A god that gives monster spells


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Tartarus Sorceror

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Post Wednesday, 6th September 2017, 09:25

A god that gives monster spells

Since there are very few gods that are fun with blasters, I thought: what about a god that doesn't give you abilities, and, instead, grants you unique spells you can't otherwise acquire?
These spells would be directly memorized and added to your I menu, free of spell slots charge. You leave the god, you lose the spells. The spells still need you to learn the magic schools to function.

The obvious question, then, is, "which monster spells are there? And which ones are good enough to be memorized?"

I don't know the full monster spell list. So please add the monster spells you find cool. These are the ones I think would be fun to have.

Dimensional anchor: good against imps, rakashas, some ghosts, you occasionally may want to cast it on yourself (friggin' ghosts with teleport other), phantoms.
Acid Bolt
That spell that creates earth elementals from a wall, I think it's awesome.
Haste Other
Corrosive Bolt
Metal Splinters
Sap Magic
Blinkbolt (always needs target)
Call of chaos
Ensnare
Miasma Breath
Throw Barbs
Virulence (rPois-)
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Dis Charger

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Post Wednesday, 6th September 2017, 14:28

Re: A god that gives monster spells

I've proposed this sort of thing before. The usual arguments against are (1) too complicated, (2) not all effects that are good on enemies would be good on players; while others would be extremely niche (only good in one branch, etc.) or very overpowered (3) giving the player a lot of monster spells also creates a lot of redundancy (ensnare and throwing a net are the same thing mechanically speaking; additionally Wands of Fire/Cold/Draining were removed because most the time they were practically the same as the new wand of Acid (which IS Corrosive Bolt). (4) Giving the player one monster effect via rare evocable or fixedArt is batter than trying to grab them all for some reason (Corrosive Bolt from Wand of Acid; Primal Wave from Phial of Floods; [there are a lot more examples of single enemy spell becoming item or god power because it wouldn't work for the player to have unlimited access to it or it doesn't fit into spellschools as is] (5) Corrosive Bolt as a spell was mostly shot down out of "Poison School can't contain Acid (would break Crawl's definition of poison) and it's too powerful for pure Conjuration, would kill elemental bolts" BUT other developers got around that with Irradiate and Yara's Violent Unraveling which cause very similar effects to B.Acid practically, while having different flavor and being balanced by Contamination (for Irradiate) and being hard to use (Yara's).
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Tartarus Sorceror

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Joined: Saturday, 18th June 2016, 13:57

Post Wednesday, 6th September 2017, 23:51

Re: A god that gives monster spells

Those are all valid points. In general, this was the "easy way" to produce a god that gives access to unique spells, that seems to me the one kind of magic god we currently lack. Of course, it would require enormous time to develop a god that gives enough spells for them to be usable by mages from different backgrounds (20-30 spells?).
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Barkeep

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Post Thursday, 7th September 2017, 20:03

Re: A god that gives monster spells

I'm firmly of the "different spells are good for players and monsters" mindset. A lot of this list is also stuff that players already have access to (the direct damage spells, ensnare is nets / webs, barbs is very similar to poison) and stuff that players used to have access to but have since been removed (earth elementals, haste other).

But really, players and monsters are so different (and have such different goals) that there's a large design space of monster and player spells that don't work well on one or the other. Most stuff other than direct damage conjurations fall into this category in my mind.

I could imagine Lugonu (or possibly Chei) giving dimensional anchor (targeted stasis for chei) as an ability, though?
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