Concept: DotAband - too ambitious?

[h3lix]

I have an idea for a variant that should be a nice break from Vanilla's played out classes and the difficulty in finding the right class/race combo.

There will be (eventually) more than 90 different character types, each having it's own preconfigured stats and different spells, which will be modeled after those from Defense of the Ancients, a popular online map for Warcraft 3.

Since there will be so many predefined types, each of whom having their own 4 inherent spells, the game will be much shorter (20 levels maybe?).

Every few levels, you will encounter uniques, which will be some of the character types you didn't pick.

This will also involve a complete overhaul of the stores, which will offer items that can combine with other items, forming powerful artifacts (all of which come from DotA).

I have no experience modding Angband and only negligible experience with C, but I may be able to get some help on this project.

My question goes out to those more familiar with making or playing Angband variants:
Is this idea too ambitious, or is there any obvious flaw in my plan that will make it impossible?

[Djabanete]

Is there any fundamental difference between this and regular Angband?

Choose character type -> go to dungeon -> kill stuff -> get $$$ -> go to town -> buy stuff -> repeat from step 2?

It's fine if there isn't, I just have never played DotA so I was curious.

[Pete Mack]

Have you tried POSBand? That has monster races as character classes for a very large number of monsters. It's based on an old version of NPP. If you like it, effort might be better spent taking it over and upgrading...

[Djabanete]

POSBand

Posband was quite awesome, it would make me happy if someone were to take up the torch on that variant...

[Slayer]

DoTAband

Everyone loves Defense of the Anchients. Allow me to suggest some mods that will allow you to make it possible to have an ASCII version based off Angband:
1) Make all creatures have an established XP value, and increase the amount of XP needed per level without decreasing the amount received for killing creatures (this is done in WCIII). For instance, level 1 might be 10xp, and you can get 1 xp apiece for killing level 1 creatures, 3 for level 2 creeps, 5 for level 3 creeps, etc.
2) Buy me a new copy of The Frozen Throne because Custom Games are indisputably the greatest feature ever introduced to any game anywhere.
3) Seriously tho, you would want it to be multiplayer if it's DoTA style, so you can speak to the experts at ToMEnet about how to make that possible.
4) Go with TFT's level limitations as opposed to the Burning Crusade limits and have closer to 50 max levels. The people at ToMEnet also employ a Skill system which is almost identical to what you would use for DoTAband spells, so they can help with that too.
5) Make artifacts not something you create, but either buy or kill for. ToME developers experimented with Artifact Creation, and while it is awesome, it was also the most painful coding project possibly ever undertaken for the sake of Angbandvariants.
6) Make encountering uniques something you can voluntarily do by entering their lairs, where they are *always* accessible, but only when you have reached the appropriate level. It's a common idea, and is much better than a forced encounter such as you find in old Final Fantasy games.

As far as how to code it, I suggest starting from only basic fragments or scratch and enrolling in some basic C-coding classes which can be extremely helpful.

[h3lix]

Is there any fundamental difference between this and regular Angband?

There wouldn't be any drastic changes in the basic formula, but there would be huge changes in birth and buying stuff.

With birth, the class and race would be the same, which should reduce the confusion of picking the right race to go with which class.

For example, a character you could pick would be Clinkz the Bonefletcher, an agile skeletal archer; or Leviathan the Tidehunter, a powerful sea creature.

Since it doesn't look like this idea is a huge hit with my DotA clan, it's probably not going to happen.

And since I have virtually no experience with C, I probably won't be picking up any torches either.