{Player Name} the God of Mimicry

[bcadren]

Just a half-baked idea. Don't take it too seriously. Be cute to actually see it, but I'm not getting my hopes up. It occurred to me that half my old proposals from a year ago were "What if player could do {foo}" where {foo} was some specific thing that was unique to some enemy. Mimic God combines all of these in a succinct manner.

Initial (?)

Theme:
"Your name is my name too! ...HEY! Quit copying me!"

{name} has a silly temperament; offering worshipers the ability to copy anything they see, for the most part. Very frank about the limitation's of the character's thin mortal frame; anything he refuses to allow the player the copy, namely other god's powers and abilities related to too different of forms, are explained as his laziness or the character's physical limitations. "You think I'm going to heal you whenever you like? ...nah bro. Too much work." "If I mutated you that far, you'd probably die, bro. No dice."

Altar:
Always found near the altar of another god. Looks similar, but is a different color.

Piety:
Doesn't use piety. All abilities offered from the start.

Powers:

• Mimic Spell: Smite targeted; attempts to copy the last spell used by the target. If successful (Spell Level vs. Invocations check) it becomes offered in blue on the memorization screen. Only one spell is available this way at a time. Spells that are not normally available to the player and don't conform to normal spell schools use Invocations as a Spellschool. Two spells are unique to this god and are learned by attempting to copy a cantrip. These exist both to (flavour) explain cantrips and provide MP support.
  • Charge (Charms, 3) - "Your eyes glow with power" Gives a (small) Wizardry and a (Medium/Large) Spellpower boost to your next spell. The boost is a fraction of your Charms spellpower.
  • Magical Inflow (Invocations, 4) - Boosts your natural MP regeneration +25-200% depending on spellpower.
• Mimic Form: Smite targeted; attempts to copy a physical ability last used by the target. If successful the god offers a take mutation that allows the player to use this ability. Stronger abilities come at a cost. There are six total slots and you may only have one mutation in each slot at a time. Slots:
  • Breath: Contains an active attack. Weaker ones (Spit Poison, Spit Fire) have no drawback. Stronger ones (Calcifying Cloud, Miasma) may slow, confuse, rot or hurt you to invoke. Has no PASSIVE effects or drawbacks.
  • Bite: Copies an insect or animal bite auxiliary attack; may be branded (venom and vampiric being most common). May forbid helmets. Slot is mostly low-cost low-reward.
  • Claws: Offers the unarmed brand of the creature copied and a slaying boost anywhere from nothing to +8. Usually at the cost of a passive defense drawback. For example flaming UC (copied from a fire elemental) comes with rC-; while vampiric UC (copied from a Jiangshi) comes with HP -15%. The claws slot is excellent for UC characters, but most its abilities are worthless to everyone else. The exception, blink self UC (copied from a blink frog or a Phantom) offers a random blink on UC hit and may be very helpful for fragile mages that want to escape melee range without using MP.
  • Offhand: Makes it impossible to use a shield or 2H weapon (unless you are formacid). Offhand mutations are very rare so two examples:
    • Chaos Claw (Apocalypse Crab) Chaos-branded offhand UC. Evocable Chaos Cloud. Using the evocation drains 1-3 Int.
    • Dual Wielding (Deep Elf Blademaster): Allows you to wield two 1H weapons. They must be the same type, but may have different enchantments or brands. They have their normal minimum delay, but base delay is multiplied by 1.5; making it cost much more XP to reach the min delay. Because of the coordination associated with dual wielding, you get +4 to your EVP while doing it.
  • Tails: You grow a tail with a large stinger on the end. Is mostly auxiliary attacks (hornet's sting [paralysis], emperor scorpion sting [strong poison], constriction), but also contains Manticore Barbs, an active attack. Cost is anywhere from slowness to loudness to rPois-.
  • Magical Passive Slot: Contains weird auras and other passive or reflexive, rather than physical effects. Cost is usually in MP (either lowered total or when the ability activates it costs some). For example, if you copy a shock serpent's electrical field collapse (shocking adjacent creatures when taking bad hits) you have to pay 3-5 MP every time this ability activates; while copying a water nymph's shallow water aura costs 10% of your Max MP.

Wrath:

• All invocations-based spells are immediately uncastable (but still memorized, sorry).
• Bad Mutations.
• Having your own attacks copied and thrown back at you.
• Automatically memorizing "Trash" spells. [Having useless spells that do things like summon hostile creatures use spell levels to force you to use ?Amnesia.]

Quick Use Case Analysis:
Mimic Spell Abilities will be helpful to any caster allowing them to dabble in "rare spells" or learn some normal spells they want much earlier than with other gods or random book drops. [though some spells, like Shatter are not learnable at all through this god.] Currently enemy-unique spells; like Aquamancer's Steam Ball and Primal Wave, Deep Elf Death Mage's Call Lost Soul, or Kirke's Porkalator may be helpful to certain casters and hybrids. Remember that the weirder spells are both rare (few enemies have them) and require both this god slot and spell levels to use; it is not like they are being given easily. Porkalator would be particularly helpful giving a MR-checking spell to pure transmuters.

Mimic Form Abilities are most helpful to Monks and other UC users; but may be helpful to all meleeists and some casters. Remember that all of them are offensive gain at (usually) defensive counterbalance.

...Alright. Tear me apart. just a weird idea. heh.

[jejorda2]

Kudos for the thread title.

How to calculate costs and effects for monster spells used by players seems like a thorny problem.

[Berder]

I like it.

The god you've described seems to be focused around copying a few abilities/spells and then keeping them. I think it might be more interesting if the copying is temporary so you're constantly using different spells and abilities based on which enemies you are fighting. To facilitate this, all spells copied from an enemy should be changed to Invocations school so that you can use them without training a specific spell school.

Here's my riff on your idea, with the idea of constantly changing based on what is attacking you, and also trying to make it so it's not necessary to special case a lot of monsters:

(Player Name) the God of Mimicry
First power: active mimicry
When a monster uses an active spell or ability within your LOS, you always gain that ability temporarily. The ability will show up in your ability menu. Once you use one of these abilities, it is gone from your ability menu until the next time you see a monster use it. If not used, mimicked abilities time out after 100 turns. They work exactly as if you were a monster with HD equal to the enemy's HD.

Second power: attack flavor mimicry
When you are attacked by a monster with an attack flavor, your melee or ranged attack temporarily gains the brand corresponding to the flavor, unless it already has that brand. Works even on unarmed attacks (yours or the enemy's). This brand is in addition to any current brands on your weapon, so for example, under ideal conditions you might be hitting enemies with a weapon of flaming, freezing, venom, and electrocution. Take that, Nessos! Brands expire 100 turns after you were last hit by them. This includes corrosion; an acid branded weapon deals on average 25% extra acid damage against non-acid-resistant enemies. Mimicked brands are implemented as statuses.

Third power: defensive mimicry
Whenever you deal damage to an enemy and the enemy resists your damage, you gain as many ranks of resistance to that kind of damage as the enemy has. This resistance expires after 100 turns if not renewed, and you can have multiple kinds active at once. Works for rTorment/rHellfire too.


These powers could be very strong in the right circumstances. The god would need some big downside to compensate. I haven't thought of what that might be.

[Lasty]

No.

[tasonir]

Copying cantrips is odd - I played a lot of crawl before I even understood that orc priests had spells that were designed to make them waste time and that those "flavor messages" actually meant crawl was being nice to me. This would be very hard to discover that you can copy these to learn two very powerful effects. Fix: Make these god abilities at **, ***, or **** piety. Have the god use piety, because piety is a system that works and is good. Otherwise these abilities, which are strong, are unlimited use and something you basically have to keep up all the time.

As for copying slots, this is quickly pretty unwieldy with how many monsters there are in the game, trying to manage downsides from the stronger effects, etc. Monster abilities generally don't work in the same way as player abilities, and so there would be a lot of work implementing all of these effects, and balance is a nightmare. Polymorphing yourself/items into other things is generally on the won't do list, I believe, although I didn't confirm. I know for sure that dual wielding is on the won't do list, and gyre and gimble is only flavored as dual wielding, rather than actual dual wielding.

I'm not entirely sure that copying a monster spell is all that worth it - player spells are already quite good and will kill everything you need. Why learn a monster fireball, which comes with some drawback like reduced max MP, when you can just learn player fireball and keep your full mana? You'd be basically doubling a lot of content in crawl, for little gain, and a lot of work.

[XuaXua]

Just a half-baked idea. Don't take it too seriously. Be cute to actually see it, but I'm not getting my hopes up. It occurred to me that half my old proposals from a year ago were "What if player could do {foo}" where {foo} was some specific thing that was unique to some enemy. Mimic God combines all of these in a succinct manner.

Initial (?)

Theme:
"Your name is my name too! ...HEY! Quit copying me!"

{name} has a silly temperament; offering worshipers the ability to copy anything they see, for the most part. Very frank about the limitation's of the character's thin mortal frame; anything he refuses to allow the player the copy, namely other god's powers and abilities related to too different of forms, are explained as his laziness or the character's physical limitations. "You think I'm going to heal you whenever you like? ...nah bro. Too much work." "If I mutated you that far, you'd probably die, bro. No dice."

Altar:
Always found near the altar of another god. Looks similar, but is a different color.

Piety:
Doesn't use piety. All abilities offered from the start.

Powers:

• Mimic Spell: Smite targeted; attempts to copy the last spell used by the target. If successful (Spell Level vs. Invocations check) it becomes offered in blue on the memorization screen. Only one spell is available this way at a time. Spells that are not normally available to the player and don't conform to normal spell schools use Invocations as a Spellschool. Two spells are unique to this god and are learned by attempting to copy a cantrip. These exist both to (flavour) explain cantrips and provide MP support.
  • Charge (Charms, 3) - "Your eyes glow with power" Gives a (small) Wizardry and a (Medium/Large) Spellpower boost to your next spell. The boost is a fraction of your Charms spellpower.
  • Magical Inflow (Invocations, 4) - Boosts your natural MP regeneration +25-200% depending on spellpower.
• Mimic Form: Smite targeted; attempts to copy a physical ability last used by the target. If successful the god offers a take mutation that allows the player to use this ability. Stronger abilities come at a cost. There are six total slots and you may only have one mutation in each slot at a time. Slots:
  • Breath: Contains an active attack. Weaker ones (Spit Poison, Spit Fire) have no drawback. Stronger ones (Calcifying Cloud, Miasma) may slow, confuse, rot or hurt you to invoke. Has no PASSIVE effects or drawbacks.
  • Bite: Copies an insect or animal bite auxiliary attack; may be branded (venom and vampiric being most common). May forbid helmets. Slot is mostly low-cost low-reward.
  • Claws: Offers the unarmed brand of the creature copied and a slaying boost anywhere from nothing to +8. Usually at the cost of a passive defense drawback. For example flaming UC (copied from a fire elemental) comes with rC-; while vampiric UC (copied from a Jiangshi) comes with HP -15%. The claws slot is excellent for UC characters, but most its abilities are worthless to everyone else. The exception, blink self UC (copied from a blink frog or a Phantom) offers a random blink on UC hit and may be very helpful for fragile mages that want to escape melee range without using MP.
  • Offhand: Makes it impossible to use a shield or 2H weapon (unless you are formacid). Offhand mutations are very rare so two examples:
    • Chaos Claw (Apocalypse Crab) Chaos-branded offhand UC. Evocable Chaos Cloud. Using the evocation drains 1-3 Int.
    • Dual Wielding (Deep Elf Blademaster): Allows you to wield two 1H weapons. They must be the same type, but may have different enchantments or brands. They have their normal minimum delay, but base delay is multiplied by 1.5; making it cost much more XP to reach the min delay. Because of the coordination associated with dual wielding, you get +4 to your EVP while doing it.
  • Tails: You grow a tail with a large stinger on the end. Is mostly auxiliary attacks (hornet's sting [paralysis], emperor scorpion sting [strong poison], constriction), but also contains Manticore Barbs, an active attack. Cost is anywhere from slowness to loudness to rPois-.
  • Magical Passive Slot: Contains weird auras and other passive or reflexive, rather than physical effects. Cost is usually in MP (either lowered total or when the ability activates it costs some). For example, if you copy a shock serpent's electrical field collapse (shocking adjacent creatures when taking bad hits) you have to pay 3-5 MP every time this ability activates; while copying a water nymph's shallow water aura costs 10% of your Max MP.

Wrath:

• All invocations-based spells are immediately uncastable (but still memorized, sorry).
• Bad Mutations.
• Having your own attacks copied and thrown back at you.
• Automatically memorizing "Trash" spells. [Having useless spells that do things like summon hostile creatures use spell levels to force you to use ?Amnesia.]

Quick Use Case Analysis:
Mimic Spell Abilities will be helpful to any caster allowing them to dabble in "rare spells" or learn some normal spells they want much earlier than with other gods or random book drops. [though some spells, like Shatter are not learnable at all through this god.] Currently enemy-unique spells; like Aquamancer's Steam Ball and Primal Wave, Deep Elf Death Mage's Call Lost Soul, or Kirke's Porkalator may be helpful to certain casters and hybrids. Remember that the weirder spells are both rare (few enemies have them) and require both this god slot and spell levels to use; it is not like they are being given easily. Porkalator would be particularly helpful giving a MR-checking spell to pure transmuters.

Mimic Form Abilities are most helpful to Monks and other UC users; but may be helpful to all meleeists and some casters. Remember that all of them are offensive gain at (usually) defensive counterbalance.

...Alright. Tear me apart. just a weird idea. heh.

[xentronium]

Mimic challenge god: Every item you find in the dungeon is a mimic, unless you use piety to preserve the item.
Piety is gained when you see a mimic.

[1010011010]

Mimic challenge god: Every item you find in the dungeon is a mimic, unless you use piety to preserve the item.
Piety is gained when you see a mimic.

Your items are still mimic, and get attacks when equipped to you (even though mimics aren't monsters any more). You can also ask your pet mimics to make a mimic of yourself to distract enemies.

[ZipZipskins]

I didn't read all or any of that but I gotta say, it sure was a bunch of words.