Adley's dungeon.

[Dudley]

You see here
A piece of raw meat. 
#.###
#...#
#.@.#
#####
@ : "Nice, i was nearly starving"

You suddenly discover
that you don't like raw 
meat very much. You starve.
#.###
#...#
#.w.#
#####

Adley. Killed by a tenia.

Comments?

[Dudley]

Commments!

[Al-Khwarizmi]

Yes (10chars)

[sangfroid]

That gives me an idea - how bout shapeshifting. Player transforms into Werewolf (upon being bitten by one) or Bat or something. Maybe bat would have a problem with carrying its inventory but just an idea !

[nathrakh]

That gives me an idea - how bout shapeshifting. Player transforms into Werewolf (upon being bitten by one) or Bat or something. Maybe bat would have a problem with carrying its inventory but just an idea !

That's already in NetHack (or was it in SlashEm) and I really don't like it.

[Dudley]

a battle bunny appears out of nowhere!
rrrrrrrrrrrrr
rrrrrrrrrrrrr
rrrrrr@rrrrrr
rrrrrrrrrrrrr

RIP. Adley. Killed by the white plague.

[Dudley]

I agree aout shapeshifting; The inventory managment you mentionned being the main problem.
Although polymorphing in a dragon/arch-lich is nice.

[Dudley]

Any ideas which are undevelloped can be sent to me by mail. Please don't put too many ideas at once, we want to keep the fun long enough.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

Polymorph self is present in several roguelikes, like Nethack, IVAN, etc. It's an idea that is very cool in theory, but in practice I find it very unbalancing in most games. If you can by chance turn into an ubermonster and destroy everything, the game ceases to be challenging.

Perhaps the only really balanced implementation of polymorph I have seen is in POWDER. IIRC, there you can polymorph only into monsters that you have already killed. That's very balanced, because if you want to be able to morph into an uber monster you have to work hard to kill it yourself first.

POWDER is a very small and simple roguelike, but man, the author really does know how to make a balanced game. It is awesome how it keeps the challenge level from beginning to end, even with such a simple system; and even prevents scumming (which is all but worthless in that game). Although cockatrices are a tad overpowered IMO.

[Nezur]

TB did not implement Polymorph that can be applied to the PC because monsters and the player are very different in ADOM. It would require a lot of work to redesign the necessary code blocks. Unless the source code is made publicly available I think the chance of that ever happening is extremely close to zero. Even if ADOM was made open source I reckon it would still be hard to find developers that are diligent enough for the arduous task.

However, in JADE, NPCs and the PC are similar so I'd imagine implementing the ability would be considerably easier and faster.