Sunday, 28th December 2014, 03:06
Enslavement/god interaction
Currently if you try to enslave a monster that is disliked by your god in any of a few ways (wrong holiness or simply has an evil/fiery/spell ability) and pass the MR check, it will fail anyway and give the ridiculously obtuse message "The [monster] is repulsed!"
I think this restriction is very spoilery and probably bad even if you give it a useful message:
- it's not very consistent: good gods won't let you enslave a monster with an evil spell, but are fine with letting you enslave a monster with an evil item such as a vampiric weapon or wand of draining; TSO is fine with letting you enslave monsters with poison stuff
- it's very difficult to know whether a monster is evil or not without spoilers, especially since monsters with multiple spellbooks could only sometimes be evil (or fiery!), also it's another piece of completely uninteresting data for players to keep track of
- if you remember it exists, it has almost no gameplay effect (and if you don't know about it then you maybe die trying to enslave Nessos with the wrong god, and that's about it)
It makes sense for good gods to object to enslaving demonic/undead monsters since they actually consistently hate them, but this is not really the case for any of the other restrictions - you aren't given any reward for killing evil monsters, Dithmenos doesn't care if an enslaved monster possesses and uses a fiery item. Trog does more consistently dislike anything with an actual spell but I still find it quite unintuitive and difficult to remember; if they hadn't been removed I would point out that he was fine with you summoning spell-ful monsters with cards and rods.
If you want to keep the flavour you could even give good gods a blanket opposition to enslavement but I personally don't think that would be better for gameplay than removing the restrictions for things other than holiness. It's also a bit weird if they still allow summoning.
If the mechanical status quo is kept then it should at least be like pacifying mindless monsters where you are notified that it won't work and they aren't auto-targeted. (also that needs to happen for trying to hex magic immune monsters in general)
I think this restriction is very spoilery and probably bad even if you give it a useful message:
- it's not very consistent: good gods won't let you enslave a monster with an evil spell, but are fine with letting you enslave a monster with an evil item such as a vampiric weapon or wand of draining; TSO is fine with letting you enslave monsters with poison stuff
- it's very difficult to know whether a monster is evil or not without spoilers, especially since monsters with multiple spellbooks could only sometimes be evil (or fiery!), also it's another piece of completely uninteresting data for players to keep track of
- if you remember it exists, it has almost no gameplay effect (and if you don't know about it then you maybe die trying to enslave Nessos with the wrong god, and that's about it)
It makes sense for good gods to object to enslaving demonic/undead monsters since they actually consistently hate them, but this is not really the case for any of the other restrictions - you aren't given any reward for killing evil monsters, Dithmenos doesn't care if an enslaved monster possesses and uses a fiery item. Trog does more consistently dislike anything with an actual spell but I still find it quite unintuitive and difficult to remember; if they hadn't been removed I would point out that he was fine with you summoning spell-ful monsters with cards and rods.
If you want to keep the flavour you could even give good gods a blanket opposition to enslavement but I personally don't think that would be better for gameplay than removing the restrictions for things other than holiness. It's also a bit weird if they still allow summoning.
If the mechanical status quo is kept then it should at least be like pacifying mindless monsters where you are notified that it won't work and they aren't auto-targeted. (also that needs to happen for trying to hex magic immune monsters in general)
- For this message the author duvessa has received thanks: 12
- and into, Arrhythmia, Bloax, Brannock, crate, Lasty, nago, One-Eyed Jack, rockygargoyle, Shard1697 and 2 more users
