[Crawl-ref-discuss] Vampires

[Jarmo K. <jar...@cs...>]

Now that vampires seem to have sneaked into soup while I was away
(hooray!) here are some main ideas that I had when I wrote my patch.
They are some kind of mixture of vampire mytologies, crawl and
my own ideas. I hope they help understanding motives behind some
features in my patch:

-Stealthy

-Undead (us_hungry_dead) but when drinking blood became "more living"

-Most suitable classes are assassin and death knight.
 Fighter, summoner, and necromancer are ok.

-They especially like human blood.

-Corpses nutrition is base on their weight.

-Attributes varies based on hunger status, especially regeneration.

-NO regeneration when they have no food. (IMO this is the most important)
 
-Higher regeneration rate when full.

-It seems that I also made hunger rate dependaple to current hp.
 I probably wanted to encourage careful and sneaky playing style.
 It costs more to heal bad wounds than small scratches.
 They kind of burn victims life force to heal themself.

(I did experiment other ways to balance hunger and regeneration, but this
 was most interesting.)

-Fresh corpses are main source for food. Blood potions should be rare.
 It is no bad thing if player is out of food sometimes. This is why I
 didn't include blood potions to Fulsome Distillation. But it may be ok
 if chance is low enough.

-Can survive without food. They just became much more vulnerable and go to
 "hunting mode".

-When hunting mode they are extremely stealthy (and dead)
  -general guideline is that they are as dead as mummies in this state
   so they get high resistance to negative energy and can't gain benefits
   from potions.
  -they should get some powers to balance the fact that zero regeneration
   is very bad thing.
  -IMO they should have poison resistance at least when starving

-They gain more power when they drink blood but also become more human.
  -lower resistance to negative energy because they are using their
   victims life force, but they get boost to death spells.
  -they can use potions, but don't get full effects (good and bad)
  -see invisible. 

-They can turn into vampire bat. (This is cool, and that is the main
 reason for this ability :). It can be used for fleeing and hunting next
 weak victim. Turning into tiny and weak bat is only way to regenerate
 naturally when you have no food. No casting spells or zapping wands in
 this form. Originally turning into bat made you drop all your equipment,
 but that was bit too much.


---
And here is sketchy description for vampires:
  Vampires are stealthy undead creatures who travel into the depths in search
  of fresh blood and protection from sunlight.

  Vampires progress very slowly in level, and in all skills except stealth,
  fighting, spellcasting and necromancy. As they increase in level they become
  increasingly in touch with the powers of death and can draw more power from
  others death.
  
  Vampires do not need to eat but they need fresh blood to be able to use most
  of their powers. On the other hand hungry vampire can be even more deadly
  when searching for next victim.


-- 
Jarmo Kielosto