Reworking difficulty levels

[Mithril]

Will not all monsters just become the same randomized smear? Regardless of what the monster is called you get same, or almost the same, random agglomeration each time. That is, every time you see a monster you must use the look command it up to see what level it is and what abilities is have regardless of what it may look like. Assuming that the look command reveals everything. If not the situation gets more problematic since anything could be lethal without revealing this before killing you. Having uniform monsters has the advantage that you, after a while, know what a monster you see can do without having to use the look command on everything you see.

[Sirrocco]

It's a good point. Making the player carefully look at every monster they meet is not really the point here. Perhaps we could add a visual indicator that a given monster had an ego, at least - like a bit of white banding in the otherwise red border-brackets. That way, you'd only have to carefully look at the monsters with egos on them. I tend to think that this would fix the problem for normal difficulty and below, where egos would be relatively rare, though it could still prove somewhat annoying at higher difficulty levels, where egos become more common. Sus? You're the local advocate for the "I want the upper difficulties to be brutally unfair" contingent. Do you have any thoughts on how you'd want this to work?

...although, now that I think about it, hiding egos might well be a viable option for the "Insane is far too easy. I want a *challenge*." crew.

[Susramanian]

This will be worth some careful thought. As a starting point, I'll propose that we simply treat ego monsters as we treat ego equipment-- we slap a prefix or suffix or both on the name and call it good.

"You see a fire-infused naga myrmidon of cloning."

Admittedly, no matter what words we choose for our prefix and suffix pool, we're going to get occasional (or frequent) monsters that look like a Mad Lib gone wild. They'll at least be good for some laughs in the character reports forum.

[Salkhir]

I just came up with this idea so bare with me while i try and explain. How about having an additional tier difficulty or just choice on the menu that creates either just a random character and options or the ability to click a button - the game then creates a char for you and puts points in randonmy. This creates a mich harsher challenge for players and adds that sense of playing a yeek bard and try and complete the game unknowing of what is coming at the next level up and having to adapt.

You can then add to show it on character dump and have maybe a ladder with succesful attempts and bad mixes or what not.

Automate talent points and stat points.