We all know the problem where we find great gear that is completely irrelevant to our build (find shields on a mage, spell rings on a warrior etc.). These items usually get sold or LFed and are lost. I suggest the following system: After you defeat Lord Dredmor and ascend, you can choose one item on your character or in your inventory to leave as an inheritance/hand it down to newer generations. This item would then be made stronger (a few new enchantments, new damage types, something) and immune to corruption. This item could then be chosen to be carried on a new character from lvl 1. This would go well with the ending too, considering an "identical hero" will soon have to come and kill Dredmor again. And I wonder how many of us name our characters like JinF I, JinF II, JinF III etc... I'm fairly certain quite a few... If your character dies with an heirloom on them, it is not lost. It should be able to be found randomly in those rooms with the dead adventurers and 1-2 items in a stack. I've found those rooms to be rare enough and it doesn't have to be a 100% chance to be found. If you defeat Dredmor while having an heirloom on your char or in your inventory you can decide to either hand down the heirloom (and thus make it stronger again) or choose another item. This way you could have a set of heirlooms to choose from when you make new characters (unless the items are currently lost and in some room waiting to be found). I think it would spice the game up a bit. We could even have a system where heirlooms on Permadeath mode are stronger than those on reload mode since it is much harder to survive in one go.
So you could just go through with a build you are certain with repeatedly generating heirlooms (Heirloom Doul's Sword... does it need more power?) leading to newer characters never requiring to bother about gear again.
Sorta defeats the purpose of a rouge-like game. Not that the "New Game+" concept is bad, but I just don't think it fits the general theme of this game.
So basically the same system that Fate uses. The way Fate balanced it though, was by needing level/stat requirements for items. So that you couldn't just keep passing along an uber heirloom that made the game a joke. Of course, people got around that by making the heirloom a ring or necklace, which had no stat/level requirements.
I like the idea, but I wouldn't make it available to characters that didn't branch from a winning character. To become super powerful from this you'd ideally have to be able to keep winning permadeath games consecutively.
True. It should be kept to a winning bloodline only. If a character dies, then the item would be lost.
Yeah. I agree. And while I liked Fate/Torchlight, I'd have no idea how this would be balanced. Besides, I"d make it out of an amulet anyway. I've rarely found any good amulets in this game. Speaking of Torchlight, people heirloomed an amulet with a powerful enough health enchantment that it wrapped around and killed you every time you wore it.
The difference between Torchlight and DoD is that Torchlight's weapons are designed to scale better as you increase in levels. DoD is designed to give you a 'reasonable chance to die at the hands of Lord Dreadmor' on level 10. It's scalability beyond that is questionable. I think of it akin to say the old AD&D 1.0/2.0 rules where it worked to level 20 then the entire system broke down and couldn't scale well beyond that. So they came up with all sorts of clumsy workarounds to address it.
Personally, I don't think the Torchlight/Fate "heirloom" system would work for a roguelike. You should make features that will affect the most players; giving a starting character some neat equipment but only if the player has already beaten the game once in the recent past is a pretty low percentage scenario for a roguelike. I mean, how often do you actually kill Dredmor on a given run, and then start up another dude immediately afterwards who would benefit from some of the old dude's equipment? However, most Nethack descendants have the concept of a "bones" file: after a player character dies, there's a small chance that other characters will be able to find the level he died on, and grab (some degraded bits of) his loot, while also having to fight whatever it was killed him off in the first place. This effect would be pretty easy to emulate in DoD, since it already has most of the bits (saving a level state, corrupting and randomly removing some items). This would be fairly well balanced as long as it only happens to characters who die on the lowest level they have ever reached, because in general a character at dungeon level X will be well equipped for dungeon level X but not necessarily level X+1. Also, since the chances of loading a bones level are generally relatively low, it's basically a bit of a bonus for a random character instead of a guaranteed leg up for your next character (and you have to keep in mind that usually, whatever killed the last guy is still hanging around).
