No good creatures in the dungeon?

[fbas]

Always seemed odd to me that all creatures, even holy ones, are always out to kill you and only you.

One thing I liked about nethack was having or befriending a dog who helped you out in exchange for some tender vittles. Would be cool to also have magic powers to convert some of the creatures to fight for you.

Seems you should sometimes come across a fellow traveller who is battling monsters and not you. Or that some creatures might be more interested in fighting a feud with each other rather than you.

And I was thinking that killing holy creatures, like angels, might be better to reduce your experience than increase it.

Anyone agree?

[LostTemplar]

No, Angband is evil place, everything in it is evil too, including player character. And monsters never use stairs, so they stay on a given dungeon level forever, and if some monster wanted to kill another one, it had done it ages ago, so no monster fights.

[Derakon]

Some variants have coaligned factions (works much better than calling the monster "good" and assuming that means that the player is its friend), and companions/pets. Vanilla doesn't, and I doubt it will anytime soon; factional combat would have too much of an impact on how the game plays out.

Also, for how much of a jerk your average angel monster is, penalizing the player for killing them is a real dick move. Particularly since most of 'em don't have any useful drop to speak of...

[Tiburon Silverflame]

Penalizing for killing angels would only make sense if factions exist. Then, killing a member of your own faction *could* be taken as giving negative XP.

[fizzix]

I'm not a fan of coaligned creatures in V. I've played some variants with it, and I don't think it really adds much.

Now, I do think spells like charm monster, or enrage monster* should be in V. In fact, I think it'd be awesome to have a class with sucky melee that gets by entirely off of charm monster, confuse monster, scare monster and sleep monster.

* charm would have the monster attack the nearest enemy as if it were @. Enraged creatures would choose actions as normal but each attack gets directed at a random target.

[Nick]

FA currently has a subset of monsters who can be neutral outside dungeons. They basically just go about their business unless you attack them, or try to steal from them.

I am slowly moving toward having some monster-monster fighting, but I don't want to go overboard with it.

[Timo Pietilä]

FA currently has a subset of monsters who can be neutral outside dungeons. They basically just go about their business unless you attack them, or try to steal from them.

I am slowly moving toward having some monster-monster fighting, but I don't want to go overboard with it.

I don't just now remember which variant it was but when two opposite-aligned summoners meet in the dungeon result is rather...messy. Epic even.

[will_asher]

I'm not a fan of coaligned creatures in V. I've played some variants with it, and I don't think it really adds much.

Now, I do think spells like charm monster, or enrage monster* should be in V. In fact, I think it'd be awesome to have a class with sucky melee that gets by entirely off of charm monster, confuse monster, scare monster and sleep monster.

* charm would have the monster attack the nearest enemy as if it were @. Enraged creatures would choose actions as normal but each attack gets directed at a random target.

I have vague plans to do something like this in DaJAngband someday. Whether I ever actually get around to it is another story. Too many things are higher priority than improving my variant.
time! time!

[Nick]

I don't just now remember which variant it was but when two opposite-aligned summoners meet in the dungeon result is rather...messy. Epic even.

This sort of thing is quite frequent in Posband - you "hear noise" a lot of times, then enter a room to find a lot of dropped treasure and one or two frightened orcs hiding in the corner.

[Derakon]

It's very easy to set up a system where factional combat ends up taking over the dungeon. Monsters have way more hitpoints than players do, which is ordinarily compensated for by the player's comparatively stronger offense. However, when the monster is fighting other monsters, kills are harder to achieve, so fights drag on, suck in more enemies, and eventually you end up with a summoner on one or both sides. At that point you're pretty much hosed; even if your side is winning they'll never actually finish the battle and you personally can't go anywhere near it.

[Estie]

ToME 2 has it all. You can use summonig as player too, its an efficient means to kill (some say: imbalanced) and yes, faction war with summoners can clog a level quickly. There was an awesome write-up of a ToME player (Greycat was the name iirc, I think the hackers have done away with it) who played a character not allowing herself to hurt any monster (but of course her pets didnt have such restrictions), calling that playstyle "pacifist". Made it pretty far.


Its a good feeling when you travel through the dungeon surrounded by a blob of friendly great wyrms, and a glorious death when something summons a black louse close to you and half a dozen of your wyrm friends decide to eliminate this threat immediately by breathing on it