New god proposal : Barnum, God of the Circus

[casserol]

Think stair dancing should be removed ? There's (could be) a god for that ! Introducing Barnum, neutral God of Performance and Showmanship.

This god doesn't want you to escape from a fight, but he'll teach you some tricks to survive it.

Post edited with the new proposition following the discussion . For newcomers to the thread, you'll find spoilered the first version of the abilities which will help to make sense of the comments

1) Piety :

Appreciate : killing monsters then ? since apparently not everyone's convinced the tension mechanism is good. My experience of it is as a demonspawn with the demon guardian mutation and it seemed to work ok ? Maybe we could envison a piety gain for each tension threshold reached , the higher the more, once in, say, a hundred turns ? Once you've got the piety gain for tension level X, you got a refractory period of a hundred turns where you don't get anything for reaching this tension level.

Depreciate : using stairs, shafts, teleporters, teleport, when monsters are in sight or hp<80% max hp. I wouldn't penalize death's door and other defensive measure that don't involve moving far away from the threat, but i know very little about spells, so i'd like to hear your opinions

2) Abilities :

- : Ran Away With The Circus : Passive : killer clowns become neutral

* : The Strongman : Passive : reduces encumberance rating for some points for all purposes

**: The Juggler : A chance each turn to make intelligents monsters temporarily neutrals (the monsters watch the show). Any action other than walking aborts it. (Uses breath mechanism ?).

*** : The Clown Car , courtesy of Hellmonk: gives you a status which summons an ally each turn while it lasts. Status duration is heavily invocation dependent and always fairly short, and summons time out quickly when the status ends. Possible summons are goblin, human, ogre mage, yaktaur captain, titan, killer klown (or something similar to that list), always starting near the bottom and with a greater and greater likelihood to go further up the list as the effect goes on (bigger and bigger clowns hop out of your car). Basically, you get a few crappy summons and then get some really strong but short duration ones if you have sufficient invocations. (uses breath ?) (summons are confused for extra fun to simulate "clownish behaviour ?")

**** : The Mime, courtesy of Arrhythmia : Summons 3 square of temporary glass wall in front of the character. (pushes monsters back ?) (Uses the breath mechanism ?)

***** : The Acrobat : the Acrobat : passive - any tile(s)-targeted , AoE included, hit that would damage the player for more than 33% max HP is cancelled and the player does a random blink instead ( uses breath ? ). Does not protect from torment or smite which the doesn't target the player "physically" .

****** : no new ability or some cool gift but i can't think of a circus themed one apart from a stack of a hundred random effects scrolls.

4) Penance ideas

- The Menagerie : spawning a bunch of hostile animals
- The Geeks : spawning hostile killer clowns
- The Show Must Go On : occasionally deny the use of stairs/teleports/teleporters/shafts/etc
- The Circus Orchestra : noise and/or mark effect
- The Impresario : gold picked up is reduced by 33%
- The Fire Breather : random sticky flame effect

Spoiler: show

2)Piety :

Appreciates : high tension

Basic piety for each turn spent under tension, the higher the better

OPTIONAL : a piety pool builds up for doing silly, spectacular things : eating, swapping armor, attempting to use spells or ability with a high failure chance, attacking a monster with elements he is resistant to, using/wearing unidentified items, using spells/weapons from not-your-highest-skill... (might overlap with some xom stuff ?)
the piety pooled is awarded when tension goes back to zero

Depreciate : leaving the stage before the show is over ! using stairs,shafts,teleports,teleporters, under tension or under 50% health/mana . This annihilate any piety pooled.

3)Abilities

- : Ran Away With The Circus : killer clowns become neutral

* : The Clown : can be toggled on and off . the player is confused and has a chance each turn to confuse any intelligent monsters in sight. uses breath

** : The Strongman : temporarily negates armor emcumberance for combat purpose - Leaves character breathless when it ends

*** : The Juggler : a chance each turn to make intelligents monsters temporarily neutrals (the monsters watch the show). must have both hands free . Any action other than walking aborts it. Leaves character breathless when it ends.

**** : the Tamer : active - can summon animals, OR active - can attempt to enslave/neutralise an animal, OR passive - ennemy animal summons have a chance to appear neutral

*****the Acrobat : passive - any tile(s)-targeted , AoE included, hit that would damage the player for more than 33% HP is cancelled and the player does a random blink instead - Needs breath - only works if the player is wearing cloth/leather/hide armor on body slot(or no armor)

******The Mime : active - the player emits a two-tile radius Silence effect - must have one or both hands free - Leaves character breathless when it ends

4) Penance ideas

- The Menagerie : spawning a bunch of hostile animals
- The Geeks : spawning hostile killer clowns
- The Show Must Go On : occasionally deny the use of stairs/teleports/teleporters/shafts/etc
- The Circus Orchestra : noise and/or mark effect
- The Impresario : gold picked up is reduced by 33%
- The Fire Breather : random sticky flame effect

Waiting for your feedback

[Hellmonk]

It feels like I would have to jump through hoops to get any advantage out of choosing this god.

[Hurkyl]

The altar only appears in a Bailey?

Tension isn't very transparent; that might make the god frustrating. Unless a tension meter is added, I suppose.

[dowan]

Tension is a really bad mechanic, and for piety gain it'd be horrible. I'd just kite a train of monsters around, just like I can do with Xom to get him to act. Only instead of a random crazy god action, I'd get piety gain.

I guess that might not be a problem, because I don't see anything useful to do with that piety. It seems like using the god abilities is at best no gain, and at worst, a waste of my turns while monsters beat on me.

Think bigger with the god abilities, and try to think of a better piety gain mechanic. Shoot for wildly OP with your god abilities, then we can try to pare them down to reasonable levels. Right now they are mostly pretty lackluster.

[Lasty]

There are some things I really like about this proposal, but as others have already said, using tension is a real problem. Tension is quite easy to game. I think the overall direction of the god has a lot of fun features though, so if you can find a way to make the piety work this has potential. A few specific notes:

• The Clown feels really narrow in scope. When would the player use this as opposed to another action? Perhaps if it also increased EV or something it would become a decent option in some circumstances. I think that in an ideal design, this would be a good option in a minority of encounters.
• The Strongman is pretty narrow, and getting the most out of it means having way too much encumbrance normally, which is awkward. Perhaps this would be better as a passive ability, or as an active ability that raises Strength directly?
• The Juggler is my favorite ability from this list; it's a somewhat risky but powerful and unique effect that's thoroughly on-theme. The "both hands free" requirement sounds irritating -- it means you cannot use it with shields and have to w- before using it every time unless you're using UC.
• The Tamer isn't all that interesting in any of the three forms, but the first active power would do an adequate job of filling a useful role.
• The Acrobat is another ability I like: it gives a unique benefit that's on-theme. Removing some of the restrictions on its use would probably be a good idea unless the god is designed to hate heavy armour overall (and it's not, currently -- see Strongman). Would Torment or flaying trigger this power? The effect should definitely use 33% max hp, since 33% current hp would make you effectively invincible.
• The Mime is a bad version of a situational L5 spell with extra restrictions; it should probably be cut entirely. Also note that 6* doesn't currently give active abilities (aside from one-time gifts/brands) for any other gods.
• As dowan said, this god needs more excitement/power to compensate for its harsh restrictions.

[svendre]

An idea for piety gain:

How about if piety is gained when you take hits which are over a certain % of your total life. It would have to be some kind of formula which takes frequency of damage received along with how bad the damage was, so people couldn't just take one big hit, flee and heal up and repeat. So if you play on the edge of death frequently, you gain a lot more piety than playing it safe. Death's Door probably shouldn't work, and maybe it would be viewed as a cowardly action incurring wrath. You might also have to account for being flayed among a few other things as well. Perhaps it could also somehow incorporate taking the amount of time you remain heavily wounded, yet struggle or proceed versus resting.

[mattlistener]

An idea for piety gain:

How about if piety is gained when you take hits which are over a certain % of your total life. It would have to be some kind of formula which takes frequency of damage received along with how bad the damage was, so people couldn't just take one big hit, flee and heal up and repeat. So if you play on the edge of death frequently, you gain a lot more piety than playing it safe. Death's Door probably shouldn't work, and maybe it would be viewed as a cowardly action incurring wrath. You might also have to account for being flayed among a few other things as well. Perhaps it could also somehow incorporate taking the amount of time you remain heavily wounded, yet struggle or proceed versus resting.

Simplify to "dungeon tiles revealed while injured"?

[dowan]

It's hard to do anything for piety based on the player taking damage or doing things while damaged without creating scummy behavior. This creates incentives to allow weak creatures to hit you, or keep a weak creature following you to keep your life below full, etc.

The ability firing off based on taking damage is fine, because what does the player gain by trying to make that happen? But imagine a character letting worms try to hit him until they get a big hit, the character gets piety, and walks safely away from the worm to heal up and repeat.

[swoonis]

Love the theme, a lot. I would love to see this refined.

[Hellmonk]

Actual serious reply now that I've looked at it and thought about it some more. The piety mechanic is a major sticking point as others have mentioned. It would be cool to have another god that has a piety mechanic that isn't on-kill or exploration based, but I think it's rather challenging to come up with those.

The abilities involving keeping hands free would be annoying, as Lasty mentioned, and wielding/unwielding isn't a meaningful cost. There's not really a point in making it required, unless the god needs to explicitly hate shields for some reason.

Of the abilities, I like the acrobat the most. It's an interesting pseudo-escape effect. I would remove the armor requirement, unless no armor is intended to be part of the conduct, and maybe make the required damage to trigger depend on invocation skill.

For a more interesting summoning effect than the Tamer version, how about the following:
Clown Car: gives you a status which summons an ally each turn while it lasts. Status duration is heavily invocation dependent and always fairly short, and summons time out quickly when the status ends. Possible summons are goblin, human, ogre mage, yaktaur captain, titan, killer klown (or something similar to that list), always starting near the bottom and with a greater and greater likelihood to go further up the list as the effect goes on (bigger and bigger clowns hop out of your car). Basically, you get a few crappy summons and then get some really strong but short duration ones if you have sufficient invocations.

[Arrhythmia]

the mime should also summon a transparent wall.

[casserol]

Thanks guys for the feedback and input ! Following the comments, let's rework this :


1) Piety :

Appreciate : killing monsters then ? since apparently not everyone's convinced the tension mechanism is good. My experience of it is as a demonspawn with the demon guardian mutation and it seemed to work ok ? Maybe we could envison a piety gain for each tension threshold reached , the higher the more, once in, say, a hundred turns ? Once you've got the piety gain for tension level X, you got a refractory period of a hundred turns where you don't get anything for reaching this tension level.

Depreciate : using stairs, shafts, teleporters, teleport, when monsters are in sight or hp<80% max hp. I wouldn't penalize death's door and other defensive measure that don't involve moving far away from the threat, but i know very little about spells, so i'd like to hear your opinions

2) Abilities :

- : Ran Away With The Circus : Passive : killer clowns become neutral

* : The Strongman : Passive : reduces encumberance rating for some points for all purposes

**: The Juggler : A chance each turn to make intelligents monsters temporarily neutrals (the monsters watch the show). Any action other than walking aborts it. (Uses breath mechanism ?).

*** : The Clown Car , courtesy of Hellmonk: gives you a status which summons an ally each turn while it lasts. Status duration is heavily invocation dependent and always fairly short, and summons time out quickly when the status ends. Possible summons are goblin, human, ogre mage, yaktaur captain, titan, killer klown (or something similar to that list), always starting near the bottom and with a greater and greater likelihood to go further up the list as the effect goes on (bigger and bigger clowns hop out of your car). Basically, you get a few crappy summons and then get some really strong but short duration ones if you have sufficient invocations. (uses breath ?) (summons are confused for extra fun to simulate "clownish behaviour ?")

**** : The Mime, courtesy of Arrhythmia : Summons 3 square of temporary glass wall in front of the character. (pushes monsters back ?) (Uses the breath mechanism ?)

***** : The Acrobat : the Acrobat : passive - any tile(s)-targeted , AoE included, hit that would damage the player for more than 33% max HP is cancelled and the player does a random blink instead ( uses breath ? ). Does not protect from torment or smite which the doesn't target the player "physically" .

****** : no new ability or some cool gift but i can't think of a circus themed one apart from a stack of a hundred random effects scrolls.

4) Penance ideas

- The Menagerie : spawning a bunch of hostile animals
- The Geeks : spawning hostile killer clowns
- The Show Must Go On : occasionally deny the use of stairs/teleports/teleporters/shafts/etc
- The Circus Orchestra : noise and/or mark effect
- The Impresario : gold picked up is reduced by 33%
- The Fire Breather : random sticky flame effect


Let me know what you think

[eliotn]

Ideas:

For piety gain, maybe it would be better to only award it if you actively move towards monsters during a combat. Breaking this awards a permanent unimpressed status effect to the monsters that saw you do this, and you don't earn piety. To help with this, when there are monsters that aren't unimpressed, the game will color the squares that will move you away from them, and warn you for doing that.

Maybe a choice between different effects would be interesting?

Strongman:
-The weapon gets bigger but keeps the same enhancements (more damage, but less accuracy) The cooler the weapon the better! Size change increases with piety. To make it really strong, make it an ability to wield weapons that would normally be out of reach.

Stage magician:
-Your spells will generate smoke around any creature they affect, split between targets. You can see through this fog. Amount of smoke scales with piety/spell level. (Penance: Generates smoke around you, but monsters can see through it.)

Banning many escapes is an interesting idea if you compensate the player for taking that route in an interesting way .

[dowan]

I don't think the crawl engine allows you to have non-reciprocal LOS like you proposed with the smoke thing, if you can see a creature's tile, it can see yours, and vice versa.