Bay 12 Games Forum

I must agree that a simple item fall trap would be very interesting. However my main desire for traps is that more traps become able to be triggered by pressure plates, wires, ect. This would let us set up Indiana Jones style death halls with weapon traps not being an actual part of the trigger. Setting up Catapults, Ballista, weapons (mostly crossbows), rolling boulders to trigger plates would seriously enhance trapping for me. My second trapping hope would be that we become able to forge mechanism out of metal (mostly steel) for more lava fun. I don't know about you but I can never find any bauxite.

I personally think that we should stop being so racist with the magic. I don't want to have to make special spell lists for each race. This would make modding in a new magic using race even harder or they would just have to use a copy of one of the other races systems.

I like random fashioning of grimores as an artifact thing (along with other magical artifacts like the standard magic sword ect..)

I am very preferential to the idea of magic as a pervasive (usually invisible) flow that could be manipulated and influence fortress design (runic engraving channeling the flow ect), so the wizards or artificers have to use local energy hotspots or create their own for their mightiest works.

As to the idea the only the priest should heal... This is not DnD we aren't worried about party balance here. The highly arbitrary separation of magic workers and the priesthood is rather silly and as Armok (god of blood!) does not seem too likely to hand out the "heals plz" I would rather bring the priest and magi closer together.

Things I would like.

Throwing outside of *Blarg Urist Angry!* I mean if some goblins rushed into my room right now I start throwing everything I can reach before they get into my face. It would also be cool to have slingers, spearthrowers, knives, chakram, axes, shurukan, caltrops, nets, bolas, dwarven fire cocktails (by Armok not da Booze!)

A base weapon speed. Perhaps modified by skill and stats, but damn those crossbows need some work. Even hand weapons could be seperated out some by making big weapons slow.

The ability to load anything on a Catapult and have it arc across the battlefield. "Release the Kitties!"

Blowdarts would be nice but if I want to poison my sword I think I should be able to as well. Its just that blowdarts are easy to make and are fairly stealthy.

I would prefer divinity to not rely solely on the worship of others. Otherwise it makes it to easy to control these gods. Besides it feels to cliche to rip off Forgotten Realms too mutch. Pantheonic wars, however I wan't.

I want to see two gods battle it out for power and supremacy outside my fortress.  
I want hordes of spirits and mortals to fill the fields with blood as two gods cleave their way towards another in wrath.
I want to occasionally unearth a buried god's artifact/temple/still living body and resurrect it with appropriate results (madness/power/being eaten.)
I want to invite Zeus to visit our fine red light district (or accept these virgin "sacrifices") and spawn a dozen or so of demi-immortals to protect the fort (or play as an adventurer)
I want to have the gods make themselves known and felt (through priest, spirit or even avatar)
Some random blessings or if displeased cursing won't hurt the devotion.

Tungsten is heavy as all get out. Besides that and the difficulty of smelting it the only common uses for it I can remember is anti-tank sabot rounds and lightbulb filaments. Titanium is also very hard to forge but seeing as how we can smelt Aluminum (I swear I had some on a fort) and Adamantine we can safely say that their isn't much beyond the smelting capabilities of dwarves.

Well sure Catapults should have a chance to knock down and bust up walls, but they don't right now do they? And while it would logical to code catapults as doing so perhaps what we need is the ability for non-person objects to be damaged by weapon attacks. Then the broken object spawns it's component material (stones, wood, ect) if appropriate.

This would help unify the act of harvesting by making it the result of the dwarf actually hacking away at the tree or stone to damage it. It would also help catapults work and theoretically allow for those goblins to slash and burn their way into your fortress. Buildings would feel more battle damaged from odd blows and it would allow for DBZ styles of deified level combat by letting those superdwavenly strong fellows throw enemies through mountains or buildings.

While a class of randomly generated horrors from beyond would be interesting, part of the reason I love dwarf fortress is the promise of a layman like me to use simple descriptor tags and pseudo-code to make our own creations to share and slaughter. If all or even most of the monsters become randomly generated then we may see some seriously unscary or ridiculous things. I love random generators but have more faith in the creativity of man. Remember that random generators brought us the fail that is Oblivion, yet careful work brought us the win of Morrowind.

That said it would be hilarious to watch a cultist summon a chaos creature only to discover it 'randomly' has no arms with which to hurt others, possesses a healing bite, melts in sunlight or simply lacks lungs.

[ April 08, 2008: Message edited by: Belteshazzar ]

Perhaps it's just my Angband/ToME background talking but I would be very interesting to have a description of a monster by looking at it. This way we could describe custom or unusual (I know what a wolf looks like but not everyone knows what a Beakdog, Nightgaunt or somesuch is.)

It would be interesting to add so that when we get more monster abilites to add we can make for some truely horrific or bizzare enemies. Besides I tend to visualize the fight better when I can get a good 'look' at my foes