Deck rework suggestion

[ximxim]

While the current implementation is not bad it's not, in my opinion, great either. Some issues I have with it:

• Playing a Nemelex worshipper turns into an inventory management nightmare.
  
• Playing a non-Nemelex worshipper decks are either ignored or identified before use which turns the cards into glorified scrolls.

My suggestion:

Scrap the current system of decks basically being a stack of unid:ed scrolls. Introduce a new deckbuilding mechanic:

• Decks or single cards are found in the dungeon.
  
• Cards can be added to or removed from decks.
  
• Cards are not consumed on being used, instead being shuffled back into the deck.
  
• The contents of a deck is known, but not the order of cards.
  
• The power of an individual card depends on the overall power of the deck it is in. Adding a card to a deck increases the overall power of the deck with a value depending on the card added and what cards are already in the deck (this should be indicated to the player). This means it could be beneficial to add a "bad" card to a deck if doing so would increase deck power a lot, basically a risk vs reward mechanic.
  
• Individual cards can still be used but the power will be very low (think on the level of a 1-level spell).
  
• Change the current cards with "unique" effects into scrolls or potions.

I think this could improve a number of issues and introduce a new fun mechanic while still keeping the "deck/card" theme. Might be too convoluted though, and certainly a challenge to code and balance.

[dpeg]

This sounds really good!

When we re-did Nemelex, the old-old version of the god had neither rarity nor deck types. I was obviously influenced by collective card games (despite never having played them, apart from a bit of Pokemon TCG with the kids). I think decks were a bit more interesting afterwards, but I also think that cards are a problematic mechanic for reasons regurgitated too often.

Your approach to decks solves some problems. Still, a few questions:
What does Nemelex do now? I guess Triple Draw can stay.
Will floor decks be fully identified? That sounds cumbersome -- we'd encourage lots of checking. Perhaps keep track of cards drawn and announce when you've seen all.

[ydeve]

The main problem I see is that when you make decks non-consumable, something has to be done to balance the power / prevent you from spamming them like nonstop. Elemental evokers go inert, but you don't want such a large timeout on decks. Spells have mp, disk of storms is disk of storms, wands are consumable, etc.

Maybe you could do the shuffling only after you evoke the whole deck, after which the deck goes inert a la elemental evoker.

With this, Deal Four would still work. You deal four cards and then the whole deck goes inert. Extra cards can still come from the deck of oddities. Same with Stack Five, stack five cards and the rest go inert.

[Siegurt]

I've had a similar un-fleshed out idea for nem kicking around in my head for a long time that I just hadn't posted because I either didn't have the time, or didn't want to flesh it out that much,

Here's what I came up with:

1. You have a virtual "deck" you start with a set of generic suited cards in your deck, the generic cards never go away.
2. When you kill things you have a chance to add special cards to your deck based on the creature killed. (This replaces gifting, or you could flavor it as god gifts, but the card being based on the critter killed keeps the power level in line with where you are in the game)
3. You have a hand of 5 cards at all times, at any time you can "play" your hand as an active ability, the exact effects of playing your current hand depend on the dominant suit or type of hand played (I was going to use standard poker hands) for instance three of a kind would have a greater effect than a pair, and the type of effect might be summons for clubs, destruction effects for spades, etc (There's a lot of effects currently in the card wheelhouse, this breaks them into a different organizational scheme)
4. Special cards act as wild cards and possibly as modifiers. (They might for instance double up on summons, or create a haunt-type effect but of specific critters, for example hobgoblin haunt for a hobgoblin special card)
5. After a hand with a special card is played, the special card(s) are discarded

Activated abilities would look something like:
0 piety, 2MP, 1 turn - Play your hand
1 piety, 2 MP, 0 turn - Burn a special card (Removes a single special card from your hand and discards it permanently from your deck)
4 piety, 2MP, 0 turns - Shuffle and draw 5
8 piety, 4 MP, 0 turns - Discard and draw (discard up to 3 cards and draw 3 new ones)
20 piety, 8 MP, 0 turns - Pick a card (Discard 1 card, and draw any specific card from your deck)

Note that your ability to *change* what you have in your hand is instant, but costs significant piety and MP, this allows you to set up a hand in advance, but change it to suit your tactical situation if need be.

It needs some work, but something like this could work with a virtual deck and eliminate a lot of the inventory management issues.

[ydeve]

I think there are advantages to having multiple decks, but we don't need tons like we currently have. If you make it so cards are goldified/virtual and aren't items you can evoke directly and give the player a few (2-5) "deck case" items that can hold cards, they can sort the cards out into the decks they want without having horrible inventory issues. Also this way you can get ahold of escape cards when you want, attack cards when you want, etc but the specific type of escape card or attack card would be random (or like Siegurt's suggestion). Mixed decks could give stronger card power (risk of getting the wrong card vs. reward of stronger effects).

[Abominae]

Why not just make decks stack? Remove all the random decks (Wonder is silly anyway) and just keep Destruction/Escape/War. It limits Nemelex to at most 9 inventory slots (Plain/Ornate/Legendary) instead of the like 20 he wants to take. You could even just remove Plain/Ornate/Legendary--do decks really need three separate power modifiers?

(Additional cards stack on the bottom of the deck to prevent loss of stacking / identification, I suppose)

[Pollen_Golem]

The main problem I see is that when you make decks non-consumable, something has to be done to balance the power / prevent you from spamming them like nonstop.

Yeah, basically, either that or cards need to be nerfed. Although it should be noted that a ton of cards are worse than high-end summonings/conjurations/translocations and less reliable to boot. It's mostly stuff like Elixir/Tomb/Damnation/Fortitude that have to be non-spammable.

You could feasibly let players hold multiple rods like a removed, perhaps as a Pakellas power:

  Code:

Unite which rods?

f + a +8 rod of inaccuracy (15/15)
w + a -1 rod of inaccuracy (15/15)
C - a +0 irod rod (12/12)
X + a +8 rod of shadows (8/10)

Wielded:

-) a temporary +15 rod of inaccuracy/inaccuracy/shadows (38/40)
Evoking this rod randomly chooses between inaccuracy, inaccuracy, and shadows.


But then we're talking about rods, not decks.

Ever-so-popular virtual deck proposals are very unclear as to how these virtual decks work, especially when they begin to talk about "composing a hand", and they either involve a 2nd inventory (why not just propose a 2nd inventory for a limited set of items?) or they could be done non-virtually at the cost of ~5 inventory spaces. I too suggested a virtual Nemelex once but I explained exactly how you would get and use cards. These proposals also do a lot of hand-waving like this:

give the player a few (2-5) "deck case" items that can hold cards, they can sort the cards out into the decks they want without having horrible inventory issues

where the middle step is *a miracle eradicates tedium somehow*.

A while ago I made a proposal similar to the OP, with some differences, and an actual specific mechanism:

• decks have a large but finite number of cards, rather than basically infinite
• you get fewer decks as a result, but of course they last longer
• a deck naturally contains ~4 kinds of cards and you know how many of each there are
• the kinds of cards chosen to go into a deck are such as to make it interesting to draw alternating cards in a row
• numerous custom decks may be gifted, rather than war/destruction/escape
• you can shuffle decks together but not break them apart

You can add to that the OP's idea, in this way:

• the number of cards in a deck is added to power when you evoke from that deck.

so that you balance between higher power and having better chances of knowing what the next card is likely to be (because having the deck {3 X cards, 8 Y cards} and the deck {10 X cards, 2 Y cards} gives you better chances of drawing what you want than having the deck {13 X cards, 10 Y cards}).

[archaeo]

Siegurt, I've actually proposed a very similar idea in the past. The problem, as gammafunk once pointed out to me, is that Crawl is a pretty focused roguelike. Unlike, say, NetHack, there aren't any minigames bolted onto the regular game; it's a pretty straight-forward dungeon crawl, without Sokoban-like breaks in the action. Anything as complicated as a card game would end up requiring the player to step out of the flow of playing Crawl to manage their hand, which is a little much for something you'd use as often as people usually use god abilities.

Another problem it has in common with the OP is that it only moves the inventory management problem around without really fixing it. The OP, for example, sets up a minigame where you have to allocate cards to decks, ideally finding a balance between rng power (more cards = more power) and predictability. Instead of playing Crawl, you're building decks for Crawl: The Gathering.

Lately, I'm pretty sure the best form Nemelex could take is where he gives you a virtual deck in (a)bility that he adds cards to the bottom of, along with a few abilities: look at the top two cards of the deck, pick one of the top three cards, stack the top 5, discard, and shuffle. No more card power, just tie it to evo and piety.

The OP is otherwise correct about decks being glorified scrolls for non-Nem, but I'd prefer it if they were just removed from generation, with any good cards getting made into scrolls.

[Aean]

Quick thought:

- Cards don't disappear after use, just get shuffled back into the deck.

- Nemelex grants decks; when Nem would give you a deck of the same type, he may enhance one or more cards in the one you already have (to ornate/legendary) instead.

- Nem can also add cards to existing decks.
-So as your piety grows, your decks have more, and more powerful cards, but both "good" and "bad" cards are more powerful.

- Can still triple draw (draw three play one), deal four, stack five as a Nem follower.

- Number of "bad" cards in a deck is increased to help prevent card-spamming. Also makes things like deal four more dangerous, since there's a good chance you'll have at least one bad card in there.

- All players can shuffle decks of the same type together, even if the cards involved are different strengths (plain/ornate/legendary).


End result: Less inventory mess - even non-Nem players can reduce inventory mess by shuffling decks together. Nem only gifts you one deck of each type at a time, so if you want to avoid drawing a bad card (even a high-powered bad card) you have to toss the entire powered-up deck or use his abilities. Card spam can be regulated by piety (have to keep burning it to avoid drawing very bad cards in the middle of combat) or by those negative cards themselves.

[Floodkiller]

I've been thinking of my own variation on how to revamp Nemelex, similar to Siegurt's in some ways, but trying less to change it into a separate mini game. I still haven't quite polished everything about it or started coding it up in a testing branch yet, but here's what I have so far (PS: When referencing a constructed deck by name like War in terms of weighting, I am referring to splitting the weighting across all component decks under that name; it is just shorthand):

1. Decks no longer spawn, natural or gifted.
2. Card power is now Invocations based (because physical decks no longer exist to be evoked).
3. Card power is determined by 15*Invocations; card power level is determined by a power-in-200 and a power-in-400 check. If a card uses card power to determine spell power, add another 15*Invocations to the card power after the power level has been determined.
4. Piety gain, piety decay and wrath remains unchanged.
5. Nemelex's new powers are:

0*
Passive: The player has a 'hand' of five cards. Upon joining for the first time, the player gets a "New Hand" for free from Nemelex (see below).
Play (2 MP, 0 piety, 1 turn): The player can view their hand, and pick a card to play. If the player cancels, no time or MP is spent.

1*
New Hand (0 MP, 4-8 piety, 0 turns): Discard any cards in the player's hand (if there are any), then draw five new cards for the hand with the weights of 35% Destruction, 35% War, 20% Escape, 10% Wonders (normal chance to replace a card with one from oddities). Cards in the hand cannot be reorganized into a different order to prevent micro-management.
Blind Draw: The player draws a card from a virtual deck (or decks) and plays it immediately. The ability would work as one of the following variations:
-Variation 1 (2 MP, 0-1 piety, 1 turn): Draw a random card from the pool of all existing cards; weighted towards destruction, war, and escape. Normal chance to replace a card with one from oddities.
-Variation 2 (2 MP, 1-2 piety, 1 turn): The player can select to draw from destruction, war, or escape. Normal chance to replace a card with one from oddities.

3*
Raise (toggle, 0 turns): The player toggles on/off the Raise status, which causes cards played from any ability to have their card power increased by (piety*(Invo+25))/27. While Raise is on, all card playing abilities cost an additional 2 MP and 1-2 piety to use. If the player goes below 3* of piety, Raise is automatically toggled off.

5*
All In (2 MP per card, 1-2 piety per card, 1 turn): All remaining cards in the player's hand are played in a single turn, in order from the first card to the last card. Costs (other than time) is based on the number of cards. If Raise is enabled, the cost is increased by Raise per card that would be played. If the player has no cards in hand, cancel the power.

Edit: Swapped Blind Draw and Free Hand, modified All In.

[ximxim]

This sounds really good!

When we re-did Nemelex, the old-old version of the god had neither rarity nor deck types. I was obviously influenced by collective card games (despite never having played them, apart from a bit of Pokemon TCG with the kids). I think decks were a bit more interesting afterwards, but I also think that cards are a problematic mechanic for reasons regurgitated too often.

Your approach to decks solves some problems. Still, a few questions:
What does Nemelex do now? I guess Triple Draw can stay.
Will floor decks be fully identified? That sounds cumbersome -- we'd encourage lots of checking. Perhaps keep track of cards drawn and announce when you've seen all.

I would think Nemelex would allow you to (like before) trade reduction of randomness for piety. Triple draw would still be useful for that, and could perhaps even be free, since there's still a decent random element. Deal four would obviously be very powerful, perhaps too much so, since the cards are not discarded. Although there's plenty of precedence for god abilities being incredibly powerful... Apart from that I could see gifting individual cards, and perhaps offer a choice out of a selection of very powerful cards as a *****-ability.

I was thinking you'd mostly find individual cards on the floor, or decks with maybe 3-4 cards. The "default" play scenario I was thinking of was that you'd find a card, consider whether you want it in your deck(s) or not and otherwise leave it.

archaeo, you are completely right that my suggestion would introduce a new kind of minigame which might not be what crawl needs. I'd perhaps argue that it would replace a different minigame (the deck/inventory/stacking etc one) and that it wouldn't be too different from the spell/spellbook minigame (select book, select spell to memorize/forget, spell gets added/removed from virtual spell list).

[Pollen_Golem]

@Floodkiller

At least that's functional. The 5 cards in your hand can easily fit into the ^ screen. 1 note: Blind Draw should not be a 0* ability because then you could excommunicate yourself by spamming Blind Draw, then run back to the altar and rejoin with 15 piety again. The only god that you can currently excommunicate yourself with by using god abilities is Chei, and maybe Ely divine protection though I'm not sure. Also I think it would be ok to have Nemelex give you a hand for free at 0* when you join him for the first time, so that you see your hand but can't draw anything until you get to 1*. Also, being banished does not make you unable to continue playing cards. I don't think anything except maybe death interrupts Deal Four.

[tedric]

So far Floodkiller's proposal is the only one that strikes me as an unequivocal improvement over the status quo.

[Floodkiller]

@Floodkiller

At least that's functional. The 5 cards in your hand can easily fit into the ^ screen. 1 note: Blind Draw should not be a 0* ability because then you could excommunicate yourself by spamming Blind Draw, then run back to the altar and rejoin with 15 piety again. The only god that you can currently excommunicate yourself with by using god abilities is Chei, and maybe Ely divine protection though I'm not sure. Also I think it would be ok to have Nemelex give you a hand for free at 0* when you join him for the first time, so that you see your hand but can't draw anything until you get to 1*. Also, being banished does not make you unable to continue playing cards. I don't think anything except maybe death interrupts Deal Four.

That makes sense about Blind Draw; I've never tried to purposefully excommunicate myself, so I didn't know that was a thing that could happen. It also does make more sense to put the free hand in with the 0* passive anyway. I also didn't know that being banished doesn't interrupt Deal Four, so I'll change that as well.