Extra racial/class abilities

[Timo Pietilä]

Hello.

3.1.2 introduced Dwarf "detect treasure" -ability which basically detects any money or treasure veins nearby automatically.

What else is there? If nothing, what else could there be? Can we expand the code that makes dwarf find treasures to other things?

Some pseudo-monster detection? Item-based orc detection? Magic mapping as we go? ESP separated from Telepathy, so that you sense items and features like traps and doors like telepathy detects monsters?

Rogue could sense traps and secret doors like dwarf senses treasures. Warrior could sense orcs, trolls and ogres. Mage could get "detect enchantment" at high levels. Priests and paladins undead detection. Rangers maybe natural creatures like spiders and hounds. Something like that.

[d_m]

The other ones I know about are gnomes auto-identifying wands/staves and hobbits auto-identifying mushrooms. The gnome ability is probably the most useful out of the 3.

I like the auto-identify mechanic a lot... I actually think auto-identifying potions or scrolls could be added to the dunedain and/or the elves.

If we get selective ESP working then I think giving limited ESP like you suggest would be fun.

EDIT: I would like to improve dwarves and halflings... right now neither of their abilities are very useful. You could imagine mushroom detection being good if there were enough mushrooms to usefully stack and they did better things. Mineral detection would be better if minerals were profitable enough to be worth going after, or you could actually find items occasionally.

EDIT2: Sorry, it's kind of early here and I missed the main gist of your post. I like all of your suggestions, particularly a permanent small radius magic mapping ability (maybe could go to dwarves and/or gnomes as part of an "underground sense").

[Derakon]

The dwarf ability would be significantly better if it mapped out quartz and magma veins for you. Then you'd know the route to take to make digging easy.

[fph]

It would be great to find something to make humans worth playing -- not necessarily powerful, it's ok to have a challenge race, but at least interesting, somehow different from the other races.

[Tiburon Silverflame]

Give humans maybe 3 extra stat points at character creation. This could well be all you need, because most racial abilities tend to become superfluous around stat gain time anyway.

[miyazaki]

It would be great to find something to make humans worth playing -- not necessarily powerful, it's ok to have a challenge race, but at least interesting, somehow different from the other races.

Humans are there as the baseline. Every other race is developed to be different from the human. This is a fantasy game, we need the human to be the boring, ordinary race that gives the other races meaning!

[d_m]

Humans are there as the baseline. Every other race is developed to be different from the human. This is a fantasy game, we need the human to be the boring, ordinary race that gives the other races meaning!

There's another way to look at it: humans are the default race with all the normal advantages, and the other races provide interesting features in exchange for increased difficulty.

There's no reason the "baseline" has to be worse than the others!

[Tiburon Silverflame]

For that matter, there's no requirement that there actually be a fixed baseline that's used to derive all the other classes. That notion, and the Angband model, are equivalent to 1st Edition D&D, and lived through 3rd Edition...but NOT through other systems derived from that basis, like Pathfinder and Arcana Unearthed/Arcana Evolved, and was scrapped in 4E altogether.

BTW: when I say +3 or so stat points, I mean they get 27 points to allocate for purchased stats...which means they can be tailored to any specific role better than another race. Dunno what I'd do for rolled stats, altho to be honest I wouldn't mind seeing rolled stats removed.

[Hariolor]

for Dwarves: I like Derakon's idea for quartz/magma esp. Thematically appropriate and fairly useful. I might even go so far as to make it a zone of mapping - call it tunnelsense.

I also like the idea of humans getting extra starting stat points. Since the other races have boosted special abilities, it seems reasonable (and fun) for humans to be both more customizable, and potentially the most powerful (in terms of stats) at endgame.

Derail: How often does anyone even play humans/elves/half-elves, except perhaps out of sheer boredom, or because all other victory conditions have been exhausted?

[buzzkill]

Derail: How often does anyone even play humans/elves/half-elves, except perhaps out of sheer boredom, or because all other victory conditions have been exhausted?

I've never won or even really come close, though my characters of late are claiming the top of my personal ladder, so I do seem to be improving. I play humans occasionally because that's what the RNG (*) chooses for me. I also use the standard roller... exclusively.

You shouldn't need an incentive to play a human character occasionally, you should do so just because it's the right thing to do .

[Whelk]

I thought LOTRO had a neat take on a human specialty in the "Easily Inspired" trait.

- Effects like heroism, bless and perhaps berserk strength could give slightly higher bonuses and last a tad longer (I've always found these effects to be negligible anyway, but maybe I don't realize how good they are).
- Call Light/Starlight could have a chance to remove fear.
- Heroism could result from the following effects: Remove Fear, Bless, Protection from Evil, Holy Word, Remembrance
- +1 haste effect from Heroism? I know +speed tends to be a really big deal, but I don't think +1 would be game-breaking. Later in the game it's not going to really mean anything.

[zaimoni]

The usefulness of bless (any variation) is highly situational; most variants do not provide the information required to know when it is useful. [This is most likely in the early game, especially for Priests. I have to be in the mood to explicitly calculate whether it's useful first.]

Of course, for Priests or Paladins Bless works great as a "prayer wheel" if you have absolutely no interest in internal turn count, once you're at ~80 mana or so (~40 mana with regeneration)

[Derakon]

Bless improves your to-hit rate, which means you're less likely to miss and, IIRC, more likely to deal critical hits when you do hit. If you have a reliable source of bless, there's almost always a dead turn when you can cast it before the fight starts, and there's no real reason not to, unless you have more important buffing spells to cast, like haste or resistance.

[Jungle_Boy]

I play humans once in a while for the quick leveling up. Maybe it could be improved more so humans only need 80% xp to level up. Sort of the "fast learner" thing you see in a lot of rpg's

[bron]

Maybe it could be improved more so humans only need 80% xp to level up

I rather like the idea of changing things at the other end: allow humans to advance to level 60.