Dungeon Dilettante
Posts: 3
Joined: Friday, 13th June 2014, 01:37
Friday, 13th June 2014, 02:24
Proposal - New Nemelex
Context
I am a new-ish player, I'll admit right off the bat. I only started playing DCSS seven or eight months ago, and I haven't tried out the amazing diversity of options available in the game. I'm kind of a creature of habit, and I figured the best way to learn the game was to pick a race/class/god combo and stick to it until I could make it work. That combo for me was DrVM of Nemelex, and it got me my first 3 rune and 15 rune wins! I understand there were some very problematic aspects of Nemelex in .14; but playing with the new Nemelex in trunk, I can't help but feel like the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater. My fear is that the current incarnation of Nemelex is not very much fun, and will only be a stepping stone toward eliminating the god entirely. This is a proposal for how to renovate Nemelex to address the balance and gameplay concerns, without losing the elements that I found most fun.
Issues with Nemelex
Having read the discussions I could find both here and on the CDO Wiki, it seems like there were three main concerns about Nemelex:
1. Deck Management was tedious. It was common for players to have 20+ decks at a time, and optimal play required endless cycling through suboptimal decks to get better ones. The amount of time that went into this was beyond excessive; and even with optimal play, the inventory management that went into it was a total nightmare.
2. Deck of Wonders was spoilery and prone to abuse. Cards like experience and helix were very powerful, especially when combined with the deck cycling problem cited above, which provided many copies of Decks of Wonders through optimal play.
3. Deck of Summoning effects were too powerful. Having Bone Dragons and Greater Demons summonable for 2mp stepped on the toes of other gods' design space, and were generally far more powerful than summon effects available through other gods and even the summoning school.
The proposed changes on trunk simplify Nemelex by reducing the four current decks to two: War and Escape. This solves problem two (because Wonders no longer exists), and problem three (because Summoning no longer exists), and cuts problem one in half by reducing the number of decks. So I get why it seems like a reasonable solution. But I feel so out of control of the effects from the deck of war that I almost never draw 1 anymore, making Nemelex primarily a god of escape options through the still-consistent Deck of Escape. Also, though this approach simplifies the deck management problem, it still requires excessive inventory slots and stashing in order to play optimally.
Proposal Outline
1. Remove decks from the game. Give worshippers of Nemelex a virtual deck that they can draw from with abilities (more on this later)
2. Keep the sacrificing loot for piety element. Remove sacrificing corpses. Thematically, it makes sense for a Gambler god to demand the sacrifice of valuable things. It would also be the only god in the design space that cared more about the weapons and armor of the thing you're killing than its alignment, ie, who cares if it's an angel or a demon, the question is how much is that sword worth?
3. The higher your piety, the more valuable items are required to gain more piety. This removes some of the tedium of endless sacrificing as the game goes on, because there's only a point in saccing very high quality items.
4. Redesign Nemelex play around a single virtual deck whose contents are somewhat controllable over the course of a long game. Let the player streamline the deck to fit their purposes.
Design Space
Nemelex potentially allows the player access to the widest range of effects of any god save Xom, and gives the player far more control over them - the catch is that you're dealt different cards every game, and can never know what tools are going to come your way. Some games you may end up with a deck stacked full of good buff spells, others a deck slanted toward destruction. Sometimes you'll get three Fire cards before you see your first Ice, and sometimes the other way around. Over the course of even the longest games, it is possible to never see certain cards. This requires that the player adapt to the hand they're dealt, so to speak, and not force Nemelex into a particular playstyle. Nemelex gives you a random toolbox and expects you to figure out a playstyle that fits around it.
Nemelex is also the only god for whom piety gain is tied to item sacrifice. As a gambler, Nemelex wants anything valuabble you find in the dungeon. As piety increases, the quality of items necessary to gain piety also increases, until only artifacts and the most valuable branded items are worth sacrificing when you're nearing max piety.
In addition, Nemelex remains the only god who bases abilities off of Evocations and not Invocations.
The Virtual Deck
When you reach piety *, Nemelex reward you with a deck of ten cards. This is not an inventory item; it exists through the ability menu, where followers of Nemelex can at any time look at all the cards in their deck and investigate what they do. At * piety, you also get an ability to draw 1 card from this deck for 2mp. When a card is drawn, it does not disappear from the deck. The deck is instantly 'shuffled' afterward, retaining the same ten cards with unchanged probabilities.
At regular piety intervals thereafter, Nemelex adds cards directly to your virtual deck (perhaps in packs of three cards at a time).
At *** piety, Nemelex rewards you with the defining strategic ability: for a piety cost, you can remove a single card from your deck (though you may never have less than ten).
Managing this virtual deck via piety gain and cutting cards with piety loss, would become the core of Nemelex play. It follows a simple dynamic:
1. The more cards in your deck, the higher power every draw. We can accomplish this by multiplying spellpower by a number that takes cards in the deck into account. This would naturally scale up over the course of the game, UNLESS a player was trying to get a very small, constrained deck.
2. The fewer cards in your deck, the more you can constrain outcomes. Making a deck of all useful destruction spells would make your draw 1 ability far more predictable, but less powerful because the spellpower would scale down.
This ought to encourage a style of play where the maximum number of playable cards for a given playstyle are played.
At ***** piety, Nemelex awards the draw four ability, which functions just as it does now, except that multiples of the same card receive large bonuses to spellpower (something like 1.5^n where n is the number of copies in the four cards dealt). This would reward streamlining a deck down to copies of a few very good cards. The counterbalance to this would be card availability (only through piety gifts), and the fact that casting flame every time at 5.5x power wouldn't be too useful against an orb of fire (which is to say, broadly speaking, a deck that can consistently get multiple copies of one card will be very weak in situations where that card isn't good).
The Cards
Thematically, it makes sense for their to exist 52 cards. Its a number everyone knows and ties instinctively to card games, it's divisible into chunks of 13 that will also be recognizable and intuitive, and it has the feel of tarot cards which is a kind-of real world analog to Nemelex. In my proposal there would be three “suits” of cards available to players, and one suit available only to Nemelex.Essentially this means 39 potential effects, mixed with 13 random and uncontrollable ones which occur infrequently and only at max piety. Higher power effects can be put on face cards of each suit, preventing them from appearing in the starting deck.
The Player Cards
13 cards 'of Swords' (ie, Jack of Swords, Eight of Swords)
2, ice
3, lightning
4, poison
5, draining
6, conjuration
7, earth
8, acid
9, air
10, fire
J, holy (r)
Q, torment (r)
K, silver (r)
A, dispelling (r)
13 cards 'of Shields'
2, ev
3, sh
4, repel missiles
5, dex
6, int
7, str
8, ac
9, resist
10,
J, slaying (r)
Q, cure (r)
K, haste (r)
A, heal wound (r)
13 cards 'of Dungeons'
2, summon swarm
3, blink
4, teleport
5, solitude/tomb
6, swiftness/flight
6, fear
7, confusion
8, slow
9, fog
10, summon butterflies
J,
Q, summon elemental (r)
K, summon herd (r)
A, enslavement (r)
The Nemelex Cards
At ***** piety, Nemelex awards a passive ability which gives a chance on every draw for Nemelex to draw an additional card from his own deck. The effects in this deck include 5 likely beneficial ones, 5 detrimental ones, and 3 that can be good or bad depending on situation. The effects in this deck include some from the previous deck of wonders. To prevent it from being scummable, mix the effects with an equal number of bad ones, and make it low probability and random on every draw.
13 cards 'of Wonders'
2, experience
3, alchemist
4, treasure
5, trowel
6, famine
7, hangman
8, thief (steals gold)
9, wrath
10, vulnerability
J, sage
Q, changes
K, banishment
A, helix
Nemelex Xobeh, The Gambler
Nemelex is the god of chance and wagers – and of manipulating those wagers in your favor! He appreciates when you offer him valuable items from the dungeon, and rewards you with a deck of powerful magical cards.
* – (passive) Receive a virtual deck of ten cards chosen as follows:
3 different, non-rare cards from the suit of Swords
3 different, non-rare cards from the suit of Shields
3 different, non-rare cards from the suit of Dungeons
1 random non-rare card from any deck
(active) – Draw 1 – costs 2 mp – draw a card at random from your deck
** - Sleight of Hand – draw a card, then either keep it, or instantly draw another card instead. (costs 4 mp)
*** - Stacked Deck – discard a card from your deck (costs piety and mp)
**** - High Stakes - (passive) - Nemelex gifts can now include rare cards.
***** - Deal 4 – Play out 4 cards from your deck; any duplicate cards earn heavy spellpower bonus. (costs 10 mp, piety)
Feedback
All the actual cards are examples I am not attached to in any way. I welcome revisions of the four card lists. The core of the concept is a static virtual deck, and the ability to remove cards from it for piety. I also ask to withhold reservations about some of the more powerful effects in the deck. Heal Wounds is a very powerful effect, for instance - but seeing it come up once in every thirty draws would be unlikely to destabilize the game. If it turned out they were, some of the more powerful/rare effects could also be removed.
I'm sure there's quite a bit of technical work to be done in terms of designing some of this (though none of it seems that ambitious). I'd welcome any suggestions about what more of the legwork I can do (ie what God messages? what text descriptions?), and would of course be super indebted to anyone who felt like helping to code it.
Thanks for reading through this whole thing if you did! Love and appreciation to all the devs who work to make an awesome game even better all the time, I hope this sparks some more conversation about the future of Nemelex at least.
I am a new-ish player, I'll admit right off the bat. I only started playing DCSS seven or eight months ago, and I haven't tried out the amazing diversity of options available in the game. I'm kind of a creature of habit, and I figured the best way to learn the game was to pick a race/class/god combo and stick to it until I could make it work. That combo for me was DrVM of Nemelex, and it got me my first 3 rune and 15 rune wins! I understand there were some very problematic aspects of Nemelex in .14; but playing with the new Nemelex in trunk, I can't help but feel like the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater. My fear is that the current incarnation of Nemelex is not very much fun, and will only be a stepping stone toward eliminating the god entirely. This is a proposal for how to renovate Nemelex to address the balance and gameplay concerns, without losing the elements that I found most fun.
Issues with Nemelex
Having read the discussions I could find both here and on the CDO Wiki, it seems like there were three main concerns about Nemelex:
1. Deck Management was tedious. It was common for players to have 20+ decks at a time, and optimal play required endless cycling through suboptimal decks to get better ones. The amount of time that went into this was beyond excessive; and even with optimal play, the inventory management that went into it was a total nightmare.
2. Deck of Wonders was spoilery and prone to abuse. Cards like experience and helix were very powerful, especially when combined with the deck cycling problem cited above, which provided many copies of Decks of Wonders through optimal play.
3. Deck of Summoning effects were too powerful. Having Bone Dragons and Greater Demons summonable for 2mp stepped on the toes of other gods' design space, and were generally far more powerful than summon effects available through other gods and even the summoning school.
The proposed changes on trunk simplify Nemelex by reducing the four current decks to two: War and Escape. This solves problem two (because Wonders no longer exists), and problem three (because Summoning no longer exists), and cuts problem one in half by reducing the number of decks. So I get why it seems like a reasonable solution. But I feel so out of control of the effects from the deck of war that I almost never draw 1 anymore, making Nemelex primarily a god of escape options through the still-consistent Deck of Escape. Also, though this approach simplifies the deck management problem, it still requires excessive inventory slots and stashing in order to play optimally.
Proposal Outline
1. Remove decks from the game. Give worshippers of Nemelex a virtual deck that they can draw from with abilities (more on this later)
2. Keep the sacrificing loot for piety element. Remove sacrificing corpses. Thematically, it makes sense for a Gambler god to demand the sacrifice of valuable things. It would also be the only god in the design space that cared more about the weapons and armor of the thing you're killing than its alignment, ie, who cares if it's an angel or a demon, the question is how much is that sword worth?
3. The higher your piety, the more valuable items are required to gain more piety. This removes some of the tedium of endless sacrificing as the game goes on, because there's only a point in saccing very high quality items.
4. Redesign Nemelex play around a single virtual deck whose contents are somewhat controllable over the course of a long game. Let the player streamline the deck to fit their purposes.
Design Space
Nemelex potentially allows the player access to the widest range of effects of any god save Xom, and gives the player far more control over them - the catch is that you're dealt different cards every game, and can never know what tools are going to come your way. Some games you may end up with a deck stacked full of good buff spells, others a deck slanted toward destruction. Sometimes you'll get three Fire cards before you see your first Ice, and sometimes the other way around. Over the course of even the longest games, it is possible to never see certain cards. This requires that the player adapt to the hand they're dealt, so to speak, and not force Nemelex into a particular playstyle. Nemelex gives you a random toolbox and expects you to figure out a playstyle that fits around it.
Nemelex is also the only god for whom piety gain is tied to item sacrifice. As a gambler, Nemelex wants anything valuabble you find in the dungeon. As piety increases, the quality of items necessary to gain piety also increases, until only artifacts and the most valuable branded items are worth sacrificing when you're nearing max piety.
In addition, Nemelex remains the only god who bases abilities off of Evocations and not Invocations.
The Virtual Deck
When you reach piety *, Nemelex reward you with a deck of ten cards. This is not an inventory item; it exists through the ability menu, where followers of Nemelex can at any time look at all the cards in their deck and investigate what they do. At * piety, you also get an ability to draw 1 card from this deck for 2mp. When a card is drawn, it does not disappear from the deck. The deck is instantly 'shuffled' afterward, retaining the same ten cards with unchanged probabilities.
At regular piety intervals thereafter, Nemelex adds cards directly to your virtual deck (perhaps in packs of three cards at a time).
At *** piety, Nemelex rewards you with the defining strategic ability: for a piety cost, you can remove a single card from your deck (though you may never have less than ten).
Managing this virtual deck via piety gain and cutting cards with piety loss, would become the core of Nemelex play. It follows a simple dynamic:
1. The more cards in your deck, the higher power every draw. We can accomplish this by multiplying spellpower by a number that takes cards in the deck into account. This would naturally scale up over the course of the game, UNLESS a player was trying to get a very small, constrained deck.
2. The fewer cards in your deck, the more you can constrain outcomes. Making a deck of all useful destruction spells would make your draw 1 ability far more predictable, but less powerful because the spellpower would scale down.
This ought to encourage a style of play where the maximum number of playable cards for a given playstyle are played.
At ***** piety, Nemelex awards the draw four ability, which functions just as it does now, except that multiples of the same card receive large bonuses to spellpower (something like 1.5^n where n is the number of copies in the four cards dealt). This would reward streamlining a deck down to copies of a few very good cards. The counterbalance to this would be card availability (only through piety gifts), and the fact that casting flame every time at 5.5x power wouldn't be too useful against an orb of fire (which is to say, broadly speaking, a deck that can consistently get multiple copies of one card will be very weak in situations where that card isn't good).
The Cards
Thematically, it makes sense for their to exist 52 cards. Its a number everyone knows and ties instinctively to card games, it's divisible into chunks of 13 that will also be recognizable and intuitive, and it has the feel of tarot cards which is a kind-of real world analog to Nemelex. In my proposal there would be three “suits” of cards available to players, and one suit available only to Nemelex.Essentially this means 39 potential effects, mixed with 13 random and uncontrollable ones which occur infrequently and only at max piety. Higher power effects can be put on face cards of each suit, preventing them from appearing in the starting deck.
The Player Cards
13 cards 'of Swords' (ie, Jack of Swords, Eight of Swords)
2, ice
3, lightning
4, poison
5, draining
6, conjuration
7, earth
8, acid
9, air
10, fire
J, holy (r)
Q, torment (r)
K, silver (r)
A, dispelling (r)
13 cards 'of Shields'
2, ev
3, sh
4, repel missiles
5, dex
6, int
7, str
8, ac
9, resist
10,
J, slaying (r)
Q, cure (r)
K, haste (r)
A, heal wound (r)
13 cards 'of Dungeons'
2, summon swarm
3, blink
4, teleport
5, solitude/tomb
6, swiftness/flight
6, fear
7, confusion
8, slow
9, fog
10, summon butterflies
J,
Q, summon elemental (r)
K, summon herd (r)
A, enslavement (r)
The Nemelex Cards
At ***** piety, Nemelex awards a passive ability which gives a chance on every draw for Nemelex to draw an additional card from his own deck. The effects in this deck include 5 likely beneficial ones, 5 detrimental ones, and 3 that can be good or bad depending on situation. The effects in this deck include some from the previous deck of wonders. To prevent it from being scummable, mix the effects with an equal number of bad ones, and make it low probability and random on every draw.
13 cards 'of Wonders'
2, experience
3, alchemist
4, treasure
5, trowel
6, famine
7, hangman
8, thief (steals gold)
9, wrath
10, vulnerability
J, sage
Q, changes
K, banishment
A, helix
Nemelex Xobeh, The Gambler
Nemelex is the god of chance and wagers – and of manipulating those wagers in your favor! He appreciates when you offer him valuable items from the dungeon, and rewards you with a deck of powerful magical cards.
* – (passive) Receive a virtual deck of ten cards chosen as follows:
3 different, non-rare cards from the suit of Swords
3 different, non-rare cards from the suit of Shields
3 different, non-rare cards from the suit of Dungeons
1 random non-rare card from any deck
(active) – Draw 1 – costs 2 mp – draw a card at random from your deck
** - Sleight of Hand – draw a card, then either keep it, or instantly draw another card instead. (costs 4 mp)
*** - Stacked Deck – discard a card from your deck (costs piety and mp)
**** - High Stakes - (passive) - Nemelex gifts can now include rare cards.
***** - Deal 4 – Play out 4 cards from your deck; any duplicate cards earn heavy spellpower bonus. (costs 10 mp, piety)
Feedback
All the actual cards are examples I am not attached to in any way. I welcome revisions of the four card lists. The core of the concept is a static virtual deck, and the ability to remove cards from it for piety. I also ask to withhold reservations about some of the more powerful effects in the deck. Heal Wounds is a very powerful effect, for instance - but seeing it come up once in every thirty draws would be unlikely to destabilize the game. If it turned out they were, some of the more powerful/rare effects could also be removed.
I'm sure there's quite a bit of technical work to be done in terms of designing some of this (though none of it seems that ambitious). I'd welcome any suggestions about what more of the legwork I can do (ie what God messages? what text descriptions?), and would of course be super indebted to anyone who felt like helping to code it.
Thanks for reading through this whole thing if you did! Love and appreciation to all the devs who work to make an awesome game even better all the time, I hope this sparks some more conversation about the future of Nemelex at least.
- For this message the author jabberwock has received thanks: 2
- Psiweapon, rockygargoyle