New God Proposal: Invidia, goddess of taboos and envy


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Lair Larrikin

Posts: 28

Joined: Wednesday, 30th November 2016, 11:35

Post Friday, 2nd December 2016, 09:55

New God Proposal: Invidia, goddess of taboos and envy

Invidia, Goddess of taboos and envy

Flavour

In ages long past, Invidia was the goddess of magical artefacts, producing countless sundry magical baubles to help mortals achieve magical powers well beyond their modest means. Yet over the countless millennia, her spirit has soured, her patience with mortals has thinned, and she has grown increasingly jealous of the sight of lowly, undeserving mortals misusing some of her gifts. And so, she has focused her godly envy on the task of purging the land of all these magical tools, so that those unworthy of power are barred from it.

Followers are expected to scorn the use of and disenchant all taboo items, in exchange for which they receive magic dust which can be used to harm and curse enemies, as well as allow followers to gain access to forbidden lore.

Invidia likes it when you disenchant taboo items.

Invidia strongly dislikes abandonment.


Once you start worshiping her, she places a "taboo" on some magical items, which means that they cannot be used without incurring her wrath. This taboo is placed randomly on 50% rounded up of all of these categories of items:

    -scrolls & potions, separating them by "colour" and then rolling for which ones are taboo. This means that, for example, 2 out of the 4 of the cyan consumables (experience, cure mutation, beneficial mutation, and acquirement) will be taboo. The same principle is applied to the 16 light grey consumables, the 7 yellow ones, the 6 purple ones, and the 1 red one. Note: identify and remove curse scrolls are always taboo and don’t count towards the total number of taboo light grey items. Potions of blood are never taboo, as they are not magical.

    -wands, also separating them by color. Here we have 12 light grey and 3 yellow items. This means that 2 of the 3 rare wands will be taboo.

    -rods, of which there are simply 6.

In addition to these, the entire suite of miscellaneous evocable items is always taboo (e.g. fan of gales, box of monsters)

Note: the assignment of taboos based on item "colour" does not take into consideration the specific racial restrictions of the character who worships her. This means that for a formicid and a human, for example, have the same probability of having "scroll of teleportation" become taboo.

In exchange, she offers:

- "Abstinent"
    • Upon conversion: Instantly identifies all items in your inventory and disenchants all taboo items in inventory, producing magic dust.
    • Disenchant item (passive): Passively converts to magic dust all visible, identified items on the ground or in the player's inventory that are taboo.
    • All items are immediately identified and de-cursed on pickup. Note: artefacts with *Curse will still trigger and will not be de-cursed automatically, but Invidia protects you from mummy item cursing.

* "Suspicious"
    • Lash Out: Make a smite-targeted attack of irresistible damage to a single target in sight. This attack scales with Invocation skill and Piety. Costs hunger and a dose of magic dust.

** "Green-eyed"


*** "Envious"
    • Forbidden Lore: Use an effect from the list of taboo scrolls and potions. This costs five doses of magic dust and produces significant draining proportional to experience level and reduced by Invocations. Note: cannot be used to mimic potions of experience or scrolls of acquirement.

**** "Covetous"


***** "Grudging"
    • Evil Eye: Polymorph a monster into a lower-HD monster of the same type. Functions like Wand of Polymorph, except the result is almost guaranteed to be of lower, and at worst equal HD. Does not work on named (unique) monsters, where it causes draining instead. Costs significant hunger and two doses of magic dust.

****** "Invidious"
    • Gifts: Starting at this level, Invidia begins to bestow gifts of random quantities of magic dust.

New item: Magic Dust

Is a stackable, quaffable consumable. When quaffed, it has a chance of producing the effects of any of the taboo scrolls or potions, as well as giving you severe contamination of 3 to 7 points. (2% chance of cyan effect, 8% chance of red, 30% chance of purple, 20% chance of yellow and 50% chance of light grey – of course, never ID or remove curse)


Abandonment:
When you abandon her, all your magic dust will be rendered inert, and you will experience her divine retribution:

    • 75%: Invidia smites you for potentially significant damage.
    • 25%: Invidia polymorphs you into a monster of HD 1-5 less than yours of the same type.
    • In addition, for the rest of the game, using taboo items will increase your penance counter, even after it has gone to 0.

Design Discussion: Invidia takes away a significant portion of your character’s flexibility when it comes to consumables, while doing away completely with identification and almost completely with curses. In exchange, she offers reliable offensive and controlling capabilities that shine with high investment in Invocations, and use a new “consumable god powers” mechanic. These powers cannot be used too often, and each time they are used, it represents a strategic choice.

The taboos themselves change how you play the game significantly and randomly each game, which forces players to adapt their playstyle to using her differently each time.

The Forbidden Lore power allows characters to circumvent the taboo restriction, but at a severe cost not only in magic dust, but also in terms of severe draining, the quantity of which should make it prohibitively expensive to use in all but the direst circumstances, at basically all levels. The exception would be in the extended or late game, at 27 Invocations and level 27, where it might be more viable to use semi-regularly.

Magic dust itself offers an interesting alternative for the blind (q)uaff or blind (r)ead roulette game of the early levels for adventurers, but which continues throughout the whole game. This means that nothing of value is lost from the loss of the identification game, and I would even say it’s more fun than ID ever is. It’s weighted towards producing a positive outcome, but of course no matter how good getting a scroll of acquirement from it is, it might not be the saving grace you were looking for then and there.

Assuming something a total of around 400 wands/scrolls/potions for a normal 3 rune game, this means that Invidia’s smite can be used 200 times in total throughout a game, if none of her other abilities are used. This means it should be reserved for particularly dangerous foes, and should be relatively strong, although I am not sure on the exact formula.

Spoiler: show
This is my first post on this forum, but I've been playing Crawl on-and-off and lurking for a couple of years now. I've won a handful of times both on 3 and 15 rune runs, but I don't claim to be anywhere near the best.

I'd like to say this community and this game are truly incredible, and Crawl is, for my money, the best roguelike around at this point. That being said, feel free to tear my idea to shreds.

Cocytus Succeeder

Posts: 2297

Joined: Saturday, 14th April 2012, 21:35

Post Friday, 2nd December 2016, 13:19

Re: New God Proposal: Invidia, goddess of taboos and envy

The steps to writing a god proposal:

Question 1: what gameplay purpose does this god proposal seek to achieve?

Question 2: why would players find it fun to pick this god?

Question 3 is "mechanics?" and Question 4 is "flavour?"

I can see you've addressed some of them but they're in the wrong order and we've seen so many god proposals that don't think of Questions 1 and 2 at all.

Also, welcome.

Edit: Ok, so let's see if I've digested your post right:

takes away a significant portion of your character’s flexibility when it comes to consumables, while doing away completely with identification and almost completely with curses. In exchange, she offers reliable offensive and controlling capabilities that shine with high investment in Invocations, and use a new “consumable god powers” mechanic

an interesting alternative for the blind (q)uaff or blind (r)ead roulette game of the early levels for adventurers, but which continues throughout the whole game. This means that nothing of value is lost from the loss of the identification game, and I would even say it’s more fun than ID ever is.

So this god is somewhere inbetween Gozag, Ru, Ashenzari and Nemelex in design space. I see an underlying assumption:

change how you play the game significantly and randomly each game, which forces players to adapt their playstyle to using her differently each time.

This assumes players pick her every game. She is in direct competition with every other Temple god in the game, could you highlight why this god should be picked over any other god for a variety of playstyles? I applaud that you've avoided the common pitfall of "this god is only good for one very specific playstyle" but I'm not seeing compelling reasons to pick her. In a vacuum she looks ok but then all the other gods are considered and I arrive at "well, I could just go X instead to get similar options".

Lair Larrikin

Posts: 28

Joined: Wednesday, 30th November 2016, 11:35

Post Saturday, 3rd December 2016, 04:00

Re: New God Proposal: Invidia, goddess of taboos and envy

Thanks for your answer Psieye, I appreciate your feedback a lot.

I have actually thought about all of these questions in basically the order you mentioned, but I chose to format my post in the order that a player would read about it if they stumbled onto the altar. I actually came up with mechanics and flavour last, so I'll gladly answer the first two questions now.

Question 1: what gameplay purpose does this god proposal seek to achieve?


As I see it, in Crawl there are basically three types of Gods: the ones that are just basically universally good, background willing (e.g. Trog, Okawaru, Vehumet), the ones that provide extended/late game switching options (e.g. Zin, Jayvia), and the "challenge/situational" gods that come with downsides in exchange for a potentially strong or reliable skillset (e.g. Chei, Ru, Qazlal). This might be an oversimplification, but it's pretty much how I see it.

Now, Invidia would fall squarely within the 3rd group, the "challenge" group. Every god in this group takes something away and gives you something in return. Let's look at both of these.

    1) What she takes away: 50% of all consumables, including scrolls, potions, wands and rods. Thus, she can severely hinder all character's basic bread-and-butter options, because you might not have access to scrolls of teleport, or blinking. You might not have potions of curing, potions of heal wounds, or cancellation and so on. So basically, she offers you a significant challenge by taking away part of your innate abilities as a player, in a similar (but completely different) way as Chei takes away your innate speed, Ru makes you lose access to some skills, traits, or other innate abilities, and Qazlal removes your ability to innate ability not to go around constantly shouting "I am here" to all monsters on the level. Invidia just targets a different aspect of a character's innate abilities to challenge them.

    2) What she gives you: basically, she gives you limited uses of smiting and the polymorph other spell. So, essentially, you get access to a reliable, single-target ranged damage source, as well as a powerful debuff. The restriction on use of these abilities is basically proportional to how often other characters can use consumables, and so represents a wholly new system of spellcasting. In addition, these two abilities are not usually usable by players (Beogh's smite and wand of polymorph exist, but the versions I have in mind are both better and more reliable to use).

    The secondary part of her skillset, the whole loss of ID and curses, is essentially just way of coping with her limitation. It makes no sense for this god to only sometimes remove access to ID and remove curse scrolls, thereby making a character essentially unplayable, so I decided to design it in a way that ID and curse are *always* removed, and I account for that in her skillset.

Question 2: why would players find it fun to pick this god?


I think players would find it fun to pick this god because it both simplifies the item game and makes it more interesting, while representing a good alternative to levelling ranged abilities or offensive magic. I, for one, sometimes find the abundance of consumables in the game to be, if not boring, at least repetitive. Don't get me wrong, the game is perfectly playable and fun with the full set of consumables, but it's also perfectly fun to play at normal speed and with access to all your hands and eyes, for instance. What I mean is, that's the point of a challenge god - to represent a challenging different way of playing the game.

I said it makes it more interesting because of the "blindly quaff a magic dust" mechanic, which while not being a central part of the perks this god offers, is an extended version of that *fun* (in the Dwarf Fortress sense) part of the early game.

It also makes it more interesting because you have to carefully think about how to adapt your character to the absence of such and such consumable.

Could you highlight why this god should be picked over any other god for a variety of playstyles? [...] In a vacuum she looks ok but then all the other gods are considered and I arrive at "well, I could just go X instead to get similar options".


I think I touched on this just now, but I'll address the question specifically: I think some Crawl players, myself included, enjoy the concept of losing access to a bunch of stuff in order to potentially gain really cool, different stuff. I'm pretty sure my two most played gods are Chei and Ru, and one of my most played backgrounds is Octopode, because I really really enjoy the sense of accomplishment from winning while under a challenge, yet still getting cool perks out of said challenge. Invidia is just an attempt to offer a new, similar avenue of perk/challenge, which I've designed out of the empty space which existed in limiting consumables. Now, whether or not I have succeeded in doing that is another matter altogether and one which I am imminently prepared to discuss, but I think there is a lot of potential for a fun god in this space, be it Invidia or not.

Cocytus Succeeder

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Joined: Saturday, 14th April 2012, 21:35

Post Sunday, 4th December 2016, 10:14

Re: New God Proposal: Invidia, goddess of taboos and envy

Ahh, this makes sense now. This is a challenge god that attacks consumables. I think it would be helpful to edit the OP's title to reflect this: "New challenge god - restricting consumables". Names and flavour aren't as important as the gameplay/mechanical hook. Similarly, the body of the OP could be ordered as:
- "This is what I want"
- "This is an example execution of the mechanics and flavour"
- "Here is why the above example achieves my stated objectives"

It's fair to check readers' reaction on reading the mechanics first to see if they get the design intent. But in this forum where we get so many proposals, some of which lack serious thought, it's better to leave that "first impression" testing to after it goes in-game. Be direct: "this is my problem, this is a solution".

Dungeon Master

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Joined: Thursday, 23rd October 2014, 03:08

Post Monday, 5th December 2016, 03:15

Re: New God Proposal: Invidia, goddess of taboos and envy

this doesn't really accomplish restricting consumables given that there's an ability that *literally* lets you use restricted consumables; in fact it's even stronger that just having the consumables because:

1 - there's no (apparent) restriction on using consumables you couldn't use normally; e.g. mummies can use potions through this ability
2 - the resource effectively converts restricted "bad" or unusable consumables into restricted "good" consumables (oh, all those scrolls of noise? now they're potions of might or something)
3 - the god gifts you more of the resource
4 - scrolls of remove curse and identify, the least useful and most abundant scrolls, are automatically converted to this resource (and you're not penalized for it since the god will auto-identify and auto-uncurse items)

so if you worship this god, at 0* you immediately get infinite identify/remove curse,and at 3* you get (at least one of) a wand of heal wounds or a wand of hasting once you reach 3* with a lot of charges, on top of a few other consumables that are effectively infinite

also mummy item cursing has been removed for a while

For this message the author CanOfWorms has received thanks: 3
dracos369, Lasty, Rast

Slime Squisher

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Joined: Thursday, 12th June 2014, 06:56

Post Monday, 5th December 2016, 05:56

Re: New God Proposal: Invidia, goddess of taboos and envy

To me, this doesn't look like any fundamental flaw with the god, just one ability (Forbidden Lore) that's overpowered. So there are a lot of ways to fix that - perhaps giving it nasty Contam as well, or turning it into a Draw Three-type thing where you are likely to get a good effect but can't guarantee you'll get the one you want.

Though one thing I will say: the whole "magic dust" thing seems redundant. Just turn it all into piety. Taboo items in your line of sight are automatically converted to piety, you get a new (instant) ability to use 1 piety for a random taboo effect and Contam, etc.

Personally, I think this god concept would work just fine with exploration- or kill-based piety. The interesting idea is losing easy access to half of all consumables; there's no reason to introduce other new mechanics. Using normal piety gain also solves the fourth problem you've mentioned here (and piety gain, as usual, can be tuned as needed).

Dungeon Master

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Joined: Thursday, 23rd October 2014, 03:08

Post Monday, 5th December 2016, 07:58

Re: New God Proposal: Invidia, goddess of taboos and envy

It's a fundamental flaw in the sense that the entire power behind the god lies in that mechanic. If you remove the "use any consumable via magic dust" you have a very thin design. Here's the summary of what the god can do if you remove that problem:

  • All items are auto-ID'd and auto-uncursed.
  • You lose access to a random subset of consumables.
  • You get some magic dust, which at best, replicates one of the banned consumables. It has a low chance (22%) that you actually get something usable out of it, and you might even get something bad instead! *Even then*, you might not get what you want, e.g. if berserk is one of the banned resource you pretty much have to train melee or not use this resource at all. To top it all off, you get contamination.
  • At 1* you get Beogh's smite, except it costs magic dust.
  • At 5* you get a "slightly better" wand of polymorph (may not actually be better) that costs magic dust.
  • At 6* you just get more magic dust.
So in other words, you lose access to a good chunk of consumables, and all you get in return is:

  • A consumable which gives a random effect (which overlaps with Gozag), which can potentially cripple your character when you use it.
  • auto-ID and auto-uncurse (which overlaps with Ashenzari).
  • a smite attack (which overlaps with Beogh).
  • a wand of polymorph that you can only use once you clear Lair.

It's difficult to argue that this is an improvement over playing godless. This returns us the point that the "convert magic dust into a banned consumable" is the main focus of this god, and I've already explained why it's a bad design.

For this message the author CanOfWorms has received thanks: 2
dracos369, Rast

Lair Larrikin

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Joined: Tuesday, 21st February 2012, 14:46

Post Monday, 5th December 2016, 08:18

Re: New God Proposal: Invidia, goddess of taboos and envy

It might be fun to have the list of taboo items change over time. Items in your inventory which become taboo are turned into magic dust, and there is a an ability to turn magic dust into non-taboo items. Taboo shifts could be linked with stair-usage, and turning items into magic dust and back into items should come at a loss. That way, the god has a subtle no stair-dancing conduct.

Slime Squisher

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Joined: Thursday, 12th June 2014, 06:56

Post Monday, 5th December 2016, 14:43

Re: New God Proposal: Invidia, goddess of taboos and envy

CanOfWorms wrote:It's a fundamental flaw in the sense that the entire power behind the god lies in that mechanic. If you remove the "use any consumable via magic dust" you have a very thin design. Here's the summary of what the god can do if you remove that problem:


Eh, I guess that is a valid point. An interesting reworking I can think of would be to enhance either the power or availability of the non-taboo consumables (instead of making taboo ones available through costly abilities), though this would probably require Kiku-book style randomization so as to avoid exceptionally overpowered or underpowered characters.

Cocytus Succeeder

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Joined: Saturday, 14th April 2012, 21:35

Post Monday, 5th December 2016, 14:55

Re: New God Proposal: Invidia, goddess of taboos and envy

Questions:
- does the list of taboo need to be randomised each time? What if it's a fixed list of all the emergency buttons?
- what if the dust gave you an entirely new set of emergency buttons instead of re-using existing effects? e.g. "immobilise: affected mob can take any action which doesn't involve changing position"
- how would things interact with monster MR? Or maybe HD?

The attachment to "revitalise the ID game" may be a hinderance to the core objective of "challenge via restricting consumables".
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Zot Zealot

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Post Monday, 5th December 2016, 22:06

Re: New God Proposal: Invidia, goddess of taboos and envy

Nemelex already has a list of all new effects too!

Lair Larrikin

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Joined: Wednesday, 30th November 2016, 11:35

Post Tuesday, 6th December 2016, 03:22

Re: New God Proposal: Invidia, goddess of taboos and envy

I accept the your point, CanOfWorms, that the design goal of limiting consumables is pretty severely harmed by giving their usage back to the player. I thought that putting a high cost in draining/magic dust would balance this power, but it's either going to be cheap enough to be used regularly enough, in which case your criticism is valid, or it'll be too expensive to ever use, in which case it might as well not be there. And obviously, the god seems extremely weak without an ability to compensate for the loss of that ability.

I think it's safe to say we need to go back to the drawing board on this one. I hesitate to overly edit out what I wrote already, because I think it's pretty informative to keep it as it is, so I think a new thread with a name like "New challenge god - restricting consumables" is in order, when I come up with an altered proposal.

In the meantime, let's look at some of the different, alternate ideas that were proposed here:

ion_frigate wrote:An interesting reworking I can think of would be to enhance either the power or availability of the non-taboo consumables (instead of making taboo ones available through costly abilities)


Hmmm, this is an interesting idea. The main issue I have with this, other than the balance/variability concern you mentioned, is that if it increases availability, it might actually just *simplify* the item game by giving you more of the same consumable that you can reliably use all the time. Conversely, enhancing the power of consumables seems tricky and very opaque to design, because the way you enhance a potion of might, a scroll of magic mapping and a potion of flight are all very different from each other.

Maybe permanent effects/mutations from consumables would be a better direction to go in, but now we're encroaching on Jayva territory.

Psieye wrote:Questions:
- does the list of taboo need to be randomised each time? What if it's a fixed list of all the emergency buttons?
- what if the dust gave you an entirely new set of emergency buttons instead of re-using existing effects? e.g. "immobilise: affected mob can take any action which doesn't involve changing position"


This is a good direction that could be taken. I thought about this in the beginning but decided against it, because I thought that it's a little pointless to remove options only to give the player back a set of completely new ones. The new ones would also necessarily have to be more powerful than the old ones, otherwise you're essentially playing atheist. So it's not really accomplishing the "restrict consumables" design goal. It is however accomplishing a "switch up the item game" goal, which could be nice in its own right.

galbolle wrote:It might be fun to have the list of taboo items change over time. Items in your inventory which become taboo are turned into magic dust, and there is a an ability to turn magic dust into non-taboo items. Taboo shifts could be linked with stair-usage, and turning items into magic dust and back into items should come at a loss. That way, the god has a subtle no stair-dancing conduct.


My concern with this direction is that this sounds like a big hassle to actually play. If this is how this god works, then every time you get to a new level, you have to go through a massive analysis of what your available consumables are, and how best to optimize them. To invoke this forum's favourite bogeyman, the "theoretical optimal player" would then spend around 5 minutes at each staircase rearranging his inventory to make sure they have the best possible chance of survival.

--

Like I said, I'm going to think about this concept some more and try to come up with a new proposal that hopefully will be more focused on the design goal. I welcome more suggestions or ideas, and if anyone wants to have a crack at it by themselves, feel free to propose something.

Random brainstorming:
- Consumable tax: Rather than taboo certain consumables, the god could "tax" their usage, so for example you would need to spend 2 consumables for 1 effect.
- Potion and scroll blindness: the god turns all your consumables into 2 respective unidentified stacks that you can consume for 0 auts, and whose effect you can accept or refuse (while still consuming the item)
- Hard mode: no potions and scrolls at all, but you gain extra exp

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