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[ZZ]

Angel of Randomity
Oh no, somebody has broken the game! Now everything here is random. So, every weapon can fire as a random weapon, including overheated nuclear plasma rifle, armour protects like an random armour, monsters fire like a random monster including Cyberdemon, power-ups and consumables work in the same way(counting Hell Staff as a consumable). But the game still resists. The chance to act like it must is bigger, but still far from certain.

[leonresevil2]

HM... Coins? How about we can only kill an enemy while rocket jumping on him? Also, when you destroy a wall, there is chance that a mushroom or magic start is spawned which grants you some powers (such as infrared vision, you can see many colours, you get hungry and so on...)

And stairs become pipes you slide down, and the Cyberdemon looks like a suspiciously familiar dragon. Plus, if you outsmart him, you get to fight a giant ape with a fascination for princesses.

Heh, I bet someone will make that total conversion...

[ChaoticJosh]

Angel of Multiplication

Each level only starts with a few enemies, but every 10 or 20 turns the monsters will 'split', creating a copy of the original and effectively doubling the enemies on the level. The monsters can do this indefinitely, unless there's literally no room left on the level.

EDIT: Something else in the same vein:

Angel of Sudden Death

You remember those Bomberman games where if you took too long, then the game's arena would start destroying itself to get you to hurry up? In this challenge, there's either a acid or lava tile in one of the four corners, and every turn the acid/lava will spawn another tile of itself, working itself around the level clockwise and once it circles around, it starts again on the next innermost row of tiles and continues until the entire level is engulfed! Hurry up, you never know where the stairs might be...

[thelaptop]

Angel of Multiplication

Each level only starts with a few enemies, but every 10 or 20 turns the monsters will 'split', creating a copy of the original and effectively doubling the enemies on the level. The monsters can do this indefinitely, unless there's literally no room left on the level.

I'd hate to be in a Pain Elemental cave with this challenge... and suddenly City of Skulls might just be too terrifying.  And the Mortuary will flat out kill you.  Twice.  Complete flattening of the corpse.  Eww...

[leonresevil2]

Angel of Multiplication

Each level only starts with a few enemies, but every 10 or 20 turns the monsters will 'split', creating a copy of the original and effectively doubling the enemies on the level. The monsters can do this indefinitely, unless there's literally no room left on the level.

EDIT: Something else in the same vein:

Angel of Sudden Death

You remember those Bomberman games where if you took too long, then the game's arena would start destroying itself to get you to hurry up? In this challenge, there's either a acid or lava tile in one of the four corners, and every turn the acid/lava will spawn another tile of itself, working itself around the level clockwise and once it circles around, it starts again on the next innermost row of tiles and continues until the entire level is engulfed! Hurry up, you never know where the stairs might be...

Interesting ideas. Multiplication would have to be far slower (maybe 40 turns), and ammo would be needed to balance the odds. Otherwise everyone would just play through for Ammochain, and the early levels could be wait-spammed for tons of former humans (and thus piles of EXP).
For Sudden Death, arena maps would be very difficult, and UC could be a critical fail (by the time you finish AoD, the exit would probably be full of lava, maybe the whole map). The idea is similar to AoRA, and the system could be abused to get easy kills on enemies on the outer edges of the maps. You could easily find the stairs, empty the room, and wait on top of the stairs until the map fills with lava and all enemies die.

[Thomas]

Angel of Sudden Death

You remember those Bomberman games where if you took too long, then the game's arena would start destroying itself to get you to hurry up? In this challenge, there's either a acid or lava tile in one of the four corners, and every turn the acid/lava will spawn another tile of itself, working itself around the level clockwise and once it circles around, it starts again on the next innermost row of tiles and continues until the entire level is engulfed! Hurry up, you never know where the stairs might be...

This is an excellent idea. Although it could be improved thusly:
You have a very small amount of time with no sudden death (1 or 2 in-game minutes)
(To compensate for this, acid/lava spawns at a rate slightly faster than 1 tile per second)
Different levels flood in different ways, eg.
Maze of Rooms starts flooding on the edges and spirals in
Hellish City starts flooding on the side you're closest to and snakes towards the opposite side
Cave/Arena starts flooding in the exact center and spirals out

[ChaoticJosh]

Interesting ideas. Multiplication would have to be far slower (maybe 40 turns), and ammo would be needed to balance the odds. Otherwise everyone would just play through for Ammochain, and the early levels could be wait-spammed for tons of former humans (and thus piles of EXP).

One thing that could be used to balance things out is that when a creature splits, the two resulting creatures only have 1/2 the exp of the original, and becomes less and less with each split.

This is an excellent idea. Although it could be improved thusly:
You have a very small amount of time with no sudden death (1 or 2 in-game minutes)
(To compensate for this, acid/lava spawns at a rate slightly faster than 1 tile per second)
Different levels flood in different ways, eg.
Maze of Rooms starts flooding on the edges and spirals in
Hellish City starts flooding on the side you're closest to and snakes towards the opposite side
Cave/Arena starts flooding in the exact center and spirals out

Yeah, thinking about it, not all levels could be treated the same. So I think the different patterns would be a good thing as well.

[thelaptop]

Just a small reminder -- 10 turns == 1 in-game second.

So if we are talking about monsters multiplying every 40 turns, we mean that for every four steps you walk around, the monsters "split".

[leonresevil2]

One thing that could be used to balance things out is that when a creature splits, the two resulting creatures only have 1/2 the exp of the original, and becomes less and less with each split.

If the EXP splits (which is a reasonable idea), the health should split, or at least decrease. Imagine a room of 2 arch viles and 5 mancubi. There would be no easy way to take them down, with them splitting before you probably even get to the room they are in. So I would like to see 50 weaker Mancubi in that case.

Just a small reminder -- 10 turns == 1 in-game second.

So if we are talking about monsters multiplying every 40 turns, we mean that for every four steps you walk around, the monsters "split".

I recommended 40 since I didn't want to completely change the idea, or mess up the rate. Maybe make an initial 'no-split' time.

[thelaptop]

Usually monsters have an initial 40 turns where they don't do anything.  Then, they start to run their AI scripts, as far as I can remember.

I don't see why having the health splitting is of any use.  Since almost everything is upper-bound by 250, we find that we can't do more than 8-splits before all the health is a paltry 1, assuming some Law of Conservation of Health is in effect.  Then in that case, one viable strategy to win is just wait for everything to split down, and then charge in with a shotgun, probably with MAD trait, blasting everything away.  Doesn't sound much of a challenge now, does it?

Here's another modification.  Don't bother about setting some multiplying rate based on time -- base it on damage taken.  If the monster is hit, it has a certain probability (tied to health) to split into two, retaining the same amount of health it had before the split, but having EXP provided from killing it halved.  It becomes a challenge without having to mess around with multiplying factors and timing issues.  No sense making a challenge where we penalise the player for just being in the game.

[ChaoticJosh]

Not a bad idea Laptop. It makes those pesky barons that just-so-happened to pick up a few medkits a bit more dangerous, since you'll be dealing damage to them, they'll be healing the damage, and with every hit you have a chance of making more barons.

Also, do you think that the split, in the case of a one-hit kill, should occur before death? So that if you one-shot a former human, he'll split before dying, killing the original but the copy remains alive?

[ChaoticJosh]

I've been thinking of some new challenges, let me just rattle them off two of them:

First, I've been thinking about that "Angel of Avarice" challenge mentioned earlier, and I was inspired with something similar.

Angel of Capitalism

PAH! Sure, the demons are bad and all, but this is all business, and hey, if you kill the Cyberdemon, that's just good PR. In this challenge, No globes, medkits, armors, uniques, or randomly generated items of any kind will be spawned on any level. Also, no monsters give any experience, and any monsters that would normally drop weapons/ammo (former humans, seargents, etc) won't drop anything either. Instead, all monsters drop a certain amount of money, with the amount varying with some randomness but with stronger monsters generally having more money. This money doesn't do anything by itself, but inbetween each dungeon level, you enter a shop. This shop is reminiscent of the trait selection screen, and in here you can spend the money you’ve collected.

Your choice of purchases include:
All manner of globes, including invincibility globes and Megaspheres, which take effect when you enter the next level.
All manner of items, including Nukes.
All manner of normal armor,
All manner of “normal” weapons, including the chainsaw and BFG
All types of ammo
You can purchase a random Unique
You can purchase a level up (this one gets progressively more expensive, of course)

After you’re done with the purchases, you just exit the shop and into the next level. All items will be priced accordingly, so of course while BFG’s, invincibility orbs, uniques, and nukes may be available, they would be so prohibitively expensive that you couldn’t buy them without first saving up and denying yourself other important things.

To keep up with the theme of the challenge, I think the special levels should have their rewards altered where, instead of being items, they’re big piles of cash equal to the items you’d normally receive.

One last thing, I think that the Angelic Armor and the Longinus Spear are iffy items, since they’re these weird cross-breeds between uniques and normals, so I think that while these items can be bought, they have to first be unlocked by completing the corresponding special level.

Angel of Gauntlet

Each level starts with no monsters on it. However, in this challenge, there’s a new type of structure, the spawner. These spawners are stationary and have HP much like creatures do. These will spawn a certain creature infinitely until it is destroyed. Now, of course, the stronger monsters will have much longer spawn rates with the weaker monsters having much shorter spawn rates. These spawners are structures, and thus don’t leave corpses that can be revived by either Archviles or Nightmare! difficulty.

[leonresevil2]

I like both ideas, ChaoticJosh. Setting up an economy for Angel of Capitalism would take some testing, but it would be an interesting challenge. Also, higher difficulties could increase the costs of all items, to balance out the fact that there are so many more enemies, and purchasable invulnerability globes would make higher levels somewhat easier. Uniques could be broken up into types (pistol, shotgun, etc.), so players could choose the type of unique they want, but the cost would be much higher, with the idea being that you do not waste so much time trying to get a unique you can use for your build, but you pay more than you would if it were all random.

Angel of Gauntlet sounds fun, but needs development. If a spawner is surrounded or cut off by lava, that could trap enemies (or lead to many demon suicides) and the spawner would need to know how to handle if a room or space was full of enemies. Also, I think the spawners themselves should be the source of EXP, depending on the monster type spawned.  Also, what if a spawner spawns an enemy on top of a barrel? The spawner creates new game situations and cases that would need to be handled, which would require thorough testing, but I think the challenge would be good when everything was decided on.

[ChaoticJosh]

I've been thinking about Angel of Gauntlet, and one way to handle the EXP situation would be if the spawned monsters gave no exp at all. Instead, only killing the spawners grants EXP, most likely in large lumps to offset the amount of work it takes to take them down.

EDIT: I may have just said what you said, except in different words.

Also, the spawning mechanism could just spawn the creatures in any unoccupied space on any of the eight tiles around it.

[leonresevil2]

EDIT: I may have just said what you said, except in different words.

Also, the spawning mechanism could just spawn the creatures in any unoccupied space on any of the eight tiles around it.

Actually you did, but that's fine. As for the spawning, I have seen a former commando completely surrounded by lava in a level, no space to move. I guess that would just be easy EXP in the case of the spawner. Also, I believe some enemies accidently spawn in normal games on top of lava and acid, which explains why you sometimes hear monsters cry and die early on in some levels (and it's not just demons). I think, for the sake of avoiding easy big dumps of EXP from spawners, spawners should at least be immune to acid and lava, and perhaps also be floating objects, able to move around (maybe just from knockback, maybe autonomous spawning vehicles!) in the level. Barrel explosions should still harm spawners, but ground surfaces should not affect it. If autonomous, the spawner could fly to clear areas (or the player) to spawn more enemies.
And I would love to trap a spawner in a ring of barrels, just for fun, whether it can move or not.