[quote=“Logrin, post:187, topic:3755”]Hoo boy! Bit of a thread necromancy on my part, but I figure it’s better than starting up a whole new thread for the same topic.
Picking up where I left off, some more suggestions!
Focused - A ‘what it says on the tin’ sort of mutation. You gain focus faster and lose it more slowly due to poor morale.
Wall Crawler - Spider Mutation - Requires Arachnid Arms - Thousands of tiny hairs now bristle eagerly from the surface of your spidery limbs. You’re finally ready to hang with the big boys.
Effect: When adjacent to a wall or other suitable impassible terrain you gain a dodge boost and ignore floor based hazards like water/lava/traps. I figure since the lizard style deadly venom tells you it’s going to change this would be a good time to usurp its effects.
Unshakable - Requires either huge/freakishly huge or subterranean anatomy - By virtue of sheer girth your solidly built form flouts the forces that would upend it.
Effect: Greatly reduces recoil from all sources and protects you from knock-back
Sprinter > Marathoner >> Feline Prowess - This would be a mutation that could have the first level taken at creation and the second gained through mutagen. The third tier however would be a feline threshold mutation reminiscent of cheetahs and the like. It’s a stacking on move buff of a flat move cost reduction. At level one it stacks every three turns spent moving and up to three times. At level two it’s every two turns spent moving and up to four stacks. At level three it stacks every time you move and up to five times. Attacking an enemy or taking any action but movement clears all stacks of the buff. Essentially it allows you to haul ass quite masterfully, and by tier three you should be able to outpace anything you come across.
Great arm - You’re a right tosser you are!
Effect: While you’re not even a lick more precise with thrown projectiles you’ve a heave ho that would make a major league pitcher jealous. Greatly increases the range and force with which you hurl items and gets extra distance out of any throws triggered by a martial art.
Water weight - You’re becoming rather adept at storing vast quantities of water as fatty tissue. While certainly a beneficial adaptation it has also provided unexpected insight into the irritability of camels.
Effect: You can gorge yourself on liquids, allowing you to stay hydrated for days at the cost of a ‘bloated’ morale debuff and occasional pain inducing cramp
Rat’s nest - You don’t know how you ever managed to get a good night’s rest outside the comfort of a well gnawed heap of trash.
Effect: You gain morale the more items are cluttered up on the tile you’re sleeping on, either placed on a bed or the ground. Inversely you’ll wake up in a terrible mood should there not be enough of such odds and ends heaped where you bed down. Additionally you chew these items in your sleep, reducing their durability and eventually destroying them.
Also, on the topic of new mutations I’ve been turning over few more ideas. First and foremost I don’t think mutagens or serums should ever be identifiable unless you’ve brewed them yourself or taken a hit. The scientists weren’t likely helpful enough to label their flasks with anything the uninitiated would be able to decipher.
Secondly their could be stat dependent mutations. As in mutations that only manifest in characters that have sufficiently low enough stats.
Brutish - Requires intelligence of 5 or lower - You derive a simple, child-like contentment from acts of violence thanks to your less than comprehensive understanding of the ramifications. Smashing things, pulping corpses and witnessing explosions all increase morale by a small degree, though you’ll suffer a ‘bored’ debuff if you go to long without indulging yourself.
Manchild / Simple Sue - Requires intelligence of 3 or lower - Most people would consider you to be one of ‘God’s special creatures’ thanks to your toddler-like demeanor, making it harder to fault you for your actions or take advantage of you through their own. While anyone shy of a psychopath is bound to treat you better you’re not going to convince any self respecting survivor that tagging along would be in their best interest.
etc. etc.
Mutations like these should most assuredly be a mix of good and bad and exist mostly to hammer home whatever major deficiencies plague the player character.
Finally I’m going to lob in the suggestion of cross-category mutations. These would occur when two mutations from differing trees, for example stretchy limbs and tentacle arms, act as prerequisites for a non-categorized mutation that replaces them both. Cross-category mutations would be beneficial but potentially undesired, as they’d serve up the secondary effect of locking you out of certain thresholds while they exist and nudge you closer to an “abomination” threshold that’s just a hot mess.[/quote]
One or two suggestions at a time, please. (And yeah, Plant got some more love a while back. Let me know what you think.)
Wall-sticking would work for Lizard as well. It’s kinda dangerous thanks to the lack of proper Z-level support: you can’t just go straight up the wall. The sprinter line would take some doing but is theoretically workable, and the only thing blocking water-weight is the UI’s inflexibility with levels past Full/Slaked. I’ve tried messing with those, and it simply didn’t show up. Not sure why. I like the HW mutation…but Huge might be too large to comfortably fit in the trigger guard.
Item-ID is the worst part of Nethack IMO. Sure, we can obfuscate mutagens & serums, but in practice I don’t think there’s much point. Either people look 'em up/memorize 'em, Weird Metagaming needs to happen to work out what something is, or found-mutagens simply don’t get used until people can craft 'em anyway.
The stat-dependent traits? nope, and those were about the worst possible examples you could have offered.
Multiple-category mutations already exist, and the system is fiddly enough without deliberately adding anti-threshold mutations.
