Proposal: Yet another equipment god

[4Hooves2Appendages]

This is partly inspired by some previous discussions, like this and that.

The point of this god is to allow players to interact with their equipment in new (and hopefully fun) ways that don't currently exist.

Before we get into the details, I would ask people to please refrain from bikeshedding. Flavour and ability names etc can come later. Numerical detail on power or costs of abilities are definitely flexible and need some discussion.

The conduct is intended to reward things players should want to do anyway (like wearing items). If any of the conduct or abilities might cause excessive swapping/stashing or other annoying behaviour, please point them out!

Further active or passive abilities that manipulate items, but don't overlap too much with other gods are welcome. For example I considered an active weapon delay reduction ability, but decided it was too close to Finesse.

Does every god need some combat abilities or panic buttons? If you think so, then what kind of abilities might fit for this god? (Incidentally, I don't think so.)

A good way to give steady piety later in the game that is related to equipment would be great! I'm not hugely convinced by the wearing artifacts idea, because I'm wary of giving an incentive for excessive item swapping.

Not all races stand to benefit equally from this god. Races with few or strange slot layouts (I'm looking at you Fe/Op) may gain very little. I don't consider this a huge problem (some gods are off completely off limits for some races), but would like to hear opposing viewpoints.

No coding has been done, but depending on the feedback/interest I would (slowly) make it playable. And here's the god:


Equipment god

Getting, making and using good items is fun!

This god interacts with players (almost) exclusively through their equipment. Grants no panic buttons, instead provides a steady, but somewhat random, increase in power.

Likes

Identifying wearable items like jewellery and staffs.
Finding new wearable item types. I.e. Hat, helmet, gloves, great sword, etc.
Filling empty equipment slots for the first time. Granted on joining for filled slots.
Enchanting/Branding weapons or armour.
Making dragon or troll armour.
Visiting armour and weapon shops, for the first time.
Using acquirement on wearable item categories.

Wearing artifacts. Gains piety for wearing artifact armour (incl. shields) while gaining XP. Weapons and jewellery effect is reduced (or maybe eliminated) to avoid annoying swapping.
Alternatively exploration or killing, but that seems less interesting.

Dislikes

Being forgotten.
Destroying items, i.e. throwing into lava.
Being abandoned.
Joining Jiyva!

Wrath

Corrosion in danger situations.
Permanent corrupting of items, adding bad properties, removing good properties or reducing enchantment level.
Destruction of equipped aux items.
Fumble chance for weapon / jewellery swapping? Item falls to the floor.

Abilities

Active

[*-----] Make cursed item normal
Cost: Small Piety
Turns cursed item into normal item of its type. Enchantment level set to 0. Curse property removed. Everything else stays.

[**----] Add random positive property to armour
Cost: Small Piety
Adds 1 random positive property to armour or aux armour and turns item into randart. No artifacts.

[***---] Upgrade weapon type
Cost: Medium Piety
Enchantment level, ego stay the same. No artifacts.
I.e. Spear -> Trident, Short sword -> Cutlass

[****--] Merge two items of jewellery
Cost: Medium Piety
Two items from the same slot get combined into one randart. Keeps properties of both items.
No artifacts.

[*****-] Remove bad property from randart
Cost: Large Piety
Removes 1 random negative property from a randart. No fixedarts. Can be used multiple times.

[******] Add good property to randart
Cost: Large Piety
Add 1 random positive property to randart. No fixedarts. Can be used multiple times. Maximum six.

Passive

[*-----] Increases power of enchant armour and weapon scrolls.

[**----] Increase enchantment level by 1-5 (depending on piety) of body armour and weapon, up to that item type's maximum +2.

[***---] Reduce encumbrance rating by 2.

[****--] Can use enchant armour and weapon, and brand weapon scrolls on randarts.

[*****-] rCorr.

[Rast]

[***---] Upgrade weapon type

This is really good, and you can do it repeatedly. All non-artifact weapons eventually become the top weapon in their class if you want, or the top 1-handed weapon in their class if you prefer a shield. And you can build up to it as you train your weapon skill, keeping yourself always at min delay for the current weapon stats.

[****--] Merge two items of jewellery

Much stronger than it seems. You can't make anything as good as good artifact jewrlery, but until you find that good artifact jewelry or win, you effectively have 4 ring slots and two amulet slots.

[*****-] Remove bad property from randart
[******] Add good property to randart

Combining these means that as soon as you find the first randart, of any quality other than an unusable weapon type, your equipment slots will fill up with ridiculous randarts just as fast as you can gain piety.

Also I see you have good passives.

[kuniqs]

The octopode god?

[Ferociousdragon]

How about a god that promotes juggernautism? Get and kill with the heaviest armors and the heaviest weapons to get bonuses. Or perhaps a god that promotes agility, and gives piety for killing enemies with lighter armor and lighter weapons? Both would involve unique treatment of certain equipment.

How about one whose piety increase is based around inventory emptiness, or perhaps one that promotes hoarding?

[ion_frigate]

A god of limited carrying capacity (like 26 slots) sounds fairly interesting, and I think actually has been suggested before. It also might make for an interesting species feature.

I can't see how a god that encourages filling up your inventory would be at all fun - that's just what players do normally anyway, but encouraging people to collect junk before they find 52 useful items is no good. The other sense of hoarding (never destroying items, i.e. no consumables) has already been considered (for a species, I believe), and I seem to recall the consensus was that would just be too hard to be much fun.

[Lasty]

This god gives a lot of bonuses to your equipment but very little active bonus for worship, making it strongly incentivize abandoning the god after you get some goodies. Degrading the player's equipment as wrath doesn't ameliorate this issue, as the player can choose to wear lesser gear until wrath times out -- after getting amped-up goodies from the god, they should have plenty of excellent gear to choose from.

Also, this god breaks the rule that you cannot alter artefacts, which I think is seen as a hard rule.

Overall, I feel like this is not so much a god idea as a wishlist of ways to create super-equipment. Making "I want super-equipment" into a god is going to require addressing all the abusability issues that super-equipment creates, offer a compelling experience, and create interesting situations or choices beyond "after worshipping this god for a while, your character has absurdly good equipment."

[Kate]

I don't think allowing a god to alter artefacts would necessarily be out of the question (but agree that this particular proposal of "all your items are passively better, and also you can make them actively better" looks really uninteresting).

[jejorda2]

Upgrading a weapon's base type should make it so every other weapon of that class that you touch Is destroyed. So you can upgrade a halberd to a glaive, but when you find a bardiche you won't be able to use it. If you upgrade a dire flail to a great mace and then find a good shield, you have to switch to axes or long blades to use a one-hander.

[tasonir]

A god of limited carrying capacity (like 26 slots) sounds fairly interesting, and I think actually has been suggested before. It also might make for an interesting species feature.

It was euquanauque, the god of symmetry, which restricted slots to 26 (in some versions of the proposal). I don't think 26 slots is a good idea - I already struggle to fit things into 52 slots.

[4Hooves2Appendages]

I don't like the idea of equipment slot limitations, and I also doubt that it would get implemented.

So far the discussion has thrown up some useful pointers, thanks!

1) There needs to be an reason to continue worshiping the god when the player deems their equipment to be good enough. I suppose there are two basic ways to do this, either by punishing abandonment, or by offering incentives to stick around. Otherwise the god turns into a scummy swapping option. My thoughts on the matter are that abandonment could destroy (or significantly devalue) the items that were modified by this god.

2) The god isn't interesting enough. I guess different people have different views on what makes something fun or interesting. To me it's hard to argue that the equipment god would be less interesting than some other gods, like Oka for example. And I like Oka, because sometimes playing a god that doesn't require a lot of interaction is nice. But I accept that there might be a significant majority of people who find active combat abilities more interesting than equipment tweaking.

Initially I considered a conduct where the equipment god doesn't really like consumables. For example using abilities costs piety and potions or scrolls. Or using consumables is punished directly, although that would require some seriously strong advantages to balance. Perhaps this could be expanded to other non-equippable items like wands, evocers, or ehm, food.

This god could potentially also interact with armour/weapon slots, for example a piety cost or punishment for swapping a god-item to a non-god item, or even any swapping. Or perhaps the god could lock certain item slots (semi-)permanently, making swapping impossible.

For active abilities I considered making monsters drop equipment, or being able to take them with an invocation. Alternatively, the god could allow 10 aut item swapping of armour for a piety cost.

Which of these things would you consider to make the god more interesting and therefore worth exploring?

I wouldn't necessarily insist on artifact modification, but it would fit the equipment god theme very well...

[mps]

The point about abandonment being too obvious/easy can be addressed as follows: Make wrath break all of the items made/modified with the god's abilities.

The upgrade weapon type seems strong, but not wildly stronger than Trog gifts (for melee weapons), with which you often net top tier weapons by the midgame. If this is supposed to work on ranged weapons too... probably too powerful.

Random positive armour characteristic seems pretty powerful in the early game, since it sounds like you mean for it to be usable on branded armor. Again, such an ability should be costly.

Improvements to artifacts would have to be costly and limited as well.

It seems to me that such strong effects require some kind of currency beyond just piety. I would suggest that the god offer exchanges for items, like you'd get from a treasure trove, and that the abilities not be available on demand, but rather like Vehumet spell gifts or Ru sacrifices. The exchange might be an offer of an upgrade of weapon type, armor improvement, or whatever in exchange for some other item or items. The power of the offered effects and their frequency might increase with piety.

Some of the passives are probably too much. Reducing encumbrance seems way too good. Enchant armour/weapon and brand scrolls on randarts is also insanely powerful. This is a god that would produce characters with maxed resistances and 60 AC by the end of a lair branch. I mean, with encumbrance reduction and the add positive effect ability, you could make endgame quality dragon armor before entering a lair branch nearly every game.

Still, I think it's a fun idea. If the passives were toned down and the costs/format of the abilities were massaged, it might work.

edit: Some have said this sounds uninteresting, but I have to disagree. A god like this would improve the tempo of the game in that it would be much less necessary to sort through tons of equipment or carefully consider what to wear, since a huge amount of useless junk, e.g. most randarts, becomes useful. Improving a couple of mediocre artifacts from lair branches, especially removing negative qualities, gets you high quality gear early and far more reliably than chance. The encumbrance thing is interesting too, allowing considerably improved options for hybrids.

[lobf]

How about if wrath summoned dancing weapons a-la Hall of Blades?

[and into]

I liked pubby's smith god quite a bit.

I do think that improving equipment over time is a lot better than, say, the Okawaru method of boosting equipment, and could be fun in its own right. Lasty might have shortchanged that notion a bit, but overall I think he's right—without some tactical abilities, I imagine the god could become stale pretty fast.

[Curio]

Liking this concept.
Few notes though:
1) Lack of flavor.
I think God of smith , crafts or both is appropriate. Anvil-shaped altars and all that.

2) Lack of active tactical abilities
I would propose "Disarm" of sorts.
Teleports weapon and armor of chosen target to the tile you standing on. Very effective against humanoid uniques and mobs, useless against everything else.

3) Overpowered
Some abilities and combination of passive abilities are very strong. Needs a nerf or/and something to limit it to avoid excess scumming.

4) Lack of usability of Invocation
Invocation is already underused skill with gods that don't use it at all or gods that require a little investment in it. Abilities should adequately scale with Invocations, I think.

My take on the concept:
Piety gain:
Right now this god feels more like "clothier" or "fashion" god, not "forge" or "craftsman" god
- Wearing god-made/improved equipment while exploring and/or gaining XP - stable little to moderate(at max slots) piety gain.
A take on original proposal. this creates incentive to upgrade a bit different slots to gain more piety, rather than focus on one item. Piety gain is pretty minor in a given time period,so swapping items is pointless.
- Iimproving items with god abilities. medium to high piety gain (depending on ability and cost). Crafting abilities does not require piety, but rather ingots. It is natural that god rewards you for improving your own equipment with his favor. About ingots - read below.
- Melting non-god-made/improved weapons, armour and jewelery. A chance for minor piety gain.
Ok, bear with me here. It is item sacrifice but with a twist. Saccing an appropriate item have a minor chance to grant piety and much better chance to grant an ingot. Ingots stack up to 999 so you always need only one slot for them. Ingot cost rises if you try to upgrade item already upgraded by god abilities, so here's another incentive to upgrade ALL your equipment more or less evenly, rather than focus on one overpowered item.
Appropriate items from higher chance of ingot/piety gain to lesser: Jewelery, Armor, Weapons, Helmets, Shields.
Inappropriate items: Cloaks, boots, gloves, robes, hats, clubs, staves etc. unless they enchanted or have a brand/ego.
Every level of enchantment and ego property increase a chance of ingot generation.
Only one ingot generated per item, with almost guaranteed jewelery sacrifice and very low chance with ego cloaks,boots etc.
For convenience and situational use worshipers granted an ability on joining god.
"Stockpile" - summons under the caster's feet every sacrificeable item on the ground in a 3-tile radius. Does not summons items from under the monster's feet.

Piety loss:
- Destroying equipment.
- Decaying over time (optional)

Wrath:
- Outright destruction of every {godly} item in the game. Including those stashed in L:2 you cheeky bastard.
- Temporary (until wrath ends) degrading of equipped items.

Abilities:
I would drop entirely "Make cursed item normal", "Increases power of enchant armour and weapon scrolls."

[Jushak]

The concept is interesting, but I feel the downsides/restrictions aren't really that well defined. With that in mind, my take on it:

Idea in short:
- Equipment god that favours dedication to and honing one's skill with chosen equipment.
- Slow growth in power for equipment.
- Chance/piety-based upgrading of equipment via item sacrifice.
- Equipment-related special ability/abilities beyond simple upgrading, real differences between chosen weapons.
- Avoiding "gear & goodbye"-problem via prohibited item changes & god-item destruction when excommunicated.

Piety gain:
- Using dedicated items. Think Ashenzari & bound items.
- Using/learning weapon you're most skilled with.
- Sacrificing Enchant Weapon/Armour/Acquirement/Brand etc. scrolls?

Piety loss:
- Using weapon types other than the one you're most skilled with?
- Being forgotten (off-set by the use of same items)

Abilities:
- Dedicate weapon. Turns the chosen/equipped weapon into blank artifact with no abilities. The artifact is blank unbranded +0 artifact weapon of the same type as original. No piety cost?
- Dedicate armour. As above, but for armour.
- Dedicate jewellery(?). As above, but for jewelry.
- Sacrificing weapon (of same type?): piety-based chance of integrating one or more abilities from the sacrificed weapon to wielded dedicated weapon, possibilities including: +1 enchantment (if superior), brand, random property in case of artifact weapon. No duplicate effects. In case of stat bonus, increase stat bonus of the same kind given by the dedicated item by 1. In case of new stat bonus, start from 1. Possibly have sacrifice reduce piety to <amount>, with extra piety above it increasing the chances/number of traits gained. For example, sacrifice returns you to **** piety, ***** gives chance to gain 2 traits, ****** gives chance to gain 3 traits.
- Sacrifice armour (of same type?): as above, but for armor-slot.
- Sacrifice jewellery(?): as above, but for ring/amulet.
- Weapon soul. Weapon-specific, low-piety cost ability that works differently for different weapons. Either weapon category (i.e. maces & flails, polearms etc.) based or weapon type (i.e. whip, dagger etc.) based. This - along with race - should be different enough for every possibility to be a deciding factor on what weapon to use with this god. Possibly limited by other equipment, i.e. minimum and maximum encumberance. Possible examples: sword + very light armor -> Raiju-like lightning charge towards & behind target enemy. Spear -> weaker version of Lehudib's Crystal Spear. Staves -> knock all surrounding enemies back X squares. Possibly/alternatively multiple different abilities unlocked based on piety.

Excommunication:
- Unequipping any of the artifacts created by abilities of this god. Unequipping any of the god ability-created artifacts destroys all of them.

Wrath:
- (Temporary?) reduction in highest weapon skill
- (Temporary?) reduction in highest defensive skill (possibly only armour/shields, since dodging is not item-related per say)
- Other item/equipment related punishment?

Thoughts?