God: Iaar, the Devourer

[Zyrnak]

A while back some variation of this idea was floated around but I don't recall anyone actually creating specifics for it. The idea and purpose of this god is to reward riskier play and encourage the player to take chances. Instead of rewarding more strategic play of luring monsters away from packs and resting between each battle, Iaar should reward constant fighting. If you're 5ing between each fight, he should be significantly weaker than other gods. Otherwise, he should be very powerful, at the cost of having to throw yourself into battle constantly at less-than-full HP.

The main mechanic behind Iaar is the amount of Essence you have. You gain essence by killing things. While increasing piety unlocks more of Iaar's abilities, the abilities are unusable if the player has not consumed enough Essence recently. Because Essence is metabolized quickly (maybe 1 point of essence every 15 turns/150 aut) you will only be able to use the more powerful abilities if you've already been fighting for a while, and if you wait too long between fights it would be as if you didn't have a god at all. Think of Essence as piety you gain and lose extremely rapidly, going from zero to full and back to zero within a few hundred turns, while your actual piety is the upper bound of your Essence. 'Essence' is called such because all creatures could be said to have something driving them, be it life-force for living creatures or the magic animating undead and constructs. Since it shouldn't matter what you are killing -> 'Essence'. The name could be changed if it reminds people too much of Djinn.

Likes: Consuming the Essence of other beings. (Killing Stuff)
Dislikes: Avoiding your hunger. (Not killing things - regular piety decay)

The maximum amount of Essence you can contain is 3 per star of piety.

0 Stars - Eater of Essence (passive): Killing creatures gives a tiny amount of satiation, and a HD-dependant chance of gaining a point of essence. While creatures significantly weaker than you give a small chance of essence, more powerful ones will result in essence gain. In addition, the probability of gaining essence is inversely related with the amount you have. It is easier to gain the small bonuses, but the top tier abilities are hard to reach. The satiation is there so you will be less likely to have to lose all of your essence because you needed to stop and butcher something.
1 Star - Strength of the Starved (passive): You gain a slaying bonus equal to 1/3 of your Essence. (+1/+1 when at full Essence at *, +6/+6 when at full Essence at ******)
2 Stars - Fury of the Famished (passive): You gain spell power equal to your Essence.
3 Stars - Rage of the Ravenous (active): You loose a tremendous roar fueled by your hunger. The magnitude of your shout is such that it shakes the essence of your foes, reducing their accuracy. The amount to which the accuracy is reduced is dependent on their proximity to you and your Essence. This ability also creates a large amount of noise. Costs 2 Essence.
4 Stars -
5 Stars - Wrath of the World-Eater (active): Burning all of your reserves of Essence, you unleash the power within to destroy your foe. Smites an enemy for huge damage dependent on your Essence. You lose all of your Essence, and if the target is killed it does not give you essence.
6 Stars - Devourer's Doom (passive): Your hunger reaches an epic threshold and you begin to suck the Essence from your foes. Deals a small amount of unresistable damage (1-2, maybe) to all creatures within your line of sight (activates every 10 AUT). You gain one HP per damage dealt, with a 10% chance of restoring MP instead if your MP is not at full. However, such is the speed of your consumption that you quickly eat away at your own reserves of Essence. You lose 1 Essence each time this activates.

Punishment: Leaving Iaar removes your ability to consume essence and you find yourself needing to consume more than you previously needed. For the duration of the punishment you must eat constantly to fill the void (effect of a ring of hunger). In addition, your hunger will sometimes get the better of you while using consumables (scroll, wand charge, potion) and you will eat the consumable without using it. This uses the turn and the item without getting any benefit (even from potions!). This happens 50% of the time. ------ I'm not good at designing punishments because I almost never abandon gods. This one probably could use some work.

[Bloax]

Fury of the Famished is kinda weak (+18 spellpower at most is quite little when you think about the fact that 200 is the maximum), but I like the hilarious punishment.

[and into]

The roar ability is tactically helpful but also supports the different playstyle well, drawing the attention of more enemies; that pairs together nicely. I'd perhaps suggest a change to "Wrath of the World-Eater" to better align in a similar way: You need at least X essence to activate, and for a period of time your essence drains much more quickly unless you are actively killing. You get a big buff of some kind and when the effect expires, you are left with a long exhaustion timer (note that a long cool down timer would actually matter for this god and wouldn't just be "yet another reason to mash 5"). You cannot reactivate the ability until the exhaustion is over. I'm not exactly sure what the buff should be (something that is distinct from other god abilities, !might, etc.) but an ability that let you, in a sense, "wager" a large chunk of your essence that you can kill a bunch of dudes quickly would be cool.

The other piece of advice I'd give is that Devourer's Doom should be an "activated passive," in other words you activate it and for X amount of time you will passively use up some essence to drain health from enemies. (There will be times when you do not need this effect and having it drain your precious essence when it isn't needed would be very frustrating.) To better distinguish this from Yred's life drain you could make it into a "radius" sort of effect that hits those one or two tiles from you at full power, but tapers off the farther an enemy is.

Would any of these abilities take up piety? Or would it be mediated totally through essence use? If the latter, that does push essence to the forefront, and makes the god play a bit differently. However I'd say there should still be the usual piety decay, and that overall piety gain should be slower for this god because piety isn't being used to fuel abilities.

I really like that the passive essence boosts encourage early spell casting on melee starts and early melee on book starts, without Iaar billing itself as a "reaver/hybrid" god—there is wider appeal than just that. Those passive bonuses aren't extremely interesting mechanically, but if powerful enough they absolutely would affect how you develop your character and thus could easily change one's strategic considerations. Very nice.

[Lyrick]

"Iaar" doesn't sound gluttinous enough.

[khalil]

As far as names go, I'd suggest Nhuoll, and possibly change the fluff from gluttony to nothingness (as in he wants you to destroy everything, reducing it to nothingness) to explain why he rewards killing things that aren't alive. (Instead of eating consumables, just have their magic be consumed by the void or something)
Also, Fury of the Famished is fairly weak. I'd go for essence times 2 (36 max) or 3(54 max), and possibly reducing spell failure as well.


I'd also change devourer's doom to have a chance to resist via mr, and possibly a chance to just not do damage at all (1d2-1 damage? -3?) but have it be a constant effect, changing the feel from "I do small amounts of damage every 10 turns" to "I am a maelstrom of death" when fighting weaker enemies, but still doing (on average) the same amount of damage to more powerful enemies (as they'd save more often). It'd also have a lower chance of draining essence, for obvious reasons. Other idea: have it start at 4 piety, but only effecting monsters next to you, coverage expanding until it covers los at 6 piety.

[Zyrnak]

Yeah, the name was mostly because the I namespace had not been used yet. If anyone has a better name I'd be happy to hear it. Maybe something that starts with G that sounds vaguely Lovecraftian? Khalil: when naming Crawl gods the only rule I know of is that you can't have the same first letter as another god. Nhuoll and Nemelex are both N. Thanks for the suggestion though! As for why he rewards killing undead, it's because you are consuming the magic that was animating them. After all, there is SOMETHING that's making the dead move, and that's what you're eating. By the same token, you are still eating the raw magic of the wands/scrolls/potions when you are being punished, which is why they have no effect.

Fury might need a buff, but if it becomes too strong it starts to edge into Vehumet/Sif Muna's space a little too much. One way that might make it strong is to have the spellpower added after the stepdown function is used. http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Spell_power This way you'd help the lower spell power hybrids by boosting their spells and also remain significant to higher leveled casters, without getting too much into the territory of other gods.

I think I might not have properly communicated a few things about the essence requirements. A given ability is only usable when you have the amount of essence the equivalent piety unlocks. Strength at 1 essence, Fury at 4, Rage at 7, Wrath at 13, Doom at 16. Doom will only be activating when you are almost full of essence. I suppose it would make sense for it to be an activated passive, but it would need to be an instantaneous toggle. Since the potential duration is so short (because once you fall below 16 Essence from your max of 18 it's unusable) you don't want to spend a full turn of that just turning it on.

I like the suggestion of changing Doom to have a greater effect based on proximity - similar to the Rage ability.

To rework Wrath and make it more in line with the other abilities augmenting what your character already does, maybe it could be activated to give very powerful damage shaving (a stronger version of DD) for a short amount of time, after which you lose a large amount of essence and have a very long exhaustion timer. I'm not sure about this though, and most of the other self-buffs I could think of are already treading on the toes of other gods. The current idea behind Wrath is for when you've been fighting for a while and you're very low on resources, and there is just one big guy left. You could use this to be your last bit of damage to close out a very tough fight.

None of the abilities would cost piety. Piety is simply used to prevent (potential) access to the stronger abilities as soon as you join. I think that having two resources to worry about would be annoying/confusing, and I think it would be against the theme of the god. A starving beast doesn't think of anything past it's next meal, and neither does the Devourer. The decisions about using his abilities should all be done when thinking in the short term, whereas if they cost piety you'd worry about the long-term effects of overuse.

Thanks for the feedback!

[khalil]

You're welcome.
As far as the name goes, how about just "The Hollow" or "The Hunger"? Using a word emphasizes the difference from other gods (in that powers come from essence rather than piety), as well as making it really obvious what he wants you to go do.

[spudwalt]

As far as the name goes, how about just "The Hollow" or "The Hunger"? Using a word emphasizes the difference from other gods (in that powers come from essence rather than piety), as well as making it really obvious what he wants you to go do.

T is already taken, though H is still free. "The Hollow" could totally be a title, though (i.e. [faminegod] the Hollow, or perhaps an invocations title).

[Velikolepni]

T is already taken, though H is still free. "The Hollow" could totally be a title, though (i.e. [faminegod] the Hollow, or perhaps an invocations title).

The definite article "The" doesn't matter for names. For example technically Trog and The Shining One have names that start with the same letter but Trog's letter is T and The Shining One's letter is 1.

[khalil]

As far as the name goes, how about just "The Hollow" or "The Hunger"? Using a word emphasizes the difference from other gods (in that powers come from essence rather than piety), as well as making it really obvious what he wants you to go do.

T is already taken, though H is still free. "The Hollow" could totally be a title, though (i.e. [faminegod] the Hollow, or perhaps an invocations title).

It'd be H, like how TSO is S, and Warmaster Okie is O.

[Sprucery]

Sif Muna is S. TSO is 1, just like said above.

[and into]

This thread is an example of why I just added this to the "You must read this before posting in GDD" sticky:

Unless you are in a thread dedicated solely to brainstorming new names for a proposed/new feature, please do not make posts in GDD that consist only of name suggestions for a proposed/new feature.

This doesn't mean that there cannot be any discussion of naming; however, posts that consist of just naming suggestions are low content and (wittingly or not) tend to derail the thread and set it on a dire collision course with Mr. Yiuf's corner of the Tavern.

No disrespect intended to those who are having the discussion about naming this god, that all happened before this was added. However, I expect Zyrnak still wants, and could still use, substantial feedback about the things that really matter with his proposed god. If the god gets designed and gets near to implementation, then we could have a really in depth discussion of the name. Until then it really does tend to distract. Thank you!

[Zyrnak]

Returning to the topic at hand, here's some questions that will hopefully spark some debate:

1. What is your reaction to the Essence mechanic? Do you like/dislike it and why? Do you like/dislike a god that promotes riskier play and constant fighting?
2. How would you want the spell-boost (Fury of the Famished) to work? The goal is to provide a small but appreciable boost to spellcasting for both full casters and hybrids, but without stepping too heavily on the toes of Vehumet and Sif-Muna.
3. How would you want Wrath of the World-Eater to work? Do you like the idea of a finishing move like it is currently, or would you prefer something like the damage shaving buff mentioned in another post? Something else entirely?
4. Assuming that Devourer's Doom stays in a similar form to how it is now, how should it be implemented to be suitably powerful for a hard-to access capstone without being overpowered?

Share your thoughts!

[khalil]

1. I feel that essense is just overcomplicating things. Just make the god gain and loose piety very fast.
2.Buffing spell power/success wouldn't step on their toes any more than Ash's buffs to those. (Buffs to the spell skills rather, but essentially the same thing.)
3. I'm undecided about this. Whichever ended up in the game, I'd still totally play it.
4.I am not the person to talk to about balance. I'd make it always active and only have a chance to drain piety/essence, but that's just me.