Felid

Version 0.13: This article may not be up to date for the latest stable release of Crawl.

This page is about the player species. For the monster, see Felid (monster).

Felids are a breed of cats that have been granted sentience. Originally they were witches' familiars that were magically augmented to provide help for their masters' rituals, yet many have abandoned, outlived, or, in at least one case, eviscerated their former masters and gone out into the world. While fully capable of using speech and most forms of magic, Felids are at a serious disadvantage due to their inability to use armour or weapons, or even grasping items well enough to throw a dart or point a wand. They can use their mouths and paws for simple manipulation like uncorking a bottle or unrolling a scroll. Like all cats, Felids are incapable of thriving on vegetable food, and need meat to survive. Their agility and stealth are legendary, as is their ability to get to hard to reach places. They move faster than most races, but don't run as fast as Centaurs or Spriggans. Felids advance in levels very slowly. They are skilled with many forms of magic, though less so with raw elemental magic. The tale of a Felid who had nine lives isn't far from truth, as well.

Innate Abilities

• Felids cannot wear any form of armour (though they may still wear jewellery).
• Felids lack opposable thumbs and are incapable of any form of advanced item manipulation. They cannot evoke wands, wield weapons, or throw items.
  • Felids may, however, draw cards from decks, evoke items like a lamp of fire or bottled efreet, wield a lantern of shadows, or wield ammunition (for the purpose of casting Sticks to Snakes or Sandblast).
• Felids have paw-claws, which is equivalent to Claws 1.
• Fangs 3: Felids have an auxiliary bite attack in melee.
• Acute Vision: Felids can see invisible.
• Carnivorous 3: Felids can eat meat at any time and gain more nutrition from doing so, but cannot eat any form of plant.
• Fast 1: Felids move quickly.
• Shaggy Fur 1: Felids have AC +1.
• Slow Metabolism 1: Felids require less food than usual.
• Felids cannot memorize any spells related to weapons: Fire Brand, Freezing Aura, Lethal Infusion, Warp Weapon, Excruciating Wounds, Poison Weapon, Portal Projectile, Sure Blade, Tukima's Dance.

Preferred Backgrounds

• Warriors: Fighter, Monk
• Zealots: Berserker
• Warrior-mages: Transmuter, Warper
• Mages: Conjurer, Summoner, Necromancer, Venom Mage.

Due to their inability to use most items, Felids are prohibited from becoming Gladiators, Hunters, Assassins, Arcane Marksmen, and Artificers. (Without weapons, armour, or wands, most of those are indistinguishable from Monks, so use that instead.)

Level Bonuses

• +1 intelligence or dexterity (equal chance) every 5th level.
• 40% less HP than average.
• 20% more MP than average.
• +6 magic resistance per level.
• Your fur grows thicker at level 6 (+2 AC) and thicker still at level 12 (+3 AC, rC+).
• Every three levels you gain an extra life:
  • When you lose a life, your stats, HP, and MP are completely restored. Any disease, rot, or magic contamination is removed. Your hunger clock is reset to just short of Full. You are randomly teleported away from the location of your death (usually to a safe area) and you retain all of your previous inventory items. You lose an entire experience level, but retain your skills progress.
  • You may have at most two extra lives at a time. If you miss gaining an extra life because you already had two, you will gain that life the next time you gain a level with fewer than 2 lives (but you may gain at most one life per level).
  • You may check how many extra lives you have, and how many times you have died, on the % screen, just below "Spells".
  • You continue gaining extra lives past level 27, at XP totals following the same quadratic progression as levels 14 through 27.

Starting Skills and Equipment

Felids receive the skills and equipment listed for their background, with these exceptions:

• Felids receive no armour or weapons
  • Any background that starts with a weapon skill gives them Unarmed Combat instead
• Any Armour skill is replaced with Dodging
• Meat rations replace bread rations

Difficulty of Play

Though the Felid inability to use weapons, armours, and wands does mean that the game becomes simpler and more straightforward, which newer players may find attractive, in effect this simplicity is achieved by the removal of many options and useful tools. The fact that Felids are faster than average and have multiple lives may appear to be strong defensive characteristics, however in practice their -40% health penalty makes them very prone to death in the first place, and the loss of a character level upon re-spawning means you will have even less life than when you died.

Skill aptitudes

The higher the value, the better the aptitude.

Skill	Aptitude	Skill	Aptitude	Skill	Aptitude
Attack		Miscellaneous		Magic
Fighting	0	Armour	N/A	Spellcasting	-1
		Dodging	3
Maces & Flails	N/A	Shields	N/A	Conjurations	-1
Axes	N/A	Stealth	4	Hexes	4
Polearms	N/A			Summonings	0
Staves	N/A	Invocations	0	Necromancy	0
Unarmed Combat	0	Evocations	1	Translocations	4
Throwing	N/A	Shapeshifting	-2	Alchemy	-1
				Fire Magic	-1
Short Blades	N/A			Ice Magic	-1
Long Blades	N/A			Air Magic	-1
Ranged Weapons	N/A	Experience	-1	Earth Magic	-1

Addenda

After a death, should you venture to the location of your demise, you will find a felid corpse labeled "felid corpse of (player name)." If you were under the effects of Spider Form or the like when you died, your corpse will even reflect this. This gives felids the dubious distinction of being the only species in Dungeon Crawl capable of self-cannibalism.

Felids will never receive gifts from Okawaru or Trog, since they cannot use anything either god gifts. In a related vein, if a trove should ask for a weapon, felids are out of luck unless they get lucky and find a weapon with the requisite enchantment: they have no way to enchant it, since they cannot wield it. In 0.14, troves will no longer ask for items that would be completely useless to a character, so this will no longer occur.

History

In 0.14 Felids will be able to jump and evoke wands.

Felids were added in 0.8.