The Tavern

What would be the gameplay implications of these changes? I would appreciate any mention of why any similar redesigns may have been rejected. And I know they have come up in other threads, where they were not refuted AFAIK. Furthermore, both Makhleb and Nemelex went through drastic revisions for the better, so it's not like Status Quo is insurmountable.

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BloodGod - modelled after Makhleb, with his usual passive benefits. Abilities are different, but all still use hunger:

1* Minor Destruction [1hp] - Makhleb's usual.
2* Major Destruction [5hp] - Makhleb's usual, but no piety this time.
3* Controlled Destruction [5hp, piety] - like major destruction, but you choose the attack.
4* Wreck Havok [10hp, large piety] - a directionless invocation that may summon a demon like Greater Servant, but may also arc lightning,, or conjure lots of flames all around you, or cast shatter, or throw around a whole bunch of acid projectiles. You may be protected from these effects, as you may be protected from the summoned demon. It might also summon a swarm of lesser demons. Summons are likelier to be friendly with monsters in LOS, hostile if player is alone.
5* Query Havok [1hp, piety] - this invocation randomly changes and reveals the next havoc that Bloodgod has stored up for you.

The summoning of a lesser demon is gone. Makhleb is a god intensely focused on immediate destruction. Healing occurs only after you kill something, and is useful only if there are more monsters around (or you can't heal naturally). Only his summons can be used to prepare for combat, so that is anomalous. Lesser servants diminish Makhleb. He looks like a puny god when he lets you have mediocre demon companions. The new flavor would be of a god waiting to burst with destruction.

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TarotGod - a god of fate, modelled after tarot cards. Your five god abilities are slots, each of which gets separately filled with a 'tarot'. More information about a tarots is revealed with time until it expires. Empty slots get replenished with new, unidentified tarots. God likes you to use tarots as unidentified as possible, to the point of losing considerable piety for letting tarots expire (e.g. -5 piety) The tarots are just like current Nemelex stuff. To make this god most distinct, you could make all her tarots take effect instantly, allowing a superposition like Nemelex's Deal Four. This god would create a niche for people who like now-or-never decisions. Idea: 5* or 6* provokes Tarotgod to give you some game-changing tarots and some very hazardous tarots, so players would try to stay at moderate piety most of the time.

Possible turnover mechanic:
Tarots exist in states that have a strict hierarchy.
Every once in a while, god advances the state of each tarot forward independently by 1d3.
Upon reaching a tarot state, you gain knowledge from that state and all previous states.
State 0 | Unusable. The tarot slot is empty.
State 1 | Piety for using: 5 | Revealed info: no information (a mysterious, usable tarot)
State 2 | Piety for using: 4 | Revealed info: ornateness of tarot (eg legendary)
State 3 | Piety for using: 3 | Revealed info: tarot type, general category (eg war)
State 4 | Piety for using: 2 | Revealed info: tarot type, originating 'deck' (eg summoning)
State 5 | Piety for using: 1 | Revealed info: the tarot itself (eg swarm)
State 6 | Piety for using: 0 | Revealed info: power (eg third and best power category)
State 7 | Piety for using: -1 | Revealed info: exact effect (eg 7 red wasps)
State 8+ | Piety for using: -2 | Revealed info: none, but tarot is now decaying.
A decaying tarot expires within a few turns, wasting the tarot and creating an empty slot.

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CardGod - The evocations god, a true trickster and artificer. Some points:

Piety - used for gift rate/quality and decays with time.
1st Piety Gain - God surreptitiously marks random monsters. He tends to so with high-level monsters and those who carry valuables. When those monsters die, they simply vanish instead of leaving anything - no corpse, no inventory, no inner-flame explosion - and even death curses are interrupted.
2nd Piety Gain - God tends to surreptitiously mark valuables that you have never seen before. He claims them the instant you find yourself on the same tile.
Passive piety gains 1 and 2 are accompanied by mischievous flavor text:

Foo vanishes. "Yoink!"
Foo vanishes. "Hope you don't mind..."
Foo vanishes. "I like what I see."
Foo vanishes. "For me, really?"

Cardgod's Gifts
God grants decks that are similar to Nemelex, but more specific and varied. Peeking is not allowed. You have real incentive to use the decks up. You could stash decks away before entering branches where they are useless. Something like the deck of escape is instead presented in several lesser decks - one for repelling enemies in various ways, one that helps you withstand an enemy onslaught, one for actually getting you out of the fight. The idea is that you know what a deck will do, in abstract, but every draw jolts your tactical orientation a little. These decks are supposed to compensate for the loot that Cardgod deprives you of. They work like some rods did a few versions back, but decks don't replenish, and I dislike the codename Rodgod.

Cardgod Deck Examples
A deck that basically casts level-2 charms spells.
A deck with 13 each of flame, fire, fireball, and conjure fire, plus a couple bolts of magma. Get it? Get it?
A deck with cards that temporarily brand your weapon with a random brand.
A deck that gives restorative effects.
A minor hex-deck that beam-targets a single random negative status.
A major hex-deck that is all self-centered mass-hexes.
A bolt deck with 6 bolts each of: fire, cold, lightning, draining, venom, silver.
A deck with sticky flame, static discharge, vampiric draining, and a melee version of force lance.
A deck that simulates shooting variously branded bolts with a crossbow, as if your crossbow skill was your evocations skill.
A deck full of Olgreb's Toxic Radiance, Poisonous Cloud, Cure Poison, and Ignite Poison.
A deck with corpse rot, animate dead, cigotuvi's embrace, and a custom spell that either replicates the toadstool effect of praying to Fedhas or destroys nearby corpses for HP/MP.
A gardening deck (g.e.c.k., u caught that?) whose cards let you place a tile of water, a tree, a translucent rock wall, or a metal wall.
Odd utility or strategy decks might be possible, but not to overlap with Tarotgod's function too much.

Active Cardgod Abilities - Optional
Lay claim to any monster (or floor tile?), making Cardgod promise to leave it for you.
Draw 3 cards in 1 turn with MP/piety cost.
Shuffle two decks together into one. Sometimes useful for saving inventory space when you have similar decks.
Snatch: a smite-targeting version of apportation, like portal projectile in reverse. (could also work as a card effect)

More Cardgod Possibilities - Optional
It's perfectly reasonable to have this god restrict or handicap your use of magic (like Pakellas).
Cardgod passively thwarts your enemies' attempts to use inventory items - wands or potions.
Decks have to be wielded from the hand, or benefit from it, or save MP when drawn from hand.
All/most/some decks have a predetermined combination of cards - but in a random order, and examining the deck in your inventory shows what cards remain in the deck without disclosing their order, e.g. a deck of offensive fire {this deck contains: 2 flame, 3 fireball, 1 bolt of magma}.
Drawing a card gives the player the chance to discard it instead, wasting the card.
Cardgod forbids the use of artefacts and piety gain is more standard.

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I'm sorry but that sounds like a Dungeon Crawling Advice topic.

Edit: to be more constructive, currently Nemelex gifts you a slew of extremely powerful and unique effects. The proposed change is to replace them with a bunch of player spells and weaker effects, which seems like a huge nerf.

More like the sick god of nuclear detonations. Seriously, any time there's a hard fight coming up, just draw 4 cards from an ornate or legendary deck of war. You can draw them one at a time if there's time, or use nem's draw 4 ability if there isn't time. Odds are you're going to get sudden, overwhelming force on your side that will kill everything. Doing the same thing with decks of destruction is almost as good. Also, stack 5 on your legendary decks of escape and you can get some extremely powerful effects lined up for emergencies, like healing all your hp or sealing yourself safely in a tomb.

This thread is not getting the attention it deserves. I don't know if it's better off in Crazy Yiuf's Corner or the dev wiki.

I can't tell if you are trying to improve existing gods, or just rename things to be clear in the same way that we have "Fire Magic" instead of "Pyromancy."

Renaming things to be more like a flavor theme is slightly harmful, because it takes the emphasis away from mechanics and puts it on flavor.

https://crawl.develz.org/tavern/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=7178

This thread is way to broad with a huge scope (changes to 3 different gods, two of whom are considered to be well designed and balanced). Any one of these redesigns would merit it's own more formal proposal and reasoning, especially to be in GDD. Putting all three together and its just one big pile of unsorted ideas I don't want to wade into.

A thread like this is better suited for CYC.

Oh, definitely not. I don't want a god called "bloodgod". It's just a codename for new-Makhleb or the-Makhleb-according-to-these-changes.


The three gods here are derived largely from Makhleb and Nemelex. These are the only gods who are both chaotic and who can be controlled. The other chaotic gods, Xom and Jyiva, can only marginally be controlled. So these three gods are thematically and gameplay-wise very similar, and discussing Ctrl-Chaos with regard to one god may as well include the other(s). It solves my Nemelex peeves: he can be made too un-random, by being choosy with dangerous decks and spamming safer decks; optimal play can be figured out, then put on auto-pilot.

The issue with a formal proposal is that it appears to make the design locked-in. Reasoning is actually pretty easy to write, but readers can read the mechanics and draw the reasoning from them, or ask questions. The reasoning is redundant if the reader gets the point of the mechanics, whereas reasoning without mechanics is without context and therefore baffling.

Plus, initial numbers are likely unbalanced (esp coming from me) and it's too easy to focus on balance, rather than the larger picture. If something needs clarifying in the OP I'll fix it.

That's why options are clearly labeled options, for cardgod. And it's not a big pile. It's a number of small piles, most of which are ordered.

Which are the two gods who are considered well designed and balanced? I've read from multiple threads that Nemelex is a prime target for excision from the pantheon, and is kept there mostly because he is so unique and beloved. As for Makhleb, lesser servant stops being useful after the early game, and most players never even use greater destruction (maybe sequell can answer).

Of these three, I've really only played makhleb. But for makhleb, the proposal is so far off of anything relevant for improving the actual play of makhleb in practice (or even making a case that makhleb should be changed in some way) that you just aren't going to get a lot of commentary. I suspect that the other two are the same. My recommendation would be to get concrete experience with the gameplay of at least one of these gods through the course of the entire game (i.e. at least a 3-rune win, ideally more than one) and then develop a further proposal about just that god, that is directly informed by that experience.

I agree

I like how your not-Makhleb proposal first removes randomness (at the cost of making you press one more button - whichever will trigger orb of elec) and then adds a super-random ability that is basically Xom lite. But I guess you can peak at it so you can flush bad ones in a safe place?

What do you even dislike about current Makhleb? It's a very strong god with very clear benefits that manages to be both simple and chaotic and is good for any character type and stays relevant through the game.

Hey Sar. I’m not sure about how the cost of major destruction works – it is 0-1 piety – but I suspect that you lose 1 piety when you get the orb of elec, and 0 piety otherwise, since orb is the strongest major destruction. If that’s the case, controlled destruction can work the same, consuming 1-2 piety depending on whether you have picked orb of elec (or 2-3 piety).



What’s so Xomlike about Havok? Are Makhleb’s destructions also Xomlike?
I’m trying to make Makhelb’s expensive powers more consistent with his cheaper abilities. He's strong, maybe too strong.

Well there should be no ‘bad ones’ among Havocs, just situational ones (which there already are, like green death) and they should be safe anyway at high invocations. Actual gameplay may go like this (hope this helps):

“I wonder what can help me get through this mess.”

“I’d rather be choosy in this fight. Query.”

“That’s not quite what I’m looking for. Query again.”

“Great! I’ll use that.”

“I could use yet another Havok. Query.”

“Hmm. I’d rather hold on to that. I’ll finish the fight without it.”

I would like to see Makhleb be more thematic. More higher risk, higher reward.

My suggestions:

Rather than have two blasty and two summoning abilities, have one each and have them scale with piety. Later in the game you will have means of dealing with popcorn already, so you aren't likely to even need the two lessers any more.

New abilities:
Active: Bloodbond. You lose 25% of your life, but deal double damage to a target enemy.

or

Active: Death Trance: Acts like song of slaying, but gives you flayed status afterwards.

Me too. Not sure how your new abilities would fit: they're quite an expansion, and crawl has a nice 5-ability cap (abcde, then fgh...)

It's actually just 0 or 1 piety, chosen randomly, with no reference to the effect picked.

I get the impression that these ideas, and most of your posted ideas, are coming from the design principle "man, I bet it would be cool if . . . ". That's not necessarily a bad place to start, but you're going to get a lot further and receive better feedback if, after coming up with something that seems cool to you, you take some time thinking about how the idea would play out in practice. How would it change the average game? How would it change a variety of unusual game states? What does it add in the best case? What cost would it impose on players in the worst case? Would it create fun situations, not just for you, but for players in general?

Consider whether the idea interacts with a system in crawl that you're not particularly familiar with, in which case it's worth learning about how that system works now before proposing that it be changed. Consider whether you have a good sense of what both new and experienced players are looking for and getting from crawl. Ideally, you'd also take the time to consider whether it fits into the design principles and direction of development that the dev team is currently considering.

It can be hard work to properly vet an idea. If that's not something you're interested in, but you still want to keep sharing your ideas, be ready to see most of them dismissed almost immediately with little consideration.

1. More significantly high risk, high reward, with more meaningful health costs.
2. I'm removing the two greater abilities in exchange for two new abilities + the increasing power minor abilities. No net ability number increase.

You know nothing about Tarot.

Content - amount and diversity. A huge draw of Crawl is that it can be played with so many different characters in so many race/god/whatnot combinations, it's like a new game each time, even though the dungeons don't care what your char is. So, more content is one of the great things to add to Crawl. Stuff that's cool. I bet a majority of runs start out with "I bet it would be cool if..." Content is added not to solve a problem, but to be cool. Although I can see how Snake could alternate with another branch, and Spider be designed to solve this "problem", there was no "problem" solved by introducing Formicids and Vine Stalkers. If the content is cool, and is neither unbalanced nor redundant with regard to other content, it should stay.


Thank you for the comment, but nobody can receive better feedback just by thinking, because the internet in not telepathic. Are you suggesting... preemptively answering those kinds of questions? In other detailed proposal posts, I only see the justifications in subsequent posts, not the first.

For example, I see how TeshiAlair's suggestion is problematic. Makhleb is only slightly biased against casters, whereas TeshiAlair's abilities are only good for melee focused chars, and you'd use them in about the same situations where you'd use berserk, and they're actually really bad at handling emergencies. Merging destruction/summons might be acceptable due to how few people actually use major destruction and lesser servant, but, TeshiAlair says to scale it based on piety. Well, if cost is kept constant and low (like Yred's animations) you'd have to severely curtail the high-piety versions, or they'd be overpowered. If the cost to power ratio is kept constant, and cost/power both rise with piety, it would be equally effective at all piety levels, but players would simply need to re-adjust some tactical considerations every time piety changed, which would simply be annoying. If cost is kept constant and high, it messes up one of Makhleb's great perks: that you can spam quite a few summons without reducing their effectiveness, unlike with Trog for example. So I don't think those suggestions would improve Makhleb.


This is actually my most serious non-UI suggestion. I point out that Cardgod and Tarotgod both solve glaring Nemelex issues, but are not so similar that they can't both be in the game. I can see how if there was never a Nemelex in Crawl, and I suggested Nemelex, it could be dismissed with something like "So you just want Xom effects on demand with extra inventory management." Maybe you can point me to a thread that demonstrates a productive vetting process.

This thread is a good god proposal. Gods are non trivial to implement, and there is a good chance the proposal still won't make it into testing. I don't know if anyone ever put any follow through behind the god.

In comparison, this thread is a good unique proposal thread. The first response?



This was (is?) tested on trunk at some point in time.

Thank you for the links, and I'm still not sure how to make this thread more like the better proposals. Maybe the following?

1) For bloodgod, I suppose I could detail an exact list of havoks, and tweak the major destructions to make controlled destruction more balanced.
2) For tarotgod, specify the times when turnovers occur, and remove the "for example"s and the "maybe"s.
3) For cardgod, split into "Nemelex piety" and "Nemelex gift" sections. Set the reform in stone i.e. create an implementable plan. Explain how it would solve current Nemelex issues.


Yeah, I know, and I'm not familiar with large coding projects like Crawl. The best I might be able to do is use an existing god slot to implement tarotgod. It would be a sloppy kludge, and even that would take me a long-ass time.

What do YOU know about Tarot?

Bloodgod must have as a start quote: Blood for Bloodgod, god of blood!

Imagine you are at a bar chatting with your buddies about what to put into a game and working through some pints. You banter, talk about cool ideas, laugh, brag, carry on (like you do.) The conversation wanders around and maybe some of the ideas are good, maybe no. It doesn't matter. You are hanging out with your buddies and you learn along the way.

Now imagine you wake up the next day, put on a suit, go into a board room, and pitch your one best idea to the people who actually have to do it. These people hear ideas all the time. Generally they appreciate casual banter, but here is not the place for cool ideas to wander through a conversation. They want a clean, concise pitch that is well thought through. Don't waste their time and they won't waste yours.

The first example is CYC. The second example is GDD. The first is a place for ideas. The second is a place for proposals.

If you want to make proposals that make it into the game, you want the original post to be a strong as you can when you make it. If you just want to talk about cool ideas (a fine, reasonable goal), put pieces into CYC and brainstorm without having the added overlay of proposing non-fleshed out ideas.

You never know, sometimes you may just throw something out in CYC and someone takes it and runs with it a bit.

I hate this being in CYC, because it's an important topic, but I can roll with it. I enjoy the idea of renaming magics to latin-based -mancy names. This can flavorfully differentiate Crawl from other, blander fantasy games. I don't see how emphasis is shifted one way or the other by renaming things. For example:

The Conjurations one is the weirdest, but also the coolest. Say it with me: "Effligomancer of Vehumet"

Please don't. Not everyone is a native English speaker and Latin expert here.

It doesn't help that half of those are actually Greek.

Plus -mancy means divination, not magic. Necromancy comes from trying to divine the future from bones and stuff.

Also, having every single magic thing end in -mancy would make crawl a lot more like bland fantasy games, not less bland. Not to mention, it's much less clear what the hell the skills do.

BATTLEMANCER

Stealth < NINJAMANCER

Hey everyone, just won my Bucklermancer of Cardgod!