User:Bubbles/bubblehack design

Bubblehack initial vision ==

You were originally an ascended nethack character, but over the aeons the gods have been forgotten yada yada yada

The amulet of yendor was stolen (again) but this time it's been replicated and improved, the multiverse is at war

you have been found and resurrected by one of the last remaining archons blah blah blah but there is not enough faith left to fully restore you

They have found some suitable hosts you can possess, hence choose your race/archetype/alignment

Alignments: lawful good neutral good neutral evil chaotic evil

artifacts are lawful/chaotic, neutral can use either, lawful/chaotic cannot use any cross-aligned artifacts (possibly make this a bit more fine grained)

archetype+alignment == role

fighter+LG = paladin fighter+NG = soldier fighter+NE = mercenary fighter+CE = barbarian

archetype would contribute let's say 50% of your identity, role the other 50%

There is a minor breach into your plane from another plane at war, you go to the army camp there to volunteer

You start off relatively unknown, and you don't have any god yet

At each "phase" of the game (as your fame increases) you will be offered some set of N tasks from a pool of P, of which you must complete C.

e.g. at the start you might be offered three branches (out of a pool of 9), and you must complete one of them.

As phases continue the breach becomes worse and/so the branches will naturally increase in danger

I still want branches to be accessible out of order, so maybe you can enter them whenever, but you just won't have the actual quest yet

You should probably know which branches you're going to be offered at the start of the game

I'd like branches to offer extremely different challenges, so that your game strategy will change from game to game based on how you want to approach them

The game would roughly play out as:

PHASESTART,hub->quests->branch,branch->complete,PHASEEND

repeat

With each phase the breach becomes worse and the plane's response is escalated, so potentially more shopkeepers and higher ranked priests, the next questgivers

The pantheons available to you will be shuffled, you need to choose a co-aligned god, but might have some amount of choice similar to DCSS. You don't have to choose a god early, or at all (religiously unaligned, independent of your personal alignment)

I don't want the game to be rigidly defined in what order things happen/you "have" to do things, but the nature of the quests should lead to a varied but natural progression, similar to how vanilla/variants with more branches tend to work (in dnh you may decide to do chaos earlier depending on the variant, in vanilla you may choose the mines earlier as a lawful/dwarf).

Abilities should be many, varied, and on short cooldowns, similar to dnh binder abilities (25-turn cooldown, no Pw cost)

Your personal Pw pool should be small and grow slowly, but regenerate moderately fast, i.e. you can't just chain-cast spells, and you have to choose which ones to cast Items should augment your Pw pool but be somewhat rare

Regular melee/ranged attacks should be significantly weaker in terms of damage, but link into your abilities, e.g. hitting with a weapon as a barbarian could return Pw (rage)

Intrinsics should be very temporary, all roles should have some (non-complete) coverage of resistances via abilities (slashem's monk techniques)

slotless extrinsics should be extremely rare, the pool of extrinsics should be shuffled over the set of equipment each game, making variety (possobly with limits, so "of Power" would appear on one of gloves/feet/hat)

I hate "compulsory items"/ascension kits

pack-ratting will be killed, e.g.

in open inventory 2 weapons (or X-weight of weapons) quiver worn armor X-weight of backup armor, NOT body armor X-weight of tools, or N-count, the lesser of the two N-count wands N-count scrolls 1 book (+1 wielded)

All characters would start with a backpack/sack/container Make shuffling items in/out less shit, possibly just make burdened be a majormajor disadvantage to fighting

Prayer will be more explicit, you should be able to specify what to pray for:

e.g.

• help - make enemies run away, remove cursed bad things, sickness
• protection - bless armor, protection, hunger (hunger is NOT help), temp resistances
• fury - bless/enchant weapons, temporary to-hit/damage bonuses, immunity to passive attacks

The timeout will be shared, but depending on the god, they may have more affinity to some types of help, and will trigger a shorter cooldown for that.

role/archetype signature abilities should be fun and cool, you should naturally be using them as your primary tools, (but for conducts or whatever it should be possible, if harder, to not use them).