Iemts, Brother of Ru

[TeshiAlair]

So, I really enjoy Ru's gameplay, and had an idea that was similar, but I think sufficiently different to be interesting.


Likes: Sacrificing consumables, evocables, and jewelry. Piety gained based on usefulness of item.
Dislikes: Using said items, penance for using/equipping but no piety loss.

Active chance of success scales with Invo, but only very little with power (think spell power impact of Spellcasting level of influence).

Abilities
* Passive: bonus AC and EV based on amount of jewelry sacrificed.
Passive: bonus regen during battles with tough (yellow or red) enemies based on number of potions sacrificed.
*** Active: Gives an active that IDs an item and removes all curses from it at the cost of stat drain and piety. Piety and stat drain inversely scales with number of scrolls sacrificed.
**** Active: Gives a non elemental blast attack. This attack has a chance to randomly slow, paralyze, confuse, disintegrate, charm, or polymorph the enemy. Chance of each and damage scale with number of evocables sacrificed. Costs 3 mp and exhaustion.
***** Active: Gives a +Res active that also gives glow. Glow is flat amount, duration scales with total jewelry sacrificed.
****** Active: Self-casting blast has a chance to heal, haste, or invisible. Chance of each effect based on total potions and evocables sacrificed. Costs 5mp and high stat drain.
******* Passive: +Slaying based on jewelry sacrificed.
******** Passive: Blast has a chance of silencing, tormenting, inner-flaming, -MR on target enemy, and generates fog or shadow creatures around them. Power scales with total scrolls sacrificed.

# of abilities scaling on potions: 2
# of abilities scaling on jewelry: 3
# of abilities scaling on scrolls: 2
# of abilities scaling on evocables: 2

Numbers and skill order would need to be heavily tweaked, I don't know stats on item usage or standard beliefs regarding power levels of certain items. It is also complex as hell, but I think in an intuitive way: Sac this item, the corresponding effect becomes stronger. It also has some randomness to it, which I think is lacking in many of the current gods.

I realize this god is rather insane, but I think it could be fun and result in drastically altering how someone can play the game.

[TeshiAlair]

Forgot some details:

Item restrictions are in-combat only
Penance is can't use items till X xp gained

[notcluie]

so if you get penance but no piety loss from wearing jewelry, couldn't you just work it off and use Robustness/Vitality/whatever

[tasonir]

Yeah, it seems like if you found a good ring early on, you could wear it, and work off the penance by sacrificing more items, and then have the ring equipped and all god powers. It would be more restrictive, but I think the god should just outright disable your jewelry slots. Anything worn when converting gets returned to inventory.

Also, rescale your * counts, there's no 7*

This last thing might be more of an implementation detail than a design problem, but it's going to have to have a fairly clever scaling system. It wouldn't be hard to imagine becoming extremely powerful if you found 30 rings one game when the average expected is 20, giving you +15 slaying instead of the expected +10 (if each ring is .5 slaying, for example). It'd probably need caps, non-linear scaling, or both.

I think it would be good for clarity to include a simple overview of the conduct in your first post, such as "This god requires sacrificing all consumables, evocables, and jewelry. In return you can ID and uncurse items yourself, gain ac, ev, regeneration, and slaying, in addition to a few active abilities."

I am not sure if that's entirely accurate, because it seems like you aren't forced into saccing all consumables - you could keep some and use them normally, and only give up the possible piety. I'd suggest making it an enforced conduct instead - items are completely disabled, and possibly also auto-sacced on sight (now that would save you a ton of interface problems!)

[TeshiAlair]

Conceptually, I liked the idea of being able to selectively choose what you sacrifice, given that reacting to your current inventory status is a large part of crawl, but I think it would still work if it was autosac, plus it would capture the flavor of being similar to Ru without significant overlap I feel. A bit more risky in many ways.

[tasonir]

It certainly could work either way, the auto-sac conduct is more severe (which could be good or bad), but you get a simplier interface. Having to choose gives you a lot more options, but could slow down gameplay a lot. You'd have to scale powers differently, ie, how much ac does the god give if you can't enchant armor? If you can use enchant armor under optional sacrificing, then how much ac should you really get? You haven't given up any AC sources outside of rings of protection. If you force auto saccing, ie, enchant armor can't be read at all, you still have the problem of characters who have enchanted their armor before joining the god, and then switch, and still get the bonus AC.

Overall I rather like the premise, but there's some technical details to work out. Optional sacrificing has less problems of having to replace missing "mandatory" effects like cure mutation, although you're already replacing ID/remove curse, so replacing cure mutation isn't out of the question.

[TeshiAlair]

With my original plan, the item restrictions were on in-combat only, to allow for usage of cure mutation, acquirement, enchant weapon, etc. The ID active was simply because it would be incredibly likely that ID scrolls and remove curse would be a common sacrifice, though that could be removed easily to remove active clutter and since it technically isn't necessary. Also, enchanting armour before joining the god wouldn't be much of an issue, since the scroll is rare enough and the motivation for joining the god early is high enough that I don't think you'd run into any more of a balance issue than finding a lucky randart conveys anyway.

Also, I'd probably aim for the power curve of the god to max out around a "5 runer": if you've done everything but Hells and Pan, you've likely maxed out your piety and scaling on abilities. Also I'd probably have Iemts ignore piety gain in Pan and Abyss to prevent scumming.

[tasonir]

I'm not sure that blocking piety in pan/abyss is a good solution. I'm assuming that piety is permanent, like with Ru, but it'll cap at 200. I would imagine you could max piety before pan/abyss anyways, and gaining any more won't help. For balance purposes, I'd just have a cap on piety. This is rough, but vaguely something like:

Low tier sacrifices: remove curse, identification, potions of curing, etc: 25% chance to gain 1 piety.
Mid tier sac: potions of might/agil/brill, scroll of teleport, scrolls of vulnerability, etc: 50% chance to gain 1 piety.
High sac: scroll of blinking, potion of heal wounds, enchant armor/weapon, most jewelry: 100% gain 1 piety.
Very high sac: Scrolls of acquirement, wands of heal wounds/teleport, randart jewelery, etc: gain 2-3 piety.

Once you hit 200, you'd no longer have any reason to sac anything else and would just keep everything. Also, on a pointless side note, Iemts is a little bit too obviously a shuffling of items, which may be considered an issue

[and into]

My take on this god would be something like this (reusing some elements from pubby's now sadly defunct smith god):

iemts, god of abstention and moderation

Flavor: An ancient god of self-mastery, willful abnegation, and purity. Iemts predates the trinity of the "good gods"; later deities borrowed much from the teachings of Iemts, but tended to add their own modern prejudices against the undead, necromancy, etc.

Demigods may not worship Iemts.

Auto-sacrifice conduct: A percentage of the non-food consumable items (wands, potions, scrolls) in the game are destroyed upon generation. Shops are not affected.
"All things in moderation": Using any of the same consumable item (the same wand, potion, or scroll) twice within a short period of time will be punished with glow (but no piety loss).

You get piety as you explore, based on the total number of items given up in the name of Iemts.
You will get penance and big hit to piety if you destroy any idol you create to Iemts.

Upon joining: "Fasting" — Iemts supports fasting by slowing your metabolism, so that your body needs less food over time.

None of Iemts abilities incurs any food cost.

* "Your body's purity gives it great fortitude." You get bonus to HP and +regen. Scales up with piety.
** Swords to Plowshares. Active, small piety. You beat the target's weapon to plowshares. The target is disarmed, and the weapon destroyed.
*** Mandate of Temperance. Active, moderate piety. High powered mass abjuration, plus !cancellation on all targets in LOS, including self.
**** Refine item. Occasional. At four stars of piety and above, Iemts will occasionally give small blessings to items of your choice. As occasional god gifts, Iemts will offer the item refinement, which will then appear under your abilities menu. Upon using this ability, you can choose a non-artefact item from your inventory. Iemts may improve it. (?enchant armor, ?enchant weapon, lesser recharge on wands, re-roll one scroll/potion in a stack with no chance of bad items and a weighted chance for a better one, etc.)
***** Idol of the Willful. Active, costs moderate/large piety. Create a temporary, large idol to Iemts in an adjacent space of your choice. This idol is functionally identical to a one-tile wall segment.
****** Item Purification. At six stars of piety, Iemts gives a once-per-game gift of a great blessing. Item purification will greatly improve one item of your choice. Non-fixed artefacts may be selected for this ability. (Bad properties will be rerolled or removed, a new good property may be randomly added, a poor enchantment will be rerolled at some positive value, a positive enchantment will be improved by a small randomized amount).

[TeshiAlair]

0. I like the idea of looting bits from the smith god.

1. I'm not a huge fan of the generation based sac since it makes early consumables a large random factor, moreso than they are already.

2. I like punishment of multiple usage though.

3. I don't get Fasting: food generation isn't destroyed, and the abilities don't incur food costs, so what's the point?

4. Idol of the Willful feels out of place to me, especially for a god partially based in humility and restraint. I'd reflavour it as follows:

  Code:

***** Humble: Active, costs moderate/large piety. Causes fear in an unintelligent enemy, pacifies non-evil intelligent foes, and paralyzes evil foes.

It keeps in with the flavour of Swords to Plowshares, while having a similar effect of hallway-blocking.

5. As a general effect of the god, I'd also have them reduce jewelry generation, but allow Refine Item to randomly change the type of jewelry, and Item Purification to fuse two pieces of jewelry together.

[Hirsch I]

I dont like that the god of fasting and vow of poverty and stuff makes your items more valuable.