ASCII Invasion ~ playtesters requested!

Invincible monsters is bad design, and monsters spawned as passive are actually a pretty nasty problem. I'd encourage you to give them a single weakness -- one obscure damage type that can hurt them. One of the ones that's not available from a CoE weapon, or from another commonplace source. Transmutative damage, maybe, or Existential.

 

Due to reported CTDs I've been unable to reproduce to fix (via Steam's workshop), and some controversy over unintended design consequences (via Gaslamp Game's forum), I've updated this mod to remove the Verdant Elf monster.

 

I think it's sort of a shame, seeing as the monster was interesting and the problem could've been solved, but it is your choice. Either way, it's still a good mod.

 

I couldn't see the problem, by the way. It is true, invincible monsters are bad design. But this verdant elf isn't always invicible, it's just the vegan friendship that makes them invincible. Aside from that, those are quite unique monsters: going rogue (for real, not the difficulty) and going after them invisible or really sneaky will not work, since those are immune to "sneak attacks".
After all one should take Veganism to create a different playstyle: vampires cannot eat entirely, and vegans cannot eat most of the things and hit animals. Lots of item mods are vegan-friendly, while the second effect is more a buff than a debuff.
This mod was doing the opposite, making the game for vegans slightly harder, while in fact negating them just some little zoo gifts, and people complained.
It's like saying that every character should live in the dungeon likewise, even if they don't have teleports, wall digs, knockbacks, trap sight and every other skill not directly combat-only. It's like complaining about island items.
This is was on the same level of Vaults of Maslech (aside from crashes ^^' ): not every character can explore the entire dungeon without problems, and there are things some characters cannot do, while others can. Vegans cannot do everything, jut because their skill tree is just really powerful with all those +, debuff removals and charms, and the ability of never die from animal attacks.
I really liked that, above all because those are mods: you can live without them, but if you want something more (different, really), you take them.

 

Is the A Little Girl supposed to spawn trying to kill you? Because it spawned trying to kill me.

 

The problem is that it's not just vegans -- any Verdant Elf that was spawning passive (which IMX is about 20-25% of all monsters in the current beta) was immortal unless you had an <effect type="shout">, which is basically limited to just Big Game Hunters.

 

Which means that adding an item with such an effect as a drop for a different monster from this pack would fix the problem, really.

 

Actually, that's not a bad idea, Kazeto. Make a upper-floor monster drop some item that's like 'flash-bang' - throw it at one monster to blind it an create a Shout effect in a template 101 radius. Or something. That would totally work.

 

A flash-bang throwed bomb that can be used to create a flash-bang bolt.
Sprites should not be a problem here .

 

How did I miss this mod?!? Wow!
I can't wait to play it and see how it works with other mods. Faxpax, Interior Dredmoring, and Roguish Renovation.
I can't help it, I like those mods.
Unless it messes up, then I'll remove them.

Anyway, thanks for this!

So, playing it so far, I like it. Little Girl was apparently a victim of a Schrodinger's cat paradox, and was dead while alive. Moving around, with the bar stating that she was dead.
Managed to find a fallen wizard, and got the the buff for that. Looking forward to more of them.
Haven't seen any Wizard-lands symbols on the first level, but they're a bit rare. I wonder how your mod works with them?
Also, I forgot to check Faxpax, for my test. So, ignore that.

Just killed the 1000th Dog. Nice reference to the Uberjackal effect in Adom.
He only did 4 damage to me, and thanks to being really lucky on the first floor, I was doing around 24 damage to it.

 

I don't know if I should edit my previous post or add one, so I'll add one for now.
So far, I'm up to the 4th floor, and having fun. I ran into a quest that gave me an adorable dog as an enemy. That's a bit mean. Although, it's not your fault.
What's the point of the ring of inaccuracy, and the amulet of forgetfulness, they don't have any bonuses/penalties, so I don't see the use of them.

 

The Ring of Inaccuracy has a small chance of landing a bonus hit on each monster adjacent (inc. diagonals) to the monster you're directly attacking in melee. The Amulet of Amnesia has a very small chance of generating a random bonus item whenever you kill a monster. These aren't the only new items with special effects like that, so it's worth playing around with what you find (or cheating and checking the xml files, naturally).

 

This is why we need the ability to add that yellow descriptive text to items.

 

Ah. Nice to know that's how they work. I suggest making it more obvious somehow, but fair enough.
Also, Glorious bolts crash the game hard when you fire them.

 

Welp, that's immediately getting commented out. I recall those bolts being among the more frustrating items to get working in my test runs and I am much less attached to their arguably redundant concept than I was to Verdant Elves. I don't suppose you were firing them off the edge of the map or anything crazy and blamable like that, were you?

(Oh, and I also tagged all items with non-obvious properties, excluding traps. Their descriptions are generally out of the way during normal gameplay - unlike monsters - so I might as well avert any further confusion or consumable wastage.)

 

No, it was in the middle of the dungeon. Not quite dead center, but far far from any of the dges.
And thank you for making it somewhat obvious what the ring and amulet do.
I'm a bit surprised it doesn't even get a minor bonus like making the Emerald amulet.

Okay, Missing Leg trap is the worst trap ever.
Rabbit's Tooth apparently must belong to the rabbit from Monty Python.
I finally got a robotoic leg from a mecha.

 

Glorious Loot Mimics (the yellow ones ?) freeze the game when casting. No error messages , the game seizes for a while and sometimes can't recover. Playing with Ascii Invasion , Essence skills and Interior Dredmorating on windows XP. I'm not surprised considering the magic law polymorph can also crash the game (though it does so neatly)

 

Hi,

Has anyone faced the Doom Eye yet? I'm having an issue where I have no debuffs, he did not hit me with the 72 turns debuff yet, but after a long time (close to 72 turns indeed, but no debuff there) I start taking heavy damage every turn. No idea how to work around it. Heavy dmg indeed, kills me in few turns (zodiacal want, potion of purity, nothing works)

Is this intended?

 

The only issue I can see here is that for some reason the Doomed debuff has <self="0"> on it. I'm pretty sure "self" always refers to the player, even if it's a monster casting the spell, so I think that tag could actually be preventing the debuff from showing up correctly on the player.

 

Right, I agree that the problem is no debuff showing, as if I was playing on permadeath I'd be gone by now.

I did like the challenge though, as I had to burn through my stockpile of health potions to survive the effects.

The Bossy Vortex is another one worth of praise, the dude is a tough fight. I can beat dredmor but can't kill the mean V