Demonic Patrons

So, as discussed on oook, I've been wanting to separate chaos patrons from infernal patrons. Only Chaos Knights and maybe Devil Spawns would have chaos patrons everybody else would have Demonic Patrons. Demonic Patrons will be close to Chaos ones ( different names, stats and preferences of course ), but they dont do morphing of the player, they might be a little less chaotic as well.

One thing I want to remove is pointless rewards. I really hate getting 'REW_HEAL_FULL' when my health is full and my stats are at max.. Or getting REW_EXP when I just turned level 50... So more checks need to be coded and if the reward is pointless, a different reward should be chosen.

Another thing I want to avoid with Patrons is that they mess up awesome characters. POLY_SELF with its chances of getting 2500 damage is not fun. CURSE_WEAPON and CURSE_ARMOR which blast items into something terrible and useless is not fun, especially once the player starts finding awesome artefacts..

Something I want to consider adding is preferences of Patrons for certain classes/races, so that conservative players can game the chances of getting punishments vs rewards. Also, players should be able to choose their own Patron unless of course if you're a DevilSpawn ;)

I've categorized current Chaos Patron rewards & punishments:

* Give Servants ( only Demonic and Undead, needs Fallen Angels and Devils for Demonic )
* Dispelling ( Banishment, Dispel, Mass Banishment, I think the first 2 should destroy rather than banish, giving the loot to the player )
* Gifts ( Objects , Stats, Experience )
* Theft ( Stats, Experience, Hitpoint )
* Give Opponents ( Locals and OOD's only for now, I'm thinking of more tailored results )
* TY_CURSE, everyone likes the TY_CURSE ;)
* Morphing ( wounds, race , mutations )

Changes planned :

+ I like the servant idea a lot, but not the way it is now, I am definitely planning to take the Player Ghost code and make custom made servants. Because the levels in Dis are shielded, no one shows up till level 30 when servants are given.

+ Dispelling I like, but objects should be dropped, the odds are low of this happening anyway, the player should experience 'w000000t!' or something.

+ Gifts ( yes, and none of that 'good object drop' stuff ! )

+ Theft ( I dont mind extra stat stealing, in fact I dont mind even some permanent stat damaging, especially since alchemy exists in hellband, so the player has access to more stat potions at some point ).

+ Give opponents is ok, I think there should be way more opponents though, maybe just blast away a large circle around the player and put tons of monsters with 1 or 2 turns of confusion ;] Also, in shielded levels, sometimes nobody shows up, that has to be fixed

+ TY_CURSE is so classic, I cant touch it.. Maybe check on cyberdemons though, not sure that part of the code still works in Hell. There were no cyber demons in Dante's work that I can recall.

+ And of course, last but not least, add support for reward testing in debug mode.

I need some fresh ideas on punishments for the character that do not kill the character but are still pretty damn annoying and more importantly allow the character to recover. To start off I am pretty open to dungeon/recalling/monster modifications. I'm pretty confident that I can code staircases that run away from the player, burn all scrolls of recall in inventory, replace all monsters on the dungeon with something ten levels OOD. Force a scroll of Descent on the player etc etc.

Your thoughts and ideas are most welcome.