God Proposal: Udums, the God of Improbability

[BobIsDead]

The Random Number God. Udums was once the god of cause and effect. But Udums grew tired of one thing leading to the other, with no room for randomness or chance. So Udums shattered causality into a thousand shards, each shard splintering a thousand more times; actuality giving way to possibility.

Udums likes those who defy the odds, who show that raw numbers aren't everything. As such, worshippers of Udums gain piety for slaying enemies more powerful than themselves. As with most gods, piety decays naturally over time.

Udums Abilities

[-]Infinite Possibility
Item generation rate is increased so long as one worships Udums, as does the spawning of more powerful monsters.

[*]Undo
Slaying an enemy has a chance of killing them retroactively, as though they'd died sooner. This undoes any damage they've dealt or effects they've caused in the last such-and-such amount of turns. The specific amount of turns is always slightly random, but as piety increases, so does the average amount of turns undone by this ability.
Slaying ane enemy has a slight chance of killing them retroactively, as though they'd died sooner. A percentage of the damage done by the enemy is restored. The exact percentage is slightly random, but as piety increases, so does the percentage of health restored by this ability.

[**]Bend Probability
At the cost of piety, this ability can be activated. When done so, it causes the worshipper to be improbably lucky. They gain an invisible, highly fluctuating bonus on all attempted attacks (including magical attacks) and attempts to resist/evade/block enemy attacks. The duration and effectiveness of this ability increases with one's Invocation score.

[****]Redo
At the cost of piety, a worshipper can "reroll" their previous turn. When this ability is used, all random elements of the immediate prior turn are rerolled. This includes attacks, spell miscasts, uncontrolled teleports, the outcome of a wand of random effects and so much more. This ability can be used multiple times consecutively, each time rerolling a reroll, but the piety cost sharply rises with each consecutive use.
At the cost of piety, a worshipper may reach through the veil of probability and replace an entire floor in their timeline with one from another. The level they're on is regenerated from scratch, rerolling everything. However, there's a sharp decrease in the amount of treasure generated and enemies are weighted towards being tougher. This ability may only be used once.

Spoiler: show

Rationale

Defying the odds is the central "gimmick" of this god. Peity can be gained from fighting off one extremely powerful enemy, or fighting through hordes of moderately threatening enemies without scumming it out. This god is for those players who don't run away when they see an OOD monster or a unique, but rather laugh as they quaff their potion of might and charge straight towards it.

The Infinite Possibility ability is perhaps the most central ability. It adds a layer of strategy to when one should start worshipping Udums. Too soon and one could be unprepared for the increased threat. Too late, and one misses out on a lot of the increased loot found. Additionally, the increase in powerful monsters allows for easier piety gain, whilst the increase of loot increases one's chances of defeating those monsters.

The Undo ability is there to give an additional incentive to finish off more powerful enemies. After all, it's essentially yet another "heal on kill" ability. But, because it can only heal damage from the one who dealt the damage, it removes the option of grinding through weaker enemies to replenish health.

The Bend Probability ability is there to give one a fighting chance against considerably powerful enemies. It's not as reliable as a potion of might or brilliance, is more subdued, giving an edge rather than outright winning the fight. It's also useful in the sense that it's a non-specific buff. So fighters and spellcasters will find it equally useful.

The Redo ability is not intended to be a combat ability. Though it could be used for that. Instead, it's meant to make the increased items you find even more useful. Wound up in a bad place on an uncontrolled teleport? Use this ability. That potion of cure mutation got rid of your good mutations and not your bad ones? Use this ability. That scroll of acquirement gave you a helmet when you wanted some fancy new boots? Use this ability.

All in all, I think this makes for a relatively simple god yet with wide appeal to different types of characters and playstyle. I'll be honest, this proposal started as a joke, a way of putting forward a loose semblance of ideas that appealed to me. However, in time it grew into a god based around increased risks and rewards. Not that this god necessitates risky or punishing playstyles (though, I suppose it would allow for that). But, rather, it rewards players for taking certain, calculated risks.

EDIT: Altered the Undo and Redo abilities. Undo is changed to make it hopefully more implementable. Redo is completely changed. It's somewhat of an extension of Infinite Possibility now, giving you more treasure and tougher monsters to beat. The most obvious use of it is to get more treasure from the likes of Vaults:5 or Elf:3, however it could also be used defensively; regenerating a level as the ultimate panic button to escape a fight you're losing.

[Shard1697]

Undo sounds like a more messy version of what Makhleb does.

[njvack]

Sucks to walk into an area dug by a Deep Troll EE and kill it.

More seriously: It's a neat concept, but I think it's basically not possible to implement without designing for it from the start.

[TeshiAlair]

I think you could do an undo of at least the previous turn.

The issue with this is that a lot of these abilities are reskinned stat boosts that you can trigger when you've messed up, which is a bit...wonky? I like the increased item gen vs monster strength though, that's cute.

[HardboiledGargoyle]

I think Redo could carry the god. Just think of all the possible things you could choose to redo! Getting hit by a LCS! Polymorphing something into a shrike! Tele-scouting unexplored areas! If you could choose a different previous action, it would be even more powerful, letting you e.g. undo the act of waking nasty monsters even with 0 stealth. Even allowing just a single reroll (no consecutive Redos) would be very big, and it is effectively not without precedent. And it should doubtlessly trigger automatically when you die, which may not help sometimes, e.g. if you die while paralyzed.

[bcadren]

I feel like I've either seen or written almost this exact proposal before and it was shot down for being complex and too similar to just "hidden stat bonuses".

[ontoclasm]

Well among other things, it's basically impossible to implement. Crawl doesn't remember how things were before the last calculation it made, let alone some arbitrary number of turns ago. You'd have to rewrite almost the entire codebase to allow undoing even a single turn.

[Rast]

FR a god of saving and restoring. For a significant piety cost, you roll back your game to the last time you entered the level. At champion level, you would e able to make savestates at any time for a small piety cost.

[amaril]

FR a god of saving and restoring. For a significant piety cost, you roll back your game to the last time you entered the level. At champion level, you would e able to make savestates at any time for a small piety cost.

it's basically impossible to implement. Crawl doesn't remember how things were before the last calculation it made,

Rast's comment reminded me that sometimes when I play offline I encounter a bug where the game crashes and when I reboot the character I have to restart the level, but item-drops/enemy placements (I am pretty sure) are all as they were the first time I played the level. Not sure how this happens, but it possibly demonstrates that there is a way to re-do levels (if such a thing would be a desirable feature/god ability)

[crate]

Crawl automatically saves when you enter a level, but that save is deleted if you make a future save. You can in theory make crawl save the game more often or maintain those saves for longer, of course, but there's not really much reason to do so. Any god (or, really, any mechanic except as a backup in case of crashes) relying on restoring to saves is probably not a good idea.

[bcadren]

Crate's point is correct, but the better way for this god to work (if it did work) is more like a rolling log of the last few turn's actions BY CREATURE because of the undo thing; then on death instantly have a shadow version of the creature do the opposite. messy.

I've done action logs like that before, but it was in a game I was making from scratch to use them as part of the core design...not...just adding it into an existing game.

[BobIsDead]

I feared that this idea would be impossible to implement. I assume it's basically Undo and Redo that get in the way of everything.

With Undo, I suppose you could change the nature of it slightly. Instead of recording and undoing a set amount of turns, it instead keeps a tally of how much damage each monster has done to you (the tally reducing as you recover HP), and upon you defeating the monster, you're healed a percentage of the damage they've done to you. The percentage being partially dependent on your piety. Still probably messy to sort out, perhaps even impossible, but likely easier than tracking every single thing a monster has done over the last however many turns.

As for Redo, the only way I can think to make it work is with a separate save state that resaves every turn, remembering your game state and what action you just decided to implement. That probably still comes under the "impossible" heading, though, or at least the "heavily impractical" heading. Perhaps the ability could be replaced with something a little less savescummy or even removed altogether.

[Quazifuji]

FR a god of saving and restoring. For a significant piety cost, you roll back your game to the last time you entered the level. At champion level, you would e able to make savestates at any time for a small piety cost.

TOME 4 has some time travel abilities kind of like that. There's one that saves the current state and automatically rewinds back to it after a few turns (so you can use it for scouting), one that's similar except you target an enemy with it, and if the enemy dies while it's active they stay dead after the rewind, and one that lets you play the next few turns three times and then pick which outcome to keep.

They're really cool, and really fun to use, but would also probably be incredibly difficult or impossible to implement in DCSS. Although they do have a significant technical advantage over the proposed god in that they only ever rewind to the stat when the spell was cast, you can't just rewind to any arbitrary turn in the past, so the game wouldn't have to save every turn, just when you use the ability.

[duvessa]

They're really cool, and really fun to use, but would also probably be incredibly difficult or impossible to implement in DCSS.

they don't actually work in tome4 either

[Quazifuji]

They're really cool, and really fun to use, but would also probably be incredibly difficult or impossible to implement in DCSS.

they don't actually work in tome4 either

I didn't say they work, I said they're cool and fun to use. I have had fun whenever I've used them, despite the bugs.

That said, even more argument for why this is impossible. Even a rewind that only works to one specific point you set would be practically impossible to add, let alone having an ability that lets you under at any given turn, meaning the game would have to always keep track of every effect that the god could reverse or reroll.

[BobIsDead]

Edited my orginal post. Decided to move away from anything resembling savescumming. The idea is neat, but doesn't really match with the design principles of Dungeon Crawl, so far as I understand them, anyway. That said, I am a little concerned that the alternate suggestions open up the door to a completely different form of scumming.