Mutation flavour text?

[Adragis029]

I’ve been playing some Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup recently, and I noticed that whenever you mutate, it gives some flavour text: Nothing much, just some sort of brief description like ‘Rough black scales start spreading over your body!’ or something of the sort.

At the moment, Cataclysm just tells you what you got, which is good from a gameplay perspective, but something like DC:SS’s flavour text would be pretty neat, and be a bit more atmospheric.

Example: Gaining the Spines mutation might give a message like ‘You feel a painful prickling sensation. Looking down at yourself, you see fine spines pushing through your skin,’ or maybe something less/more matter-of-fact.

Potential problems, of course, involve a possible disruption of the sense of roleplaying. And also drinking mutagen and getting four bits of flavour text that make no sense together. But still.

Would it be possible to add that in? More importantly, would anyone here be interested in that being added in?

[kevin.granade]

Sounds like a reasonable thing to do, we generally prefer to add flavor text for things like that rather than a factual statement of what happened.
Also the direction we’d like to take mutations is them taking a while to actualize, that would address the weirdness of several happening at once.

[Adragis029]

That be interesting: maybe make it like a disease/status effect or something. For instance, gaining night vision might make you blind temporarily (light overloading the new receptors or something) at intervals, while stuff like ‘Spines’ might occasionally mildly damage clothing/cause occasional pain?

Unless you meant something different

[kevin.granade]

Hmm, “mutation specific conditions” is an interesting idea, but not what I was getting at. Whatr I’m talking about is you take some mutagen, instead of mutating immediately you get a “mutation sickness” condition with a mild debuff. After some time passes, the mutation sickness causes the mutation to occur. This might be hours later or even days.

[Adragis029]

Would that warrant a change to Genetically Unstable, then?

And I can imagine coding in s many conditions at once would be tedious anyhow, especially for modders.