God Proposal: Patron God of Humans

[Dauntasa]

Stulgar the Contemptuous is the Patron God of Humans. He is neutral. He can only be worshiped by Humans.

He also hates Humans. He's an ambitious and demanding God, and hates that he is associated with a race that is known for being average. As such, he's a difficult God to please. He has no piety decay. You lose piety with him by running from enemies(intentionally teleporting or using stairs with enemies on screen. Moving away from an enemy or breaking line of sight is fine as long as you don't go too far and let it forget about you), and can gain penance if the enemies you are running from are especially weak. Additionally, you lose piety when your allies kill things. The only way to gain Piety with him is by using the Request Challenge ability, which he grants you immediately upon converting. Abilities require Invocations.


Abilities
Level ......
Request Challenge
The Request Challenge ability is completely free and never fails. Using it causes Stulgar to summon a powerful enemy for you to defeat, with its strength increasing based on your piety level. The enemy will either be a melee, ranged, or spellcasting enemy. To gain Piety, you must defeat it at its own game. Defeating melee enemies with melee, ranged with ranged combat, and spellcasters with magic. Defeating it improperly grants you no piety, fleeing places you in penance. If defeated properly, you immediately gain enough piety to reach the next piety level. The enemy type summoned is whichever type you will have the most trouble killing properly. If your spellcasting is low, he summons spellcasters, etc. The exception is when your piety level is either 0 or 1, in which case he will summon the type you are best able to defeat. Creatures summoned at higher piety levels should be extremely risky to take on at any level.

Level *
Purge Weakness
Costs a large amount of piety to use. Stulgar grants you a gift of either a weapon, ranged weapon+ammunition, armour or a spellbook. What he gives you corresponds to the best of the worst. If your weapon skills are poorer than your spellcasting skills, he will give you a weapon corresponding to your best weapon skill. Strength of gifts depends on Piety level used at.

Level **
Support Armoured Spellcasting
Stulgar reduces your penalties for casting in armour based on piety level. By level 6 even extremely heavy armour should give only minimal penalties.

Level ***
Punish Cowardice
Costs MP and Hunger. All summoned creatures on screen are hit with Abjuration, and those that summoned them are pulled towards you. All Fearful enemies are paralyzed.

Level ****
Protection from Smiting
Having gained some of Stulgar's favour, he is no longer willing to allow other Gods to interfere with you.

Level *****
Giant Strength
Passive ability. Stulgar grants you the ability to wield Giant Clubs and Giant Spiked Clubs.

Level ******
Declaration of Contempt

Costs MP, Hunger, and a huge amount of Piety. Stulgar immediately destroys all enemies in line of sight(without giving experience) except for the strongest one. The strongest one is given haste, might, agility and brilliance and is healed to full HP.

Penance:
Summons powerful Human warriors to attack you, cancels Teleporting status, randomly destroys previously given gifts from Purge Weakness.


The idea behind this God is an extreme risk, extreme reward deal. The abilities he grants can be extremely powerful, but in order to obtain and use them you must be willing to take on potentially fatal challenges. In order to gain abilities that let you take on anything, you need to prove you can take on anything. If you're brave you can try to shoot up through the piety levels extremely quickly, but even an end-game character should have trouble reaching level 6. Additionally, using some of his abilities costs piety, so you might have to risk everything multiple times to regain lost power if you end up having to abuse them.

[Quazifuji]

The concept is neat, although honestly, I'm not sure why he would need to be human-only aside from their aptitudes being well-suited to his encouraging you to be a jack of all trades. Beogh has very significant flavor reasons to be orc-only, and even then there was a recent thread where a lot of people wanted him to be allowed for more races. This guy doesn't seem to have nearly as strong a justification to be human-only, and it would probably be more fun to allow other races to use him and alter his flavor to be the general god of challenges and strength, rather than restrict him so much.

Also, I'd probably be in favor of changing Giant Strength, just because it pushes all worshippers of him towards maces and flails a bit.

[Dauntasa]

The concept is neat, although honestly, I'm not sure why he would need to be human-only aside from their aptitudes being well-suited to his encouraging you to be a jack of all trades. Beogh has very significant flavor reasons to be orc-only, and even then there was a recent thread where a lot of people wanted him to be allowed for more races. This guy doesn't seem to have nearly as strong a justification to be human-only, and it would probably be more fun to allow other races to use him and alter his flavor to be the general god of challenges and strength, rather than restrict him so much.

Also, I'd probably be in favor of changing Giant Strength, just because it pushes all worshippers of him towards maces and flails a bit.

Well, the reason I thought he could be human only is because he supports a jack-of-all-trades playstyle more than anything else, so he'd have good synergy with them but other species have less reason to go for him. That, and I like the concept of Beogh being a Patron God for one specific species and think that a few more of those would be interesting.

And I'm not sure whether Giant Strength would really push people towards Maces and Flails or if it would push people who already use Maces towards this God, but that bit might need some rethinking. I thought it would be a benefit with flavour appropriate to the God and would be useful enough for people to think it was worth trying to go through 5 challenges to reach it.

[1010011010]

I agree with Quazifuji that restricting to humans is unnecessary, and hurts the god more than anything.

Request challenge is a cool method of gaining piety but restricting how the player kills it is too limiting and maybe even problematic, you want player to choose a rounded character rather than force it eg. what if the player hasn't found any offensive spells to kill the spell caster? Penance for running is also too harsh, instead why not just a piety loss (and who you fight is not piety based). This also shouldn't be the only way to gain piety, it could be a challenge you must face to get passed piety limiters.

Purge weakness is good but seemingly spammable, especially with the request fight difficulty based on piety. Something hard capped like automatic gifts at 2*4* & 6*, this could be tied into what I mentioned about challenges in the previous paragraph - at XYZ piety you can accept a challenge, once the opponent is beaten you are rewarded with a higher piety cap and a gift. If gifts are a bit clunky then a manual style leaning boost to your lesser skills or even boost your lowest stat up to your second lowest.

I don't get Punish cowardice, does your god hate summons in general? are resurrected minions also "hiding behind creatures" and thus bad? aren't you being cowardly by not taking on all the summons?

Giant strength doesn't need to be here. It doesn't promote rounded characters, just giant clubs.

Deceleration of contempt is much too powerful. Noise + DoC + teleport = V5 empty. if it teleported even just the stronger monsters out of LOS then it'll be better but still seems too extreme.

[Dauntasa]

Request challenge is a cool method of gaining piety but restricting how the player kills it is too limiting and maybe even problematic, you want player to choose a rounded character rather than force it eg. what if the player hasn't found any offensive spells to kill the spell caster? Penance for running is also too harsh, instead why not just a piety loss (and who you fight is not piety based). This also shouldn't be the only way to gain piety, it could be a challenge you must face to get passed piety limiters.

Purge weakness is good but seemingly spammable, especially with the request fight difficulty based on piety. Something hard capped like automatic gifts at 2*4* & 6*, this could be tied into what I mentioned about challenges in the previous paragraph - at XYZ piety you can accept a challenge, once the opponent is beaten you are rewarded with a higher piety cap and a gift. If gifts are a bit clunky then a manual style leaning boost to your lesser skills or even boost your lowest stat up to your second lowest.

The ideas behind these two are related. The reason you get the easier challenge at low piety is so that you can unlock Purge Weakness. That way, if you have no offensive spells to take on the next level of challenge, you can use Purge and be granted a book you can use.

Purge would be spammable at lower levels, but the gifts you get are based on piety so you'd have a nearly infinite supply of total garbage. I guess if you really wanted 20 books containing only Magic Dart then you could abuse this. Trying to spam it at higher levels would quickly drop you to lower levels, and dropping to lower levels with this god is a major setback as you'd be required to do challenges again, and the higher level challenges should be risky enough that the player really shouldn't WANT to redo them.

I don't get Punish cowardice, does your god hate summons in general? are resurrected minions also "hiding behind creatures" and thus bad? aren't you being cowardly by not taking on all the summons?

He does hate summoners. That's why letting your allies kill things loses piety. He thinks it's cheating and not a real show of power if you get other things to do your fighting for you.

Giant strength doesn't need to be here. It doesn't promote rounded characters, just giant clubs.

You might be right here.

Deceleration of contempt is much too powerful. Noise + DoC + teleport = V5 empty. if it teleported even just the stronger monsters out of LOS then it'll be better but still seems too extreme.

Well, I meant it to be very powerful. Maybe I went overboard, but my thought process was this: The challenge to get to Level 6 is meant to be quite, quite hard. It is not meant to be something that players should want to do more than once. The Declaration is available at only level 6, and should cost enough piety that using it should drop you to level 5.

It would, essentially, be an almost once per game get out of jail free card that turns one extremely nasty fight into a more manageable but still quite nasty fight. Very powerful, and an appropriate reward for defeating the final challenge, but every time you use it you condemn yourself to another very nasty fight down the road if you decide to rechallenge to make it available again.

[Brannock]

Can you give us an example of what you consider to be a "very nasty fight"? Khufu? The Royal Jelly? Randomly-created Pandemonium lord? Cerebov?

Or will this invocation create its own unique monsters to challenge you?

[Dauntasa]

Can you give us an example of what you consider to be a "very nasty fight"? Khufu? The Royal Jelly? Randomly-created Pandemonium lord? Cerebov?

Or will this invocation create its own unique monsters to challenge you?

Ideally it would have its own unique monsters, but that isn't strictly necessary and would likely be a lot of work(although you could just create one and scale its stats and skills with piety level). Cerebov would be overboard. It would be one-on-one(unless you were foolish enough to challenge while already fighting something).

I'm not sure if Pandemonium lords specifically would be right, but roughly that level of danger seems appropriate. Randomly generated monsters would actually work quite nicely. The idea, really, is that the player should never feel comfortable challenging at level 5. At lower levels, a well prepared player should always feel reasonably confident. The fights should still be tough unless you convert or blow all of your piety late in the game, but doable. But getting to level 6 should be an ordeal at any point. That's why I suggested such a powerful ability for level 6.

It shouldn't be something that would just murder you immediately though. Nothing that's going to show up and tear your face off in 1 turn. Something relentless and tough that wears you down and forces you to exhaust your supplies seems more appropriate. Something with the same kind of philosophy as a Royal Jelly, but without the jelly army.

[XuaXua]

Appreciates sacrificing humans.

[and into]

I think the "fixation/hatred" of humans theme is weak, but a general "god of battle" flavored somewhat differently than Okawaru would be fine. "Battle/fighting/war" is a very broad concept with lots of areas of application in Crawl (obviously) so it would be fine if some variation of a more straightforward "god of battle" motif were used, so long as the game play and abilities promoted by the god didn't overlap with Oka. This one seems to fit a slightly darker "kill or be killed, cull the feeble" sensibility.

Challenging enemies is a cool idea, but I'd approach it slightly differently, as 10100 was suggesting. Here's how I'd approach it:

Upon joining: You get the moniker, "Soldier of Fortune."

There is no piety decay for this god. However, as you gain experience, challenges will be offered to you. You can accept the challenge via the (a)bilities menu.

A challenge costs a wager of some useful consumable items you currently have available. Cost goes up based on piety and character level. If you win the challenge, you keep the item, get a big infusion of piety, and if you perform especially well on a tough challenge, you may receive a gift (quality of which also scales up with piety and character level). If you fail, you lose the item(s) wagered and have to wait for another challenge for another shot of gaining piety. Gifts through this god are significantly rarer than Okawaru or Trog, but tend to be of high quality, and are focused around something you are weak in.

For instance, if you are low on gold and the ratio of shops to total levels generated is high, you may get a gift of gold. If few potions are still in existence and you get a gift, a few !curing, !heal wounds, and !might are likely to be given. If an armor slot is empty, you have a good chance to get a piece of armor for that slot. If no unused ?enchant armors are in the game but you still haven't enchanted all your gear, a couple of scrolls of enchant armor are likely to generate. Getting +1 or +2 to your weakest stat is always a possible god gift. And so on.

At * piety, supports armor use by lowering encumbrance; support raises with piety. This affects spell casting as well as one's ability to evade in armor.

Aside from that, I'd have the god just give two or three active, tactical combat abilities at higher piety. I don't like Giant Strength for reasons already pointed out, though, nor do I like Protection from Smiting. (Just doesn't seem interesting.)

A "punish/disallow cowardice" ability that, for a period of time, forced enemies to close with you before attacking—like a reverse scroll of fear—would be very cool. This could come online at **. Power scales up with piety (enemies have chance to resist, like ?fear). EDIT: However, after using the effect, you cannot run away from affected enemies until it expires. You aren't allowed to be cowardly, either!

A different take on the final ability would be "pitched battle": Large piety cost. Range 8, hex-like targeting, but ignores HD and MR. Instantaneous speed. You target a hostile creature. You and that target are immediately transported to a completely different screen that consists of one small room. Neither can escape or leave until the other is dead. If you die it counts as a normal death and you lose; if you kill the enemy, you are immediately transported back to the spot you were in when you activated the ability, and the enemy you targeted is dead. Cannot target marine creatures or certain large or otherwise weird enemies (such as eldritch tentacles).

Probably need one active ability between "punish/disallow cowardice" and the final one.

[Dauntasa]

The core concepts of this proposal, really, are the challenges and the support of a jack-of-all-trades playstyle. Anything else can be worked around, they were just my ideas thrown in for how the concept could be applied.