Dungeons of Dredmor Preview
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As for game mechanics, DoD distinguishes itself from other roguelike games through its skill trees and crafting system. Although there are no named classes in the traditional sense, you essentially create your own class during character creation: you get to choose seven skill trees, and are not allowed to add new ones later in the game. The game boasts a total of thirty four skill trees (!), including five melee weapon proficiencies, two ranged weapon proficiencies, three defensive skills, and seven schools of magic. In addition there are skills that work in tandem with other skill trees, such as those that help you cast spells more efficiently, give you buffs or special attacks in combat, and so on. There are some rather unique miscellaneous trees such as the '˜fungal arts' series (which lets you grow mushrooms for personal use and gives the ability summon fungal pets), a series of skills devoted to wand use, and the archeologist tree, which helps you avoid traps and allows you to do weird things with unique artifacts. Finally, there are the crafting skills: alchemy, smithing and tinkering- more on this later.
Each skill tree has between three and seven upgrades, and the player gets to upgrade a single tree each time they level up. For combat skills, an upgrade usually just means bonuses, but in some cases also usable powers. For the magical disciplines, each upgrade represents access to a new spell. I found that each magical discipline seems to have a fairly wide range of buffs, debuffs, attacks, summons and the like, although certain disciplines focus more heavily on one area over another- for instance, (promethean magic) is mostly about dealing damage with fire, whereas golemancy is almost entirely about summoning. Mathemagic is largely about debuffing and teleport spells. All in all, I found most of the disciplines pretty interesting, although I sometimes find myself wishing they were even more specialized than they are. it seems that in many cases choosing more than two or three magical disciplines gives you several redundant abilities.
The crafting skills are another major feature that sets DoD apart from other roguelikes. Alchemy obviously lets you make potions from base components, but it also lets you distill booze from fruit and manufacture acid and gunpowder, both of which can be used as components for making traps or ammo. Tinkering has two main uses: on the one hand it lets you disarm traps (which can be placed by you later), or new craft traps from components. It is also useful for players who specialize in ranged weaponry, since it is used to make thrown ammo (bombs) and crossbow bolts, or to upgrade crossbows.
Smithing lets you create armor and weapons from metal ingots, and to upgrade these weapons. This skill combined with the Krong anvil shrines (described below) allows you to create some rather potent artifacts from scratch as long as Krong cooperates.
