The Tavern

This is kind of annoying to me, why can't we just receive it via the ability menu? I understand the need to roleplay but it's annoying and especially awkward for Lugonu when her gift is of dubious value (It's certainly pretty annoying to use).

Edit: Now actually in GDD

I don't see why this should be on CYC.

The voyage back to D:4 temple seems completely pointless to me. Haven't given this a thought before I saw this post but at least I don't see a single reason why it could not be changed. Well, other reasons than so-called roleplaying aspect ts mentioned.

Backtracking to get your blessing means that speedrunners can't do it and it costs some score to everyone else. That's the only cost.

Make the ability create an altar at which you can pray to bless the weapon.

Lugonu's a lot better than TSO and kiku in this regard: You can corrupt other gods' altars with the corrupt ability. Granted, this sometimes destroys the altar, so it's best to do where you can hit more than one.

I forgot about the corrupt thing. I guess you have to sacrifice the ability to worship some gods, but if you're taking lugonu's 6* you probably aren't going to change gods.

The last couple of times I've played an AK I've had a Jiyva altar conveniently in Lair to corrupt, so no backtracking was required.

If creating the altar is too much, maybe TSO and Kiku could also convert another god's altar?

My point is that there's no need to trek through the abyss or anything to find the altar. I had thought that this might've been a feature to prevent distortion from being too easy to get since it is considered powerful. But, this isn't the case obviously.

I think distortion would work better as a temporary activated god ability anyway, since you really only want it in niche cases. And remove the warp weapon spell.

xentronium wrote:And remove the warp weapon spell.

No. Damn you for even considering it.

xentronium wrote:I think distortion would work better as a temporary activated god ability anyway, since you really only want it in niche cases. And remove the warp weapon spell.

I had thought that warp weapon might be better as a Lugonu ability, actually. Distortion is pretty annoying and not always desirable for a lot of characters.

Well the nice thing about warp weapon is you only have a distortion weapon when you want one.

For a while now, Logunu has suppressed the dangerous effects of unwielding distortion, so you can use ' to only have a distortion weapon when you want one.

Requesting a move to GDD for this thread.

Mod note: Moved to GDD. Please keep discussion on the original topic now that the thread has been moved here.

Just wanted to support the suggestion upthread of allowing kiku and TSO followers to produce altars for branding use. Something like cleansing flame + evil god altar = TSO altar and/or torment + good god altar = kiku altar would be thematic and considerably more convenient than the current situation.

The drawback to kiku/TSO converting altars is that it's spoilery, and doesn't merit an extra line in the ability's description. Imagine: "Activating cleansing flame while standing on an evil god's altar will convert it to an altar to The Shining One." A new player would think: "What? Why? Does it give me piety, or some other bonus? Oh, it's just for blessing your weapon... but hey, there's an altar in the dungeon/temple, why not just go there?" This kind of overloading of a mechanic is pointless and bad for the game, although experienced players wouldn't mind it of course.

All of this is not a problem with Lugonu's Corrupt because Lugonu's altars are hard to find.

Pollen_Golem wrote:The drawback to kiku/TSO converting altars is that it's spoilery, and doesn't merit an extra line in the ability's description. Imagine: "Activating cleansing flame while standing on an evil god's altar will convert it to an altar to The Shining One." A new player would think: "What? Why? Does it give me piety, or some other bonus? Oh, it's just for blessing your weapon... but hey, there's an altar in the dungeon/temple, why not just go there?" This kind of overloading of a mechanic is pointless and bad for the game, although experienced players wouldn't mind it of course.

All of this is not a problem with Lugonu's Corrupt because Lugonu's altars are hard to find.

The suggestion (well, mine at least) is that you can create an altar with which to bless your weapon at 6*. It dosen't involve converting altars at all, you simply create one where you are standing. This way the flavor/RP concept is preserved while avoiding things like trekking upstairs to D:4 while getting interrupted 10 times by goblin respawns or having your piety decay to 5.9999999 stars and getting frustrated. How is this overloading?

Thanks, I was responding to mps. Overloading is, you have an extra active ability for no initially apparent reason. Why not instead:
1. have gods randomly drop altars as you explore, like Xom.
2. spawn an altar when you get to 160 (or ~180?) piety.
3. have a Kiku altar spawn on your tile or somewhere in LOS when you invoke torment.
4. have angel/daeva allies randomly spawn TSO altars.

Just making it an ability would be good.

An ability would be great I believe, but why not look at the restriction of once per game? A high piety cost with the ability to use it multiple times wouldn't be very different from the current status quo, right?

Well, Kiku presents you with a very important choice, so it would be quite different if you could pain-brand multiple weapons and get the Necronomicon too. I don't think there are any strategic god abilities that cost piety, except Gozag and maybe Nemelex.

Obviously, from a purely gameplay perspective a plain ability is best. However, I really like the altar flavour (it is much easier to take out flavour than to inject it, and a lot of flavour has been lost). That's why I like tabstorm's suggestion much better. It's basically the same thing, but the flavour is kept.

Remove holy wrath and pain brands. Replace TSO and Kiku branding with passive ability that gives +slaying in the relevant circumstances. Pain is already basically slaying based on necromancy skill, and holy wrath is currently terribly designed in that it is the best multiplier for certain monsters and utterly worthless for all other monsters. There is no need to go back to an altar earlier in the game because you just get the bonus passively.

Distortion brands can stay, just because they're so much fun in the hands of monsters. Holy wrath and pain don't do anything special in monster hands, just more damage.

dpeg wrote:Obviously, from a purely gameplay perspective a plain ability is best. However, I really like the altar flavour (it is much easier to take out flavour than to inject it, and a lot of flavour has been lost). That's why I like tabstorm's suggestion much better. It's basically the same thing, but the flavour is kept.

I think the problem is that the "Stone Soup" part works really well for game play, but really badly for flavour. Look at ADOM: a game that's been largely written by one person, and it has far better and much more consistent flavour than anything that Crawl can offer. Similarly, other community/committee-developed games tend to have bad or at best mixed flavour: NetHack and its variants come to mind.

It's not that you need one genius, it's just that you need one voice. To that end, why not have a developer who writes or approves all flavour text, much like ontoclasm does with the artwork? I think that's the closest a community-developed game can get to having a single writer. It doesn't help with flavour elements that had to be removed because they adversely affected gameplay (e.g. sacrificing items at altars), but I think a single 'flavour-master' could really help a lot in injecting flavour into game elements as the other devs come up with them.

Instead of a separate ability solely to make an altar, just make every Corrupt guarantee at least one permanent Lugonu altar among the terrain that gets placed, regardless of whether there are any other gods' altars around. That wouldn't be spoilery like having to corrupt other altars is, because you could see the effect every time.

In the same vein, TSO's Summon Divine Warrior could create an altar under the angel/daeva that gets placed. That makes sense: the altar is a connection to TSO's heavenly realm through which the angels pass. To avoid clutter from multiple invocations of Summon Divine Warrior, it could refrain from creating multiple altars if there's already an altar in LOS, and just try to create additional angels as close to the existing altar as possible.

Kiku's Corpse Delivery could work the same way, creating a single altar through which the corpses appear from multiple invocations of the ability.

Do altars prevent things like water nymphs making water tiles, or thorn hunters making plants? It seems like there is probably some scummy case where it would make sense to create altars for a tactical advantage.

I was under the impression that the altar corruption bit was part of the luguno power description. (Haven't checked lately, admittedly.)

It's not spoilery if the game tells you you can do it. Just add a line to the respective abilities' descriptions. You preserve the neato flavor of altars for branding w/ clean gameplay.

As to why a new player would or wouldn't think to do it... If you're happy to go to an old TSO/kiku altar, that's still allowed. If you care about making the trip, e.g. if you're speedrunning, the description tells you you can do it. When you use torment, you'll notice your piety going down, no matter how green a player you are. Cleansing flame perhaps less so.

It's not even about speedruns (which are dead because no cTele), it's just that marching up to D:4 is really annoying because of the goblin respawns. I probably wouldn't care about going upstairs if we didn't have respawns.

jejorda2 wrote:Do altars prevent things like water nymphs making water tiles, or thorn hunters making plants? It seems like there is probably some scummy case where it would make sense to create altars for a tactical advantage.

Limit the altar creation to one per level.

On topic, I agree with Tabstorm, insofar as I think the 6* blessing abilities would be totally fine if it weren't for pointless monster spawning. Assuming there's no real appetite to remove that, however, I'd be fine with just making a new 6* ability for those gods called "Consecration" or something, that creates an altar and applies the blessing/gifts the book.

ion_frigate wrote:I think the problem is that the "Stone Soup" part works really well for game play, but really badly for flavour. Look at ADOM: a game that's been largely written by one person, and it has far better and much more consistent flavour than anything that Crawl can offer. Similarly, other community/committee-developed games tend to have bad or at best mixed flavour: NetHack and its variants come to mind.

I'm not sure what qualifies as "objectively great flavor," but in my opinion, DCSS and NetHack both have excellent flavor. Flavor isn't all writing and story and imagery; it's also atmosphere, mood, etc., a gestalt of everything going on. The "fantasy kitchen sink" design of Crawl and NetHack has its own charms.

I'd be all in favor of somebody setting up some kind of tzar of flavor on the devteam, but that's a huge task, and one that would be endlessly controversial no matter who took care of it. Coming up with a compelling new Crawl flavor sounds difficult. Original stories are hard; look at ToME4.

The Tavern

Weapon blessing at 6*

Weapon blessing at 6*

Re: Weapon blessing at 6*

Re: Weapon blessing at 6*

Re: Weapon blessing at 6*

Re: Weapon blessing at 6*

Re: Weapon blessing at 6*

Re: Weapon blessing at 6*

Re: Weapon blessing at 6*

Re: Weapon blessing at 6*

Re: Weapon blessing at 6*

Re: Weapon blessing at 6*

Re: Weapon blessing at 6*

Re: Weapon blessing at 6*

Re: Weapon blessing at 6*

Re: Weapon blessing at 6*

Re: Weapon blessing at 6*

Re: Weapon blessing at 6*

Re: Weapon blessing at 6*

Re: Weapon blessing at 6*

Re: Weapon blessing at 6*

Re: Weapon blessing at 6*

Re: Weapon blessing at 6*

Re: Weapon blessing at 6*

Re: Weapon blessing at 6*

Re: Weapon blessing at 6*

Re: Weapon blessing at 6*

Re: Weapon blessing at 6*

Re: Weapon blessing at 6*

Re: Weapon blessing at 6*

Re: Weapon blessing at 6*

Re: Weapon blessing at 6*