New God: U(nclothed), a Martial Arts God

[archaeo]

Yeah, I'd like to combine a few god ideas from here and there for another try at this. Note that I've really loaded up on god abilities; this is both because I like the idea of having lots of abilities in exchange for a tough conduct, and because we could always just take the ones out of these that work.

U(nclothed), the Naked Master

Likes: Nudity (+10% piety gain for every empty armour slot), killing monsters
Dislikes: Time (normal piety decay), Encumberance (-20% piety gain and +10% piety decay rate for each filled armour slot)

Usau's rate of piety per monster killed is notably higher than that of other gods, but it's abilities are also much more expensive. While Usau rewards those who maintain a high level of piety, its abilities offer significant power.

1*: Flurry of Blows - You gain the cleave status for 10-20 turns, 10-15 piety
Cacophony - You slam your fist into the ground, creating significant noise; monsters in LOS are stunned for 2-5 turns, 10-15 piety and 2-5 HP.
2* Inner Purity - You temporarily strengthen yourself against mundane and magical attacks. Gain resist status as if consuming the potion, 15-20 piety, sets exh
Inner Stillness - You hold your breath, exuding an aura of magical stillness that pushes monsters away 2 tiles as long as you stand still. Gain silence status for the length of time that you are still. 15-20 piety, 1 MP drain per turn.
3* Gale Force - Gain "gale" status, which restricts all actions but movement for 20-30 turns. Your movespeed is halved, and you do 25-50% weapon damage to any enemy that is next to you when you move. Effect is lengthened based on successive attacks. Sets exh, 25-30 piety.
4* Whirlwind - You turn your body into a martial hurricane. Using the Rod of Ignition targeter, the player can move from the current position to the edge of LOS, doing a 3x3 square of 75% weapon attack damage when moving through an enemy's square. The player must end on an empty square. Sets exh, 30-35 piety.
5* nothing
6* Divine Propinquity (passive) - Your strong connection with U gives you supernatural abilities. Ability costs are halved. Additionally, you gain regen 1, stealthy 1, and running.

[WalrusKing]

That sounds like a god that no one except felids and the like would be interested in, to be honest. Possibly really EV heavy characters, but I'm not even that sure about them. It just feels like even characters that don't want to wear heavy armour still usually get a large benefit from the armour that they do wear, and aren't usually characters that are itching to climb feet first into melee combat. Maybe I haven't run EV based meleedudes that much, but this seems like it would also lock out many species due to dodging apt. Are EV based melee builds good enough to choose this and EV over AC and another melee god, like trog or oku?

[archaeo]

Yeah Walrus King, it's possible that it needs some kind of 0* ability that gives you piety-dependent SH or AC? But the idea follows the other thread, where you had a really quickly rising piety meter that powered expensive abilities.

[Lasty]

I would strongly discourage setting up a god in the archetype, "god demands you don't do X, rewards you by giving you what X gives you," e.g. don't wear armour in exchange for AC and an ability that gives you resistances.

[archaeo]

yeah, that's a fair point. Suggestions welcome!

e: I went ahead and split this topic off, it was rude of me to hijack the other thread.

I imagine that you could correct that problem Lasty points out by simply removing the 1* stunner and the 2* resistances and just focus the god around offering strong combat abilities with a highly variable piety meter.

e2: although in response to Lasty, I'd point out that it seems to me that his god, Ru, is very much dedicated to the player giving up abilities in order to receive powerful invocations that likely replace those abilities; it's possible I'm just too dim to see the distinction, though.

[WalrusKing]

I agree with Lasty, I was mostly pointing out that if the answer to "is this god and ev better than another combat god and ac" is false for too many characters, then you have a god whose niche is quite narrow. I did think of a case where this god might be desirable, which is in the case of transmuters, particularly statue or dragon form ones.

I'd disagree with removal of the stun, it's a tactical ability that is not a direct replacement to the ac you abandon to take the god. I find the ability which pushes things away from you as long as you stand still to be far more bizarre, as if it lets you attack then it could be crazy degenerate for ranged shenanigans, and if it does not then it's usefulness is questionable outside of some sort of wacky clouds abuse or summons but I don't think summoner would want this god.

[byrel]

The directness of the replacement matters. At some point, any sacrifice requiring god will give you more power than it takes away. But if it gives it back in exactly the same way you would have had it without the sacrifice, it doesn't result in a gameplay change and so isn't really a good design.

For Ru, I can sacrifice rF, rC, and I'm not directly compensated. Instead I get awesome situational abilities which can mitigate the risk that sacrifice gave me if I use them well.

[Lasty]

e2: although in response to Lasty, I'd point out that it seems to me that his god, Ru, is very much dedicated to the player giving up abilities in order to receive powerful invocations that likely replace those abilities; it's possible I'm just too dim to see the distinction, though.

My argument isn't against gods that make you give up some form of power in exchange for some other form of power; my argument is against gods that make you give up one source of a specific resource (e.g. body armour for AC) in exchange for more of that same resource. It's true that there could be a player who loses 27 levels of Earth skill (Shatter) and also 20 levels of Translocations (CB) in exchange for Power Leap and Apocalypse, but in general what ones loses to Ru isn't particularly similar to what one gets.

[njvack]

I read this as 'Marital Arts' which puts a different spin on the name.

[Quazifuji]

Also worth noting that the god doesn't have a conduct requiring empty equipment slots, it just gives extra piety for them and less piety for wearing armor. It's like cursed equipment with Ash, not spells with Trog. That means you can still wear some nice chest armor and just leave all your aux armor slots empty and still get to use his abilities (just not as often as a completely naked character). And I would absolutely say the god is plenty strong to make up for sacrificing your aux slots on many characters. Hell, some characters would probably be willing to give up their aux slots for regen 1, stealth 1, and running alone, let alone all the actives, some of which seem extremely powerful.

On that note, two important questions that I think would need to be addressed:

1. Does an aux slot that isn't available to your character count as an empty slot? Do Felids automatically get full Nudity bonus, Octopodes bonuses for no chest armor, boots, or cloak, etc? (My vote would be yes, but I think there's room for debate here, as this god does seem really powerful for low-equipment races, which typically already get racial bonuses intended to compensate for their missing equipment slots.)

2. Should chest armor have a bigger bonus/penalty than the other slots? Chest armor is a much bigger deal than aux slots, and I imagine most characters who are capable of wearing chest armor would happily take the hit to piety gain and decay so they can keep wearing it while keeping their aux slots empty.

Overall, I do think encouraging you to sacrifice armor slots is an interesting conduct for a god, and some of the abilities are neat. I think the hard part will be balancing it with the fact that sacrificing armor slots for bonuses is already a really common feature of races, so making the god feel both distinct from just playing a Spriggan or Draconian or whatever and balanced for the races that are already missing slots anyway might be tricky.

[archaeo]

For what it's worth, y'all, this is a god I came up with in the length of time it took me to walk back from the coffee shop down the road, and I fully admit that it'd need a lot of tweaking to work out. But the whole "piety as fighting game gauge/limit break" mechanic is one that I find very attractive.

Quaz, I honestly don't think it'd be incredibly broken to let species get the benefits of their unfilled restricted slots, if only because this still doesn't seem more powerful than FeBe or several good Op^God combos. And I think it might indeed make sense to treat body armour as granting double the piety bonus/malus given the outsized effect it has. OTOH, I take Lasty's criticism to heart, and I'm not sure how many people would take the god without it giving some kind of defensive bonus.

I find the ability which pushes things away from you as long as you stand still to be far more bizarre, as if it lets you attack then it could be crazy degenerate for ranged shenanigans, and if it does not then it's usefulness is questionable outside of some sort of wacky clouds abuse or summons but I don't think summoner would want this god.

I imagined it being more useful either on its own in certain spaces (imagine it in a killhole or narrow closet, or on one side of a door) or particularly powerful in combination with other consumables. It also doesn't forbid anything silence wouldn't forbid, so ranged shenanigans are on the table. I'm not sure if it would be unreasonably degenerate; we have many species, consumables, and spells that make it fairly trivial to keep one's distance from melee threats, after all.

e: to the more general case of "is this worth it," I would suggest that, with the right kind of piety mechanic (maybe you get piety whenever you swing a weapon/fist or whatever?), you would be giving up body slots in exchange for some very powerful abilities that would be less spammable but more frequently available than most gods' invocations. Another way to encourage players to go naked would be to add a power factor to the abilities based on how clothed the character is.

[bcadren]

You know. This is (at least partially) based on the current draft of my Monk God; which is based on an old draft of such. The old draft literally just gave UC-focused boosts and elemental enhancers from lack of clothes and was shot down for being too UC-focused at the time. [Though an uber-focused god isn't necessarily bad just because it only helps with one thing that the majority of other players wouldn't be using *cough* Kiku, Vehu, Neme]. (That's to say god could just give boosts to UC and then the players could go UC and Necro if they wanted, nothing forces to literally only use UC).

[reaver]

Preventing wearing body armour is bad because what body armour to wear is a very interesting decision.

Also there are quite a few species which already prevent wearing body armour!

As well as plenty of species which prevent wearing auxiliary option, although auxiliary armour is very rarely an interesting decision currently so the overlap there is less bad.

[tasonir]

Funny, I didn't think of felids for this first, I thought of trolls. You get free glove/boot piety, probably can't find a hat early on either, so you're basically going to be wearing cloak/body armor only for a long while, up to cloak/hat/body armor late game. You could even give up the robe for little cost, the 2 ac isn't huge. Once you get a dragon armor you'd probably switch to that, or if you find a good +2 ego robe.

So in short I'm not sure getting piety for slots you can't use to begin with would be fair. Sadly, same goes for statue form/dragon form etc.

I assume the +AC Lasty mentioned you were giving worshippers has been removed, I don't see it in the proposal anymore.

IMHO inner stillness seems the most broken, being able to completely lock out melee enemies, of which there are many who have either no ranged attacks or limited ranged attacks. I assume it ends when you run out of mana due to the 1mp/turn drain? Does it have another duration which can expire? It's a fine effect, but I think you want to put a pretty harsh limit on it - 5 to 10 turns at the highest. It'll make reading teleport a lot safer, and it's a good way to protect a caster who needs a few turns to fire bolts. What monster isn't going to die to 5 casts of a decent conjuration? Picture some mid level mage fighting a stone giant, hitting it with IMB or fireball. The giant can't hit you at all, you get 5+ turns of free shots, that's quite powerful. This is after you already got your free shots for it approaching you, assuming it came into LOS at max range.

Note I'm not saying it's a bad ability, just that duration would have be pretty small imho. Aside from that, I'd say piety costs should also be tweaked...If you give people +50% piety gain from 5 empty slots, and in return they get access to god abilities that cost 100% more piety than other god's abilities...they aren't really getting much from that bonus piety. Abilities which cost 30-35 piety are extremely expensive. I'm assuming you want to strike a balance where there's a meaningful tradeoff between 0 slots used and frequent abilities vs someone who uses 3 armor slots, leaves two open, and can still use abilities, just not as much. I'm not sure the current values would support that, although in theory that should be possible to work out. I'd increase the bonus for empty slots (maybe 25%) and reduce the piety costs somewhat (take about 1/3 off each to start with). Further tweaks would probably be required after playtesting, but that's about the ballpark.

[tedric]

Re: piety-gain tweaking, I think you would want to scale the bonus piety based on:

a) how many slots are available to the species, and
b) how many of those slots are open, i.e. how naked the character is.

For instance, you might give

  Code:

max.bonus / ((species.slots + 1) - open.slots) * (open.slots / species.slots)

percent bonus piety. That produces a bonus of 0% for any species with all its slots filled and ramps up to maximum bonus for all slots open, and gives a larger proportion of the bonus for each additional slot you free up. Low-slot species gain bonus more quickly as they free up the slots they have (it's all-or-nothing for felid), while high-slot species are strongly incentivized to be mostly or completely naked.

[milski]

Here are my issues with the god, in no particular order:

I'm not sure what you're trying to do with the Piety costs. A high piety cost god with Exhaustion attached to most of the useful abilities seems pointless; Exhaustion is just mimicking Ru's method of preventing ability spam and preventing you from actually draining Piety in a fight by spamming. Of course, at 6* piety you still have a minimum of 20 turns of LoS stun, so there is some use for spamming.

On that note, having a LoS stun as one of your lowest cost abilities is bad. AoE crowd control besides "kill everything" is pretty rare in Crawl.

Inner Purity lets you make up one of the biggest losses of armor, not having a multitude of +resists.

Inner Stillness seems pointless when you have Cacophony, though if the silence is screen-wide rather than just on you it is still a tremendously powerful skill for characters that rely on nonmagical ranged attacks. It doesn't really synergize with the rest of the abilities, though, since they are mostly focused on cleave or similar AoEs.

Gale Force would be ridiculously weak even if it did full damage, since you give up all panic buttons in order to be worse at manfighting and worse at walking away from your enemy. The reduction in damage is even worse, since you likely won't be able to touch high AC targets. Plus, Qaz already does the "walk away while hurting enemies" thing in an actually effective manner.

Whirlwind: It's just a strictly better version of Ru's blink, so I can't really complain.

Divine Propinquity: Having a very strong 6* passive on a god that is supposed to encourage burning piety seems directly contrary to its design, as does halving ability costs so you can stretch 6* piety further.

I'm not sure if giving up armor is an interesting choice, and certainly not as interesting as Ru sacrifices or Ashkenzari cursed equipment.

It feels sort of muddled overall; you've got strong melee and an ability that locks enemies out of melee, a design goal to use lots of piety with exhaustion to prevent spamming and a passive that minimizes piety costs, and you want to remove armor but you don't really make it that bad to put on an artifact plate since you have spammable +resist. Plus, you have some abilities that are worthless and multiple abilities that would be powerful as 6* actives.

[Lasty]

I think that there is interesting god design space to be explored around two of the mechanics mentioned here: 1) voluntarily leaving equipment slots open, and 2) "limit break" piety, as we seem to be calling it. I don't think they necessarily have to be on the same god. I'm not grabbed (grappled?) by any of the specific proposals I've heard yet, but I think many of them have some good elements.

As far as 1) goes, I think it should take into account every not-necessarily-weapon slot, including off-hand and jewelry slots. That allows for a broader range of possible player choices, and opens up the god's conduct more to characters with limited slots. I think the benefits should be tied to empty slots that your species could fill -- choosing a god that effectively has little-to-no conduct for your species is a less interesting thing than choosing a god that has a more extreme conduct for your species. It also fits better with existing gods: Chei doesn't leave naga movespeed alone because they're already slow, and Ash doesn't give felids bind credit for every slot they don't have.

[infinitevox]

Just out of curiosity, what's to stop me from going "naked", kiting monsters to staircases, going upstairs to don my CPA, and then going back down to unleash hell with all the god bonuses and a shitload of AC?

[Sprucery]

Just out of curiosity, what's to stop me from going "naked", kiting monsters to staircases, going upstairs to don my CPA, and then going back down to unleash hell with all the god bonuses and a shitload of AC?

Probably wearing any piece of armour should block all god abilities and effects for a while.

[kuniqs]

Unarmed combat is Cheibriados and Okawaru's thing. No armor is Jiyva's.

[Quazifuji]

Unarmed combat is Cheibriados and Okawaru's thing.

Unless I'm missing something, nothing about this god specifically promotes unarmed combat over other melee. Also, while Chei and Okawaru both synergize very well with unarmed combat, I wouldn't go as far as saying it's "their thing" and that other gods shouldn't reward it.

You make a good point about Jiyva already frequently requiring the player to sacrifice armour slots, though.

[duvessa]

Chei doesn't synergize with unarmed combat at all, and saying unarmed combat is Okawaru's thing when Okawaru gives you weapons is kind of silly.

That said, actively making an "unarmed combat god" makes about as much sense as making a "polearms god" or a "long blades god". Fortunately, archaeo's god proposal isn't related to unarmed combat in any way, shape or form! The god is about armour slots, which almost never relate to your weapon choice (gloves of archery and fencer's gloves are the only cases I can think of). Nobody suggested anything related to unarmed or the weapon slot.

[Aethrus]

I'm really excited that the prospect of piety super meter gods is being seriously discussed, but I'm not sure about combining it with a theme of missing equipment slots. It seems like they sort of conflict with each other as foci, and I think they don't combine that well. Piety based on not having items on directly conflicts with fast build up / decay. Either you need to be naked all the time to use the god, or the penalty isn't bad enough to warrant actually going without. The problem of races with different equipment options is also bothersome.

Here's my counter-idea. Have the God reward players for having an empty hand.

This is something that is consistent across races and mutations (but Felid, and Formicid sorta) and makes the god synergize especially with unarmed combat without prescribing it to them. It's a single slot that you're considering, and one that's more tangible, than say, telling how much better you are with or without +2 boots.

Players can use a single-handed weapon or go unarmed with a shield, (Formicid can go two-handed no shield or one-handed and shield) and get the bonus. Effects might range from stronger off-hand punch, a grapple / throw ability, a combo attack / power attack, whatever.

[Pollen_Golem]

the prospect of piety super meter gods is being seriously discussed

What makes you believe this is the case?

[Lasty]

Probably reading the 0.18 planning document.