Abyss Ambulator
Posts: 1189
Joined: Friday, 28th January 2011, 21:45
A high risk/reward god
Finally, I came up on a god idea. Originally an idea for a god of justice with more standard play, it evolved into one with a conduct and abilities that encourage a play style that’s a wild departure from optimal play and, in fact, rewards you very well for it. Of course, those big carrots come with a big risk since you’ll be doing things that aren’t normally optimal and, thus, this god probably won’t be the best pick for streaking and what not. Hence, I am certain not everyone will like it.
Anyway, enough of that. I feel that this proposal might have some controversial components to it, so I explained my lines of thought and reasoning quite a bit in depth below the descriptions of abilities and mechanics. Yes, it’s a bit of a wall of text, but please look at it since it may answer some questions, concerns, or suggestions you might have.
=====Denethe, god of risks =====
Current flavor is a god who wants to be entertained, so the god has mortals do risky things for his entertainment. He rewards those who are entertaining with power so they can do even more riskier, more entertaining things.
…I’m not really happy with the flavor here since it sounds a wee bit much like Xom. But, hey, the gameplay is entirely different from Xom and that’s the important part. Also, I’m not overly fond of the name either.
===== Basic Information =====
Temple god.
The general idea is a high risk-high reward play style. The player is supposed to step out of their comfort zone quite often and engage in behavior that would normally be sub-optimal or counter-intuitive. This might make the god “less powerful” in that the player would be more likely to die, and thus not an optimal choice for winning, but this is fine. This one can be a “challenge” god.
=====Piety=====
====Appreciates====
* When you kill stuff quickly
* When you kill uniques quickly (worth more piety than the previous)
* When you kill lots of stuff quickly (stacks with unique kills if the kill in question is applicable)
Killing stuff grants a small amount of piety, but the majority of it comes from killing monsters simultaneously or within a few turns of the last kill. This might encourage a player to whittle down several monsters and then take em all out in a single cleave of their axe, but I am okay with this.
To prevent players from kiting whole floors into huge balls of monsters, an unseen timer starts for each monster, say 20-30 turns (or less), perhaps a bit higher for uniques. If the timer runs out, the player doesn’t get piety for the kill. This timer is also used for some other abilities.
====Deprecates====
* Piety falls over time
* Killing monsters too slowly
Note that killing stuff too slowly simply results in no gain for the kill rather than piety loss.
=====Given Abilities=====
====Piety: No stars====
* (Passive) Increases your AC, EV, and, if applicable, SH for each monster beyond the first in melee range. The amount granted increases as piety rises.
* (Passive) Protects you from your own splash damage. This is full protection, so you can drop Fireballs in your face or bounce Lightning Bolts back at yourself and be okay.
====Piety: One Star====
* (Passive) Reduces the penalty to SH when blocking multiple attacks. The amount increases as piety rises.
* (Passive) Whenever you kill an enemy that’s eligible for piety gain, your HP and MP is restored by 25%. However, both also regenerate 25% more slowly and external sources of recovery, such as Potions of Magic and Wands of Healing, are 25% less effective, though they still cure rotting and status effects at full effectiveness.
====Piety: Two Stars====
* HP/MP recovery on eligible kill is now 50% and other sources of recovery are 50% weaker. Again, full effectiveness on healing rot and statuses.
====Piety: Three Stars====
* (Passive) Protects you from Paralysis, Sleep, Petrification, and any other status effects that render the player helpless. The flavor here is the god is using you for entertainment and gets just as frustrated as we do when you die while helpless. The god would rather you go out with a bang rather than a “You lose the ability to move! You die…”
* HP/MP recovery on eligible kill is now 75% and other sources of recovery are 75% weaker.
====Piety: Four Stars====
* HP/MP recovery on eligible kill is now 100% and other sources of recovery are 100% weaker.
====Piety: Five Stars====
====Piety: Six Stars====
* (Passive): Whenever you suffer fatal damage from an enemy, you don’t die. Yet. Instead, the player is given 5 turns (or whatever is a good combination of fun and balance) to make a kill and are granted infinite MP and boosted stats to do so. If the player makes a kill, they regain all of their HP and MP. If they don’t… well, they die. This ensures that, for the god’s entertainment, you either go out with a bang or survive to continue giving him a good show.
Note that this has a very hefty piety cost. Since it’s 100% chance at life saving, if successful, and also includes full healing, the piety cost is significant enough to drop the player back to ****. Or possibly more or less depending on balance and fun factor.
===Other Possible Abilities===
Here’s some other things I considered but am not sure they’re a good idea or mesh well with the other abilities or flavor.
* Swap HP/MP (Hunger): This swaps the player’s HP/MP caps and current levels. So a player with 300/300 HP and 26/40 MP would have 26/40 HP and 300/300 MP. This lasts until they swap them back. It sounds interesting on paper, but I don’t know how useful it’d be in practice.
*Slaying Bonus for adjacent foes: It could work similar to the existing defensive passive or be a buff whose strength depends on the number of adjacent foes at the time of usage. I’m leaning against this because this pushes more heavily towards melee.
*Apport Foe (Hunger, MP): When I was still using the “god of justice” flavor, this had the niftier name of “Inescapable Judgement.” Anyway, basic idea is it checks user’s Invo against victim’s weight and, if it passes, it yanks the victim adjacent to the user and stuns the victim a turn or two. I don’t think it meshes too well with the current design, but I’m putting this here because it is the ability that ultimately led me to come up with this whole proposal.
=====Reasoning behind the design=====
Be warned, this section is very long as I tried to include my thoughts and reasonings behind all the decisions here.
Crawl is very much a game where a low-risk low-reward approach is frequently the most desired one to pursue. So much to the point that it’s usually a good idea to do things such as lure every pack to the nearest corridor or engage in other very safe but, ultimately, not very exciting behavior. I wanted a way in the game to encourage doing other things throughout the entire run without relying on specific encounters, requiring the player to adopt a conduct, or forcing it upon players who do not want to do it.
Hence, a god.
In order to make a high risk/high reward god seem appealing, I figured that not only did it need to look rewarding to play, but also contain some crazy abilities to encourage people taking it. Hence, it’s mostly a carrot approach. However, I also want to push players out of their comfort zone. I didn’t want a god that, aside from a few abilities, was business as usual. Rather, the idea is to change circumstances enough to force tactical and strategic considerations that either wouldn’t apply elsewhere or wouldn’t even exist.
The result is a god with mostly passive abilities that drastically changes the way the player will play. I wanted combat to feel a bit faster and more frantic than normal (well, as much as it can in a turn-based game), hence the player is given abilities that allow them to wade into combat safely and a timer that discourages trying to set-up the usual optimal situations (and prevents a lot of degenerate behavior, but more on that in a bit). There’s also a tension that the player can only heal by killing (at **** and above, at least) which can’t quite be replicated anywhere else (Deep Dwarves can at least recover mana by resting). Combine needing to make rapid kills to maximize piety gain and the player is actually made to make a lot of considerations rather than just blindly tabbing into combat. For example, do you kill this guy to heal yourself or do you only weaken him so you can AoE him and his friends down for more piety gain?
More in-depth, I went mostly with passive abilities because to be honest, I couldn’t come up with good active ones. But these change the gameplay so much, unlike old Vehumet, who was basically a passive upgrade, that I feel this is okay. You might not be using Invocations at all, but you’ll definitely feel the difference following this god than if you went with anyone else or nobody at all.
For inspiration, I glanced at plenty of other games where to get abilities from. While not everything made it in, some games I looked at include City of Heroes, Borderlands, Super Smash Brothers, and a few others.
The first two passives are there to encourage the player to get out of corridors and into crowds, aka stepping out of their comfort zone, while giving something upon joining with enough impact that the player will notice it immediately. The idea behind increasing defensive abilities is to make it safe enough to be surrounded. But, at the same time, it shouldn’t be as safe as painstakingly luring everything to a corridor one-by-one.
The self-AoE protection is largely there to ensure that this god isn’t entirely melee-centric. That was the original intent, at least, since you’ll still probably not want to be a squishy caster in the midst of a pack. But it also allows for some different strategies, such as making a somewhat tanky mage whose goal is to dive into crowds and then shoot fireballs into his own face to kill everything. You can’t do that anywhere else in-game (at least, not safely or reliably) and I’m sure there’s other crazy things that the player could do to leverage the self-AoE protection.
The next passive, cutting the SH penalty when blocking attacks, admittedly feels kind of weak on its own. But again, the intent is to make sitting in a crowd survivable. It was originally part of the “increase defenses based on number of adjacent hostiles” ability, but I decoupled it to give * something to do. Of course, that was a bit ago and now * also does another thing, so that’s not such a big deal.
The next passive is probably the one that’ll be the most controversial one and I can already guess at who will say it’s dumb or whatever, though I’ll be pleasantly surprised if I’m wrong. Originally, this was just the **** only and no increasing stages. The idea of increasing it slowly was inspired by Chei gradually slowing you down. Rather than just suddenly making such a huge change, I figured it was better to do it gradually over time so the player can adapt to the mechanic.
I will admit that the reduced regeneration rates will make resting more annoying. However, since resting eventually becomes impossible, doing so is missing the intent of the ability. It’ll be more efficient to track down and kill something to heal, popcorn if necessary, and hopefully the player will catch onto that before they hit ****. Ultimately, it’s supposed to come down to “find enemy, take damage, kill enemy for HP and MP, repeat” rather than “find enemy, take damage, kill enemy, rest, repeat.”
Combine this with the timer and this can force the player into some tense situations that wouldn’t arise otherwise. Low on HP and MP and you run into a pack of enemies. Conventional tactics would be to flee and rest, but that’s either no long possible or is at least highly inefficient. Additionally, because they can’t simply come back later to kill them for healing, the player has to make a choice: engage for piety and HP/MP or flee and search for new victims. If they choose to engage, then they have to make choices based on group composition and terrain on how to score the quickest kill possible since they may not have enough time to lure them to a better position.
By eliminating the option of resting and adding large amounts of recovery to killing, we get interesting situations you won’t see anywhere else in the game. Or that’s the hope, at any rate.
Moving on, rParalysis and etc. are partly just flavor, partly just a gimmick to help draw players to the god, and largely a way to help avoid sudden deaths among a crowd. Dive into a group and an eyeball rolls around the corner? That’d be pretty darn fatal and not very fun. Under normal play, we’d blame the player for being dumb and diving into the crowd. Here, since that tactic is supposed to be encouraged, I don’t want the player to feel “cheated” or “punished” in those kinds of situations. This is hardly a necessary ability, but it’s definitely one I’d recommend keeping.
Finally, we have the life-saving passive. This one is also probably going to be controversial (hey, look at Felids), but it’s also very distinct and something no other god does. If, say, Zin saves you, you just ignore a fatal hit. And that’s it. Handy, but not exciting. But with this god, you’re given a chance to save yourself. And, not to mention, in a very fun and flavorful way.
The timer is short because I want it to be a brief but tense moment. It’s do or die, act now and save yourself or drop dead! It’s a very active and exciting way to keep yourself from getting killed. You get to be much stronger than usual for such a brief moment with a last surge of adrenaline to keep yourself going. Even Felid life-saving has nothing on this.
The piety cost is high to ensure that people who made really dumb moves still die and also to prevent abuse. While constantly dipping in and out of the “almost dead” state is pretty cool in theory, it’s not something that I’d think would work well in this game. At least, not with these mechanics. Plus it avoids the potential complaints of “became literally immortal once I learned Firestorm”. Or some of them, anyway.
On the bright side, if the player does fail to kill anything and ends up dead, they can at least console themselves with the knowledge that, with less piety or a different god, that situation would have probably killed them anyway. Or that they made the mistake and weren’t merely cheated.
And it took me a while to get to it, but piety mechanics. Killing monsters rapidly means engaging more at once. Engaging more at once means higher risk. Higher risk = higher reward, in this case more piety than killing them individually.
The timer is there to encourage rapid engagement of monsters upon first encounter, aka more risk, with the reward being piety. The timer also serves as a nifty anti-abuse function. Tying it to the “heal on kill” mechanic means that you can’t drag some rats around to heal yourself with on demand. Well, you can for a little bit, but not for any effective length of time. It also means that you can’t drag the rat around to resurrect yourself after taking fatal damage. And if people drag rats around to boost their defensive stats, then we can tie that passive to the timer as well.
It also means you can’t herd the whole floor into a big ball of HP-restoring piety. While this would definitely be cool on some level, I don’t think it’d be healthy behavior to encourage in the long run. And I’m pretty darn sure that it’d be one of the first things pointed out as a problem (that and dragging rats for healing if I had missed that too).
I did what I could to try to make this god not overly favor or disfavor any particular type of build. A squishy caster might not want to benefit from jumping into a ball of foes, but they can still utilize pretty much everything else. Meanwhile, shields might get an extra side-benefit, but you by no means need one. Besides, piety gain would be easier with an Executioner’s Axe anyway.
If anyone benefits in a disproportionate amount, I’d have to say it’d be both Deep Dwarves and Felids. The former already have zero natural healing, so the drawbacks here wouldn’t be nearly as pronounced while they would absolutely love the benefits. Also, damage shaving + defensive bonuses? Yeah, that sounds a bit crazy.
Meanwhile, Felids already mind death far less than any other species. They’d not only be able to prevent death with the final ability, but also prevent death by using a life. I do feel that this is probably less problematic than DDs since Felids are squishier than a pillow. In fact, actually does seem pretty cool on a conceptual level.
If either of these are problematic, we can always forbid these species from taking this religion. Their innate “safety” mechanisms can found to be too boring for the god or some other similar flavor reason.
Finally, the main goal of this god is to be fun. I don’t know about you, but the crazy high risk-high reward style just sounds really fun to play. It may or may not be the most optimal decision for winning games and it won’t be the god everyone picks, but if a number of people think it’d be fun, then it’s a win in my book.
As always, suggestions and criticisms are welcome. Even if this god somehow isn't controversial, I doubt it's perfect.