New feature suggestions/requests Thread - Rogue's Tale

Now that the new patch is out, it's time to pester the developer with ideas for new features or improvements to old ones!

- Allow free looking. As it stands, the primary use for lhe look function is in combat, to tell how hurt creatures are. But in combat, every turn counts, and you will almost always get more benefit out of using a turn to attack, move or use an item than you will out of using it to look. It also doesn't make sense thematically, since the level of detail you get is what your character sees automatically, rather than a detailed analysis that takes time. I think that either looking should not take a turn, or it should provide much more benefit (like giving you lots of tactically valuable information about the target, TOME-style).

- Allow putting things in containers. Right now, you can take objects out of containers but not put them back in. It doesn't make very much sense, and being able to put things in containers would be a great solution to the problem of having your dumped gear looted from the floor by friendly NPCs (since as far as I can tell other creatures don't loot containers).

- Buff deafening. It's probably the weakest effect in the game, and the least valuable enchant. While it's at least noticeable when used on the player (because Rogue's Tale makes hearing actually useful), its effect is way too minor and situational to ever be worth using against other creatures. It only applies to casters, and pretty much any other offensive effect is more effective against them.

- Allow players to strip their rations. The in-game graphic for a ration is cheese, bread, fried meat and egg, and for players who like having friends, those individual ingredients are way more useful than just having the ration. Being able to strip the rations into their components (maybe getting a number of foods proportional to how "full" the ration is) would be a really cool alternative function, like the way water flasks have the alternative function of putting out fires.

- Have more "positive" potions. Right now, the overwhelming majority of potions are poisons or diseases, which is kind of unvaried and also means there's no incentive for "taste testing" because odds that bad things will happen are extremely high. For example: "Potion of Arachne" - temporarily polymorphs the player into a spider. Orcs, spiders and mamalobs treat you as an ally until it wears off, but friends and humans treat you as an enemy. Another potion could do the same for wolves or bats, and make undead your allies. Another potion could do the same for whelps and demons. "Potion of the Gambler" doubles the melee damage you deal and the melee damage you take. "Potion of Burning Blood" lets you do +1d6 fire damage but makes you vulnerable to cold. Other potions can do the same for other element pairings. "Potion of Midas" turns your blood into gold and you gain gold equal to twice the damage you receive until the effect expires. "Potion of Shadowstriding" makes you invisible, but stops you seeing the light radius around other humanoids. "Potion of Rage" boosts your damage but also afflicts you with the Curse of Wrath. "Potion of the Golem" slows you but boosts damage resistances a lot. And so on.

Like the potion ideas I do (my Yodaish is a bit rusty so it might have gone wrong). They would probably end up being called something else than potions though, such as flasks, and they would be the opposite of potions in that most of them are good but the few that are bad are really bad.

I've been thinking about adding health bars to creatures that the player looks at (perhaps as an effect that lasts x turns) and some other ideas but haven't really decided yet.

Fun fact: Yoda actually speaks in Japanese sentence order, as a tribute to Akira Kurosawa whose film "The Hidden Fortress" inspired Star Wars.

One more thought: If Silent Move works off agility, which it seems to, you might want to put that in the text. I've taken Silent move with a couple of strength-based characters and they've all failed miserably to use it.

Another feature suggestion: when you press the hotkey for a talent, make it cancel any previous talent you had selected. E.g. if I select Heroic Charge, and then realise the enemy is too close, and want to use Blade Flurry instead, pressing the Blade Flurry hotkey should switch to Blade Flurry targeting, instead of me having to press Esc to turn off Heroic Charge targeting first.

It would also be great for the log to record damage numbers so you could see them and figure things out in your own time, or, better still, for it to show dice rolls and calculations as well, so that people could see the effect of their stats in practice.

Here are few minor requests:
- Since dog is something more important now, add some way to know it's level, or at least some tips to it. Variants are: 1) When dog levelup display some message about it's claws getting bigger or whatever. 2) Display dog's level when looking at it. 3) Change dog's type when getting every 3rd level, f.e. "small dog" -> "dog" -> "big dog" -> "dire dog" (or may be display this when looking at dog).
- Replace "You have unlocked a new heritage!" with "You have unlocked [heritage name] heritage!", because sometimes it is hard to figure what I've got, especially when you are new.

Edit: Ooh, that's what the "Ding!" for.

- Make friendly fire work same way as stepping into visible trap does, i.e. ask before actually doing this. I keep loosing my mages due to shooting fireballs at self, when missing heal or some other hotkey. Same problem with pets, because sometimes I just use wrong button and attack pet instead of buffing/healing it.

Edited by: Altren

I have a number of suggestions for pets:
- I would definitely like a way to view a pet's level.

- It would be convenient to tell if pets are currently affected by a curse/poison/disease. I find when I'm babysitting them with healing spells I'm never quite sure if it's safe to move on or not. Maybe even make it something like a colour tint applied to targets affected by poison/disease/etc.

- Having damage done to friends appear in red would make some combats a lot less confusing. When pets get in melee with an enemy (except Woof where you can see his lifebar), I just see hordes of white damage text popping up and can't tell if my pet is getting mauled or if it is dishing out the damage.

- Being able to tell how much a healing effect heals for on an alternate target. If I heal a bear with a spell, I can't see how much it is healing for. This would also help me tell if I've gotten them to full health or not. I may be mistaken, but I think this pops up on Woof, just not other friends/pets.

I would love a minimap or a map scroll feature that would let you look around the dungeon floor, or see it all at once. That way, you could remind yourself where the stairs were on an already-explored level without having to traipse through it all over again (potentially having to jump over those accursed corridor-blocking pits).

Also, PLEASE give us a way to get the dog back if he goes hostile. I just had an enemy shoot him with an arrow which I can only assume had confusing poison on it, since it made him immediately go hostile and attack me. Then I found out that giving him meat does *nothing*. Oh, and that he's immune to the Wand of Crippling for some reason. And then I died.