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[Neonivek]

Don't forget that not all weaknesses are just about what hurts it more. It could also be the requirements for it to hunt or spot a creature.

For example Chinease (I THINK it is) vampires hunt by smelling one's breath. Thus holding your breath legitimately works.

So I guess another weakness could be a condition where the creature lacks the ability to sense the presence of something.

So lets see weaknesses so far
1) Cannot notice
2) Hurt
3) Satiated
4) Stall

I mean if you want more things people have done to avoid monsters
-Walking across a bridge backwards avoids the attention of fairies (and trolls)
-Hemlock under your pillow wards off spirits (I think)
-Wolvesbane wards off Werewolves

Oooh there should be Nightcreatures where if you say their name three times they should just strangle you no matter where you are and they are. Bloodymary should TOTALLY be a night creature!

[darkflagrance]

The Forgotten Beast Candlejack has come! A great s

[Neonivek]

Yeah paranoia being real is a great mechanic for making Night creatures like Candlejack re

[Armok]

I really hope Toady actually reads all this great discussion and suggesting.

[Kogut]

I really hope Toady actually reads at least part of this great discussion and suggesting.

fixed?

[de5me7]

other roguelikes are all about weaknesses. You need intrinsics to stand a chance of surival in nethack, and exploiting monsters weaknesses to fire etc is essential. The danger with this approach is that you need to spend loads of time collecting a kit together to go on your adventures (this isnt necessarily a bad thing but id defo makes the game even less casual and more research necessary).

I support any ideas of giving specific creatures some sort of weakness to certain equipment as well as moves etc. It would give silver weapons, wooden weapons, and potentially carp leather amulets another dimension in the game. If bogey men were afraid of carp leather (for bogey men they could get an extreme random dislike of one material) they might not approach within 1 square of any creature wearing that material.

[Vorthon]

other roguelikes are all about weaknesses. You need intrinsics to stand a chance of surival in nethack, and exploiting monsters weaknesses to fire etc is essential. The danger with this approach is that you need to spend loads of time collecting a kit together to go on your adventures (this isnt necessarily a bad thing but id defo makes the game even less casual and more research necessary).

I support any ideas of giving specific creatures some sort of weakness to certain equipment as well as moves etc. It would give silver weapons, wooden weapons, and potentially carp leather amulets another dimension in the game. If bogey men were afraid of carp leather (for bogey men they could get an extreme random dislike of one material) they might not approach within 1 square of any creature wearing that material.

Reminds me of the Modern D20 SRD. There's a table for generating random weaknesses for monsters included with it.

[Jeoshua]

If randomly generated creatures end up having various weaknesses to materials or poisons, it could be easilly handled by having to learn the Legends about those creatures.

Talking with certain individuals about those Night Creatures would yield information about them, their strengths and weaknesses.  Then you could look around in Legends mode and basically get a list of what weaknesses various creatures have for that world generation.

Adventurer: "What do you know of the beasts that are plaguing your town?"
Peasant: Leans in close
Peasant: "They say that the Horned Woman can't stand the sight of Diamonds."
Peasant: "But maybe that's just an old wives tale."

[monk12]

Oooh, know what would be sweet? If some monsters could be easily lulled or pacified by playing music. Finally, a use for the musicality skill!

Not an uncommon trope, I won't even bother pulling out examples.

[Jarhyn]

I know I can't be the only one that's brought this up before, but why in the heck isn't pyrite usable as an ore of iron? It's well known to be one of the primary ores of iron in the real world.

[Jeoshua]

I know I can't be the only one that's brought this up before, but why in the heck isn't pyrite usable as an ore of iron? It's well known to be one of the primary ores of iron in the real world.

Pyrite enjoyed brief popularity in the 16th and 17th centuries as a source of ignition in early firearms, most notably the wheellock, where the cock held a lump of pyrite against a circular file to strike the sparks needed to fire the gun.

Pyrite has been used since classical times to manufacture copperas, or iron sulfate. Iron pyrite was heaped up and allowed to weather as described above (an early form of heap leaching). The acidic runoff from the heap was then boiled with iron to produce iron sulfate. In the 15th century, oil of vitriol (sulfuric acid) was manufactured either from copperas or by burning sulfur to sulfur dioxide and then converting that to sulfuric acid. By the 19th century, the dominant method was to burn iron pyrite.[15]

Pyrite remains in commercial use for the production of sulfur dioxide, for use in such applications as the paper industry, and in the manufacture of sulfuric acid. Thermal decomposition of pyrite into FeS (iron sulfide) and elemental sulfur starts at 550 °C; at around 700 °C pS2 is about 1 atm.[16]

Pyrite is a semiconductor material with band gap of 0.95 eV.[17]

During the early years of the 20th century, pyrite was used as a mineral detector in radio receivers, and is still used by 'crystal radio' hobbyists. Until the vacuum tube matured, the crystal detector was the most sensitive and dependable detector available- with considerable variation between mineral types and even individual samples within a particular type of mineral. The most sensitive mineral was galena, which was very sensitive also to mechanical vibration, and easily knocked off the sensitive point; the most stable were perikon mineral pairs; and midway between was the pyrites detector, which is approximately as sensitive as a modern 1N34A diode detector.[18][19]

Pyrite has been proposed as an abundant,inexpensive material in low cost photovoltaic solar panels.[20] Synthetic iron sulfide is used with copper sulfide to create the experimental photovoltaic material.[21]

Pyrite is used to make marcasite jewelry (incorrectly termed marcasite). Marcasite jewelry, made from small faceted pieces of pyrite, often set in silver, was popular in the Victorian era.[22]

I see nothing in there about being an ore.  It was used in alchemy, guns, semiconductors, and jewlery.  In DF we have it as a gemstone, and gemstones cannot be ores.  Since we don't have alchemy in DF Vanilla, there would be no way to extract the Iron Sulfide from it... and if we did no way to separate the Sulfate from the Iron.

But you can make Jewlery from it.

[EmeraldWind]

In some variations of the kappa story, the plate is actually a bowl-shaped indent on the top of their head. Which makes for another possible weakness, certain parts of the body on the creature can be an Achilles's Heel weakness.

For example, a particular Night Creature may have a tail. The creature cutting off the tail will weaken the creature. In the case of a spouse, removing said tail could restore them to their original form.

I like idea of the possible random weaknesses as like Kohaku pointed out, the kind of folk creatures that Night Creatures are based on have this tendency and at times can be funny in a Nightmare Retardant kind-of-way (which makes sense, as the most likely reason for the weird or funny weaknesses might have be to make the monster less scary). 

[NW_Kohaku]

While we're on the topic of weaknesses, though, might as well share some more myth...

Hercules fought two very notable creatures as part of his trials - the Hydra and the Nemian Lion. 

Although the hydra is already in the game, a part of the myth that isn't already a part of the game is that the hydra had poisonous blood and heads that would regrow as he cut them off.  Hercules "failed" the trial of the hydra because he had to get advice for how to defeat the hydra (cauterizing the wound with fire to prevent the head from regrowing), but after defeating the hydra, he put his arrows in the blood of the hydra, and used those as poison arrows in his subsequent adventures.

There was also the Nemian Lion, whose hide was essentially impervious to harm.  Basically similar to having adamantine skin, the lion could not be harmed by conventional kinetic attack... through its hide.  Some tellings of the myth state the weakness of the lion was to attack its open mouth, and crack the skull from the inside, where its hide did not protect it.  (Which sounds a lot like a video game boss...  "Who would have thought that the boss's only weakness was its giant, glowing red eye?")  Hercules then hollowed the lion out, and used its hide as a cloak as a sort of armor.

Also, since I was trying to think of "alternate" type of monster, Celtic folktales have the Leanan Sidhe (or some variant spelling thereof).  Sidhe are a general class of fairies in Celtic myth, but the Leanen Sidhe takes the form of beautiful women who act like greek muses - inspiring artists and craftsmen, but at the same time, draining away portions of their life as they pour it into their work. 

Some versions of the myth have them feeding off of artistry, and encourage artists to literally put their souls onto their canvas, so that they can feed off them.  Other versions have them as something like a succubus.  Other versions just play the whole thing as a metaphor for romance in general, and say that any woman can take the aspect of a Leanan Sidhe, and if your love is unrequited, you become her slave, and if you resist her, and her love is unrequited, she becomes your slave.

And of course, there are the potentially beneficial kind of monster, like the Russian Domovoi, or its Japanese counterpart, the Zashiki-Warashi.  These are creatures that like to live in people's houses, but hide.  As long as they are living with you, they bring your family good fortune, but if they ever leave, it will fall immediately to ruin.  As such, if you have one of those, you have to find ways to ensure it can't ever leave, even if that means trying to find a way to cage it.  Domovoi are generally entirely benign, unless angered, although Zashiki-Warashi are child-like and enjoy pranks.

When you get onto Japanese stuff, though, they have entirely crazy monsters, like Tenjoname, the ceiling-licker.  Apparently a mythological rationalization for water damage to ceilings, the tenjoname literally is a creature that wants to break into your house in the middle of the night to lick your ceiling (and do nothing else), leaving a slobber stain on it.

I'd honestly like to see some more of the utterly bizarre-but-benign magical creatures out there.

[Neonivek]

Frankly I am surprised Toady went outright with Renaisance Fairies instead of Medieval ones.

[zwei]

I'll just chime in with one thing:

It can ge tiring.

First, i can not really imagine that testing alchemy parameters in each new world would be fun after several worlds.

Seccond, I kinda dislike nethackish adventurer which carries tons of junk around to deal with everything. Gathering said junk can become major checklist pita. (shark leather item against boogey men, check. diamonds against horned women, check, silver whip against ghouls, check ... )