God Concept: Ukozan, God of Close Combat

[milski]

Ukozan is a god of close combat, believing that violence should take place within arm's reach. Ukozan supports those that would wade into the fray and slaughter their enemies, and hates cowards that attack their enemies from range, use others to guard them, or let poison do their dirty work. Followers of Ukozan are encouraged to charge forth into battle rather than wait for their enemies to come at them, and gain tremendous powers to force enemies into the fray.

Ukozan likes:

Killing monsters. Optional: Additional piety for summoners, ranged monsters, or poisonous monsters.

Ukozan dislikes:

Damaging enemies not adjacent to the player.
Inflicting poison on enemies (design note: Prevents kiting).
Allies/Summoning.
Piety decays with time.

Abilities:

-: Choked grip (passive): While worshipping Ukozan, polearms have one tile range.
-: Charge (passive): You move faster when moving towards the closest enemy monster, scaling down to 0.5 auts with piety. Does not take effect if you are already next to a monster.
*: Taunt (Active, 3 MP, low piety): Target monster makes an MR check against invocations. If they fail, they will move towards you until in melee range, then attack as normal. Breaks instantly if you move away from the monster.
**: Danger Close (passive): You are immune to your own damaging spells, and AoE spells are reduced to a 3x3 square maximum.
***: Resonating strikes (passive): As you remain in high tension combat, you gain a growing bonus to slaying and wizardry/spellpower.
****: Bulwark of Offense (passive): On turns you attack enemies, take decreased damage depending upon how far away the source is; damage is not reduced in melee and significantly reduced at max range.
*****: Duel (Active, 8 MP, very high piety): Challenges a monster within melee range to a duel. For the duration of the duel, you are unable to damage and immune to damage from any monster besides the one dueled. Moving away from the target, not attacking the target, or killing the target ends the duel, and it times out after some time. Killing the target grants Might, Agility, Brilliance, and healing. Duel (max) duration, buff duration, and is healing based on the difficulty of the target monster and it's current HP.

Why Ukozan?

Ukozan is unique among challenge gods in Crawl by severely limiting how you can deal damage, without significantly affecting your options outside of direct combat.

Ukozan has several unique (to Crawl) abilities that complement his core theme differentiating Ukozan gameplay from a tabber of Trog or Okawaru. Additionally, the focus on entering and staying in melee combat differs from other gods that offer damage in the form of spammable buffs, summons, or direct damage.

Ukozan's abilities are beneficial for most characters, even characters that wouldn't traditionally enter melee combat. This can promote interesting gameplay, especially on hybrids who can use weapons to damage tough enemies until they can pull out high level blasting spells.

(minor) Ukozan has a fairly distinct flavor/theme compared to other gods with significant restrictions.

(joke) We don't have a "U" god yet.

Potential issues/things that can change:

He's possibly too strong for characters that are already inclined to simply tab through enemies. However, I do not think his overall power would be much higher than Okawaru or Trog in that respect, nor do his benefits to pure tabbing characters overlap with them too significantly.

He overlaps with Vehumet in terms of "make blasty spells better." However, I wanted Ukozan to support hybrids, not just martial characters. I considered an active that simply cast the same spell/attacked multiple times in the time it took to use one action, but that overlaps with Dithmenos (less since Dith doesn't completely double spells, but still).

Duel overlaps with Zin a fair amount. However, you are still at risk for damage and the duration should be relatively short even against strong monsters. It could probably stand to apply Stasis as well, if we accept that it prevents Hasted Dueling.

Decreased damage from enemies at range has scummy interactions with popcorn and teleports.

Summons and poisons are mostly restricted because they break the "fight in melee" concept no matter how you apply them. If there is a workaround or anything else that can't work with melee range, let me know.

It promotes a playstyle that is generally terrible, but that's the point.

[reaver]

I don't think Tension is what you want for Bulwark, it's pretty unstable and easily affected by weird things such as monster becoming invisible.

I like some the abilities (Taunt, Charge although it might be exploitable) but I'm not sure if making every ability revolve around close combat is a good idea.

[milski]

I don't think Tension is what you want for Bulwark, it's pretty unstable and easily affected by weird things such as monster becoming invisible.

I like some the abilities (Taunt, Charge although it might be exploitable) but I'm not sure if making every ability revolve around close combat is a good idea.

I was considering making resonating strikes "as long as you continue to attack without interruption" but the problem is that you can lose the bonus if you kill a monster and nothing else is nearby. Tension is pretty fiddly, yeah.

I tried to make Charge as non exploitable as possible. Since it only benefits you moving towards the closest monster, I cannot really think of any situations where it's exploitable aside from fearing popcorn to chase it down in a direction away from a dangerous monster at range. And even that exploitation is so weak as to be meaningless.

As for not-close-combat: I considered an active form of charge where you performed melee attacks against everything up to a specified target, but I figured that giving a pseudo-ranged attack felt like a cop out. Additionally, several potentially relevant passives (mimicking actions, passive rMsl, healing/strengthening on kills) already exist, though a passive and modified Song of Slaying might be interesting.

[dpeg]

Interesting concept, I think the basic premise can work well.

Some comments, not all of them random:

1. Instead of disliking damage against non-adjacent monsters, such damage could be reduced/prevented. That might make for less aggravating gameplay, especially with casters. (This is already what you do with AoE spells.)

2. Charge ability: if this is to go in, if monster(s) with charge movement boost are around, they have to be marked on the screen.

3. Resonating strike: ideally, this is not necessary. Obviously, the god can become arbitrarily strong if we ramp up the slaying/spellpower bonus enough. But it'd be better if damage is in the responsibility of the player, and the god helps in other, less numerical ways. (And there's the problem with tension that reaver already mentioned. Tension is good for some things, but it should not be part of a core mechanic. DS guardian and Xom are perhaps the natural boundaries.)

4. Bulwark of Offense: again, this is very numerical. I suggest the following replacement: for monsters attacking you at range, there is a chance (depending on range and piety) that they fail. "The deep elf sorceror throws up his arms." If this happens, they instead (try to) move a step closer to you. That way, you also have reduced incoming damage, but now it is more clear: rather than some magical fraction of damage not coming in, on-screen you see monsters forfeiting their damage action and instead coming closer to you (which is doubly good). I think this effect should kick in early on, and get stronger as you build up piety.

5. I think I see what you want with Duel, but I am not sure it'll work as expected. For example, I can imagine that often you will duel not the strongest opponent but rather someone weakish, and then use the safety of the dual phase to heal, buff etc.

Some ideas:

A. It might be interesting to give all melee attacks cleaving (passively). This can work continuously, for example at * piety you attack the target and the two adjacent neighbouring squares, and at ***** you have full range cleaving. This could extend to other forms of attack (but note that the conflict of interest with the AoE range restriction).

B. Other interesting powers might be: reflection of all ranged damage; being able to jump over adjacent monsters (checkers-style).

[milski]

Interesting concept, I think the basic premise can work well.

Some comments, not all of them random:

1. Instead of disliking damage against non-adjacent monsters, such damage could be reduced/prevented. That might make for less aggravating gameplay, especially with casters. (This is already what you do with AoE spells.)

2. Charge ability: if this is to go in, if monster(s) with charge movement boost are around, they have to be marked on the screen.

3. Resonating strike: ideally, this is not necessary. Obviously, the god can become arbitrarily strong if we ramp up the slaying/spellpower bonus enough. But it'd be better if damage is in the responsibility of the player, and the god helps in other, less numerical ways. (And there's the problem with tension that reaver already mentioned. Tension is good for some things, but it should not be part of a core mechanic. DS guardian and Xom are perhaps the natural boundaries.)

4. Bulwark of Offense: again, this is very numerical. I suggest the following replacement: for monsters attacking you at range, there is a chance (depending on range and piety) that they fail. "The deep elf sorceror throws up his arms." If this happens, they instead (try to) move a step closer to you. That way, you also have reduced incoming damage, but now it is more clear: rather than some magical fraction of damage not coming in, on-screen you see monsters forfeiting their damage action and instead coming closer to you (which is doubly good). I think this effect should kick in early on, and get stronger as you build up piety.

5. I think I see what you want with Duel, but I am not sure it'll work as expected. For example, I can imagine that often you will duel not the strongest opponent but rather someone weakish, and then use the safety of the dual phase to heal, buff etc.

Some ideas:

A. It might be interesting to give all melee attacks cleaving (passively). This can work continuously, for example at * piety you attack the target and the two adjacent neighbouring squares, and at ***** you have full range cleaving. This could extend to other forms of attack (but note that the conflict of interest with the AoE range restriction).

B. Other interesting powers might be: reflection of all ranged damage; being able to jump over adjacent monsters (checkers-style).

1. I think that preventing damage is probably better, but I figured if that was the design philosophy then most gods with conducts would simply prevent you from using X.

2. Agreed.

3. I wanted Ukozan to have some sort of direct offensive bonus, but I agree that it's a pretty numerical way to do it.

4. This is a lot better and fits the brawl theme, and walking towards you probably keeps it from stepping on Ru's toes.

A. I considered this very strongly, but I didn't want to make a god passive that overlapped with just picking up an axe. Still worth considering.

B. Reflection of ranged damage has the problem of slightly incentivizing keeping monsters at bay and giving some ranged damage, both of which I would prefer Ukozan not do. The Checkers style leap would be interesting, or you could make it forcibly swap your position with a monster's (probably don't allow drowning monsters using it).

E: For Duel, the idea was that all the bonuses would be extremely short/minor if you won a duel against popcorn, and that the duration would be so short that you couldn't duel popcorn and magic dart it for minor regen.

[Lasty]

Re: charge, you'd need to find a reasonable way to mark all the tiles you can move faster on that works in both console and tiles, and you'd need to come up with a relatively sane way of considering what's "towards" a monster. Marking these tiles would, I think, be necessary, but also cause a lot of visual clutter.

[Pollen_Golem]

that sounds like the least problematic thing - Obsidian axe already does it and you can see where you're allowed to go and where you're not

[milski]

Re: charge, you'd need to find a reasonable way to mark all the tiles you can move faster on that works in both console and tiles, and you'd need to come up with a relatively sane way of considering what's "towards" a monster. Marking these tiles would, I think, be necessary, but also cause a lot of visual clutter.

Wouldn't the Fear visual (or a reversed one) work pretty well? With square LoS move closer is basically "take an action that ends with you less moves away from the enemy," which is pretty intuitive.

[Velikolepni]

I really like many of the ideas floating around here. Would it however not be great to combine it with the "martial arts" god suggested here
https://crawl.develz.org/tavern/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=17938?

In particular, the idea of wildly fluctuating piety appeals to me greatly.

[Lasty]

Well, ideally it wouldn't be the same as the visual for fear, mesmerize, or obsidian axe, because you could have all of those effects at the same time as having faster travel tiles.

[Can-ned Food]

I lean towards simply modifying Trog to have him “somewhat dislike” too much armor or use of missile attacks (gives the player some flexibility while not changing too much). IMHO.
How many gods do players need? As the interest is not in developing a plot, I suspect that too much specialization with gods, and the resultant plethora of gods, is really unnecessary and would result in several gods being rarely used.

[milski]

I lean towards simply modifying Trog to have him “somewhat dislike” too much armor or use of missile attacks (gives the player some flexibility while not changing too much). IMHO.
How many gods do players need? As the interest is not in developing a plot, I suspect that too much specialization with gods, and the resultant plethora of gods, is really unnecessary and would result in several gods being rarely used.

I disagree with this suggestion and this philosophy.

For the suggestion with Trog, slightly nerfing his conduct annoys players without actually creating a unique experience.

For the philosophy, as long as all of the distinct options are interesting, there's no reason to cut simply because of numbers. Specialized gods with a unique theme add to the experience, even if they are high in number. I would rather shoot for a large number of distinct gods than a small number of broad gods that can't offer unique playstyles.

[tasonir]

You already have duel as an ultimate activated ability, but I was thinking of an alternative high end ability. Maybe there's room for two, maybe not.

Shroud: Temporarily limit your LOS to 1-3 tiles. I'm not sure exactly how small an area you'd want to make it, but it's basically a short term hyper-powered darkness at a high piety cost. Should only last 10-20 turns imho, cost about 7-10 piety?

[Lasty]

Thanked for the shroud ability. That seems like a great idea for some god.

Edit: actually, this is really similar to fog blood / activated fog.

[milski]

I was actually considering limiting LoS to one tile with duel, but I liked the concept of being only threatened by the duel target and at that point LoS isn't super relevant. I still think a massive LoS limiter is a great idea in general.