God of Eating

[bcadren]

Another Strange idea. Putting this one over here first. This god is somewhat of a challenge god, like Chei, but the bonuses offered can get great if you know how to use it. This is also moreover a powerful tradeoff; horrible hunger and statrot for the ability to get higher max stats and unique abilities.

You are what you eat...and that is everything.

Abilities:

• 0 - Insatiable: As your piety grows, so does your hunger.
• 0 - Degeneration: As your piety grows, your stats rot more quickly. (This source ignores SustAb).
• * - Strength from eating. You may heal Stat Rot by eating.
• ** - Breakfast of Champions. Gain permanent Stat points by eating uniques. [Free]
• ** - Overclocking. If you eat at full stats; you may get haste, might or brilliance. This exhausts you and makes your Hunger and Rot faster though.
• *** - Intellect Feeding - You gain the (a)bility to feed on an enemies intellect (smite targeted anti-magic attack; heals Intelligence stat rot). [Low Piety, MP]
• **** - Knowledge Feeding - You gain the (a)bility to extract knowledge from enemy brains (normal and high intelligence characters only). Melee targeted. [High Piety] Doing so may give you spells or (a)bilties robbed from them. In most cases; this is done by offering you knowledge of a random spell from their spell-list (excluding ones that are deemed TOO powerful for players (smite targeted hellfire), those that are useless to players (Ilsuiw's Call Tide, for example) or are accessed exclusively by other gods (Banishment). You may only do this once per species and these must fit in normal spellslots. For example; using this on a Merfolk Aquamancer offers you knowledge of Steam Ball, Primal Wave, Blink or Throw Icicle (Random). If you memorize one; it's treated as a normal spell.
• ***** - Devour Whole - You gain the (a)bility to eat enemies whole. Doing so gives you some of the benefits of their monster type. [High Piety.] 75% positive mutations depending on what you ate. Eating some things may damage you. [Fire damage from eating a salamander, for example. (Checks HD and current HP vs. Invocations). [Example: Eating a Jumping Spider may give you (Poisonous Bite; Ensnare (a)bility; rPois-; or Jumping I). After you've eaten one jumping spider, you cannot gain further benefit from the same species. When you've hit a lot of mutations gained in this way, you start losing one when you gain one sometimes.
• ****** - Eat anything - You may (e)at anything you are standing over; except artifacts. [Stones, weapons,whatever.] This usually offers nothing except satiation and item destruction; but may offer temporary Slaying (weapons) or AC bonuses (armor).

I like...really want Water magic...ok?

[archaeo]

So, in addition to a fiddly stat rot/hunger minigame, two mechanics everybody loves, you also create a huge list of special cases for every monster you can eat, all of which come with a new set of possible mutations they can confer, as well as a big list of possible monster abilities and spells, many of which would have to be redesigned to be usable by players.

I have to honestly wonder, bcadren: does it bother you at all that most of your suggestions and proposals have been met with pretty considerable opposition? I admire your creative spirit and your interest in contributing to Crawl, and it's hardly my place to tell you to stop (my own proposals haven't exactly flown into the game), but it does seem like you're throwing every idea at the wall in the hopes that something will stick. The problem is that your ideas don't have much "stickiness," inasmuch as they seem almost uniquely calculated to fail with the two audiences that GDD seeks to address. We're blessed with devs that have plenty of their own good ideas to implement, so your extremely complicated proposals don't really have the kind of simplicity and ease of implementation that would attract a dev looking for something to add to the game. And, with all due respect, your ideas don't really seem all that fun from a player's perspective; the God of Eating idea, for example, sounds like a cognitive overhead nightmare, with all of the problems nethack's eat-corpses-for-intrinsics system plus a big FF-style Blue Magic minigame.

Which doesn't really matter if you're having fun just throwing ideas into the mix. But if you're looking to make a contribution stick, it'd probably be a good idea to go over the last few weeks of proposals and take it all into consideration before putting up the next big proposal. And I say this all with every intention of offering friendly and constructive advice. It would be really great for the game if someone as motivated as you could make meaningful contributions to the game.

[bcadren]

This is another brainstorm...which real purpose is player access to Primal Wave. Player access to primal wave was the point of the god of water too.

As a side note though; it occurred to me in writing this that a race that (1) couldn't read books or scrolls (2) had a racial ability to use MaxMP to at least remove curses [or at max MaxMP to enchant things or immunity to curses] (without scrolls, period leads to being stuck with the first cursed equipment you are stuck with unless there's an exception for it) and therefore (3) Could learn magic only from robbing the brains of creatures that already know it.

Could be unique and interesting.

I just want Primal Wave though...please.

[DracheReborn]

I just want Primal Wave though...please.

Isn't that what phial of floods does?

And anyway, if you just want Primal Wave, why don't you revisit your water god? Would make more sense and some people were interested in that, at least.

God knows, I've had my share of bad ideas too, so don't get me wrong. But I think OP's problem is that he doesn't develop or polish his ideas enough, and instead keeps coming up with one half-baked piece after another. Ok, I can understand not wanting to put a lot of effort into something people will reject anyway, and yes it's frustrating when ideas that you've put a lot of work into (whether it's time or code) don't lead to anything, but that's just the nature of trying to add new things to an already well-developed game.

So I'd suggest picking 1 (or 3) out of the dozen or so proposals you've made recently, and spending some time to really think about how it can fit into the game. Looking up similar, failed ideas from the past could really be helpful here.

[sgrunt]

I just want

This is never a good basis for a design proposal.

[dck]

I think it's a really bad idea to justify additions with "I just want of player version X monster spell" if you can't even give some sort of argument why said spell would be good in the hands of players.
If in fact you have an argument to get the player spell into the game and that argument is good then you don't need some weird convoluted mechanic to justify its inclusion as part of a bigger addition.

[and into]

I agree with archaeo's criticisms and the (helpful) spirit in which they were given.

As for this particular proposal, I will say, on the positive side:

+ Devouring specific enemies for certain kinds of mutations a la nethack would be problematic on a number of levels, but that can just safely be dropped I think. Killing an enemy by devouring it could be really strong already and doesn't need some other gimmick to make it worthwhile, just use it as a "kill this dude quickly" thing with certain limitations and balancing features.

+ Some kind of "learn enemy magic" mechanic I could see possibly working. You can xv to see enemy spells, perhaps this god would change this to tell you exactly what their spell list is, and learnable spells can be highlighted in blue. If you use this ability and (let's say) kill the enemy fast enough, you "absorb" their spell (similar mechanic as enslave soul). Rather than have this take up spell slots, I'd have it take up an ability slot. You get one ability slot for enemy spells. If you choose to absorb a new spell, the one in the ability slot is replaced. Using your enemy spell takes a moderate amount of piety and uses up however much MP (some enemy-only spells would need to be assigned MP values). Certain spells could be made unusable to the player, obviously. [Note I expect this would be a lot of work to code, and probably wouldn't be worth it, but mechanically I don't think the above would be overpowered or too fiddly in terms of actual game play.]

+ I actually quite like the idea of eating uniques for permanent statgain (or maybe positive mutations—but then these should be random beneficial mut, don't link the mutation you get with the particular unique). If you leave eating god, you are stripped of all positive mutations and any statgains you got from eating uniques.

[Lyrick]

I like the idea, but just how crazy will the hunger get? (I'm also guessing that Vampires and Mummies will absolutely have to be off limits since hunger has no effects and Vampires dont eat anyway they drink). Rings of hunger are some of the most dangerous items to have on, cause if you get unlucky with corpse drops...you are actually in good position to be screwed. Corpse-leaving monsters appear often enough that even trolls will not have too hard a time staying full, but if you have to chow in the middle of a fight thats a little dangerous. He would appear then to appeal more to melee characters who do not have problems with spell hunger, but then they wouldn't be casting spells much anyway so that would go to waste. If you were a caster the Eat-Guy ability is very dangerous cause you probably have to be right next to them to eat them (and right next to something is not where you want to be).