11-14-2006, 01:01 AM
Quote:Barbarian--clarify a little on the magic. Scrolls? Staves? Spells on scrolls which are not normally available as spells (and could thus be defined by a few as non-spells). If this is going to be a competition and not a friendly invitation to have some fun (not sure which way you're leaning yet) make sure everything is well-defined HERE, not in some long-lost literature that most aficionados know about, but the odd person out won't.
Rogue--Not a hell of a lot of experience here, so I'm not sure how much is possible nor what makes things difficult.
-Barbarian/Minimage choice at the beginning (Either all magic/no attacks or vice-versa)
-No hand slots (no weapon/shield--or alternatively, something like staves only), maybe restrict armor as well?
Mage--Seems alright, but you may want to implement a couple more as there are plenty of hard-to-start mage variants.
-Muscle Mage (breaking my own clarification rule for the sake of brevity, here)
-Live off the Land (harder than naked with bad book spawns)
-Spell restrictions (No Stone Curse, Fireball, Chain Lightning, etc.--get 3 dots)
-Alternative to spell restrictions; restrict magic schools--no Fire, etc.
Obviously all can be hardcore or not, depending on how difficult you want this. Just trying for some more diverse ideas here. Lemme know how easy/hard you want in comparison to these.
--me
Edit: and there's of course the Hardcore Beyond Naked Mage that we're all thinking about but no one has said out loud yet. I'm saying it.
As for the Barbarian, I was thinking that TP/ID scrolls are legal, all others are not, and no staves are legal at all. To the matter of competition or fun, of course it could be either, but I think that the community is far too small for there to be a true tournament of sorts. Take a look at the IM tourney. =o
There's a few of your ideas that I like a lot, but I'll start by critiquing the ones that I don't. =D
For a Rogue, it's near impossible to use purely magic and stay a purist. You'd have to run around levels until you found bookcases, and would likely end up trapped in a room, (where you couldn't legally quit). To use no weapon seems like it would be a fun, but not so challenging variant. How well you did would really depend on the armor that you find (or take the time to find), directing the game away from skill-oriented gaming, towards purely time consuming play.
Restricting magic schools just makes the play take longer. Imagine a Sorcerer in hell/hell versus advocates. Has anyone really ever died to them because of the time/mana it takes to SC them? Also, this variant is very easy to start, given that you initially have two schools in any case.
HCBNM is pointless because it would essentially need to be supplied or would just end up exactly the same as a normal sorcerer. If I used, say a "Dull Mace" that I might have found, it would probably make it even easier, as I could see the AC from "Armor of Tears" being very useful early on.
Feel free to respond, I'm certainly not perfect in my theorying and may have missed something. I'll move on to the others that I see as playable, though:
An LOL Sorcerer is harder than naked for sure at first, but I imagine that you could get some 200 charges out of the starting staff, if recharged wisely. Still, I think that I'd need to test this or talk to someone experienced with it to know how hard it is in the later levels. This somewhat leans towards the playtime issue aforementioned, but not too much so, because of how challenging I believe it would be to start and finish.
Muscle Mage (if by that you mean no spells/staves.. again I'll extend the use of TP/ID scrolls as okay) is definitely a viable playstyle. I could see it being very challenging in the last levels. This one checks out for me even if not hardcore. Item recoveries could be quite some trouble without dying a few successive times. =D
Spell restrictions is good by me. After some though, I think that saying a Sorcerer can use page one and page two spells/scrolls only (yes, no mana shield), plus an added restriction of Stone Curse. That gives a spell choice of each type. This would very much require that he be skilled at melee enemy activation as well, and it would be pretty funny to almost recommend that a variant use Holy Bolt on Diablo. =p
I'd prefer to see all of these hardcore, just because it's rather easy to beat Diablo non-hardcore. I've done a 3@30 with a character that should have been far from able just by SC'ing and killing a few monsters every time I went down, and having some 150,000 gold stockpiled for potions.
Thanks for the input. =)