[CF List] wraight

[Steven Lembark]

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      according to the handbook wraiths should be immune to disease and also
     
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      not need any food, however in practice player chars of race wraith do
     
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      get sick and do consume food.... since when has this been changed and
     
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      not documented in the handbook?
     
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       Dunno about diseases, but I recall wraiths consume food more slowly than
     
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      other races.  there is in fact no way at present time to make a race that
     
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      requires no food at all - you can just give them a very high sustenance
     
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      value so that their food consumption is much lower.
     
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       The idea of wraiths (and fireborns for that matter) eating food is a bit
     
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      odd - certainly if it is food of the same type as the other races.  You
     
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      could certainly see wraith's food to effectively be the lifeforce of
     
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      creatures they kill - doing that would require a bit of code
     
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      modification.
     
     
Old idea: Wraiths (or Devourer followers) reduce the HP of
anything around them, way w/in a 3x3 square area by issuing
the create food prayer (or a modified version of it). If there
is nothing animated nearby them then they are in deep trouble
(perhaps the spell might trade mana for food). As a last,
desparate ploy they can eat "normal" food but must consume
10x more of it per Kcal to get any benefit.

They would be born w/ the skill of "suck life out of",
with higher levels being able to get more hp from other
high-level monsters. This would include whatever -- minimal --
level of life force animates undead creatures nearby.
The skill would do some damage, transferring the resulting
HP to the wraith. Code for it is rather similar to Destruction,
with an add'l counter that up's the user's hp/fp.

This is similar to *Angband handling of Vampires: they get
little benefit from eating food, only way to keep fed is
drink blood. This has an advantage since they don't have to
carry food and do damage when they do suck blood; tradeoff
is that they have to get near enough to get hit in order
to suck the blood. If the only thing nearby is a Dragon and
you're hungry, oh well...

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       Hard to say what a fireborns source of food should be - in theory
     
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      something like fire, or maybe flamable liquids (booze) at least?  Having
     
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      it fire would be a bit odd - it just means that the fireborn casts
     
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      fireball on itself to eat.  OTOH, that may give them a use for wands of
     
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      fireball and the like if they don't want to burn up their spellpoints to
     
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      do it.
     
     
They could live on fire. Similar to handling of Wraiths,
above. They get X Fp/turn by being in a flame. If they
stand in front of a dragon they might never need to eat :-)
Problem is that if you get hungry in a roomfull of treasure
it can be a nasty choice...

This could be handled by reversing the sign for their
damage-from-fire and leaving them "vulnerable" to fire.
As their exp goes up they become more "vulnerable",
which is to say they get more points added to their
current stats by being exposed to fire. Given the FP
remain at zero forever and the hunger rate is fairly
low, sitting away from flame would slowly reduce their
hp due to constant starvation; entering a flame would
regen the hp due to negative damage.

Survival at low levels could be handled by giving them
low hunger rates, that go up with exp. Worshipping
Ruggilli would cost something there, but added protections
and easy access to fire in most dungeons would tend to
leave this sustainable.


Another alternative is to say that fb and w's don't need
"food" but "lifeforce". They basically live at zero fp
forever and consume mana to survive. This means that if
their SP goes to zero they begin to "starve". Their
"food" would be existing restore mana potions and magic
crystals (basically they'd store "food" by charging the
thing before going into battle).

This would effect their mana regen, with the "food" use
offsetting any normal regen rate (i.e., just recompute
the regen rate at a fraction of what it otherwise would
have been). A damaged character uses more fp to heal,
which would effectively reduce their sp regen rate;
casting healing spells would basically be tradeoff of
prayer points for spell points.

This mehtod would probably be sustainable since both
fb & w's have fairly high pow stat limits and end up
being magic users, which up the pow stats to begin with.
This would tend to give them fast enough mana regen to
begin with that they could survive lower levels.


--
Steven Lembark                               2930 W. Palmer
Workhorse Computing                       Chicago, IL 60647
                                            +1 800 762 1582