Metamagic God

[Nekoatl]

My goal
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To give players some interesting new choices about how to use magic. This god provides a variety of boons to spellcasting, which vary from useless to quite powerful depending on the circumstances. I expect in almost any situation, at least 2 of these boons will be desirable, but only 1 can be active at a time.

Crawl's goals
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Meaningful decisions: Accomplished in 2 dimensions, which should offer synergistic effects...
* having to choose between at least 2 useful boons in any given situation, and being stuck with that choice for an unknown length of time
* providing more viable options for players to pursue in terms of how to build their character, which in conjunction with the above
Gameplay supporting newbie support:
* The formulas involved in spellcasting are complex and unintuitive, but being able to temprarily mitigate one limiter of spellcasting makes magic more forgiving to mistakes.
* Making spells more accessibile encourages new players to try out different strategies and get used to the idea of adapting their character to fit what Crawl provides.
Replayability:
* Being able to make use of more of the spellbooks that Crawl provides should make those books more relevant, which should result in more varied gameplay.

Flavor
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An ingenious god who encourages followers to be flexible, clever, and resourceful in using whatever spells they find.

Appreciates
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Killing enemies, spending gold or scrolls of acquirement to obtain books

Deprecates
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Forgetting him
Abandoning him

Given Abilities
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While active, boons apply a passive bonus to spellcasting which does not time out and which grows more powerful with piety (no effect at 0 piety, full effect at 200).

Activating any boon deactivates and disables all others until a small amount of piety is gained.

Boons:
* Clear: Difficulty -50% (applied before skills/INT/armour/shield, e.g. a level 9 spell would be reduced from 390 to 195 at max piety)
** Healthy: Hunger -100% (after all other calculations)
*** Abundant: MP cost -67% (rounded to the nearest integer)
**** Potent: Spell power +100% (cannot exceed spellpower cap)
***** Quiet: Casting noise -100% (does not reduce spell noise)
****** Unbound: Can cast unmemozired spells from books in inventory (does not scale with piety)

Gifts
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None, but continued piety gain is needed to unlock boons after switching.

Punishments
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Applies a penalty with the opposite effect of a random boon immediately upon leaving. Whenever a new punishment would be applied, this is replaced by a new random choice. When penance is complete, the penalty is removed.

Strategy
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Rather than the dedicated pursuit of a specific type of magic or of the accumulation of magical knowledge, this god favors hybrid play and living off the land. Armored characters can branch into magic more easily, stabbers can silently hex foes, species with troublesome relationships to food don't need to invest as heavily in spellcasting, and primary casters can more easily incorporate spells from other schools or allocate skill points to non-magic skills. In cases where books are scarce, or for characters who attain skill mastery, this god offers more bang for buck out of the available spells.

[tankra]

It seems to me that

* Clear: Difficulty -50% (applied before skills/INT/armour/shield, e.g. a level 9 spell would be reduced from 390 to 195 at max piety)

is strong enough to basically make all the other choices this god provides basically moot. Usually, in my experience in Crawl, you train just enough magic skills to get a spell "online" for a certain armor/intelligence parameter, and then you continue training other things that will allow you to survive, like fighting, dodge, weapons, etc. This one passive god-power is essentially enabling you to completely alter how you distribute your exp, and once you set it, you will probably never change it for the rest of the game. This goes for both gish characters and pure spellcasting types. So this god doesn't become so much about metamagic or "choosing between 2 useful boons," but rather amounts to a single, build-enabling passive bonus.

Plus, Vehumet already does a less powerful version (33%) of this that only applies to one type of spell, and he's already a pretty strong choice for spellcasters because of it. I think that speaks to how strong this God would be.

As an aside, if we want to think about "metamagic" as in the DND 3rd edition concept, perhaps it would be more interesting to go down the route of making a whole new spell school that would allow you to toggle miscellaneous effects (i.e. Quicken Spell, Silence Spell, Maximize Spell, Enlarge Spell, etc...) in exchange for increasing the effective spell level of the spells you're casting.

[Nekoatl]

It seems to me that

* Clear: Difficulty -50% (applied before skills/INT/armour/shield, e.g. a level 9 spell would be reduced from 390 to 195 at max piety)

is strong enough to basically make all the other choices this god provides basically moot. Usually, in my experience in Crawl, you train just enough magic skills to get a spell "online" for a certain armor/intelligence parameter, and then you continue training other things that will allow you to survive, like fighting, dodge, weapons, etc. This one passive god-power is essentially enabling you to completely alter how you distribute your exp, and once you set it, you will probably never change it for the rest of the game. This goes for both gish characters and pure spellcasting types. So this god doesn't become so much about metamagic or "choosing between 2 useful boons," but rather amounts to a single, build-enabling passive bonus.

This really depends... primarily on which spells you're using, but also which species you're playing. Spell power doesn't matter much (or at all) for some spells, but it's extremely important on others. Also, Spriggans really can't afford to be throwing around spells with huge hunger costs each fight. I have played characters who would only care about reducing spell failure, but I think those characters would be better served by following a different god. I can personally attest that I've wanted to have each and every one of the benefits I listed here at one time or another for characters I've played (though not all 6 of them on any single character).

Also, one of my main design goals for this god is to allow more flexibility in where skill points are allocated, especially in the early game, which is why the failure reduction is offered first. Remember, though, that as characters progress through the game and experience points are acquired in greater abundance, the relative experience investment required to increase a skill by 1 level becomes increasingly minor. Taking this god for the sole purpose of only needing to train spellcasting skills to level 4 instead of level 6 would be a colossal waste, considering how quickly a mid- or late-game character could get those next 2 levels. There are much, much, more valuable uses of this god at that point... increasing success rate of hexes, only needing to blast enemies 2 times instead of 3, etc....

Plus, Vehumet already does a less powerful version (33%) of this that only applies to one type of spell, and he's already a pretty strong choice for spellcasters because of it. I think that speaks to how strong this God would be.

While designing this god, one of my biggest concerns was offering distinct benefits to Vehemut and Ashenzari without stealing their thunder. The failure reduction here has to be stronger than what Vehumet offers, because choosing it means giving up all other god benefits until you turn it off. Vehumet's failure reduction comes in conjunction with very nice passive MP restoration, a very nice passive range increase, and a sometimes-useful but very awkward system of spell gifts. However, I haven't playtested this, so the actual number is subject to change. Also, do note that Vehumet's reduction is applied after skills/INT/armour/shield modifiers while this god's is applied before.

As an aside, if we want to think about "meta-magic" as in the DND 3rd edition concept, perhaps it would be more interesting to go down the route of making a whole new spell school that would allow you to toggle miscellaneous effects (i.e. Quicken Spell, Silence Spell, Maximize Spell, Enlarge Spell, etc...) in exchange for increasing the effective spell level of the spells you're casting.

My goal here is not to reproduce 3rd edition DND metamagic in Crawl (though you're welcome to try, if you'd like). I don't think it would work in Crawl, at all, and actually I don't even think it works all that well in 3rd edition DND. What initially got me thinking about this god concept was asking myself, "If some kind of metamagic system that actually would fit well in Crawl were to exist, what would it look like?" I didn't expect to actually come up with an answer that I though would genuinely make the game better, but I managed to do it.

One thing to keep in mind about this is that DND metamagic is specifically designed to tweak the rules that define how magic works in DND, and those rules are very different from the rules that define how magic works in Crawl. I think that for any attempt at designing metamagic for Crawl to even have a chance of succeeding, it needs to be done from the ground up while carefully considering Crawl's rules of magic, which is what I did.

[kuniqs]

God of Casting Every 9th lvl Spell for 3mp and 0% Fail Chance and Max Power at Max Piety

[Nekoatl]

Erm, no... I think if you read a bit more carefully you'll notice that you can only have 1 boon active at a time.... Also, +100% spellpower is perhaps not as strong as you imagine, considering the demonspawn mutation "Augmentation" gives +120% at rank 3 and full HP.

[Hellmonk]

Healthy is basically useless. Spell hunger is almost never meaningful and this should be an always on passive for every character in the game.
Unbound encourages a lot of inventory tedium for what pretty much amounts to "you get extra spell slots"
I'm not sure why Quiet comes so late since it's more situational (read: weaker) than most of what you get before it.

The other passives are ok, but I'm not convinced that there isn't an obvious "best" choice for any given character (it'll usually be spellpower), nor that this god occupies a particularly unique or interesting design space.

[Nekoatl]

It can take quite a lot of skill in Spellcasting (or a staff of energy) to reduce spell hunger to 0 on mid-to-high-level spells, to the point where I've sometimes had to budget the usage of spells when I first learn them in order to not burn through permafood (or more rarely starve mid-fight). It made me think more, which is a good thing for a game mechanic to do. Not all species care about food, of course, but not every boon has to be useful for every character or at all times for meaningful choices to exist.

Unbound was actually an afterthought I added when I removed a range increase boon (it's better that be an exclusive perk for Vehumet worshipers). The neat thing about Unbound, though, is that you can't apply any of the other boons to spells you cast directly from books, making the choice of which spells are memorized and which are cast from books more interesting. But, yes, fitting books into inventory is already a pain, and I'm hoping the proposal to have them not occupy slots when picked up goes through... but if it doesn't, at least the choice of whether carrying a book is worth a precious inventory slot would occasionally have some actual meaning with Unbound in the game.

There are 3 reasons why I chose to award Quiet so late:
* In the early game, characters use low-level spells which tend to produce very little casting noise.
* A slight reduction in casting noise (due to low piety) seemed less useful than the low-piety effect from most of the other boons.
* It is more situational than most, meaning that fewer characters are likely to care about it, and therefore it's lower priority. However, I expect that characters who *do* care about it will find it sufficiently powerful, and worth the wait.

I don't mind if there's an obvious best choice for a character at any given time, as long as there are parts of the game where that obvious choice changes for most characters. I expect that there will be times during some games where the best tactical choice is either not obvious or changes frequently from one situation to the next, although that depends a lot on the strategic choices that players make. And, I'm pleased to see that 2 of the people who've commented in this thread have singled out different boons as the likely best option.

As for what's interesting, that's a matter of personal preference... all I can say is that this god seems very interesting to me. In terms of uniqueness, the closest thing in Crawl that I'm aware of to the general concept would be swapping magical staves... which doesn't offer as many options, and doesn't work so well for characters that use actual weapons (i.e. almost all characters). In particular, the ability to cast spells silently or cast directly from books isn't available by any means I'm aware of, which I think fits the very definition of unique, at least within the context of Crawl.

[kuniqs]

Better to remove books altogether and replace them with libraries for example, which allow you to learn spells but can't be carried around.

[mattlistener]

I would think that, as written, a player is going to pick one of the boons that is right for their current build and sit on it fulltime, which is boring.

Could this work better if it were more along the lines of Ru, in which at infrequent intervals MG offers you one of two boons of roughly equal power (across all possible characters), neither of which is the one you currently enjoy?

It would be strictly better than playing godless, but to take advantage you would need to adapt your playstyle for each different boon.

[Nekoatl]

To an extent, I think you're right. I do anticipate situations where characters will want different boons for different spells (success or hunger for high-level or off-school spells, power or MP for spells that have been brought down to 1"%, etc.) or against different enemies (an enchanter would care more about noise if near sleeping enemies, and more about power against enemies with high magic resist), but I also expect other times when players will choose a single boon and stick with it until their strategic situation changes somehow. But, even this allows players more flexibility in how they allocate skills, enabling players to open up more tactical options.

Rather than providing flashy god powers, this good aims to provide tactical options by allowing access to magic that a character would not otherwise have been able to afford at that stage of the game. These bonus spells will vary from game to game, depending on what books are generated, offering quite a bit of replay value. A spell that would otherwise go ignored, or at least postponed until much later in the game, could instead be considered affordable enough to justify the reduced skill investment required to turn it into a useful tactical option. Even in games where the RNG doesn't offer any spellbooks until much later in the game, the skill points that would be required to cap spellpower or expand the MP pool enough for the early-game spells to remain relevant could be instead spent on other skills, offering expanded tactical options through the use of other items.

The Ru-style offerings is an interesting suggestion, but I worry that it would only further discourage a player from switching boons. With the Ru-style offerings, players wouldn't be guaranteed that they would ever see a specific offering again, which I imagine would encourage a hoarder-mentality of picking what they perceive to be the best general-case boon and never switching off of it. The idea of adapting to a randomly offered boon is interesting, but I want to offer players more flexibility in making use of what items (especially spellbooks) Crawl generates, which this proposal wouldn't seem to support.

Then again, maybe regaining access to boons through piety gain, even if it's a small amount, would be too much of a discouragement from switching. I want players to feel confident about being able to switch boons when the situation warrants it, but I think offering too much flexibility (i.e. being able to reliably cast every spell with the optimal boon for that cast) wouldn't be very interesting tactically. Maybe, instead of gating boon usage by piety, exhaustion might be a better choice, as boons would more reliably become available several turns later. But, I want amulets of faith to be worth considering. I suppose one possible way to make this god seem more exciting could be to convert excess piety gains to a stored resource, which would allow the simultaneous activation of a second boon for very short periods of time (maybe every 100 excess piety points earns a single turn of dual-boon usage). Thoughts?

[mattlistener]

Actually I had in mind that when MG offered you a choice of boons, you had to pick -- ie surrendering your current one. After all, he "encourages followers to be flexible, clever, and resourceful."

[Nekoatl]

That's even worse. Players wouldn't be able to trust their boons at all.

[mattlistener]

That's even worse. Players wouldn't be able to trust their boons at all.

You want boons to be situational, and also for players to be able to trust them (ie build around them). Seems contradictory.

Okawaru is kinda similar. Two boonlike buffs to melee, one cheap that you can build around (ie leverage for min delay) because you can afford to cast it in every tough situation, one more expensive that can be used less often. That plus gifts is interesting enough, while being considered one of the boringest gods. What could make MG more interesting than this, gameplay-wise?


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[NhorianScum]

It's a bit more fluid and intuitive to not toggle constantly.

I would find a classic take on metamagic far more entertaining tbh. Something like still, quicken, empower, silent. explosive, etc as a semi-permanent additional property of a spell with some sort of arbitrary limit on how many buffs could be applied to each spell, how many spells each buff could be applied to, and some overall limiter comes to mind. (Example: no buff can be used on more than 2 spells, cap of 3 buffs per spell, cannot learn more than 6 spells, cannot learn spells over level 6, top tier buffs increase fail rate and mp cost)

Pro's: Doing very very stupid things with low end spells (Line of confusion, doublefireball, bolt of cold might actually have a niche ever)
Con's: It's pretty much D&D 3.5 and that's somehow bad now? (save the golden locks 2016)

That aside metamagic alone probably is not enough to flesh out a god fully without overlapping into sif/veh territory, a god of "fuck you no top end anything" might incorporate it nicely though.

[Nekoatl]

You want boons to be situational, and also for players to be able to trust them (ie build around them). Seems contradictory.

It's not. I don't book a flight to get to the grocery store, but when I'm travelling a long distance, I trust that the plane isn't going to suddenly stop working midair. The fact that air travel isn't a suitable choice in every situation doesn't mean that it shouldn't be considered a trustworthy option for situations where it is suitable. If you have a Swiss army knife, does trusting that each tool is fit for its intended purpose imply that each tool must also be fit for the intended purpose of all the other tools? Of course not. If they were, you would only ever need to have one of the tools, and it wouldn't even matter which one. The whole point of the Swiss army knife is that not every tool is appropriate for every situation, but by having a variety of tools on hand, the owner can trust that they are prepared to deal with a variety of different situations. He doesn't have to worry about the knife suddenly retracting the tool he's trying to use to solve a problem, and then making it unavailable for hours or days, and who would want a knife that did?

Okawaru is kinda similar. Two boonlike buffs to melee, one cheap that you can build around (ie leverage for min delay) because you can afford to cast it in every tough situation, one more expensive that can be used less often. That plus gifts is interesting enough, while being considered one of the boringest gods. What could make MG more interesting than this, gameplay-wise?

Okawaru's abilities only offer one question, "How much buff should I use for this fight?" In contrast, the boon system offers, "What type of buff would be most beneficial for this fight?" Most characters that learn spells eventually learn several of them. Not every spell is an ideal choice in each fight, and not every boon is an ideal choice for each spell. Sure, some players might try to adjust their build so that a single boon was optimal for every spell, but realistically that attempt isn't going to work out well in many cases.

For example, if you find (or start with) a Book of Conjurations, and decide to invest enough in Conjurations skill to get IMB to 1% while Clear is active, you'll probably also have learned MD and SR, which wouldn't benefit significantly from Clear. MD would probably even have capped spell power by that point, meaning you might ideally want to use Clear for IMB, Potent for SR, and Abundant for MD. At a glance, one might think that Abundant would be the optimal choice for every spell in every situation, because all spells can benefit from it, but that's also wrong. For one thing, MP only matters if you run out, so any situation a player could overcome without running out of MP normally would get no benefit from MP reduction at all. For another, if the other boons can allow a player to deal with a situation by casting fewer spells, they're not only indirectly reducing their total MP consumption but also reducing the enemies' opportunities to harm them. Also realize that many spells (many Summonings and Hexes, for example) have no spell noise at all, so you could use Quiet to set up an ambush, or to avoid attracting nearby monsters, but if something alerts the monsters to your presence, Quiet suddenly becomes useless, so that's another reason why even a single spell wouldn't necessarily benefit most from the same boon in every situation.

Because of these differences in boon usefulness, players would be rewarded for being able to assess a situation and choose the boon that offers the most immediate value. Moreover, players may want to use more than one spell in the same fight, and if the optimal boon for each spell isn't the same in that situation, the decision of which boon to use may be even less straightforward. On top of that, the option to switch boons, but not for each spell, means the player can have the option to either shift their tactics mid-fight, either to respond to an unexpected change in the situation or as part of a more intricate plan. Furthermore, players would have richer strategic decisions, because rather than simply asking whether or not having access to a spell is worth the skill investment to be able to use it reliably, the player now has more skill investment targets to choose from, but has to consider the cost of using a boon to make up the difference, and what impact that will have on his other spells.