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Underground Monkey: Difference between revisions
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== Roguelike ==
* Roguelike games employ this device to a fare-thee-well, since all of the monsters are represented by ASCII symbols, color coding is often the only easy way to tell them apart. Of course, sometimes two monsters have to share the same letter and color. Which leads many players to use alternate graphical "tile sets" which offer more information. Whether or not you should do this is one of the major fault-lines in ''[[Nethack]]'' fan circles. Of course, this also led to isometric sprite based clones (''Vulture'') using mini-map and shortcuts in the original ''Nethack'' style.
** It's interesting that this trope still appears in roguelikes not just in that the monsters look the same but in that there are different variations of the same monster, even though in those there is NO work required in generating sprites for new monsters, so the imagination is the only limit. Given that ''[[Angband]]'' has close to 1000 unique monster types, the reason for this happening in such a game is probably more that the designers started running out of ideas rather than not being able to animate distinct monsters.
** ''[[Dwarf Fortress]]'' inherits this
** In ''[[Nethack]]'', this can also lead to [[Yet Another Stupid Death]], in ways both obvious and surprising. Not only might the player not distinguish between a dwarf lord and a mind flayer, in some contexts ''the game itself'' doesn't distinguish between them. Ooh a blessed scroll of genocide! You'd better cap the mind flayers, having to remap levels is a bitch. What's that? You were playing as a dwarf? Congratulations: you have succumbed to death by palette swap. (Blessed scrolls genocide a class of monsters, in this case h, Humanoid)
* The sprite based [[Roguelike]], [[Dungeons of Dredmor (Video Game)|Dungeons of Dredmor]], has an absolute ton of these sorts of monsters. Most have different effects - Diggles are just annoying, but Sickly Diggles debuff you and Diggle Commandos are invisible.
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** This was parodied in the webcomic ''[[Order of the Stick]]'': in one comic, a paladin discovers the titular party has killed a dragon. She then accuses them of possibly killing a creature of benevolence and wisdom, and asks why they thought it deserved death, to which Roy Greenhilt replies, "Erm... its scales weren't shiny?" which placates the paladin. Elan then breaks the [[Fourth Wall]] by winking at the reader and saying, "Dragons - now [[Colour-Coded for Your Convenience]]!"
*** Ironically, the comic does this itself with goblins/hobgoblins/ghouls.
** Rothé are bovines [[Call a Rabbit a Smeerp|resembling musk oxen]]. That have magical variants too: underground "deep rothé" is about 4' at the shoulder, still charging in herds, with infravision and communicating via ''dancing lights'' and "ghost rothé" is bison-sized, white and capable of stampeding ''under magical silence''.
** The Elves of D&D come in high, wood, sea, grey, wild and several other varieties.
** The third edition of ''[[Dungeons and Dragons]]'' features ''templates'', giving uncreative GMs the opportunity to color-code ''any'' monster into a water monster, a fire monster, slime monster, etc.
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