Yet Another God Idea - The God of Exchange

[Un67]

So I was thinking a bit, and I thought to myself about the one thing that most Crawl players encounter all the time and are constantly annoyed by - useless "useful" items that would be great if they had a different character. I then thought, well, why not a god that exchanges your items for others?

Name:

Maybe Dynamo or something along those lines, to suggest a sense of dynamism. Perhaps for flavor his name could change randomly, or the capitalization of his name could change, for example Dynamo one moment to DyNaMO another, or something like that.

Altar:

a dynamic altar
an everchanging altar

Umm... not too sure what else, I think the alliteration of dynamic altar would be nice (or maybe boring from a certain point of view).

Flavor:

Dynamo is the god of merchants and the overseer of exchange among the peoples of the world. So many people own things that they consider useless that others would consider useful, and thus Dynamo steps in to facilitate and govern the necessary task of exchange. Dynamo does not revel in chaos like Xom, as it seeks to give its followers something equally useful to what they chose to give away, not something less useful. Dynamo does expect constant offerings from his followers, but in exchange he rewards his followers richly in return.

Welcome Line:

"Embrace change!"

Piety Rank Titles:

...... -
*..... -
**.... -
***... -
****.. -
*****. -
****** -

Not actually sure what these might be, it has to do with exchange obviously but I'm not too sure beyond that.

Altar Location:

Definitely should be a Temple god, should be guaranteed like all the other Temple gods.

Appreciates:

Offering equipment (for later exchange)
Changing equipment
Using different equipment (consumables and evokables, not too sure how this would work)

Depreciates:

Using the same thing for too long
Abandoning it

Given Abilities:

...... -

Offer items to Dynamo (passive). Dynamo does not accept anything with an individual shop value of 1. The higher value of the item, the more piety gain.
Receive items in exchange (passive). You get a pile of items that are of the same item type of items you offered. You do not get the items immediately, you must wait a few thousand or so turns. The value of the items that you get in the exchange will be about 25% of what you offered in the beginning at ...... piety and increases to about 150% of what you offered in the beginning when you are at ****** piety, so an increase of 25% per piety star. Equipment that you get in exchange will use acquirement code to make them more useful to you. They will also be marked with {exchanged} and cannot be offered to Dynamo again to prevent abuse.

*..... -

None

**.... -

Rapid Exchange (MP, piety). You can instantly exchange one item of your choice. The value, however, will always be at about 50% of of what you exchanged.

***... -

None

****.. -

Monster Exchange (MP, piety, food). You can instantly polymorph all the monsters in your line of sight. The resulting monster will always have about 80% of the HD of the original, making it much superior to wands of polymorph other.

*****. -

None

****** -

Location Exchange (MP, piety, food). You can instantly change a shop or portal to become another type. However, you cannot interact with the location at all before using this ability.

Punishments:

Randomly destroys some items with the {exchanged} tag.
Randomly exchanges some of your equipment to something else, with 90% of the original value and actively weighted against you. This affect both equipment worn and in the inventory. Thankfully, these items will not have the exchanged tag, unless you actually want his wrath to be actively destroying all of your items.
Exchanges your position with the position of another monster. (So you can't go around sitting in a Tomb with your equipment on the floor.) Weighted to higher tension areas.
Does the reverse of Monster Exchange on the monsters around you, so basically the same thing that the wand of polymorph monster does - changes them into something stronger.

So, thoughts? Ideas? I know this is really rough and needs a lot of work, but surely at least the idea is nice?

[roguelikedev]

Definitely has potential for fun, and I'm a big fan of anything which dulls the pain of finding +7 boots of running RF++ RC+ on D:1 with a kenku, which is guaranteed to occur if your last character worshiped Okawaru until dying on Zot:5 due to crummy equipment.

Off top of head riffs--

Early ability with moderately high piety cost, call it 'Invest', which takes all the "pending" items that you have coming to you in the near future and erases them in favor of a new pending item of value based on their total value, weighted to probably fill the same equipment slot as most of the deleted items do. You can repeat this effect to delay the cash in indefinitely, assuming you have the piety for it, and eventually get something very good (you hope.)

The delay shouldn't be a flat number of turns, or a worshiper is encouraged to stand around checking his watch and eating bread until the gift like magic appear. An exploration mechanism like Ashenzari's would suit, or perhaps just require some number of further trade ins.

Capstone ability, call it 'Cash Out,' usable once per game. Sacrifice an item at the god's altar; it will be on the altar for your next character. If said next character dies on D:1, well, that's Crawl.

[Un67]

You are probably right about the flat number of turns thing, that won't work out. I think that the Invest idea might be possible, but it just seems a bit iffy and encourages you to sacrifice every little thing that has value to get a good item. As for the Cash Out idea, I think that's way too metagamy and might be combined by some people with the Invest power to give yourself an unfair advantage by handing yourself a superartifact really early in the game.

[Whart]

I like the idea of a merchant god but would like one that wouldn't require lots of sacrifices-- possibly only accepts artefacts? Also likes the collection and the spending of gold, grants discounts at shops as a passive ability, allows player to sense shops & bazaars.

Combine merchant with craftsman and grant ability to remove a trait from an artefact (awesome for getting the mutagenic rays out of an otherwise nice ring). You could then have another ability to change, say, boots into a cloak (don't know about a cloak of running, though) or that short blade of speed into a demon whip of speed. Obviously, this would have to cost a lot of piety. You could only do it a few times in a standard game, and it should cost more depending on how radical the change is.

I like this idea because the god would give no direct help in battle.

[xzanthius]

I like the idea of a merchant god but would like one that wouldn't require lots of sacrifices-- possibly only accepts artefacts? Also likes the collection and the spending of gold, grants discounts at shops as a passive ability, allows player to sense shops & bazaars.

Combine merchant with craftsman and grant ability to remove a trait from an artefact (awesome for getting the mutagenic rays out of an otherwise nice ring). You could then have another ability to change, say, boots into a cloak (don't know about a cloak of running, though) or that short blade of speed into a demon whip of speed. Obviously, this would have to cost a lot of piety. You could only do it a few times in a standard game, and it should cost more depending on how radical the change is.

I like this idea because the god would give no direct help in battle.

I am bumping this thread. As there is no selling of gear in this game I would be good to find another (less redundant) way to capitalize on the purchasing element. Likewise with transforming unusable gear into something great (though I believe that it should be very expensive and permanent thing to do).

Now... whether this avenue (mercantilism) is best explored through a God, Race, or Background...

[khalil]

Perhaps an ability to move a brand from one item to another you already have, destroying the original item in the process?
Call it merger or something.
It'd probably have to cost a lot of piety, to make up for the fact that you're guaranteed to get an item you want.
EDIT:
Also, there would have to be a minimum value for what you can sacrifice, and it would have to slowly go up, as otherwise players are encouraged to sacrifice D:1 trash and then invest it for something halfway decent.

[VargrVeum]

Perhaps an ability to move a brand from one item to another you already have, destroying the original item in the process?
Call it merger or something.

Some sort of enchanting god? I think xom has the moorcockian god of warping change and transformation thing down - something more centred around altering weapons and shifting bonuses around (perhaps some sort of sacrifice mechanic? praying over a weapon breaks it down and allows the enchantment to be applied to something else?)

[ontoclasm]

As there is no selling of gear in this game I would be good to find another (less redundant) way to capitalize on the purchasing element.

"There's no selling in this game, so we should put selling in but call it something different."

[khalil]

As there is no selling of gear in this game I would be good to find another (less redundant) way to capitalize on the purchasing element.

"There's no selling in this game, so we should put selling in but call it something different."

The stated problem with selling is that it encourages going around and hoovering up d-1 trash and turning that into something useful.
While the investment ability does violate this (and thus should be removed) the other abilities just take something and turn it into something of equal value. This makes sacrificing d-1 trash pointless, as you just get a different piece of d-1 trash.

[njvack]

I think Nemelex fills the "hoover the dungeon for items to be exchanged for items of equal or greater value" niche pretty well.

[xzanthius]

Perhaps only being able to sell Uniques (including Purgy Armour "Aye I'd give you a better price if you hadn't ruined the value by turning it into armor."); at an appropriate shop.