New Mutation: Gills

[John Milferton]

"A pair of gills grow on the sides of your neck."

Good Mutation

Rank 1: You can move through water without penalties.
Rank 2: You can move thorugh water without penalties and you gain a +20 bonus to stealth while in water.
Rank 3: You can move through water without penalties, gain a +30 bonus to stealth and your movement delay is reduced by 3 while in water.

Merfolk and Octopodes cannot accquire this mutation.

A human wanderer with the gills mutation.

Edit: Removed the image because it was way too large. Also if you really have to you could call it Gills & Webs, I just figured that if I had gills I would probably spend a lot of time underwater and get used to them and learn to swim faster, use a little imagination...

[TeshiAlair]

I like this idea. It'd be fun to have a few more offball mutations, and this one might affect your strategy at least in some sections of the game, without being gamebreakingly strong or annoying.

[damiac]

Why would gills help you move through water faster? Knee deep water doesn't slow you down, because you stick your head under the water? And by the same token, why would this make you more stealthy?

[njvack]

Yeah, I'd call it "aquatic" instead of "gills."

And maybe l1 is "shallow water is no penalty, deep water is like shallow water" and l2 is "deep water is no penalty". Then l3 could have a stealth bonus or movespeed bonus or something.

[duvessa]

Yeah going into deep water, having a neqoxec remove my gills mutation, and instantly drowning sounds like a great thing to add to crawl.

[njvack]

Just flag it as a badmut

[John Milferton]

Yeah going into deep water, having a neqoxec remove my gills mutation, and instantly drowning sounds like a great thing to add to crawl.

People here only see the negative things in life, it's kind of sad

[Sar]

He said that would be, and I quote, "a great thing to add to crawl". Maybe it is you who are negative?

[Sandman25]

Yeah going into deep water, having a neqoxec remove my gills mutation, and instantly drowning sounds like a great thing to add to crawl.

People here only see the negative things in life, it's kind of sad

duvessa is right in this case. It makes swimming in deep water extremely dangerous.

[John Milferton]

He said that would be, and I quote, "a great thing to add to crawl". Maybe it is you who are negative?

Maybe. I will travel to Héng Shān summit and meditate about it. Meanwhile you can flag aquatic as a bad mutation and implement it.

[Sar]

To be more constructive, IMO there's enough of really underwhelming benemuts (let's pretend this is a benemut and won't kill you, for a moment). There isn't too much water in the game, so I can hardly imagine being excited by it. Level 3 sounds alright, but Mf get better package for free and it's not like you will ever get a level 3 on a mutation anyway.

[John Milferton]

To be more constructive, IMO there's enough of really underwhelming benemuts (let's pretend this is a benemut and won't kill you, for a moment). There isn't too much water in the game, so I can hardly imagine being excited by it. Level 3 sounds alright, but Mf get better package for free and it's not like you will ever get a level 3 on a mutation anyway.

I kept it lower than mf on purpose because people tend to hang themselves up on the numbers too much so I didn't want it to be broken...

We could ramp up the power level (especially on lower ranks) easily...

remember concepts can be changed easily, but numbers are eternal like the mountain stone they are carved in /sarcasm

[Sar]

the concept is that it's a benemut that changes the way you approach water a bit and, as I said, there isn't a whole lot of water in the game

[njvack]

Most of the way it would actually change my interaction with water would be giving me a cheesy way to use ranged attacks on melee threats with no risk. I mean, in the rare cases where there's water and melee threats. Yes, Mf and Op and Te and lev boots let you do that now but adding a mutation for it sounds suboptimal.

Regarding neqoxecs and drowning deaths, I think drowning shouldn't be an instadeath, and allow you a half dozen turns to get a tele off or something.

[PleasingFungus]

The drowning death thing is perfectly solvable; we can just fail to remove mutations in cases where it would instakill (drown) the player. We already do something similar for /poly.

Sar & nvjacks's objections, on the other hand, are a harder problem to solve.

[duvessa]

The drowning death thing is perfectly solvable; we can just fail to remove mutations in cases where it would instakill (drown) the player. We already do something similar for /poly.

So it's perfectly fine that I should walk into deep water before quaffing cure mutation?

[CanOfWorms]

Turn the mutation temporary (like a wretched star's effect) instead?

[duvessa]

I don't think it's worth adding counterintuitive special cases just so you can randomly make other races into merfolk.

[and into]

I can see why the idea of your character being able to go into water might be appealing on some aesthetic level (I always liked Aquaman, sue me), but even if we put aside all the weird or bad things that could result from it, I don't see how it is a particularly good addition. I'd get some enjoyment out of acquiring this mutation before I did Swamp or Shoals, but that's about it, and even if it was just a single-level good mutation ("aquatic") that gave you all the stuff from the level 3 mutation in the OP, it would still be very rare to get it before doing your second rune branch.

There's already a lot of rather underwhelming good mutations; the subset of substantial, good things you hope to get from !benemut is pretty dilute already. I don't see any reason to add this mutation.

[SufferNot]

On the one hand, I support the idea of this because I like the idea of being able to collect items that merfolk dropped in deep water in the Shoals, just in case I want to get some more nets or the glowing bardiche Ilsuiw dropped. However, outside of those rare situations, I can't think of anytime I would care about having this mutation. Sure, you can do cool things with deep water kiting, but by the time you get mutated enough to get gills you've probably either found access to a source of Flight or are strong enough that you don't need to kite in deep water. I think I'd rather see this as an effect on an unrandart (cloak of the manta ray or something like that), because then the game might potentially generate one in a shop or something at a time when my character can actually use it.

It'd probably be a more useful benemut if water happened more often, but outside of shoals/swamp water just stops being a thing. And I don't think that's an element of Crawl that needs to be changed, really.

On further consideration, it could also be a cool mutation for Jivya to give you since all other slimes are amphibious, but that's more of a flavor thing than something that Jivya really needs since you'll probably have cleared the Shoals/Swamp before worshiping him.

[Phillip]

Yeah going into deep water, having a neqoxec remove my gills mutation, and instantly drowning sounds like a great thing to add to crawl.

I think out of all the ways to die, that would be he most humorous.

[bananaken]

Regarding neqoxecs and drowning deaths, I think drowning shouldn't be an instadeath, and allow you a half dozen turns to get a tele off or something.

This is a fine idea, IMO. Another alternative would be to make it so your gills last until you leave deep water. No more insta-death, no potential for spoilery knowledge exploitation, you just become Aquaman

Also, having l3 have a movespeed bonus on shallow water would be kind of interesting with various sources of shallow water (Fedhas, Phial of Floods, Rod of Clouds, etc?), though situational for sure.