Dungeons of Dredmor Interview

The guys over at RPGWatch have kicked up a lengthy interview with Gaslamp Games' David Baumgart about the indie developer's promising roguelike, Dungeons of Dredmor. A couple of questions on character creation:
RPGWatch: What are the players options when creating a character?

David: You choose seven skills from a pool of 34. These skills range from weapon focuses to magic schools to crafting. Each skill is associated with a primary RPG-class archetype (Warrior, Rogue, Wizard) which have implications about how the stats will work out. I like the elegance that comes from having the consequences of a few simple, important decisions cascade down to the lower-level game mechanics.

RPGWatch: The player doesn't have a choice on gender or race. Are there any future plans for making your character a different gender or race such as an elf?

David: I would love to have an option for playing as a female character though we need to make some money so we can hire an artist to pick up where the other freelancers left off.

As for choosing different races to play as, this somewhat conflicts with character creation as skill selection. Depending on what one means by race, this might also require a huge number of animated sprites to be redrawn -- it would take an immense amount of work for little payoff in terms of improving the game. There is however a vampirism "skill" which affects gameplay in some very important ways, and if there are any of what one could call "races" in the game they would probably take the form of a skill.

I think we'll be okay. If traditional roguelikes are based around the idea of making two or three core decisions -- of race and class and religion -- then we've got seven core decisions to make character creation interesting.