I mean I was in favor of adding The Keeper to begin with so yeah I think that's fine by me doing that. I find Keeper challenging and I enjoy the challenge, also with this buff he's probably gonna be easier than blue baby (because he has stronger multiplier and better potential).

I'd like to see a change with the characters in R9's (I think it's a better name than R9) or jud9s to make it more interesting to run then the vanilla game.

honestly, i'm thinking some people have not even try play on new keeper but saying "we don't want him"

Building on what Dea1h said, the people who don't like Keeper are: HauntedQuest, karolmo, SedNegi, and CrafterLynx

To the 4 of you, have you actually playtested the new Keeper at all in the past 20 days? Do you still feel like he is too weak?

While I haven't played on modded keeper yet, I've seen some people run it. At least to me, it seems ok in the way it currently is, although fixing that gullet's bug would probably be a reasonable buff (more like a fix tho). However, adding yet another quarter seems a bit too much. Mainly because if you're lucky, as dea1h mentioned earlier, you could get up to two mapping items (or more, if you get one + a diplopia on first floor).

So, to summarize: Yes to keeper on R+9, yes to fixing the gullet, no to the extra quarter :)

¤¤QUICK EDIT:¤¤ As part of the gullet fixing, maybe make it so devil deals take the 25/50 coins if available first, then the actual hearts? Also, not sure if the gullet effect remains after dying with something like dead cat :/

I like the keeper con R+, I made some sub7 or sub8 easy if you get mind, god head or something OP, free mapping and coins, sack head batteries... Keeper now is really strong

I did a few R+ Runs with 9, Keeper & Eve instead Isaac and Maggie and I really enjoyed, great cat for me, i never completed a new 14 R+ yet..

btw, I like fix gullet and...extra quarter only can make keeper faster if you have good shops :D

I'm fine with adding keeper. Definitely in favor of fixing the gullet. It's super-bugged with dead cat also. You die when you take the cat and also die if you drop below 25 coins (for example by taking a shop item).

For those who don't want to run Keeper, we can still have a seperate 9 chara "classic" category as some have suggested, with the 9 charas from AB.

I think the 9 character category should remain unchanged from ab. My opinion is not related to the perceived difficulty of keeper, but more to keep a consistent progression between speedrun categories. Historically it seems that the lower character categories utilize the more 'standard' characters, and the newer characters are in the larger category. I feel the primary purpose of speedruns like this is for a runner to show consistency over a string of runs, and the uniqueness of the characters should not be a requirement for determining the category. Also, if runners would prefer to not run the highly modified keeper (for whatever reason that may be), there is no available category in this mod set. Additionally, as keeper is refined through play testing (the bug fix, or any more 'tuning') this may invalidate the run containing the character, so presumably under my proposal, the 9 character would still be valid.

tODD

Yes Im really not anti keeper. I would like to be able to generally compare my times in R9 to Jud9s and see the catagory stay the same.

Ok, it took me an entire day of messing around with it, but Keeper is fixed now with Greed's Gullet in the latest patch. Dead Cat also works now too! (I had to code that separately.)

Ok so the way you want to think about it now is that Keeper has 2 "base" coin containers. Any health ups you take will count towards those. If you are at 2, you can't get any more, but if you are less than 2, health ups will work normally again. Also, you can go into negative containers as far as you want, but just make sure not to spend any coins, or else you could kill yourself.

So finally you can enjoy Keeper in the way he was actually intended, so feel free to take all the Devil Deals.

Note that Dead Cat works differently than on the other characters - it will set your containers to 1 EXCLUDING the coin containers. (On the other characters, it will remove all of your base containers, which is pretty dumb, so I didn't want to replicate that part.)

starg09 - I thought that doing it that way would be more complicated. It's easier to understand I think in the way that I described above.

Re: Which characters are in the new category?

• It looks like most people in the thread are PRO swapping out the characters to be new ones.
• It seems like the people who don't like Keeper don't like him because he is too weak. However, he is really strong now in the latest build of R+. (He starts with the D6, 50 cents, Greed's Gullet, and Duality.)

I've done some practice runs with Keeper, and I've noticed the following things:

1. I like Keeper having the D6. Without it, the run seems like it is too much "on-rails" and you have no choice in what happens. Furthermore, there is a nice symmetry in having every single character in the mod with the D6.
2. Without having the Wooden Penny, there is an interesting strategical trade-off between backtracking across the floor to gather a penny on the ground, and "risking it all" and continuing forward to save time.
3. There is a very cool strategical trade-off between shops and devil deals. If you buy an item in a shop, you might not be able to get a Mom's Knife in the Deal Deal anymore, for example, so you have to be careful about what you buy.
4. Duality makes you able to risk dropping to extremely low health if you go for Devil Rooms. Alternatively, you can go for lesser-power but "free" Angel Rooms.

Overall, there's quite a lot of strategy going on with this character! So I think Keeper is not too weak anymore, AND he is a lot of fun. I'm still open to making the character stronger or weaker, if you playtest him and feel that is necessary.

So, let's tentatively agree on the new 9 characters for the R+9 category:

1. Keeper (swapped with Isaac)
2. Eve (swapped with Maggy)
3. Cain
4. Judas
5. Blue Baby
6. Samson
7. Azazel
8. Lazarus
9. The Lost

And then all 14 characters obviously for the R+14 category.

I still dont see what the point of changing the char's in the 9 cat is. We dont mix and match the char in any other run of it from game to game. 7 char is still the same 7 as always. So why wouldnt 9 stay the same 9 we had at the start. Now that we have 14 it seems even more silly to change it. Just let the same nine carry over and we will have 14 for all of them.

Marcus, 11char was changed though (using rebirth's 11 instead of replacing lost with lilith). Seems okay to replace the two most basic characters (Isaac loses his main quality, starting with d6, and Maggie... is Maggie, even with a speed up) with arguably way more interesting ones.

After watching some runs of R+9 today (thisguyisbarry + Shatterglasslol), I think that the 9 characters in the R+9 category are all unique and somewhat interesting. Hopefully you guys agree. In this post, I'm not going to propose any changes to the R+9 category, but I do want to talk about something else.

Krakenos and I have been discussing the R+14 category. If you examine the 5 characters that are NOT in the R+9 category, I think you can find some problems. Well, maybe "problems" is not the right word, as the category is definitely playable the way is, without any additional changes. But there ARE unappealing things about these characters from a game design perspective. Consider the following things:

1. Apollyon - This is a character that Krakenos really has an issue with. His base stats are completely identical to Isaac, with the exception of only having 2 red heart containers instead of 3. Since Apollyon has the D6 now in the Racing+ mod, there is nothing at all to distinguish him from Isaac (and the other characters) except for just having worse starting health. This is quite lame; all of the characters should probably have at least one unique thing about them. To solve this, we could give Void back to Apollyon, but that is also quite lame. Firstly, it breaks the symmetry of all of the characters in the mod having the D6. And secondly, Void kind of sucks - you can't really control which stats that you will get from Voiding items. (To be fair, you also can't control the items that the D6 rolls for you, but I think we can agree that the D6 really gives you a nice degree of control over the run, while Void really does not.)

2. Lilith - This character really sucks. The concept for the character is novel and somewhat interesting, but in practice it really doesn't play out well. I don't know of any speedrunners who actually enjoy playing Lilith. Having the D6 is obviously much better than having the Box of Friends, but Box of Friends is quite useful, and it really suits the character.

3. Eden - As we all know, Eden gets 1 random passive item and 1 random active item, which really makes the character unique and gives speedrunners a chance to use some items that they would never otherwise bother to pick up. In Racing+, Eden loses the random active item and gets the D6. Of course, Eden still gets the random passive item, but it isn't quite the same.

4. Magdalene - After using her speed up pill, Maggy has exactly the same base stats as Isaac. And now that she has the D6, she has the same problem as Apollyon in that there is absolutely nothing to distinguish her from the other characters.

5. Isaac - Again, now that every character in the game has the D6, Isaac has the exact same problem as Apollyon and Magdalene in that there is absolutely nothing to distinguish him from the other characters.

So each of these 5 characters has a pretty lame attribute about them. If you only play R+9, this isn't a problem. If you play R+14 and you want each character to provide a unique experience, then maybe it is worth entertaining a change to these 5 characters. So what am I proposing? Well, you may have guessed by now that there is a somewhat clean way to tackle all 5 of these problems at once - the School Bag from Antibirth. I propose that only these 5 would get the School Bag (not the 9 from R+9).

• Apollyon would get D6 + Void. This could lead to a lot of strategy about deciding which items to roll and which items to Void.
• Lilith would get D6 + Box of Friends. This gives her a somewhat-needed power-level boost, as the Box of Friends really synergizes with her.
• Eden would get D6 + her random active item, preserving one of the most important parts of the character.
• Magdalene would get D6 + Yum Heart, which isn't really useful besides getting to animation cancel all over the place, so with that said I still kind of like it.
• Isaac could start with D6 + an empty 2nd active slot, but that is kind of lame, and doesn't solve the problem of the character not having anything unique about it. I think it is better to give Isaac a D6 in both slots, which would be pretty zany and potentially a lot of fun, as well as add more strategy, since you can mix up where you want to spend your rolls.

So, School Bag could "fix" some of the lame characters. Beyond this, there is another big pro - it really increases the overall skill level of the game. You have to perform a lot of new inputs in order to play optimally, and its quite tricky + a lot of fun. It also gives rise to a lot of new strategies, since you might want to drop the D6 for 2 other active items.

But enough about the pros. Let's talk about the cons of this.

1. It makes the game too easy

School Bag has the potential to give a ton of defensive power to the run. You can take things like Satanic Bible and The Nail without having to sacrifice your D6, really ensuring that you won't kill yourself off in the last two floors. I'm sure that there are some people out there who enjoy playing through a "struggle" of a run sometimes. That can definitely still happen with the School Bag, but the chances are a lot lower. Overall, we want to make the R+14 category better, and for these types of people it might decrease the fun of the category instead of increase it, which is not what we want to do.

2. It is too much of a departure from vanilla

One of the goals of R+ is that it should be "pretty close" to vanilla in terms of playstyle. Introducing School Bag is not a small change; I talked earlier about the number of inputs + new strategies. So this might be a reason to leave it out of the mod. On the other hand, having the School Bag is not a humongous change either. In a weird way, it actually makes them more like vanilla, since we are re-giving them the items that they are intended to have. And in all likelihood, School Bag will be officially coming to the game at some point, either in one of the booster packs, or when Antibirth is officially integrated with Afterbirth+.

Anyways, these 2 cons are fairly sizable, so it is worth considering them. With that said, I think that it still might be a good idea to implement this. Ultimately, the most important question for me at the end of the day is this: how does it play? And after playing a bunch of runs with School Bag, I feel that it really does play well. But most of the people who plan on playing R+14 would need to be on board for this, obviously.

I think Isaac, Apollyon and Maggie need some kind of uniqueness to them in the run but I feel schoolbag is a bit too OP. It kinda defeats the purpose of 14 chars, where you have to deal with some bad characters and some good ones over the course of the full thing

I like the idea. I think even a full 14 char schoolbag run could be fun (although obviously it's completely unbalanced).

This probably doesn't matter.

I think the only real con is "making the game too easy". But think about how this works in practice: fastest racers will choose Krampus head over the nail every time. The fastest runs will still have more risk to them, but also more speed. Some of the safety items have time cost as well(stan bible and book of rev). I don't think the easiness factor will eliminate the skill factor.

Anyways, I like the idea. Jud6s/Racing+ has always been about removing "trolliness", adding D-6 for strategic purposes, while trying to stay vanilla. I think the proposed addition doesn't depart TOO much from that ideology.

I like the idea of the schoolbag but I do think that if we implement this idea it needs to be to very specific characters otherwise it will be too op and boring to play IMO.

I think out of the 5 left characters besides the basic 9 characters only characters below need that buff / change: 1.Lilith - this character really sucks and not fun to play in anyway, not casually or speedrunning wise, a lot of the synergies don't even work on Lilith and also a lot of good items (like Maw Of The Void, Tech.5, Knife sucks on Lilith).

2. Apollyon - this character is nothing special as you mentioned just an Isaac with different skin and 1 hp less, really lame designed and boring to play.

3.Eden - used to be special character with really interesting / fun synergies with space-bar items + passive items combos (for example Scapular + Blood rights, Unicorn Stump + Midas Touch), I think taking that uniqueness from Eden makes him less fun and less enjoyable to play.

Now I see no reason to give Maggy or Isaac the schoolbag since those are the old vanilla (wotl, aka- Wrath Of The Lamb) characters and I think they should stay the same even if they're a little boring they're still strong with the d6 and that makes them kinda unique IMO.

Some updates.

R+9 was added as a category now, so you guys can submit your runs now.

I'm fine with Cyber's suggestion of only giving Lilith + Apollyon + Eden the School Bag. But can we make Isaac or Maggy unique in some other way without giving them the School Bag?

For Isaac, I was thinking that instead of the School Bag, maybe we should start him with the Battery? That's an intermediate solution between giving him the full blown School Bag, while still making him unique with the potential for double dice rolls. (Twice the rolls, twice the strategy?)

For Maggy, Cyber and I tried out giving her a new custom item called Curse of the Crow that would have the same effect as the Crow Heart trinket. This would solve the problem of Maggy not being unique without actually making her more powerful. However, this doesn't play very well. It's just very similar to Eve in that you avoid all red hearts. So essentially it plays the same as Eve, so it doesn't actually solve the problem of making Maggy unique. If anyone else has any ideas for Maggy, I'm open to that. We don't necessarily have to buff her. We can nerf her, as long as it makes a unique character.

Im thinking about Judas' Tongue on Isaac and The Battery, can take more deals and will solve weakness of this char... or maybe this two things are pretty unbalanced, but im okey with only battery, can play more with D6, even rolling item rooms if you get Dr Fetus or Epic for bomb sinergies.

And Maggie its quite hard to find some to run with her maybe two active slots is ok, you can drop the heart for another item i suposse, thinking about ideas maybe a Purity start with a HP nerf or stats nerf can help... Im thinking between she can start Purity or maybe she can start with Deep Pockets and Mom's Purse in order to can take 2 trinkets and 2 pickups... Its only a few hot ideas, maybe running a little bit more with this pjs can get better ideas :/

How about this: On every frame, soul/black hearts are removed from Maggie. Every heart removed on this way gets added to a counter. When the counter reaches 6 hearts, then she gains a red heart container.

Sounds like Bethany from Antibirth :)