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I discovered The Bard's Tale about the same time as I discovered Moria, so in my mind the two have always been linked, and this association has continued to Angband. The are a few things about The Bard's Tale that I've always wanted to have implement in Moria/Angband so I thought I'd mention them here and see what everybody else thinks.
1) Stat gain on level up. In Bard's Tale, when a character gains a level, he gets a point added to a random stat. Since Angband already checks for and restores reduced stats on level up, it should be easy to add picking a random stat and applying whatever effect a stat potion has.
2) The bard class itself. It's sort of a warrior/mage hybrid with half a dozen songs which are basically long acting spells. To use them, the bard needs an instrument and the occasional drink to keep his throat from drying out. Here's a use for the flagons of whiskey sold in the General Store. Some instruments were basically ego/artifact, like a flame horn that occasionally let the bard breathe fire like a dragon. (Maybe the bard could wield an instrument instead of a bow? Except for the bow of the bard, of course.)
3) The ability to change classes. After a certain point you could change classes to a different type. The character would still be able to use the spells they'd already learned, but be unable to learn any new ones from the old discipline. The character would go back to level 1 and lose all experience, but would retain the HP/SP/stat gains from leveling up.
4) Memorizing spells. Bard's Tale didn't use spell books. Instead, once you learned a spell, you knew it for life. What I'd like to see in Angband is that after X successful castings of a spell, there's a chance that it could be memorized, allowing you to cast it from memory instead of a spell book, perhaps with a slightly increased chance of failure (bottoming out at say 5% instead of 0% for most spells). Memory could be considered spell book 0 (zero), and failure messages could include bits like "You try to cast Magic Missile from memory. You misremembered the spell!"
5) Adventuring Parties. In Bard's Tale you didn't play a single character. You played a group of up to 6 characters. They moved as a group (all stayed in the same square) and attacked (and were attacked) depending on player speed and initiative and the like. Only the front 3 could attack/be attacked by melee weapons, so you'd put 3 fighters in the first three slots and put archers/magic users in the rear. I'm not sure if this would work in Angband, as the party would be limited to moving as slowly as the slowest character, which would make pillar dancing and shoot-n-scoot and other strategies difficult.
6) Luck. The Bard's Tale had the standard stats, but where Moria/Angband has/had Charisma, the Bard's Tale had Luck. This acted as a second saving throw. Trigger a trap and fail to get out of the way because you failed the Dexterity check? Well, LUCKILY the trap malfunctioned and you took no/reduced damage. Have a perfect saving throw but bad luck? Take full damage from that fireball anyway. This would probably be too difficult to balance. Which leads me too...
7) Luck II. This is actually from an old RPG called Top Secret. When the character is created, the game runner does a secret roll for Luck points. The player never knows how points many he has left. The player just knows that sometimes when death seems certain, LUCKILY by some miracle he survives, which also causes the game runner to subtract one from his tally of Luck points. Every secret agent dreads the day when his luck runs out. In Angband, this would lead to IF LUCK>0 THEN "The drolem (offscreen) breathes poison. Luckily, it doesn't reach you." LUCK = LUCK - 1. Or just a general failure message so the player doesn't even know that he lucked out of an instadeath.
1) Stat gain on level up. In Bard's Tale, when a character gains a level, he gets a point added to a random stat. Since Angband already checks for and restores reduced stats on level up, it should be easy to add picking a random stat and applying whatever effect a stat potion has.
2) The bard class itself. It's sort of a warrior/mage hybrid with half a dozen songs which are basically long acting spells. To use them, the bard needs an instrument and the occasional drink to keep his throat from drying out. Here's a use for the flagons of whiskey sold in the General Store. Some instruments were basically ego/artifact, like a flame horn that occasionally let the bard breathe fire like a dragon. (Maybe the bard could wield an instrument instead of a bow? Except for the bow of the bard, of course.)
3) The ability to change classes. After a certain point you could change classes to a different type. The character would still be able to use the spells they'd already learned, but be unable to learn any new ones from the old discipline. The character would go back to level 1 and lose all experience, but would retain the HP/SP/stat gains from leveling up.
4) Memorizing spells. Bard's Tale didn't use spell books. Instead, once you learned a spell, you knew it for life. What I'd like to see in Angband is that after X successful castings of a spell, there's a chance that it could be memorized, allowing you to cast it from memory instead of a spell book, perhaps with a slightly increased chance of failure (bottoming out at say 5% instead of 0% for most spells). Memory could be considered spell book 0 (zero), and failure messages could include bits like "You try to cast Magic Missile from memory. You misremembered the spell!"
5) Adventuring Parties. In Bard's Tale you didn't play a single character. You played a group of up to 6 characters. They moved as a group (all stayed in the same square) and attacked (and were attacked) depending on player speed and initiative and the like. Only the front 3 could attack/be attacked by melee weapons, so you'd put 3 fighters in the first three slots and put archers/magic users in the rear. I'm not sure if this would work in Angband, as the party would be limited to moving as slowly as the slowest character, which would make pillar dancing and shoot-n-scoot and other strategies difficult.
6) Luck. The Bard's Tale had the standard stats, but where Moria/Angband has/had Charisma, the Bard's Tale had Luck. This acted as a second saving throw. Trigger a trap and fail to get out of the way because you failed the Dexterity check? Well, LUCKILY the trap malfunctioned and you took no/reduced damage. Have a perfect saving throw but bad luck? Take full damage from that fireball anyway. This would probably be too difficult to balance. Which leads me too...
7) Luck II. This is actually from an old RPG called Top Secret. When the character is created, the game runner does a secret roll for Luck points. The player never knows how points many he has left. The player just knows that sometimes when death seems certain, LUCKILY by some miracle he survives, which also causes the game runner to subtract one from his tally of Luck points. Every secret agent dreads the day when his luck runs out. In Angband, this would lead to IF LUCK>0 THEN "The drolem (offscreen) breathes poison. Luckily, it doesn't reach you." LUCK = LUCK - 1. Or just a general failure message so the player doesn't even know that he lucked out of an instadeath.
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