God idea: Jorgrhiss, demonic serpent

[adozu]

"Jorgrhiss is the demonic God of venom, legends say it once swallowed a true God thereby acquiring divine status, its followers hope to someday be rewarded with mastery over it's poison but must endure it themselves to prove worthy"

In gameplay terms, the idea is to create a god of poison that could fill several roles: give poison magic a reason to exist after lair while also providing melee characters with a different (and hopefully interesting) support option. Ideally with poison magic being limited in maximum level and the god having some ok-support overall it should favor hybrid characters.


Piety:

You gain piety for kills
You gain piety for converting potions into potions of poison (by praying over them like ash)
- "bad" potions like degen and mutation would give no piety, while the better potions would scale up to 1-2 piety (like haste or cure mut), curing would be special cased to always give 2. Each potion would convert into 1d3 poison. Blood can't be converted (vampires would abuse).

You lose piety for curing yourself of poison, more loss the more you were poisoned (something like: ((current "yellow bar"/10)+1)d2 loss) so 1d2 loss for 0-9 "yellow bar" or for example 3d2 if you had 25 "yellow bar") when using curing or cure poison spell
You lose piety slowly over time

Powers:

......

You lose all your resistance to poison, it will not make you vulnerable to it but you can never get rPois regardless of race/gear/mut... (possibly: poison can't directly kill you)
You can pray over potions to convert them to poison (1d3 per potion) and gain piety*
Quaffing a potion of poison grants you might and magic, duration of might and amount of MP scale with piety (but should scale badly so they start out relevant enough but don't turn into full mp refill and perma might at ******, something like 10 turns of might/10Mp recovered at 0 piety up to 20/20 when maxed)

note: potion of blood would not be possible to convert or vampires could stack up indefinitely, other potions would probably have to turn into 1-3 each.

*.....

While poisoned, you gain one rank of regeneration
You can pray over a weapon to brand it with poison (costs 5 piety) (would need a confirm prompt)

**....

New ability: summon snakes (3 piety)
- this would work somewhat like a sack of spiders but scaling with invocation and summoning snakes
List of venomous snakes would include: adder, water mocassin, black mamba, sea snake, higher invo would get better/more snakes.


***...

jorgrhiss strenghtens your poison: all natural/holy/demonic entity in LOS (enemy or otherwise) is stripped of its rPois just like you are
New ability: numbing poison (5 piety, costs 1 less for every 10 points of poison damage on you, min 2 piety)
- every poisonous or poisoned entity in LOS is slowed (2d3+1d(inv/2) turns?), duration on everything except you is increased with invocations (2d3 turns on you)

****..

While poisoned, you gain two ranks of regeneration
New ability: empower poison (7 piety, costs 1 less for every 10 points of poison damage on you, min 2 piety)
- poisoned entities see their hp decrease twice as fast, poisonous entities are immediately poisoned if they were not (if difficult to code, might just double the amount of poison currently on each enemy)

*****.

jorgrhiss grants you its divine toxin: no enemy (even undead and nonliving) can now resist poison
New ability: madness poison (12 piety, costs 1 less for every 10 points of poison damage on you, min 3 piety)
- poisoned or poisonous entities are frenzied, this can be resisted at low invocation, you are confused instead if you were poisoned (the self confusion is irresistible), effect durations would be approx the same as the slowing version.

******

While poisoned, you gain three ranks of regeneration


Rage (only possible for abandoning him)

you can gain rPois normally but it will fail to protect you 3 times more often than normal
every potion has a 50% chanche to turn into poison upon coming into your LOS the first time
enemy corpses have a chanche to turn into a number of poisonous snakes (durably summoned)
every spell you cast has a 33% chanche to produce a moderate or serious poison miscast (it still completes if it would have)

this is obviously an Evil aligned god.

Early game, the possibility to brand your favored weapon with poison and the regeneration when facing early nasties like killer bees should be really strong possibly with some summons as panic button, later on the MP refill and Might from voluntarily quaffing poison (coupled with a stronger regeneration), the summoned snakes and the various effects against poisoned enemeis should make for some interesting options. It would also make it so Venom Magic scales into endgame if one is willing to use their god slot for it which is something i think several players wanted at some point or another.

(btw: regen should probably not apply to deep dwarves)

Thoughts?

EDIT: upgraded a bit the post with more numbers and some tweaking.

[1010011010]

I like a lot of the double edged mechanics in this such as trading good potions for poison, which in turn buffs you at the cost of being poisoned. Free poison weapons early on is very nice, making others poison vaunrable is good (although part of poison is that not everything is susceptible.) But the real problem is, poison encourages tedious play like kiting and pillar dancing.
I would suggest focus on being able to debuff enemies by poisoning them or when they are poison to encourage fighting poisoned mobs.

[Wahaha]

Sounds fun and good. Nice to see a god that offers something useful at 0-1*. I don't see anything wrong with these abilities except for one thing. I think that making undead and non-living vulnerable to poison at 5* is not a good idea. There are two reasons: confusing flavor, and there's not much strategy when you can spam poison cloud on everything, it's overpowered too. I think that the 3* ability to remove rpois from natural, holy and demons is good enough, and this one could be moved to 5/6*.

[Sandman25]

The god encourages casting Mephitic/Poisonous Cloud on player character while exploring, this is very bad IMHO.

[adozu]

flavor-wise it's a demon serpent with a venom so powerful it killed a god an ate it to attain divinity, if it can do that it can surely affect constructs and undeads too (it's more magic than actual toxicity), poison cloud being overpowered i'm not sure, it still takes several turns to kill enemies in it (as opposed to a single-turn firestorm) and your summons could not tank the poison either (also, freezing cloud exists). It would need to be tested to see if it really becomes too strong.

Remember you're giving up your god-slot for it:

early venomgod + poison cloud might be very strong, but eventually vehumet + firestorm is better. (and you're not guaranteed to get pcloud anyway) if anything mephitic cloud might actually be stronger.

as for encouraging tedious gameplay i guess it could be true but i'm not sure what could be done to discourage it, up for ideas.

I don't see why does it encourage casting pcloud on yourself, sure, you get regen to counterbalance your poisoning but eventually it would stack up too high and overcome it and then using !cure costs you piety. Does rC+++ encourage casting freezing cloud on yourself while exploring?

[Sandman25]

Does rC+++ encourage casting freezing cloud on yourself while exploring?

Worshiper of the god has regen+++ while poisoned, it means you are at max HP ready to regen incoming damage really quick and to pay lower piety cost for god abilities if there is need to use them. There is no such god for Freezing Cloud.

[adozu]

but you only get large discounts for very large amounts of poison, won't that eventaully deal so much damage not even regen3 can outheal it?

[tasonir]

Really like the overall concept and it's not too convoluted or unfocused. One thing that is a bit tricky though is the scaling piety costs on abilities based on how poisoned you are, you might want to make those a fixed cost, or have a smaller range of costs, it could be tricky to tell how much your abilities will really cost you to use.

Giving up potions to convert them to poison so you can poison yourself is a pretty big sacrifice - seems like this god would become a great deal stronger if you have some method of poisoning yourself without using potions instead - like poison cloud. This is probably fine, but maybe buff the potion sacrifice by making each potion sacced generate 2-3 potions of poison.

[sdynet]

Overall, it is a concept of preference. What about how to use the poison potion to fedas so in the penalty of power?

[Abominae]

A simple fix to avoid scumming poison regeneration would be to have it only be active when monsters are in LoS. There's precedence in the code for the opposite effect, so I assume it's not a difficult thing to implement. It makes post-battle poisoning annoying or problematic, but there are fixes for that. For example, the god prevents you from dying from poison and cures it if you would or whatever.

[adozu]

that could leave you dangerously low if some wandering enemy appears while you're resting, if regen is so scummy (which i'm not 100% sure of, much of it would be used to counteract the poison) how about if it only activated when poisoned AND below a certain health treshold? (say, 50, or 60% hp), sure, you could walk around and poison yourself all the time but that would also mean starting any given fight at <treshold>% hp.

mostly the regen is there because whitout rPois and with curing costing you piety you need something to keep you up or it would actually be "the god of making every trivial poisonous enemy likely lethal"

[milski]

I don't actually think the Regeneration thing matters that much; isn't Regeneration 3 just 0.6 HP/turn? While it would wind up being a slight power boost for Mephitic Clouding or stinging yourself with the regen, I think that a potion of poison or poison cloud would still damage you through the regeneration. All the regen does is provide a (very low, lategame) threshold where you are "immune" to poison damage because your extra regen counters it.

[adozu]

that was my initial idea, you'd become able to shrug off larger amounts of poison but there wouldn't be a lot spare to actually heal you up. i don't know if that's exactly how it would play out, testing would be necessary.

mephitic doesn't even poison you btw, it *would* confuse you however (which would be a powerful boost to the spell because it could potentially confuse every enemy in the game at ****** provided they fail the HD check)

i didn't dig too deep in the actual numbers but if there's enough interest that can be done at any point.

[bcadren]

that was my initial idea, you'd become able to shrug off larger amounts of poison but there wouldn't be a lot spare to actually heal you up. i don't know if that's exactly how it would play out, testing would be necessary.

mephitic doesn't even poison you btw, it *would* confuse you however (which would be a powerful boost to the spell because it could potentially confuse every enemy in the game at ****** provided they fail the HD check)

i didn't dig too deep in the actual numbers but if there's enough interest that can be done at any point.

Without digging into the numbers; I -can- say Meph Cloud used well makes a huge difference on Elf:3 (where nothing has rPois; but everything has too high of MR to use hexes). Seems to disable all the creatures hd: 12-15 pretty effectively. Triggering on half the turns or so.

[floatRand]

I really like the idea, so I decided to make a quick altar for it.
Tried to go kinda jadeish-look, a jade serpent with pool of poison over a simple rug.

If someone wants to try to implement it.

[adozu]

that looks awesome, i really like how the snake's position actually creates a small pool in the middle

[bel]

I like this god. Some things might be tweaked. I don't know about the numbers: is it really possible for regen to overcome staying in poisonous clouds continuously? If so, that is bad.

By the way, comparison with firestorm is misplaced. Few characters ever cast firestorm in a 3-rune game. Poisonous cloud is extremely useful. It can almost win a 3-rune game by itself, assuming some decent melee backup (you hit the monsters while they stay in the cloud) and a way to handle OoF, liches etc.

[hannobal]

By the way, comparison with firestorm is misplaced. Few characters ever cast firestorm in a 3-rune game. Poisonous cloud is extremely useful. It can almost win a 3-rune game by itself, assuming some decent melee backup (you hit the monsters while they stay in the cloud) and a way to handle OoF, liches etc.

This feels little bit like circular reference: If a player has a method of handling OoF and liches, that same method should be able handle everything else too?

[adozu]

UPDATE: i tried in wizmode a troll with amulet of vitality (that means regen+++ right?)

after a few turns inside my own poison cloud my regeneration was not NEARLY enough to keep up with the damage at XL 10 and died in approx 20 turns. The same test at XL27 (on a maxed out troll with 338Hp) killed me in 32 turns. If anything it might be too little, maybe the god could prevent your health from going below 1 hp from poison. i did have every skill at 27 however so maybe the cloud was stacking faster than it would in a normal game? i'm not sure if the stacking speed is dependend on spellpower or otherwise.

also, about it being confusing that piety costs go down it could just say so generically in the description, it's not like other god abilities in game ever tell you "exactly" how much piety they will cost, game doesn't even tell you exactly how much piety you have stacked up.

PS: i can C++ but i never touched crawl code with a 10 foot pole and would have 0 clue on how a god is implemented, even as a barebone test, if anyone feels like "adopting" it to see how it would play out feel free.

[Sandman25]

There is no need to stay in the cloud, you can poison yourself for a turn or two and continue exploring with regen+++ status.

[adozu]

but then you can also do that on your first turn in the fight with a potion of poison and benefit form the related buffs or something, and it excludes the "reduced piety costs at fight start" because you need a serious amount of poison to really benefit from that (more than regen+++ can handle eventually), more than just stinging yourself a little.

i don't see it as a big issue personally, as i said, it's hard to imagine how exactly it would play out on paper.

then again, you can also die just fine while having regen+++ on you (i'm pretty sure trolls can die), you might also make that power passive and unconditional and the scummy part goes away (loses a lot of the flavour however)

[Sandman25]

Yes, I agree, we should try it first

[bel]

By the way, comparison with firestorm is misplaced. Few characters ever cast firestorm in a 3-rune game. Poisonous cloud is extremely useful. It can almost win a 3-rune game by itself, assuming some decent melee backup (you hit the monsters while they stay in the cloud) and a way to handle OoF, liches etc.

This feels little bit like circular reference: If a player has a method of handling OoF and liches, that same method should be able handle everything else too?

No, the point is that OoFs and (ancient) liches are few in number. The method could involve using a consumable, like quaffing a potion of might, haste, reading a scroll of summoning, silence etc. Obviously you can't do it for every fight.

[adozu]

on a sidenote, i'm thinking it might be awesome for non-spellcasting stealthy characters:

unresistible poison branded quickblade coupled with on demand might? unresistible curare? coutnerbalanced by a generally small HP-pool that would struggle to keep up with self poisoning or being poisoned by certain enemies.

[floatRand]

PS: i can C++ but i never touched crawl code with a 10 foot pole and would have 0 clue on how a god is implemented, even as a barebone test, if anyone feels like "adopting" it to see how it would play out feel free.

Well, I'd say it is not too difficult. There's just quite bit of places where you have to throw code to make things work.
Implementation of god I had in mine, you can look around at the patch to see what kind of things I had to change around. Mind you, you might have more or less things to do depending, but considering the concept, I don't think it won't be too difficult!
Biggest pain is probably writing the conducts.

[adozu]

writing the actual code doesn't scare me, it's more a matter of finding all the right places where it needs to go, i have no clue how crawl is structured files-wise. thanks for the example i might look into it altough it would be cool if we got any kind of word from above different from "no absolutely not, never ever"

[dck]

It is wholly retarded to hold "but you might wanna poison yourself while exploring" as an actual argument against the god. No you goddamn won't. Not even in preparation for fights you would want to do such a thing. You throw out the window your ability to use mass slow and frenzy without being affected, the regen can barely keep up with a single stack of poison and you're also wasting mp on it to achieve exactly nothing more than making noise and wasting time.
Now that's out of the way, this sounds like a pretty good god concept. There are a couple of things that seem dubious to me, such as the second ability being s2s without the sticks; this seems awkward since s2s is pretty much the defining spell for early game Tm. On the other hand I very much like the idea of being able to mass frenzy a whole bunch of snakes.

One thing I'd like to mention is that I'm not sure the idea of having to keep track of the numbers involved in piety regarding curing poison translates very well into gameplay, although the way I picture this god piety gain would be comparable to Makh's and in such a situation it wouldn't be anything to concern oneself about.
Also self poisoning in the early game is a touch sketchy. Some races have pretty much awful HPs and at that XL quaffing !pois demands that the player is aware of how much damage he will actually take with a precision that is plain ridiculous. One doesn't just might up for any random monster after all and while it is good to present the player with opportunities to get himself killed by poisoning himself and trying to shank an ogre, having him need to sit down and poison himself a couple of times to see how it works with the current regen seems like busywork for no real reason.

Last thing I wanna comment on is piercing demonic, undead and nonliving resistances. It's sort of an weird affair since it wouldn't be ideal to just let the god not affect them altogether when he does so much to so many already, but similarly it would be pretty ridiculous to just let the LoS status effects affect them freely without any danger to the player.
My suggestion is that the player has to be poisoned in order to ignore the resistances of these types of enemies; this allows for damage to still be dealt in a wide variety of ways and keeps the option of using invocations open, yet has the player actually have to invest further into them to profit from their impact to the fullest and doesn't allow him to parrow everything for a million damage with no setup.
Another random thought is that since the LoS abilities are remarkably strong, they could seep poison into the player's system on usage to prevent spamming away in certain environments.

Again, this is certainly a very nice first stab at the concept and it even has a very nice picture to go with it.

Spoiler: show

Ten million times better than Ixhuachatetl, even with the name being Jorgrfuckinghiss.

[Sandman25]

"no absolutely not, never ever"

Nobody is saying that. Personally I like the concept of making poison more useful late game.

[Sandman25]

It is wholly retarded to hold "but you might wanna poison yourself while exploring" as an actual argument against the god. No you goddamn won't. Not even in preparation for fights you would want to do such a thing. You throw out the window your ability to use mass slow and frenzy without being affected, the regen can barely keep up with a single stack of poison and you're also wasting mp on it to achieve exactly nothing more than making noise and wasting time.
Now that's out of the way, this sounds like a pretty good god concept.

I like the concept too but there are ways not be affected by slow/frenzy thanks to Fo/Stasis/Clarity and to restore mana (Staff, CBoE, VS). Also it is written that slow's duration is less for character.

[adozu]

not saying that someone said that, just that we have no word of "authority" at all.

on the other hand concerns such as "potion of poison might kill you early on" or "slow duration on you is shorter" are just numbers, those can easily be tweaked to accomodate balance (like, potion of poison could be special cased to scale with your maxHp on this deity, or give you a warning if it has a very high chanche to be lethal, overall the god is surely more useful to a race with higher base hp but i don't think that's a big deal, some races can't even choose certain gods at all)

what's important is that the base concepts are solid and liked, i agree some part of it might be too strong at first glance but balancing is not the big problem. (also i really don't think players need to know the exact cost in piety for abilities, just a generic "this ability will cost less piety if you're poisoned" should be in line with crawl overall information philosophy, game doesn't tell you if finesse costs more than heroism for example)

got any better names in mind?

[Lasty]

In gameplay terms, the idea is to create a god of poison that could fill several roles: give poison magic a reason to exist after lair while also providing melee characters with a different (and hopefully interesting) support option.

Poison already is quite effective after Lair, including substantial parts of extended. Since that premise seems to be the underlying motivation for the god, I think you're going to have a hard time turning this into something with an interesting place in Crawl.

That said, I don't want to discourage you from refining this god into something that could be a good addition. If you're looking into coding something up, I'd suggest that you start by searching for every place in the codebase that references an existing god, ideally a simple one (Okawaru?). That will give you a sense of the places you're likely to need to make additions. Coding up a god was one of my first significant Crawl projects, and working through all the details helped me get a much better sense of how the codebase hangs together.

Edit:
A few more specific points of feedback on the design:

• Sacrificing "good" potions for piety is a novel piety gain method, though it looks like you can get plenty of piety just by killing monsters. If it was the only piety gain method, it'd impose pressure on your resources, which could be interesting.
• The god doesn't really give you a way to poison opponents, making its powers mostly useless unless you have a weapon of venom, blowgun, or Poison Magic. As a result, the god is fairly narrow in appeal. On a low-level VM, compare Veh with this god: Veh says "I'll change how your spells work, change how mana recovery works, and let you branch into new schools of magic"; this god says "I'll let you double down on what you're already doing."
• Getting self-buffs off being poisoned raises questions like, "why can't I just poke myself with this poisoned needle/cut myself with this poisoned blade?"
• The purpose of most of these powers is either to make poison more like non-elemental damage (nothing resists it!) or to inflict status effects, and I don't think either of those things is particularly interesting. Right now poison is "interesting" in that it deals damage over time but it's not effective against all monsters; this proposal turns poison into merely "does damage over time". The status effects aren't inherently bad, but there are already enough ways to give monsters status effects that just a new status effect delivery method isn't particularly novel.

[dck]

The god doesn't really give you a way to poison opponents, making its powers mostly useless unless you have a weapon of venom, blowgun, or Poison Magic. As a result, the god is fairly narrow in appeal. On a low-level VM, compare Veh with this god: Veh says "I'll change how your spells work, change how mana recovery works, and let you branch into new schools of magic"; this god says "I'll let you double down on what you're already doing."

The god gives you poison brand on demand for any weapon, changes poison brand to make it even more appealing than it already is and gives you poisonous summons. Saying that he doesn't give you a way to poison foes seems removed from the truth.

Veh is a bit of an odd comparison since he's pretty much the worst designed god of the entire older pantheon, his "change" to "how your spells work" is "your spells are now a touch better after a couple thousands of turns".
Myself, I would take this god on any elementalist over Veh pretty much on any game played with the intention of winning (or fun since Veh is horrible). Hisspater guarantees I have a strong weapon at worst hundreds of turns after converting, not only that but it guarantees an unlimited supply of might I can use with somewhat reckless abandon; I wouldn't know about you but I value gods that open up possible courses of action that are of actual use much more than gods who just expand on what I already have somewhat or give percentual boons to stuff.

If anything this god is comparable to Kiku in that he opens up a whole branch of possibilities and has solid guaranteed benefits. However Hissis seems fresher to me, instead of just giving you good spells and then one last really overpowered gift he gives you a very strong weapon that still won't win you the game on its own and then expands on the possibilities that a whole damage type can be used for. Then he capitalizes on it by letting you use cheap summons that not only kill things but also enable you to use the new options of poison with enemies you can't hit with your poison weapon. THEN his last invocation actually works in tandem with the summons to provide very strong offense as well as great battlefield disruption (and coincidentally works best with selected poisoned targets instead of just poisoning everyone).
I truly am at a loss as to how you can call a god like this narrow.

Also the premise of the god pretty much falls apart entirely if you are going to make piety be mainly gained through a means as convoluted as turning potions into poison, instead of being plentiful and letting the player choose what to !poisonize, as well as experimenting rather freely with god powers as open ended as these are.

[tannisroot]

Edit: In my excitement I posted woefully off topic, so here's a different comment

I think Jorgr needs an umlaut and you're set! Players will call him Hiss anyway :p

[Lasty]

The god gives you poison brand on demand for any weapon, changes poison brand to make it even more appealing than it already is and gives you poisonous summons. Saying that he doesn't give you a way to poison foes seems removed from the truth.

Oops, missed that part. I take back my statement on the subject. In that case I'd estimate that this god's * power would put it among the top early gods in the pantheon thanks to the guarantee of a strong weapon to get you through Lair/Dungeon/Orc. It also has the weird incentive of encouraging you to use the power on any weapon before you ?brand it, so that you're guaranteed not to get venom.

Veh is a bit of an odd comparison since he's pretty much the worst designed god of the entire older pantheon, his "change" to "how your spells work" is "your spells are now a touch better after a couple thousands of turns".

Veh isn't at the top of my list of well-designed gods, but I think the comparison (for a VM) was still apt; what I was getting at is that I think this design is less interesting than one of the less interesting god designs.

Hisspater guarantees I have a strong weapon at worst hundreds of turns after converting, not only that but it guarantees an unlimited supply of might I can use with somewhat reckless abandon; I wouldn't know about you but I value gods that open up possible courses of action that are of actual use much more than gods who just expand on what I already have somewhat or give percentual boons to stuff.

I wasn't making the argument that this god is weak; I was making the argument that this god doesn't do much to interestingly expand gameplay. I don't see hitting monsters with damage over time and then giving those same monsters a status effect as being that interesting, but YMMV.

[adozu]

i did start with the base idea "how could i make a god that can make VM play more like other elementalists" but it eventually grew into a more hybrid concept, considering it doesn't gift you any book and parrow/pcloud (especially parrow) are rare spells it certainly favors hybrid above pure caster.

i guess since one of my ideas is that it would be a strong god that puts the player in danger by stripping his rPois before the enemy's and encourages to drink poison yourself there could be *more* of it tied to the quaffing poison part, like, the stripping of all enemy rPois could only happen in the 100 turns following you quaffing a poison potion, would that make the theme stronger?

abilities were also meant to have a steep piety cost *unless* you are taking the risk of fighting while poisoned (the more the better), steep enough not to spam them *unless* you're taking your chanches with high self poison and self inflicted statuses. piety gain and piety usage are just numbers, i'm sure they can be tweaked to the point using your abilities whitout poisoning yourself would be something the player has to actually weight carefully over using them more freely while watching your hp go down, imho it would create interesting tension. How much piety you gain from killing is not a constant of the game.

Of course, i don't mean to disregard any feedback and the proposal is still 100% up for changes but given that the responses seem to be mostly positive i think the "Interesting" part is at least good enough for whatever small sample of tavern users felt like replying. not a large sample i guess, but still a sample.

if anything, the biggest concern that was raised and that i'm not sure how to solve i think is "But the real problem is, poison encourages tedious play like kiting and pillar dancing" from the very first reply, for which i don't really have a solution right now (would like to hear some ideas)

[dck]

@Lasty:
Would need one hell of a reason to actually bother using anything but venom under Dionhissus, I do have to say. Certainly wouldn't bother with the ?brand minigame and it's not like one couldn't just make it impossible to rebrand due to being a gift from your god.
I do think your comparing him to the god of doing all things magicklike a bit better and then saying that Hephisstus' would only "double down on what you're already doing" is plain wrong, and seems deliberately so. Else VM's book must have changed a lot to have both melee buffs that actually require you measure the enemy properly, or have summons in it.

But regardless of the details of the comparison at this point there is nothing more to ask but what do you consider an interesting god then? If a god who opens an amount of possibilities such as this is still uninteresting then what is not? Because this honestly just reminds me more of Fedhas and Kiku the more I think about it and I've always considered both of them unintrusive and interesting, overall very fitting for what crawl has to offer in terms of gameplay.

[Lasty]

@adozu: there is indeed a lot of positive feedback, and again, I don't want to discourage you from developing this idea. My feedback is certainly not law. If you decide to move forward with coding up a god, I'd be happy to help answer implementation questions that might come up. I do think there are some open questions about how to turn your concept into a strong design, but some of those questions might be easier to answer once you've got a solid draft to try out.

@dck, even with enemies being unable to resist poison, I'd rather use speed, elec or vampiric in most situations, since they'll do damage more quickly (or, in the case of vampiric, do something better). If I had other methods of dealing poison damage (especially pcloud) I'd probably rather use a bunch of other brands as well. You can only stack a finite amount of poison on a given monster.

As for which gods are "interesting" designs and which are not, I'd suggest that almost all our current gods are either "interesting" designs or clean, solid designs. I think Nemelex is an "interesting" god with weak design, and I just don't like Gozag at all (sorry, dpeg). My absolute favorite god as a design is Dithmenos, who offers a suite of powers that substantially enhance every character and transform certain aspects of play, but where each character makes best use of a different subset of those powers.

The heart of our different assessments here seems to be that you read this god as opening a lot of possibilities and I see the god as opening one fairly narrow possibility. I may be underestimating the quality of the decision space that this opens up, but given what I know now that's my impression.

[mps]

Interesting notion. So you can focus on poison magic and it won't suck later in the game. I'd like to see how it plays. Crawl needs gods that enable an aggressive style of play and this might be one.

[njvack]

@adozu: there is indeed a lot of positive feedback, and again, I don't want to discourage you from developing this idea. My feedback is certainly not law. If you decide to move forward with coding up a god, I'd be happy to help answer implementation questions that might come up. I do think there are some open questions about how to turn your concept into a strong design, but some of those questions might be easier to answer once you've got a solid draft to try out.

And, before you put a lot of work into this, know that "I have done a lot of work on something" does not guarantee the something will make it into Crawl. See, for example, the ill-fated food reform.

[adozu]

Sure thing, food reform isn't the only ill-fated project crawl had.

btw, poison brand is a 1* power, it's meant to be your god helping you early-game rather than necessarily be your endgame, else it would be a 1-time 6* deal.

[adozu]

so, let's say,

TO-DO

- give Sir Hiss a better name

- make a potion conversion table

- make a summon snake scaling table

- decide how to balance the stripping of rPois on opponents (could wait playtesting)
- possibilities might include: only work when poisoned yourself, only work X turns after quaffing !pois

- refine piety gain/usage numbers

- things that might need rebalance:
- should !pois do less damage at low XL?
- should poison effect invocations work/not work on unpoisoned poisonous creatures? maybe a %?

- maybe scrap things and make new ones entirely (ok not really a to-do)

- learn how crawl code works / blackmail someone else into it

any contribution is highly welcome regardless of what fate will the poor snake have. all contributors will have a special place in it's belly when it's done eating up the forums.

[dpeg]

Some comments by a late comer:

1. I think the flavour is alright, certainly good enough for a Crawl god Don't worry *at all* about the name. Your have a decent working title, stick with that for the time being. If you need a new one, don't ask in public!

2. The self-poisoning has a micro-managing aspect, as has been mentioned. I am afraid this could quickly be annoying, and that players would complain about it pretty soon. However, I think you can keep the core concept with a better interface: (a) you won't die to poison, the god will prevent you from poison death (flavour: the god likes poisoned followers, but needs them alive to spread the vitriol); (b) don't give piety hit on using !curing (the player is already paying with piety by not having been able to turn that !curing into !poison, you can strengthen this effect by giving more piety for !curing sacrifice).

3. "pray over weapon to apply poison brand" should be an ability; we only use prayer for sacrifices these days. (Also better interface that way.) Perhaps it's also a good idea to either make the brand temporary, or passive (if you are poisoned, and you weapon has no brand, then it gets poison brand).

4. I am not certain if self-damage (in this case through poison) actually works out in the end. It's been proposed very often, but seems hard to pull off. Would be worth a try.
There is also this odd thing that mechanics work against each other (continuous poison damage vs increased regeneration), making it harder for the player to assess what's going on. (I've been guilty of getting contradictory mechanics similar to this into the game; thankfully others got them out again.) Perhaps a cleaner solution is that under this god !poison just slow down and eventually stop innate regeneration?

5. I am not too happy about summon snakes, simply because so many gods already use allies. (Yes, it's getting harder as development goes on, more niches already filled.) Not a big thing, though.

6. I think one of the More Poison abilities should be passive. For example, Empower Poison is already slated to take player !poison into account. You could simply say that the effect triggers if the player has enough piety, the monster poison level passes some threshold and the player drinks enough !poison.

7. Why is this "obviously" an evil god? This is also not a big deal, but I don't really see where you are coming from. It's just death by poison.

8. I like the idea of using a finite resource (potions) as a currency for this god. In particular, I don't think other forms of being poisoned should count. (Flavour, if needed: only by drinking from His Annointed Poison Chalice you establish the divine link.) The choice of what or what not to sacrifice might be less interesting than desired, but that can be enforced, if necessary. (Also, the interface might be clumsy... nowhere on Nemelex terms, of course. Again, this could be improved upon, if needed. For example, with the god demanding bulk sacrifices at intervals. Nothing for now.)

9. The scope: this god is something of a one-trick pony. That's not immediately a deal-breaker, as Crawl has other such gods, like Vehumet or Elyvilon (that one a bit less now). It's good that the god helps melee early and does not provide spells or books. Still, the intention seems to be that you can eventually kill everything with poison. (You could say that Trog is about killing everything with melee, and Vehumet is about killing everything with conjurations, of course. I don't think that judgement on this aspect is possible just by looking at the paper.)


dck: You have some good points but your language is too strong (for me) to warrant proper response. Sorry.

Lasty: Hey, no qualms on Gozag. My vision is to have enough gods for a plethora of tastes. Gozag got better and noticeably stronger just now (won a Gr^G today), but there's still things to improve. Thanks for comments in this thread.

tannisrot: The idea of a god with highly volatile piety, like you propose, is good. I really believe that this is a major, unused god design niche. (Especially now that we finally have constant piety with Ru.)

[adozu]

well, it's evil because it's of demonic origin and probably ate TSO cousin or something (which explains TSO hate for poison), totally logic.

As for poison and regeneration the idea is that if you strip players of rPois but give nothing to compensate for it it just becomes the god of "getting killed by a swamp dragon", i guess regeneration might not be the best idea but i'm not sure which could be, maybe an effect like chei that gets stronger as piety rises could work and be less confusing but it should always be such that quaffing !pois is always going to have a trade-off and not just become a free action. I've been nearly killed by lots of things in some games where i couldn't find rPois: swamp dragons, naga ritualists, sea snakes...

Poison brand can definitely be an ability instead of a pray thing, it could be temporary but i think it's not so strong it needs to and only working when you are poisoned seems to add *more* micro management aspects. I guess it could be made temporary as a piety-tax if piety is too abundant but it's a common brand, you are likely to find several poisoned weapons early in the game this just allows you to choose your favored weapon type.

Summon snakes is mostly so you have an alternative way of dealing poison whitout offering you spells but the fact that you would create allies that are also affected by your los abilities i think would be interesting, sure, i can maybe frenzy them all (and their targets) but what if my frenzied black mamba decides to attack my confused (and rPoisless) self? it would require at least some degree of attention and positioning.

Empower poison is definitely what i like less of the potential powers, might just rethink that one into something totally different.

It's all very reasonable concerns anyway but i think many of the effects are pretty dynamic and situational in nature so they'll be really hard to properly evaluate until tried.

[tannisroot]

Balance:
I like the idea of poison brand being a temporary power rather than permanent brand although the distinction is a bit unimportant for the moment.

Potions of poison doubling as might as magic is a great idea! Although as your regen gets higher that might unbalance the game later since you'd be permanently buff'd you'd expect. Maybe Hiss makes potions of poison deadlier as your piety increases to balance this out?

Undead and other poison immune a should probably stay so. How exactly does a ghost get sick and die (again) without a functioning cardiovascular system or a liver? Although I can understand how this line of thinking would also make undead ineligible to worship Hiss (which might not be so bad).

Lore:
Lore wise I think he or she needn't be a "demon" as there are no other demon snakes in the game and this tramples on Maklheb's turf a bit. I'd say declaring him the serpent god of plague and poisons is menacing enough.

Also how exactly did a snake come to eat a god? Perhaps this particular god had a pet snake that got a little too big

Maybe guarantee an altar in Snakes? It would be cool if the altar doubled as a poison trap.

[adozu]

well undead are magic right? it's magic poison that disrupts their magic, same applies to golems, spellcasting statues and whatever

[tannisroot]

well undead are magic right? it's magic poison that disrupts their magic, same applies to golems, spellcasting statues and whatever

That's acceptable. It all comes down to how viable and powerful you want to make the god at the end of the day. If everything becomes vulnerable to this god's damage type, then Hiss is doing little more than amplifying player damage uniformly, which would probably make him the number one god to choose for any character for any run. There would be little incentive to ever abandon this god.

This runs counter to the design of damage types. Why resort to other elements when poison solves every encounter and every branch?

[adozu]

not to say it isn't a legitimate concern and there surely can be tweaks, but don't bows or axes already do that? or earth magic, or fire/ice (mostly), even air if you get tornado online... i mean, poison is probably the only school you *can't* focus on and have good chanches at completing stuff, the only other school with this issue would be necromancy but that has minions, lots of support options and kiku to deal with corpseless branches.

[tasonir]

well undead are magic right? it's magic poison that disrupts their magic, same applies to golems, spellcasting statues and whatever

That's acceptable. It all comes down to how viable and powerful you want to make the god at the end of the day. If everything becomes vulnerable to this god's damage type, then Hiss is doing little more than amplifying player damage uniformly, which would probably make him the number one god to choose for any character for any run. There would be little incentive to ever abandon this god.

This runs counter to the design of damage types. Why resort to other elements when poison solves every encounter and every branch?

Physical damage solves every encounter and branch. Earth spells solves every encounter and every branch. Conjurations spells (IMB, OOD - pure conjurations) are the same. I tend to prefer earth for this reason, actually, even though there are plenty of ways for fire/ice/air to get around resistances, I tend to be lazy about it.

[Pollen_Golem]

Jorgehiss especially likes it when you or your allies kill poison-resistant beings, poison-immune beings, and beings capable of attacking with poison.

[Lasty]

Physical damage solves every encounter and branch. Earth spells solves every encounter and every branch. Conjurations spells (IMB, OOD - pure conjurations) are the same. I tend to prefer earth for this reason, actually, even though there are plenty of ways for fire/ice/air to get around resistances, I tend to be lazy about it.

But Earth magic has some trade-offs in exchange for being so universal: it has poor range, and at low spell power poor accuracy; it (mostly) only affects single targets. Imagine if there was a god whose function was just "earth magic is full LOS and has good accuracy and has AOE".