God Proposal: Liatrix the Polymorph God

[lethediver]

OVERVIEW:

Laitrix the Shifty

"Never show them your true face."

Liatrix is the sly and chaotic god of many forms. To gain favor with Liatrix, followers must polymorph themselves and others, especially in battle. As they progress in their faith, Liatrix's followers gain the ability to polymorph at will, as well as attaining partial control over the form which they will take. Greatly favored disciples of Liatrix are able to polymorph large groups of enemies, sowing confusion and panic, and summon shapeshifters to their aid.

Appreciates:

Killing living, undead, holy or demonic enemies while polymorphed.
Polymorphing enemies.

Depreciates:

Inaction.
Harming a shapeshifter in any way (penance).
Quaffing a potion of cancellation while polymorphed (excommunication).
Abandoning her/him/it.

RANKS/ABILITIES:

Piety Level -: Shifty [species name]

* All shapeshifters turn neutral. (passive)
* Touch of Shifting: Allows you to polymorph yourself or attempt to polymorph one other target in a 1 square radius, with success based on your invocations. If used to poly self, this is exactly the same effect as a wand of polymorph, with chance of a decent form (statue, ice, dragon, spider) being only about 7%. (1 MP, 10-20 Food).

Piety Level *: Two Faced [species name]

* Rapid Shifting: This ability gives the rPoly status effect. While it is active, the player faces no restrictions on polymorphing, and can polymorph his/herself even while already polymorphed. Note that the player will polymorph instantly once this ability is activated. (4 MP, 20-40 Food, 1-2 Piety)

Piety Level **: Sly Devil

* Whenever you polymorph, you have a 10% (3.33% each) chance to take on one of the following Liatrix-exclusive forms (passive):
- Burning Form: all melee attacks are flame branded, +1 movespeed, +5 EV, rF+++, rC-, you leave flaming clouds in your wake. Your weapons, armor and jewelry do not merge. Spellcasting not disabled.
- Water Form: melee attacks cause axphyxiation, +fast swim, can enter deep water, +5 EV while in water, MR+, rElec, rPois(infinite), rTorment, rF-, leave a trail of water in your wake. Armor and weapons merge, jewelry does not. Spellcasting disabled.
- Imp Form: +flying, +5 EV, rN+++, torment/poison immunity, +blink (ability), regen+. Armor merges, weapons and jewelry do not. Vulnerability to holy wrath. Spellcasting not disabled.

Piety Level ***: Role Reverser

* Shifting Aura: Your melee attacks have a 5% chance (before HD/MR checks) to polymorph enemies. This will only transform enemies into those of lower HD. Enemy HP is not restored. (Passive)

Piety Level ****: Impersonator

* Summon Shifters: Summons some allied shapeshifters to fight alongside you. Their numbers increase with piety (minimum 3, maximum 5), while their duration increases with Invocations (3-6 turns at minimum invocations, 12-24 turns at maximum invocations). (8 MP, 40-60 Food, 5-6 Piety)

Piety Level *****: Agent of Alteration

* Whenever you polymorph, you have a 10% (3.33% each) chance to take on one of the following Liatrix-exclusive forms (passive):
- Skeletal Form: +10 AC, rN+++, torment/rot/mutation/poison immunity, rC+. Vulnerability to holy wrath, dispel undead. Weapons, armor and jewelry do not merge. Spellcasting not disabled.
- Chaotic Form: All melee attacks are chaos branded, +10 EV, +2 movespeed. Torment/rot immunity. Leave clouds of chaos in your wake. +Chaos breath attack. Vulnerability to silver. Weapons, armor and jewelry merge. Spellcasting disabled.
- Plague Form: All melee attacks are vampiric branded. Rot/poison immunity, -1 movespeed. Spawn clouds of miasma in 1 tile vicinity (similar to qazlal). +Poison cloud breath attack. Weapons, armor and jewelry do not merge. Spellcasting not disabled.

This stacks with the previous Liatrix forms to give a 1:5 chance of a special form whenever the player polymorphs.

Piety Level ******: Harbinger of Change

* Paradigm Shift: Attempts to polymorph every hostile creature in line of sight, as well as automatically polymorphing yourself. Success rate raises with invocations. As with Shifting Aura, effected monsters will always be lower HD than before. (12 MP, 40-60 Food, Exhaustion, 6-8 Piety).

PUNISHMENTS:

Randomly polymorphs you -- with zero chance of acquiring a good form.
Randomly polymorph enemies in your line of sight into higher HD enemies.
Summons 4-8 hostile shapeshifters to your vicinity.
Random transmutations miscast effect.

---

NOTES:

This is my attempt at a polymorph based god. I tried to keep it balanced and reasonable, making Polymorph Self still risky to perform but no longer worthless. By allowing the player to 'roll' several forms, and choose one, polymorph becomes a reasonable escape option (bat, pig, wisp form), and even a decent combat option (tree form, and the possibility of rolling a good form like statue or dragon)... Synergy with unarmed combat might make it a little more attractive.

Hopefully, summoning shapeshifters/paradigm shift are a good reward to balance out the relatively restricted piety gain and relatively weak early/midgame abilities.

I thought about playing with polymorphing items, but decided there was too much scum potential.

Just for the lulz: Liatrix altars should masquerade as other gods' altars until you walk onto them.

[Aean]

It's an interesting idea, but the main issues that come to mind for me are early utility and piety gain. Basically, the player needs to kill things while polymorphed to gain piety, or to polymorph enemies to gain piety. But because the polymorph ability has such a low percentage chance of giving a "good" form when you first join, odds are that shifting will just put you in a form that forces you to retreat and reset until you get a form you can use. Or, I suppose, polymorphing enemies is an option - but at that stage your only way to polymorph enemies is the wand (if you've found it/have charges for it).

So you have to put yourself at a serious disadvantage in order to gain piety (or just endlessly reset battles), and even at **** you've still only got a 58% chance of getting a "good" form. I think the character just needs a bit more utility, or at least some more practical low-level abilities that could facilitate piety gain. Otherwise no matter what level you join as, you're endlessly resetting every battle until you get something you have a chance with.

Suggestion: Give an ability on joining that allows polymorphing an enemy (maybe, similar to slimify, make it on touch). It can be Invocations-dependent, so it won't be overpowered for low-level characters, but it'll provide an alternative source of piety gain and make him/her/it useful even at lower piety levels.

[CanOfWorms]

Most existing god abilities that spend piety don't actively make your situation worse. There's also a better polymorph god: Nemelex.

[lethediver]

Most existing god abilities that spend piety don't actively make your situation worse.

A lot of them do RISK making your situation worse though. Mahkleb summons come to mind. Perhaps I erred too much on the conservative side with my abilities.

What if the polymorph ability was improved even more? Such as by giving stat, skill bonuses while in polymorphed form. Or perhaps allowing for some special polymorphs not available to other PCs?

[lethediver]

It's an interesting idea, but the main issues that come to mind for me are early utility and piety gain. Basically, the player needs to kill things while polymorphed to gain piety, or to polymorph enemies to gain piety. But because the polymorph ability has such a low percentage chance of giving a "good" form when you first join, odds are that shifting will just put you in a form that forces you to retreat and reset until you get a form you can use. Or, I suppose, polymorphing enemies is an option - but at that stage your only way to polymorph enemies is the wand (if you've found it/have charges for it).

So you have to put yourself at a serious disadvantage in order to gain piety (or just endlessly reset battles), and even at **** you've still only got a 58% chance of getting a "good" form. I think the character just needs a bit more utility, or at least some more practical low-level abilities that could facilitate piety gain. Otherwise no matter what level you join as, you're endlessly resetting every battle until you get something you have a chance with.

Suggestion: Give an ability on joining that allows polymorphing an enemy (maybe, similar to slimify, make it on touch). It can be Invocations-dependent, so it won't be overpowered for low-level characters, but it'll provide an alternative source of piety gain and make him/her/it useful even at lower piety levels.

Great points. I would hate to add even more tedium to the early game, and there should be a way to access both types of poly gain even if you didn't find a wand. I do like your suggestion for a poly-other ability at the low levels, but I don't think I want to have more than four abilities... I just feel like four is the ideal number. What I will do is edit it so that the initial poly ability is a beam-target ability so it can be used both ways. Let me tinker with it a bit.

[WalrusKing]

Yeah, as several others have noted, this god has a number of problems as written.

It is fairly thouroughly useless for any character that isn't UC, and if you want forms and UC you could just learn the spells instead on most characters.

Even if the good forms were made more accessible, the randomness involved makes even UC types probably want to steer clear, as many of the forms are highly situational, and additionally many are quite bad late game (I would never use these self- poly abilities late game probably in case that the only "good" form I pull is Ice Beast or something and then I get nuked by a fire giant).

The 6* ability steps on Zin's and Ru's toes somewhat with the status effects.

Additionally, polymorphing enemies is not an ability that is very useful in a very large number of encounters given the way that polymorph works with HD, in that there are particular situations that you can helpfully use poly for (that the wand is already good enough for), and for other encounters where you could handle things as is you have no real incentive to spin the roullette because you might accidentally pull something with dumb HD.

[CanOfWorms]

Most existing god abilities that spend piety don't actively make your situation worse.

A lot of them do RISK making your situation worse though. Mahkleb summons come to mind. Perhaps I erred too much on the conservative side with my abilities.

What if the polymorph ability was improved even more? Such as by giving stat, skill bonuses while in polymorphed form. Or perhaps allowing for some special polymorphs not available to other PCs?

I did say most, not all. Anyway, there is a big difference with an ability potentially dropping an OoD monster on you but still leaving you with all your combat options, and an ability that removes most combat options. Makhleb also has the decency to let you summon more demons. You can't even cancel bad polymorphs with this god.

Even if you made it so the abilities *only* gave good forms, the main problem is that only a narrow range of builds are compatible with the self polymorph ability: Monks, Gladiators and Transmuters because polymorphing yourself will remove your weapon slot in most cases and possibly some armour slots. Some forms also give you wizardry penalties. So basically this god has even less to offer to most players.

The god also has zero meaningful passives (in the "God does something for the player that isn't in the abilities menu" sense.) Shapeshifters appear in two areas: Vaults and Depths/late Dungeon. The closest existing god that come to not having passives is Elyvilon since the life saving is random but it's at least a strong passive when it kicks in and remains relevant through the whole game, and Elyvilon makes up for it with an extremely powerful suite of abilities that increases with every * of piety. Lugonu is the second closest in terms of no passives but it at least becomes relevant when you hit 6* or find a distortion weapon.

[Chicken]

I think this is a really fun idea, but I don't like many of the specifics, and the character seems underpowered.

I think you should get the power to shift randomly every turn if you want with no special cost, or 1 MP or a little hunger at most. Whole fun here is shift early shift often, and if most of the forms suck, that's the compensating feature. Instead of having the extra features of choosing from different forms, you just polymorph more often. Also, let invocations skill reduce the time to polymorph using the sort of formula that applies to weapon speed.

I think that harming shapeshifters and cancelling polymorph might cost some piety but not go to any extraordinary levels of repentance.

For an advanced skill I'd say you get an effect that allows really fast regen HP while you keep shifting from one form to another each turn automatically, so you can attack, flee whatever with your moves.

Polying the masses sounds like great fun at high level, except... CAN you poly anything at high level? Seems like the game quickly gets to the point where I put that wand away because it's a joke% chance of doing anything.

[lethediver]

Yeah, as several others have noted, this god has a number of problems as written.

It is fairly thouroughly useless for any character that isn't UC, and if you want forms and UC you could just learn the spells instead on most characters.

Even if the good forms were made more accessible, the randomness involved makes even UC types probably want to steer clear, as many of the forms are highly situational, and additionally many are quite bad late game (I would never use these self- poly abilities late game probably in case that the only "good" form I pull is Ice Beast or something and then I get nuked by a fire giant).

The 6* ability steps on Zin's and Ru's toes somewhat with the status effects.

Additionally, polymorphing enemies is not an ability that is very useful in a very large number of encounters given the way that polymorph works with HD, in that there are particular situations that you can helpfully use poly for (that the wand is already good enough for), and for other encounters where you could handle things as is you have no real incentive to spin the roullette because you might accidentally pull something with dumb HD.

Thanks for the detailed feedback. The point about this being only good for UC characters is a killer.

I've been thinking it over, and decided to add some Liatrix-specific polymorphs, similar to how Jivya has specific mutations. Most of them (though not all) allow for keeping weapons, armor, jewelry, or all three. This should hopefully make the god more useful for non-UC users.

I also tweaked the final ability to be less Ru like, yet still tier 6 worthy.

While poly-other might not be useful in most cases... it kinda shouldn't be. Poly-other is a way of gaining piety with this god. I did tweak the final ability so that, even though it polymorphs others, it does so in a way that actually benefits the player (thus justifying the piety cost).

Hopefully these changes actually fit, rather than the god just being a jumbled unworkable mess at this point. Let me know what you think.

[lethediver]

Most existing god abilities that spend piety don't actively make your situation worse.

A lot of them do RISK making your situation worse though. Mahkleb summons come to mind. Perhaps I erred too much on the conservative side with my abilities.

What if the polymorph ability was improved even more? Such as by giving stat, skill bonuses while in polymorphed form. Or perhaps allowing for some special polymorphs not available to other PCs?

I did say most, not all. Anyway, there is a big difference with an ability potentially dropping an OoD monster on you but still leaving you with all your combat options, and an ability that removes most combat options. Makhleb also has the decency to let you summon more demons. You can't even cancel bad polymorphs with this god.

Even if you made it so the abilities *only* gave good forms, the main problem is that only a narrow range of builds are compatible with the self polymorph ability: Monks, Gladiators and Transmuters because polymorphing yourself will remove your weapon slot in most cases and possibly some armour slots. Some forms also give you wizardry penalties. So basically this god has even less to offer to most players.

The god also has zero meaningful passives (in the "God does something for the player that isn't in the abilities menu" sense.) Shapeshifters appear in two areas: Vaults and Depths/late Dungeon. The closest existing god that come to not having passives is Elyvilon since the life saving is random but it's at least a strong passive when it kicks in and remains relevant through the whole game, and Elyvilon makes up for it with an extremely powerful suite of abilities that increases with every * of piety. Lugonu is the second closest in terms of no passives but it at least becomes relevant when you hit 6* or find a distortion weapon.

These are good points. I think the only real way for me to deal with them, other than scrap the god, is add better polymorph options (ones that do not disable armed combat, armor, spellcasting, etc.) I have whipped up a few and edited them into the main post. However, I'm a little worried that in doing so, I made the god go from simple to implement, to pain in the ass to implement, and it feels a bit... messy, as a solution.

Though on the other hand, the initial set of polymorph options did feel quite limited. So I think it's somewhat justified to have more polymorph options, similar to how Jivya has its own specific mutations.

I'm not quite sure how to deal with the "passives" point. The improvements to the polymorph ability are all passive, and there are now four of them. However, I'm not sure that's quite the point you were making. I think you're saying there needs to be a passive ability that doesn't simply link in to the active ability of this god.

I can only really think of a few possibilities:

1) Liatrix randomly polymorphs enemies in your vicinity. Unlike with a normal polymorph, it would have to be a special "same HD or weaker" polymorph.

2) Like above, but triggers when the player attacks an enemy in melee (like 5% chance).

3) Liatrix randomly polymorphs you into a bad form with full HP on a hit that would've killed you.

Do any of these seem appealing? I'm open to other suggestions...

[lethediver]

I think this is a really fun idea, but I don't like many of the specifics, and the character seems underpowered.

I think you should get the power to shift randomly every turn if you want with no special cost, or 1 MP or a little hunger at most. Whole fun here is shift early shift often, and if most of the forms suck, that's the compensating feature. Instead of having the extra features of choosing from different forms, you just polymorph more often. Also, let invocations skill reduce the time to polymorph using the sort of formula that applies to weapon speed.

I think that harming shapeshifters and cancelling polymorph might cost some piety but not go to any extraordinary levels of repentance.

For an advanced skill I'd say you get an effect that allows really fast regen HP while you keep shifting from one form to another each turn automatically, so you can attack, flee whatever with your moves.

Polying the masses sounds like great fun at high level, except... CAN you poly anything at high level? Seems like the game quickly gets to the point where I put that wand away because it's a joke% chance of doing anything.

This is a really great suggestion - the polymorph mechanics were starting to feel really complex, and this is a good way to shave them down. I need to think of exactly how to work it into the abilities, but I'm definitely now going to move towards a "you can polymorph yourself a lot, and quickly" rather than "you can polymorph yourself in a semi controlled fashion but it costs a lot."

I don't quite want to remove the mass poly effect because I feel like then, the god becomes exclusively about YOU polymorphing, which... I don't know... feels un-chaotic-god-like. I feel like if there's a god of polymorphing and shapeshifting, they should want LOTS of polymorphing and shapeshifting going on... as befits a chaotic god. I think the problem that poly doesn't work on many high HD monsters can just be math'd or programmed away. It's think it's easier to justify poly cutting through monsters' HD/MR when its a high piety cost ability.

[WalrusKing]

This isn't moving the design in a better direction. Your new suggestion is that the player memorize a boatload of forms added for this one god that are wildly inconsistent with each other.

1) Liatrix randomly polymorphs enemies in your vicinity. Unlike with a normal polymorph, it would have to be a special "same HD or weaker" polymorph.

2) Like above, but triggers when the player attacks an enemy in melee (like 5% chance).

3) Liatrix randomly polymorphs you into a bad form with full HP on a hit that would've killed you.

Do any of these seem appealing? I'm open to other suggestions...

For 1) this is already offered by Nemelex, and is literally the Degeneration card. Notably, Degeneration is still something you stand a good chance of not wanting to pull on a combat you could already handle anyways because there's a lot of very spoilery lookups you'd want to do first because there's a lot of monsters whose HD barely corresponds to threat level. At any rate, you could already take Nemelex if you were looking for that effect, so...

2) This isn't something I would take on any character that wasn't already looking to die, like a xom character. But in that case I'd already have xom.

3) Most of the bad forms that I can think of off the top of my head would leave you near guaranteed dead very soon if you're in late game, so this doesn't actually do very much


e: I think you could benefit from a better understanding of how polymorph/degeneration work in this game.

Creatures have HD which is a number which is supposed to be a representation of how dangerous and tough they are. And it sort of is. Kinda. The reality of it is that a lot of monsters have a dispraportionately low HD for their threat level.

Polymorph as it exists in game does something which is mildly mysterious to me, and which I may be recalling incorrectly, but the idea is that it attempts to replace the monster with something with similar HD. Due to the fact that HD is semiarbitrary as mentioned above, this means that with certain monsters you're likely to pull something you would really really rather not. It can also pull things from higher HDs. You'd rather not do this on average. This means that you want to poly things you're poorly equipped to fight, and not poly anything else.

Degeneration is a card in decks of war that polymorphs everything in LOS but kind of tries to make the resultant HD lower. I vaguely recall it not being a solid guarantee of a lower HD, and it most certainly is not a guarantee of lower threat level

ee: I may be slightly shaky on some things for poly and degeneration above, but the bottom line is that it's quite spoilery in its current form, and the semiarbitrary nature of HD means that you're not actually going to want to poly things all that often, making a god that does: [give you a random form which you have to memorize and in a random way which means you don't want to do it out of fear of killing yourself in a large number of situations AND both enable and force you to do something you want to do situationally but really don't want to be doing all of the time all of the time] pretty unnappealing to the overwhelming majority of characters

[CanOfWorms]

I'm not quite sure how to deal with the "passives" point. The improvements to the polymorph ability are all passive, and there are now four of them. However, I'm not sure that's quite the point you were making. I think you're saying there needs to be a passive ability that doesn't simply link in to the active ability of this god.

Yes, every existing god has enough design space in them that you can theoretically play with them without ever using their ability menu abilities. Obviously it's suboptimal to do so with most gods, but because the passives are usually not Invocations dependent, it makes the decision of when to train Invocations and how much to train more interesting.

So from your point of view, you should think about how your god concept plays if you removed all active abilities. Right now it's better than atheist, but only by a extremely small margin. It would probably be more interesting if you framed the god as a god of transmutation type effects that just happens to have polymorph related abilities. A simple but fun passive to have would be the Plutonium Sword's gimmick (transmutation miscasts), for example, with power/frequency scaling on piety. And regarding polymorph, it would probably be really useful if the god made monster polymorph super simple and predictable (in the same way that Slimify has very predictable results), although that would be stepping on Jiyva's appendages a bit.

[lethediver]

This isn't moving the design in a better direction. Your new suggestion is that the player memorize a boatload of forms added for this one god that are wildly inconsistent with each other.

1) Liatrix randomly polymorphs enemies in your vicinity. Unlike with a normal polymorph, it would have to be a special "same HD or weaker" polymorph.

2) Like above, but triggers when the player attacks an enemy in melee (like 5% chance).

3) Liatrix randomly polymorphs you into a bad form with full HP on a hit that would've killed you.

Do any of these seem appealing? I'm open to other suggestions...

For 1) this is already offered by Nemelex, and is literally the Degeneration card. Notably, Degeneration is still something you stand a good chance of not wanting to pull on a combat you could already handle anyways because there's a lot of very spoilery lookups you'd want to do first because there's a lot of monsters whose HD barely corresponds to threat level. At any rate, you could already take Nemelex if you were looking for that effect, so...

2) This isn't something I would take on any character that wasn't already looking to die, like a xom character. But in that case I'd already have xom.

3) Most of the bad forms that I can think of off the top of my head would leave you near guaranteed dead very soon if you're in late game, so this doesn't actually do very much


e: I think you could benefit from a better understanding of how polymorph/degeneration work in this game.

Creatures have HD which is a number which is supposed to be a representation of how dangerous and tough they are. And it sort of is. Kinda. The reality of it is that a lot of monsters have a dispraportionately low HD for their threat level.

Polymorph as it exists in game does something which is mildly mysterious to me, and which I may be recalling incorrectly, but the idea is that it attempts to replace the monster with something with similar HD. Due to the fact that HD is semiarbitrary as mentioned above, this means that with certain monsters you're likely to pull something you would really really rather not. It can also pull things from higher HDs. You'd rather not do this on average. This means that you want to poly things you're poorly equipped to fight, and not poly anything else.

Degeneration is a card in decks of war that polymorphs everything in LOS but kind of tries to make the resultant HD lower. I vaguely recall it not being a solid guarantee of a lower HD, and it most certainly is not a guarantee of lower threat level

ee: I may be slightly shaky on some things for poly and degeneration above, but the bottom line is that it's quite spoilery in its current form, and the semiarbitrary nature of HD means that you're not actually going to want to poly things all that often, making a god that does: [give you a random form which you have to memorize and in a random way which means you don't want to do it out of fear of killing yourself in a large number of situations AND both enable and force you to do something you want to do situationally but really don't want to be doing all of the time all of the time] pretty unnappealing to the overwhelming majority of characters

"This isn't moving the design in a better direction. Your new suggestion is that the player memorize a boatload of forms added for this one god that are wildly inconsistent with each other."

Well, I could make them a little more consistent. However, that'd kind of go against the whole nature of polymorphing. The point of polymorphing is that you get something random and different. If the forms are too same-y, it won't actually feel like you transformed.

What I'm driving at: the flaw (large amounts of differentness) is built into the idea, not the implementation.

To address your main point, at this point more forms seems like the one viable solution to me. Either polymorph has to be better, or the god is pretty pointless/unusable, from the feedback I'm getting.

I mean, if you think about it... polymorph as it currently exists in the game is a punishment. So, to rebalance that, either I give the player a lot of passive buffs while polymorphed, or just straight up remove the penalties associated with it (bats casting, pigs using weapons and armor, etc.) ... in which case, why even bother with the whole 'polymorph' side of it, just rename it Okawaru and call it a day... or polymorph itself has be tweaked in some fashion.

If you have an alternative though, love to hear it.

Thanks for the explanation of how polymorph relates to HD. However, it doesn't seem an insurmountable problem to me. Just make Liatrix's abilities downgrade the target's HD even harder than Nemelex's degeneration does (to the point where a favorable outcome is almost guaranteed).

[dynast]

It appears to me that this god idea's objective is not to bring something new to the game, but instead exhausts a single game mechanic for the sake of amusement.

[Chicken]

From what I see, a main point of the gods is to bring little-used features to the foreground, or change the relative weights of the different tactics, turning a single game into a bundle of related games. Who polymorphs stuff, let alone themselves? But here you have some character for which it's relevant.

[Quazifuji]

I feel like the obvious question here is: What makes this god different from playing a transmuter? It seems like there are two big differences: You don't have control over your own form, and the god also enables and encourages polymorphing enemies. Both of these have a very similar effect: they can randomly turn encounters easier or harder than they should be. But that sounds a lot like Xom.

So I pose this question: What makes this god different from playing a transmuter of Xom? Not at the detail level, but at the overall feel level. What experience do the transformations and random difficulty dips and spikes that this god provides add to the game that transmutations and Xom do not already add, respectively?

I think the god's a fun concept, and I really would like to see it turned into something worth adding to the game, but it needs work. I don't see why I'd ever play the suggested implementation outside of as a Xom-style novelty, and Xom already exists for that purpose. If the god is a novelty god, it needs more to distinguish it from Xom. If it's not a novelty god, it needs clearer strengths to compensate for the weaknesses. My initial off-hand thought: Polymorph should usually give you good forms, but they should be good in different ways. The challenge of the god should be about adapting to the forms you get. The forms should also not restrict your existing spells or weapons too much. This is partially to increase the diversity of the characters who can play this god (it's boring if the god's basically unarmed only), and also to distinguish the god from transmuters.

[lethediver]

I feel like the obvious question here is: What makes this god different from playing a transmuter? It seems like there are two big differences: You don't have control over your own form, and the god also enables and encourages polymorphing enemies. Both of these have a very similar effect: they can randomly turn encounters easier or harder than they should be. But that sounds a lot like Xom.

So I pose this question: What makes this god different from playing a transmuter of Xom? Not at the detail level, but at the overall feel level. What experience do the transformations and random difficulty dips and spikes that this god provides add to the game that transmutations and Xom do not already add, respectively?

I think the god's a fun concept, and I really would like to see it turned into something worth adding to the game, but it needs work. I don't see why I'd ever play the suggested implementation outside of as a Xom-style novelty, and Xom already exists for that purpose. If the god is a novelty god, it needs more to distinguish it from Xom. If it's not a novelty god, it needs clearer strengths to compensate for the weaknesses. My initial off-hand thought: Polymorph should usually give you good forms, but they should be good in different ways. The challenge of the god should be about adapting to the forms you get. The forms should also not restrict your existing spells or weapons too much. This is partially to increase the diversity of the characters who can play this god (it's boring if the god's basically unarmed only), and also to distinguish the god from transmuters.

Good meta comment, and I have to agree. Overall, I see I need to go back to the drawing board with this god and think about the concept a little more deeply, as it initially began as just "wouldn't it be cool if polymorphing yourself/others in Crawl was a legit strat" and spiralled from there. I will post another draft when/if I find a way to make the god work in a truly unique way.

[Quazifuji]

Good meta comment, and I have to agree. Overall, I see I need to go back to the drawing board with this god and think about the concept a little more deeply, as it initially began as just "wouldn't it be cool if polymorphing yourself/others in Crawl was a legit strat" and spiralled from there.

Personally, I think that was a fun question to ask. I just think the conclusion we've found so far is "a god that rewards piety for doing these things and increases the odds of getting a good polymorph on yourself does not give enough incentive."

On top of what I said about distinguishing this god from a Transmuter of Xom, I think you just need to figure out what the upside of this god is. It feels like you tried to incentivise polymorphing mostly by making a god that gives piety for it, but the main thing that you can use that piety on is more polymorphing. To really incentivise polymorphing, you need to either make polymorphing stronger, or make it so the piety you earn from polymorphing can be used to do something else. "polymorphing lets you do more polymorphing" isn't a good motivator if polymorphing isn't good in the first place.

[dpeg]

The good thing is that the god has a rich theme. By this I mean a theme connected so well to mechanics that one can actually make a god around it.

I am not sure how I'd approach a morph god, but I think the current proposal is too complicated. (Yes, I made very complicated proposals myself.) Here are some goals I'd ask for such a god:

1. No random enemy polymorphing. (Already mentioned: Xom, degeneration card, too risky both active/passive.)
2. No random self-polymorphing.
3. No spell forms. (The god should perhaps reward these forms in other ways, I don't think he should give them.)
4. Avoid long list of hand-made new forms. (Very few, say one or two, may be okay.)

That's it for now. I think it'd be pretty cool if the god started at * piety with tree form (what lignification does). That's not a spell, it is an interesting ability with advantages and drawbacks.