ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I've seen the idea of multi-tile monsters kicked around before. It's a great idea, but sounds like a nightmare to implement. Now that we're getting Shockbolt's beautiful new tiles, I've been thinking about it again. I think his original tiles are 128x128 and he scales them down for us. With the high resolution versions of these tiles around, they strike me as very well suited to an implementation of multi-tile monsters.

What if we just inflated the dungeon by a factor of two in both dimensions, while not doing the same for the player character and most monsters? So this...
... becomes this:
Admittedly, this would have all sorts of profound effects on gameplay. The lack of single-tile-wide corridors, for example, would make most adventurers' lives harder. On the other hand, I think it would lead to much more aesthetically pleasing dungeon layouts, as well as a more epic feel overall. But the point of all this is of course to allow an easier implementation of monsters that take up a 2x2 tile block. They'll cruise around these inflated dungeons as easily as everything navigates the current dungeons. No worries about huge dragons being unable to move through tight doors and halls.

Playing in 32x32 tile mode and seeing one of Shockbolt's 64x64 dragon tiles coming at you would be loads of fun.

Better to have some wider corridors and some narrower ones than globally boosting corridor width.

Large creatures should be able to squeeze into small spaces, anyways. Just make it slow going and harm their combat stats while they're so inconvenienced.

Make larger creatures able to crush through walls and everything's fine.

Even if you doubled everything it would lead to the player being able to make single-width corridors with diggers and bolting large enemies with impunity from their caves.

I too like the idea of wall-crushing alongside a mix of narrow and wider paths. Nothing to say there can't be some relatively wide open areas and special vaults primed for the likes of this as well.

Problem is that there are some monsters that pretty much would have to be large - Dragons, for one. Do we really want all dragons everywhere to wall-crush?

Perhaps a modified version of wall-crushing - wall crushing (large). It wouldn't let you crush walls willy-nilly, but if you had a tile that would be legal to enter if you were a single-tile monster, but can't be reached as a multi-tile monster, you could step into it, and crush walls as necessary to make the space legal. They might take some damage in so doing, and would only do so if pursuing the PC. That way, the monsters don't go tearing up the dungeon by default, but the PC can't hide down long corridors. Possibly even have some monsters with appropriate ranged attacks or summons that would be large but wouldn't have the wall-crushing at all. If you stand back and shoot at them, they'll stand back and shoot at you.

I like the idea that hiding down a narrow tunnel provides some measure of safety from big monsters. Think of Bilbo and Smaug. I also think that big monsters should be given various tools to help extract troublesome morsels from tight spots. They didn't get that big by going hungry. Some evil abilities for big monsters:

Teleport prey to self
Earthquake
Shapechange to humanoid form
Send unpleasant minions in after prey
Fill confined space with fiery/acidic/frozen/crackling death. An AoE whose total damage is determined by affected area would be great. Set if off in an open room, and each affected square wouldn't take that much damage. Set it off in a cramped tunnel and it's ruinous. Let's see dragon breaths work like this!
Render prey's terrain fatal. Maybe a spell that turns the floor under you molten, or inscribes a Rune of Heartstopping under your feet, or sucks the oxygen out of the air. Anything that forces you to evacuate your hidey hole.

I'm all into this, this could really be a great addition. Some things I just thought of:

- Make usable one-turn diggers with cooldown/energy. So far diggers can't be used during a battle because they take around 30 turns to dig a hole, there are some magic skills to dig faster, and I remember in T2 some diggers with a normal speed but also a 1-turn dig skill with an energy cost/charge. Maybe just bring wands of digging back. We have to consider that digging is an important strategy when fighting multi-tile mobs.

- This wall crushing sounds really exciting. I like the idea of the mob getting damaged by doing it, but I wouldn't like it to work like 'H's chewing through the map, it could be a skill with a rather long cooldown (10-15 turns). It would be really scary to have a Dragon slowly crushing the corridor to get its fangs on you.

- About expanding the maps. I concour with the ones posting about not just doubling up the tiles on the dungeons, but keeping a balance between small corridors and wider spaces. There are several issues around this, like running through 2-tiles corridors or illumination. It can take a rather long while to just check all the places if it's all wider, specially since in the current dungeon design there are sometimes corridors coming out of the strangest corners of rooms, and I'm not even mentioning doors, hehe. Maybe something to implement with this idea should be a very old idea of static light sources in dungeon rooms. Torches and fireplaces and such.
I think a good place to think of is the former-Moria dungeon Reknor, that's a great place to add torches and big monsters and see how it works.

I also support the idea of summons and specific skills to counter hiding players. But what about player skills and spells to specifically deal with big monsters? A 3-turns aiming archer shot comes to mind, or larger, shorter ranged, ammunition for slingers. Secondary weaponry for melee fighters, say polearms and such, specifically made for dealing with huge monsters but really ineffective with smaller enemies.
I think big monsters should have a massive armor and a faster metabolism, so normal attacks would do very few damage and would be countered with the regeneration, so the way to deal with them would be large-damage outputs and APR. So there could maybe some tactical sustains for warriors, making a stunning blow take 2 turns, but doing a bonus damage against large mobs. Same for the more dextrous fighters, boosting APR and actually using the rogue skills for armor penetration.
What about mages? 'You shall not pass' kind of skills?