Playable Race Request

[Lord Fell]

A variant I played years ago (Yangband???) allowed Yeeks as playable races. The one thing I have always liked about Yeeks, is that they're an Angband original (at least, as far as I know).

Yeeks appeal to my sense of whimsy. I definitely like that they're sort of poorly defined; I'm sure we all have a sense of what they look like, but our visions probably have little cross-over. I also like underdogs... and even when you look at Boldor, King of the Yeeks... we see that he is the mightiest, craftiest, most powerful yeek... but despite all that, he's just a yeek. Classic underdogs.

So, I'd like for them to be a playable race. What I'm thinking is...

• Penalties to stats, cross the board
• A bonus to Infravision and Stealth.
• Resistance to Chaos... which would be very useful at Higher Levels ...provided they lived that long.
• A free 0d0 melee attack, that added Insult to Injury: You hit the snaga. You moon the snaga.

[ekolis]

Pretty sure Zangband had Yeeks among the 26 billion other playable races in that variant Or maybe it was Hengband or ToME?

[Derakon]

ZAngband had yeeks, and ToME, which descends from ZAngband, also had them. IIRC they leveled even faster than humans and had inherent acid resistance/immunity, at the cost of massive stat penalties. Not exactly a straight-up challenge race, but still pretty hard. I seem to recall a few nuts on RGRA playing yeek arcane high mages in ZAngband, which is about as useless a race/class combination as you can get (high mages only get one realm of magic and are lousy at everything except magic, and arcane magic is pretty worthless).

[EpicMan]

Yeah, I always felt adding the acid resistance (and acid spit ability in Heng I think) kind of detracted from the "look - I'm the weakest race" appeal of Yeeks. If they were added to Vanilla I would just give them -1 or more to each stat, maybe slightly faster XP, as well as poor skills round the board. Maybe slightly better stealth since they are small and timid.

The other advantage of adding Yeeks is that humans will no longer be the weakest race option, though they (we?) will still be the least interesting.

<thread hijack>Maybe we should allow players to increase one of the skills (fighting, devices, saving throw, etc) at the beginning of the game if they are playing a human. I like that humans are the base class stat-wise, but giving human characters a selectable skill bonus would give them some flavor where they have none whatsoever right now. So you could play your warrior with a better devices skill, or your mage/priest with a mediocre (as opposed to abysmal) fighting or bows/throwing skill, or a rogue with a high saving throw, etc.

Another idea, which is stolen from ADOM, is to give them a random heirloom - i.e. some random item at start, discounted 100% so it doesn't just become more gold - which would need to be identified to really be usable at the beginning. This would make the early game more interesting for humans since the item you get could be a game-changer at that point and could alter how you play your character.

I pretty much never play humans right now because they are boring. If there was some perk they would get (that would hopefully be different somehow than the resists and such that other races have).
</end of thread hijack>

[Lord Fell]

Right...

So, who's going to code me some playable Yeeks?

[buzzkill]

Right...

So, who's going to code me some playable Yeeks?

Play DaJ. If it doesn't have yeeks, it'll have something close, or at least something similarly absurd. I played an Umber Hulk not too long ago.

[Ycombinator]

So, who's going to code me some playable Yeeks?

You don't have to code anything to add a new race. Edit p_race.txt and limits.txt: the format is straightforward, except maybe player history lines which is a bit hairy, but you can always steal this part from another race.
Just make sure to backup original files and your savefile: changes in limits.txt are going to break savefile compatibility.

[tigpup]

Kobolds are also pretty wimpy, but fun to play. Kobold rogue is my favourite. They're good as questors in NPP; inherent poison resistance is very useful in NPP early quests. They're also fun to play in V. Getting the balance of magic, ranged & melee is a challenge.

[stabbo]

It'd be cool if mooning or otherwise insulting a monster caused some kind of effect, such as confusion.

[Sirridan]

Kobolds are awesome, I beat V for the first time legit with a Kobold Warrior.

That poison resistance is just nice for diving down, you don't have to worry about juggling that =rPoison ring with good stuff, hah.

[Lord Fell]

Having looked over the files, it doesn't look to me that it would be too hard to edit a Yeek race into the game. Based on the current file though, adding a special insult attack looks to be either impossible, or way beyond what I'm capable of doing.

I don't really want to be the soul player/maintainer of a variant that includes yeeks... if I want them added to Vanilla, I'd need to write it up, and email it to the current Maintainer? (Takk?)

[Derakon]

Write it up and make a post here that includes the new file. That's the simplest way to show people the change.

And yeah, adding an insult attack would require code changes.

[ekolis]

Do you really want Yeeks to be that annoying to play? "You hit the orc. You insult the orc's mother!" vs. "You hit the orc."

[Lord Fell]

I mostly button mash through melee anyways, while keeping an eye on various status indicators (primarily "oh, I should do something about my critically low health).

Maybe an activatable "insult to confuse" power would be less annoying, and more useful... except of course, there's no goal to make the yeek's abilities useful.

Of course, since it would be far too difficult for me to actually try and code such a thing, it's a moot point.

[Nick]

Posband may have playable yeeks one day...