Spider Stomper
Posts: 247
Joined: Monday, 10th November 2014, 21:32
God Concept: Ukozan, God of Close Combat
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.