: "Erosion of rights never seems to reverse itself." -- kenny@panix X-US-Congress: Moronic Fucks. X-Attribution: EtB X-Usenet-II: Because it is time for October. Subject: Re: [YANQ] Priests Newsgroups: rec.games.roguelike.moria Encrypted: double rot-13 References: <960bfcc2.0203070231.338a296b@posting.google.com> <960bfcc2.0203080357.2807d0c1@posting.google.com> <960bfcc2.0203110407.756341fb@posting.google.com> X-Comments: "(Welcome to the desert of the real.)" -- eck@panix "... terrorism is open-source war ..." -- srini@unamerican Organization: Some absurd concept X-Newsreader: Sony Playstation 5.0MIPS To: undisclosed-recipients:; In rec.games.roguelike.moria, Dr Darth wrote: > Eli the Bearded <*@qz.little-neck.ny.us> wrote in message > > By starting out with more stuff, getting over that initial hump > > is easier. > This is a good point - I lose a lot of character with clvl <=10, but > once past this stage they tend to reach clvl 20 or so before dying in > a stupid way. My last two character deaths were to over-confidence in dealing with explosive breeders. Those deaths of a thousand (or at least several score) cuts are nasty. > Another good addition if you're modifying Moria would be to add the > level feelings, similar to Angband. Level feelings make endless > dungeon trawls a *lot* more interesting. Nothing beats the tension > you get on a special level in Angband. That's too close to Angband. Moria doesn't assign treasure until it is needed (a few bits are spread out on the floor, sure, but some creature could pick those things up). > Also artefacts and uniques are a very good idea. Moria can become > tedious, and these sorts of things liven it up and provide "mini-boss" > battles at regular intervals. At the moment there's only Iggy - not > that I've met him, mind! I don't know about that. To me one great thing about Moria is how often you can repeat battles. The more often you fight a creature the more you learn about it. A unique only lets you do that with monster memory between games, and that's one thing that makes the Balrog such a challenge. But you know where he is, approximately, and you can avoid him until you are ready. But perhaps a few more non-winning creature not-quite uniques, like Iggy, could be fun. Say a creature that always gets placed during the creation of level 25 (1250'), with drain stat attacks. :^) Or that sort of thing. Elijah ------ imagining an explosive breeder with 1d8 HP and five 1d2 stat attacks From foo@bar Date: 12 Mar 2002 12:40:00 -0500 Message-ID: Path: qz!not-for-mail From: Eli the Bearded <*@qz.little-neck.ny.us> X-Files: Used for sharpening claws and teeth on your hawk and hacksaw X-Motto: "Erosion of rights never seems to reverse itself." -- kenny@panix X-US-Congress: Moronic Fucks. X-Attribution: EtB X-Usenet-II: Because it is time for October. Subject: Re: [YANQ] Priests Newsgroups: rec.games.roguelike.moria Encrypted: double rot-13 References: <960bfcc2.0203070231.338a296b@posting.google.com> <960bfcc2.0203110407.756341fb@posting.google.com> <1015958680.819334@yasure> X-Comments: "(Welcome to the desert of the real.)" -- eck@panix "... terrorism is open-source war ..." -- srini@unamerican Organization: Some absurd concept X-Newsreader: Sony Playstation 5.0MIPS To: undisclosed-recipients:; In rec.games.roguelike.moria, Romanadvoratrelundar wrote: > In article , > Eli the Bearded <*@qz.little-neck.ny.us> wrote: > > imagining an explosive breeder with 1d8 HP and five 1d2 stat attacks > You are a bad bad man. I'm thinking Specters (symbol 'G', but not invisible), evil undead and worth, ever viligilent for intruders which it can notice from 150 feet, somewhat erratic movement, change that to four stat attacks (current compiled in max), worth 75 points for a 25th level creature. This is somewhat inspired by the specters from Philip Pullman's _His Dark Materials_ trilogy. There the specters are invisible and harmless to children, but ghostlike and deadly to adults, hence the G. Again, these would be appearing at depth 1250' only. Once you get to 1300', you need never see them again. Elijah ------ thinks a priority should be a wizard mode command to create new monsters From foo@bar Date: 13 Mar 2002 18:21:00 -0500 Message-ID: Path: qz!not-for-mail From: Eli the Bearded <*@qz.little-neck.ny.us> X-Files: Used for sharpening claws and teeth on your hawk and hacksaw X-Motto: "Erosion of rights never seems to reverse itself." -- kenny@panix X-US-Congress: Moronic Fucks. X-Attribution: EtB X-Usenet-II: Because it is time for October. Subject: Re: [YANQ] Priests Newsgroups: rec.games.roguelike.moria Encrypted: double rot-13 References: <960bfcc2.0203070231.338a296b@posting.google.com> <960bfcc2.0203110407.756341fb@posting.google.com> <960bfcc2.0203120851.17e25802@posting.google.com> X-Comments: "(Welcome to the desert of the real.)" -- eck@panix "... terrorism is open-source war ..." -- srini@unamerican Organization: Some absurd concept X-Newsreader: Sony Playstation 5.0MIPS To: undisclosed-recipients:; In rec.games.roguelike.moria, Dr Darth wrote: > 1. Expand the number of rings/headgear/amulets available. Certainly doable. Personally I think more shoe varieties, and more cloak varieties would be better, too. > 2. For weapons, replace the ego weapons with a suffix + prefix model. > i.e. on a suitably high level you may find a "Y Bastard Sword of X", > where both Y and X can be one of, say 20 things. This model was used More work, but possible. > 3. Something similar to point 2 for armour, although probably suffix > only. There should be mithril armor, at least. Light weight with good protection. > 4. Allow a storage place in town for your items - either a "Your > House" as in Angband, or a "Left Luggage" which you have to pay for > (giving some use for excess cash in the game). This is a bit of work, but I do agree it would be useful. Often low level chars find stuff that isn't very useful to them (potions of resist heat come to mind) but ar quite useful later in the game. I'd probably also include a black market, a good use for 'excess cash'. > Anyway, let me know what you think. Also - what platform? And if you > have anything a fairly non-technical type can help with, let me now. I program on Linux, but I hope my code would be portable to other platforms. I'll probably post it in complete form and as patches on a website when I'm done. Maybe I'll even try to get patches for the palm version, but I still don't have a working palm compiler. Elijah ------ or might call it a 'flea market' From foo@bar Date: 15 Mar 2002 17:11:00 -0500 Message-ID: Path: qz!not-for-mail From: Eli the Bearded <*@qz.little-neck.ny.us> X-Files: Used for sharpening claws and teeth on your hawk and hacksaw X-Motto: "Erosion of rights never seems to reverse itself." -- kenny@panix X-US-Congress: Moronic Fucks. X-Attribution: EtB X-Usenet-II: Because it is time for October. Subject: Re: [YANQ] Priests Newsgroups: rec.games.roguelike.moria Encrypted: double rot-13 References: <960bfcc2.0203070231.338a296b@posting.google.com> <960bfcc2.0203120851.17e25802@posting.google.com> X-Comments: "(Welcome to the desert of the real.)" -- eck@panix "... terrorism is open-source war ..." -- srini@unamerican Organization: Some absurd concept X-Newsreader: Sony Playstation 5.0MIPS To: undisclosed-recipients:; In rec.games.roguelike.moria, Jonathan Ellis wrote: [various ideas Dr. Darth was bouncing off me] > ...and you've just invented the precursor to Angband. Why not play the > real thing instead? :-) I've played Angband, although not recently, and it just didn't work for me. There are a lot more changes besides those in Angband, and many of them are not ones I want to pursue. For instance: I can see adding a few more monsters, but I don't want to add dozens or scores of them. I don't want to introduce radically new spells or attacks, eg. chaos or nexus, nor radically new items like Scroll of Acquirement, Green Dragon Scale Mail, Phial of Galadriel, etc. I don't want to introduce the idea of artifacts. I'm not going to introduce armor that would change the balance of the game, eg body armor with AC than Ribbed Plate Armor; I just might introduce Mitril Mail (+1) [20,0] weighing just 12 lbs. I have been thinking about introducing things that can't be used by the player, but can be sold to the stores. Specifically, I was thinking more about _His Dark Materials_ characters, such as the Armored Bears. My idea was this: armored bears with armor and life ratings like an iron golem, but without the slowness. However, when killed, they would drop bear armor, very heavy, unable to be worn, but worth a lot in the town. I'm thinking 75 to 350 lbs heavy, enough so that there should be a good chance that you can't carry it all even with the slowdown. (Currently you can carry any amount, although it may slow you down. That would have to be fixed.) The changes in Angband I think make the game play much different, which is something I wish to mostly avoid. Elijah ------ although I really like targeting, and that does change gameplay a bit