God idea: Wanpasant, God of Positioning/Games

[Factorialite]

First post! I imagine there are several god proposals at any given time and they are probably mostly bad. Hopefully this one isn't mostly bad - but if it is, let me know! I enjoy criticism.

Wanpasant the Puppetmaster knows that life is just a game. Thousands of come in search of the orb, and thousands have failed. To him, you are just another piece on the eternal board. Followers will entertain Wanpasant by dancing around playing the game beautifully.

The steps to writing a god proposal:

Question 1: what gameplay purpose does this god proposal seek to achieve?

This god is suited for characters that aren’t necessarily stealthy and have variable speeds (either very fast or very slow races would work best). The idea is to move around and be able to put up roadblocks to help you position. Then, you have ways to deal with these threats based on their position to you.

Question 2: why would players find it fun to pick this god?

Players generally like movement abilities like Knight Jump. Players also like the ability to summon things (which this does without impinging too much on Yred, Trog, or Hep). Lastly, this would provide an opportunity for some characters without high magic aptitudes to play with magic. Currently, that is basically the purview of Qaz or Nemelex and this feels meaningfully different. It feels cool to jump away from an enemy, have them move into blast range, and then pop them with something.

Question 3 is "mechanics?" and Question 4 is "flavour?"

WIP: Wanpasant – god of positioning/movement.

(*) Rookie – Summon Pawns – (Cost: 1 MP, 100-200 food, 2-3 Piety) - Summons 1d(Invocations/3) pawns randomly adjacent to the player (though weighted towards enemies in LOS). Pawns are pitifully weak (rats or worse), but allow a player to use them as body blocks to better position themselves.

(**) Player – no new abilities.

(***) Master – Knight Jump – (Cost: 2 MP, 2-3 Piety, 50-100 food, mild (very mild) Contamination) – Jump to any legal knight’s square. Monsters on the given square are forced off, take moderate damage ((Invocations/9)d(Invocations+4), and are stunned for 1d(Invocations/5) turns.

(****) Candidate – Fianchetto – (Cost: 7-10 Piety, mild Exhaustion) – Fire a random bolt from the following (Cold, Draining, Magma, Venom). Fired in all 4 diagonals with spellpower based on invocations skill (roughly half as powerful as a normal bolt at 0 invocations to one and a half times as powerful at 20 Invocations).

(*****) Grandmaster – Summon Rooks (Cost: 5 MP, 8-10 Piety, 200-300 food, medium Exhaustion, mild Contamination) – Summons 1d(Invocations/6) + 1 rooks randomly adjacent to the player (though weighted towards enemies in LOS). Rooks are about as strong as earth giants but can’t throw and can only move in non-diagonals.

(******) World Champion – Promotion (Cost: None, 1 use per game) You choose a piece of armour in inventory and it rerolls into a random trove-level armour of the same type. The new armour will be guaranteed something to wear, but is not guaranteed to be good (though it will tend to be good to very good).

Appreciates: Wanpasant enjoys taking pieces (killing enemies). He also appreciates novel movements (reading scrolls of blinking/teleportation, evoking a wand of teleportation)
Depreciates: Wanpasant hates forced positions. If you are in a position where no legal move is available, you will lose piety (killholes).
Wanpasant doesn’t want to get bored (you lose piety in a time-based fashion).

Excommunication

Wanpasant doesn’t like being abandoned and will take action against those who leave his service.
If you’ve promoted an item with Wanpasant, it gets demoted to a -2, -Tele version of whatever item it is (but it retains all other properties). In addition, Wanpasant will summon 3 to 5 durably summoned rooks from time to time while you wait out his wrath. He will also sometimes:
Haste an enemy you are currently fighting.
Close all stairs/doors similar to a vault warden for 10-20 turns during moments of tension.
Afflict you with a level 3 translocation miscast.

[ion_frigate]

My thoughts:

• Food costs: Most of these have been removed, and honestly I think the same reasoning applies here. It looks like piety and exhaustion would be more than sufficient constraints (not to mention the positioning itself required for many of these abilities).
• Summon Pawns: This sounds like a really weak version of Summon Butterflies. A character just picking up this god is going to summon just 1-3 of these at a time, and honestly, this sounds like you might as well be an atheist until *** piety. I'd say make them (slightly) tanky but remove any ability they have to do damage. And up the number summoned a bit, maybe to 1+ (Invocations/3).
• Knight Jump: Cool idea, but the problem is that it's basically a short-range CBlink, for a pretty mild cost - the set of possible knight moves is a rough circle, so this works out to be a slightly constrained fixed-range controlled blink. Add to this the fact that there's nothing preventing the player from just chaining a couple of them together, and you've got a very overpowered move. One way to fix this: make it require an enemy on its target square. Perhaps it could then have a higher-piety version (a la Yred) that lets you target occupied squares reachable in both one and two moves.
• Flanchetto: I like it.
• Summon Rooks: Can they attack along diagonals?
• World Champion: I really don't see how this fits with the rest of the god's abilities. Moreover, I don't think it needs a capstone ability like this.
• Wanpasant hates forced positions: Love the idea, but I'd suggest basing it on the number of walls adjacent to both you and the monster you're attacking. The basic idea is this: consider the eight squares around you - if you attack an adjacent monster, and the two squares orthogonally adjacent to that monster and in that set of eight squares are both walls, you lose piety. That makes killholes impossible, without penalizing the player for simply moving through tunnels or allowing the player to just camp in places where they have one legal move available (i.e. the first square of a tunnel).

[ion_frigate]

Also adding an idea for a ****** ability: Upend the board. Costs massive amounts of piety (like 20+) but moves every monster in sight to a random, non-adjacent square in LOS. The idea is that it's a very powerful escape ability that can also be used to set up further uses of this god's abilities.

[tankra]

I really like the theme of the god, the whole chess related movement idea is clever. My biggest criticism is with the first level, for the reasons ion_frigate mentioned. I think I have a good idea for replacing Summon Paws:

En passant (passive): Whenever you move diagonally from your position to a square on either side of your opponent, you perform an "en passant" melee attack on them.

I feel that this ability, while of course not being exactly the same as the ability in Chess, fits the theme of both chess and positioning, and establishes the idea of "always re-positioning yourself" that seems to be at the core of this god's powers. The idea would be to constantly be trying to position yourself and others to get the most out of your abilities, while not losing too many "attacks" by doing so.

Other ideas:

-"Castling" with enemies at 4-5 squares distance
-"Check-mate" passive bonuses against enemies that are stuck while you are not
-Replacing the loss of piety from being stuck with some other, more severe and immediate gameplay ramification
-Ability to create/destroy walls temporarily when in a shitty position. Or instead, maybe you teleport yourself and all monsters in sight to a randomly layed-out chessboard with friendly statues until the monsters are dead?

[Factorialite]

Thank you both for the excellent feedback. Looking into it.

[phloomp]

Contra earlier posters, I think summon pawns is OP if anything. Summon butterflies is already extremely good, and its main weakness is that butterflies move too much to be predictable meatshields.

Anyway I like all of this a lot.

[8bitsdeep]

I really like a lot of this, but the summons don't quite feel right to me. Perhaps summoning/moving statues in some form would work? Though trapping yourself could be problematic unless you could move through them ala Fedhas/plants.

Tankra's all sound like solid alternatives.