This is probably not the best time to be talking about this, what with Clockwork empires in development and all (bless you for making something like this, Gaslamp!) but, what would you say to Dungeons of Dredmor's entire world made accessible in the form of a Roguelike? Like ToME, ADOM, Elona, or similar. And what features would you want in such a Roguelike? I'd willingly pay the same 60$ I put down for Unreal world when I found it, should such a thing ever come to pass, but knowing Gaslamp they'll probably make the price $ 20 or something. How would you like something in that vein? have the player enter the dungeon first and then choose to go around doing further adventures? Or make the dungeon the endgame? Eyebrows for all, or just our character? multiple races? Personally all I want is an expanded magic system anyone can access if they're smart enough, and keep the signature spells of each magic class unique to them unless the tree gets selected. And if somebody adds the infinite dungeon mode to said Roguelike, I'll probably never leave my room again. That, and exploring random planes of existence added on by content packs. Discussion for discussion's sake please, no arguments about DoD being a coffee-break Roguelike which needs to stay the way it is. I don't want this thread closed for the sake of personal preferences, and I would rather not be harmed by Daynab. Let's get on with it.
One thing I would like for a game like that would be a "Generations" thing (like Vash's thread, "for the bored and triumphants") actually implemented in the game. Sorta like a Campaign, if you want. Races I'm kinda meh about. I'm fine with the game being only humans. Maybe clockwork humanoid (like an android or cyborg, etc). Of course, they could implement the dwarves and elves since there's already mentions of them in the game. But adding more races seems kinda pointless.
When they get done with Clockwork Empires, they can probably be nudged in the general direction of this. I think it would work well as an expansion pack too. Just adding races to the character build would allow for lots of nice things.
Hmm... I think it is a really tricky question, Warlock, but at the same time a really good one. On one hand, when I think about something like "expanded Dungeons of Dredmor", I picture something similar to Elona in its concept, but on the other hand it would be really difficult to make it balanced with the way skill trees work in DoD. Especially since after some time you would stop getting enough levels to make any changes in the gameplay. Now, veering into the direction of "hypothetical ramblings of an insane person" (the "insane" part is supposed to be about me, for those who failed to notice that), it would be possible to make it into something like this if some parameters (like "block" or "counter" or any other of the kind) tested itself not against an absolute value of 100, but rather against a relative value that would change depending on the stats of whatever you are acting against, and if tiers on skill trees were not gained on every level but rather at certain level thresholds (like, your skill tree could get its first "bonus" when it reaches level 5, then the second at level 10, then at level 25 and so on) with levels itself giving small bonuses by means of increasing your archetype levels, and with skill tiers giving percentage-based bonuses instead of absolute ones (other than the resistance/damage bonuses, because those would remain useful even without that, and would often be 0 without accounting the skill tree bonuses so making them percentage-based would be bad). With that, you could add randomly-generating dungeons (with limit to the number of dungeons existing at the same time), semi-randomly generated dungeon bosses, and monsters could get a bonus to their parameters and to the experience given to you after every dungeon and/or dungeon floor you cleared (lesser dungeons could have a "mini"-miniboss on every floor, killing which would mark the floor as killed, with us unable to progress deeper until we find it (and with us seeing it on the minimap if it's in an already explored part of it). Such a solution would also make it possible to change the overall difficulty and length of the game by making the skill tree thresholds either require lower or higher level (a lower difficulty setting could give you these bonuses at levels 3, 6, 15, and so on instead of the standard 5, 10, 25, etc.), and the game could pretty much progress for any amount of time, like in Elona.
Not sure how I feel about the rest of your post, but the idea of some persistent elements across all games would be neat. Like in Torchlight, where you "retire" and you pass a powerful item down to the next hero. I have no idea how that would be balanced in this game though.
If they made it like a campaign, you could choose what gets passed down (doesn't need to be an item, they could limit it to skills). Heck, they could also do like "You beat the Lich Dredmor. Grats. As a reward, your next hero in the campaign starts with an extra X skill points" or something like that. If it was items like in TL, it could get crazy if you don't use permadeath. I remember passing down an item in TL1 from one of my characters so many times that it ended up just having insane stats. Granted, they could easily make 2 different campaign, 1 with PD and 1 without, that would alleviate 1 of my worries with a system like that.
