Subject: Terminals and Colors.
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2002 07:52:10 +1000
From: "Robot Monster" <monster@robot.com>
Organization: Client of Alphalink Australia Pty. Ltd.
Newsgroups: rec.games.roguelike.development

I know that originally Rogue had ~52 monsters because there were 26x2
characters to use. (Assuming that there were no armor monsters or mimics -
I haven't played the original for any great length of time so please
excuse my ignorance.)  The terminals used at the time were monochromatic.

These days, the big RLs like ?Angband, Nethack, ADOM and Crawl have all
kept with the tradition of using one character to represent a genus
('I'nsects), species ('o'rcs) or sub-species ('z'ombies).  Colors, where
used, usually represent different classes of the same genus.

To me, this is distasteful.  It means that with most RLs, the number of
races is broad, but the individuals in each race is narrow.

I would like to try a roguelike where colors denote the race and
characters indicate the class.  So we might have 'p'easants, 'm'edics,
'b'ishops, 'w'arriors, and so on.  A brown character would indicate a
human, a green would be an orc, a grey an elf.  It may sound unusual as an
idea, but this type of color coding works very well in many RTS games.
With this system, you could have a greater depth of role-play-like
interaction because of the variety of classes.

Assuming that all of your players had access to color displays, this
system could work well.  Otherwise, you would really only have the
capacity for two races: capitals and lowercase.