Bioengineering God

[Nekoatl]

Mutations can be interesting, fun, powerful, and cool, but because they're so completely random, many players choose to ignore them entirely, settling for less interesting gameplay in the name of safety. This god is an attempt to encourage players to have fun with mutations by rewarding experimentation with the unique ability to fine-tune the mutation list.

Innate species mutations and temporary mutations don't count as mutations for the purposes of this god. Worshipers are not excommunicated for falling to 0 piety. Granting or removing of mutations by divine abilities are not subject to mutation resistance or failure. Does not accept undead worshipers.

Appreciates dissecting (chopping) corpses and acquiring or losing mutations by non-divine means. 5 piety for the 1st corpse of each type dissected, decreasing linearly to 1 for every corpse beyond the 4th (to discourage grinding, but flavored as there's less to learn from dissecting the same species multiple times). Mutation acquirement is worth 10 piety, and mutation loss worth 5.

Abandonment removes all mutations and drains skills by the same amount Clean Slate would have + [2 - piety/200]% of an additional large skill drain. Aside from the skill drain, no lingering punishment is applied.

Granted abilities:
[------] (no activation failure for these 4)
Experiment (costs 2000 nutrition): Gain a random mutation (equal chance good or bad; limited to those available from consumables plus those innate to more than one species).
Clean Slate (skill drain): Remove all mutations. Amount of skill drain scales linearly with the number of mutations removed.
Rollback (costs [10 x DIFF + 3 x TOTAL] piety): Remove one mutation of the player's choice.
Engineer (costs [10 x DIFF + 3 x TOTAL] piety): Add one mutation of a category which the player has been mutated at some point in the game, but restricted by compatibility with existing mutations.
[*-----]
Redesign (costs MP): As wand of polymorph, but not subject to MR and can't target uniques or undead. Chance of successfully activating ability based on Invocations skill.
[****--]
Malpractice (costs piety, MP, nutrition): As Malmutate. Chance of successfully activating ability based on Invocations skill.

DIFF is the absolute value of the difference between the numbers of good and bad mutations. TOTAL is the number of all mutations. Piety cost can exceed 200, at which point Rollback and Engineer are unavailable for use until some mutations have been removed by other means. This is done for balance reasons and to encourage meaningful decision making, but is flavored as a piety cost proportional to the complexity of further tweaking the genetic code.

When selecting mutations with Rollback or Engineer, the player is asked "Which mutation?" and given a text prompt, and the input string is checked to match part of the name and description of each valid mutation. If 1 match, a y/n confirmation is presented (with an init.txt option to allow advanced players to skip this prompt). If 0, the ability is cancelled with a message stating there was no match. Otherwise, a list of matches is displayed to choose from. Pressing Esc at any time cancels the whole process, and cancellation at any point does not consume time or piety.

There are 2 opposing strategies, of which players can choose to follow one to an extreme or try to strike a balance. Players can try to maintain a small mutation count, keeping the piety cost low so they can mutate frequently to fit their changing situation. Or, players can try to gradually load up on their favorite mutations at increasing piety costs and the risk of losing control of their mutations entirely (the piety cost keeps the limit approximately in line with that of the luckiest godless mutation roulette practitioners and peak moments of Jiyva's whimsy, with additional leeway to players willing to bear bad mutations).

[Vajrapani]

The problem is that sacrificing your god slot in favour of stacking mutations is little better than playing godless, because no set of mutations will ever offer the same amount of power as Oka,Trog,Ash,Makh,Chei etc.

[Nekoatl]

"No set"? You're saying even...

Str +4, Int +4, Dex +4, HP +30%, MP + 30%, AC +7
rF+++, rC+++, rElec, rPois, rCorr, MR +90
Clarity, SInv, Passive Mapping
Movement Delay -4, Stealth +120, at-will Blink
Carnivore, Regen+++

... wouldn't be good enough in your opinion? Because I've tried that, and in my experience it's OP. The equipment slots you free up by never having to worry about those resistances is quite a boon in and of itself, and with the other benefits on top of that, the game just stops being challenging at all.

[CanOfWorms]

you can't gain movement/diet changing mutations through mutation though

and kiku is already is better than that set of mutations (ignoring movement since you can't actually get it)

[removeelyvilon]

you can't gain movement/diet changing mutations through mutation though

Perhaps this god could offer them?

[Vajrapani]

"No set"? You're saying even...

Str +4, Int +4, Dex +4, HP +30%, MP + 30%, AC +7
rF+++, rC+++, rElec, rPois, rCorr, MR +90
Clarity, SInv, Passive Mapping
Movement Delay -4, Stealth +120, at-will Blink
Carnivore, Regen+++

... wouldn't be good enough in your opinion? Because I've tried that, and in my experience it's OP. The equipment slots you free up by never having to worry about those resistances is quite a boon in and of itself, and with the other benefits on top of that, the game just stops being challenging at all.

Alot of that stuff is just convenient, and you're not likely to get a mutations set as good as that earlygame, whereas Oka offers heroism, Gozag offers potion petition,Trog has berserk, and so on, straight off the bat to bolster your earlygame survivability.

[duvessa]

[Nekoatl]

Well, this god is not intended to front-load power to the degree that Oka and Trog do, but it only takes a little piety to fish out some mutations in the beginning, so it's not like there's no early benefit at all. Access to the different mutation potions and mutagenic meat can speed up progress even more. Maybe auto-identifying all the mutation potions upon joining would help early-game players to get the ball rolling.

It's true that it's possible (just much more difficult / unlikely) to obtain all the same mutations and still have the benefits of another god, though. Expanding the possible mutations that Experiment can produce seems like a good idea. How about, any mutation that can be awarded by a potion or is innately available to at least 2 different species? This would include somewhat exotic features like Fast/Slow Movement and Big Wings, while keeping highly exotic features like VS's antimagic bite reserved for the species they're associated with. And rank 1 counts as discovering ranks 1-3 for purposes of Engineer, so if multiple species share a mutation line but only 1 goes all the way to rank 3, then rank 3 is available anyway.

Jiyva is the god currently most well-known for mutations, but there are significant differences. Jiyva makes it incredibly easy to get rid of bad mutations while loading up on good mutations, but offers no control or reliability in terms of which good mutations you end up with (as one would expect from a chaos god), not to mention the swarms of (semi-)friendly jellies and passive healing. This god makes it much more difficult to load up on good mutations while getting rid of bad mutations, but offers a lot of control in terms of which mutations you end up with. Jiyva is for players who can enjoy letting go and embracing the chaos, but most if not all of those players almost certainly already play mutation roulette. This god is meant to make mutations accessible even to players who need to be more in control of their fate.

[removeelyvilon]

I looked at it intently for a minute but I don't get it. Is that the fun police?

[Croases]

There is a series of jokes about Bee Movie (and various other animated movies as well, like Shrek) where the movie is sped up every time a character says/does something, eventually devolving into a comical buzzing mess.

The original (?) is called "the entire bee movie but every time they say bee it gets faster", many of the imitators have similar gimmicks (some characters are removed entirely, some audio channels are omitted, every character is replaced by Count von Count, you get the idea).

This is a parody of that.

[Quazifuji]

Jiyva is the god currently most well-known for mutations, but there are significant differences. Jiyva makes it incredibly easy to get rid of bad mutations while loading up on good mutations, but offers no control or reliability in terms of which good mutations you end up with (as one would expect from a chaos god), not to mention the swarms of (semi-)friendly jellies and passive healing. This god makes it much more difficult to load up on good mutations while getting rid of bad mutations, but offers a lot of control in terms of which mutations you end up with. Jiyva is for players who can enjoy letting go and embracing the chaos, but most if not all of those players almost certainly already play mutation roulette. This god is meant to make mutations accessible even to players who need to be more in control of their fate.

While you are right that this god gives the player more control than Jiyva, I'm not sure how interesting that is. The problem with the idea of controlling your mutations is that there aren't very many interesting good mutations. Your example of a strong character with this god even proves that point, to some degree: it's just a big ball of boring passive bonuses. Sure, those bonuses are strong, but they're not interesting.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I suspect that playing this god would mostly involve spending a large amount of time in menus only to end up with a fairly boring-but-strong character with a bunch of free resistances and stats. That doesn't sound very compelling to me. And the menu part is very non-neglible - the micromanagement involved in using this god's abilities optimally is the kind of thing DCSS normally avoids. If it involved carefully picking and choosing abilities to fit your character and playstyle maybe it would be interesting enough to be worth it, but like I said, most good mutations are straightforward enough that I think it would feel less like Bioengineering your character and more like playing a really boring version of Ru where the sacrifices are only temporary.

If you want to make it feel more like the god of bioengineerng and not the god of having lots of stats after fiddling around in the abilities menu for a while, then I think the approach would be to add a bunch of exclusive mutations with very powerful effects, but make it impossible for the player to have all of them. Essentially, it would almost be a reverse Ru - every once in a while you get a choice, but instead of the choices being random sacrifices that give fixed rewards, the choices are strong mutations that are the rewards. That would make the choices more interesting and involves less menu fiddling. The problem with this idea is that "occasionally you get a special, exclusive mutation that could meaningfully affect your playstyle" is pretty similar to Demonspawn. And I don't think the devs would be interested in adding a god to the game that's just "build your own demonspawn."

I realize this negativity could be discouraging, so I do want to say that I like what you're trying to do. Like you, I think Crawl's mutation system has a lot of untapped potential, and I think the idea of a god that lets you customize your mutations is neat in theory. I'm just not sure how to make it work in practice without having too much overlap with Jiyva or Demonspawn. Ultimately, I think the lack of control is part of what's interesting about the mutation system in the first place.

[Nekoatl]

I've updated the proposal. Good feedback so far; please keep it coming.

In my example, I deliberately avoided some good mutations that players have developed an aversion to (particularly body-slot mutations), but in practice I imagine players would welcome those if they had the option to turn them off upon finding a sufficiently desirable piece of equipment (though players may disagree on what constitutes sufficient desirability).

I've expanded what Experiment can produce. In the long run, I think it's probably better to increase the pool of possible good mutations instead (I haven't seen the thorn god in a while, so if it's been abandoned, maybe its passive features could be salvaged as good mutations as well), but unless and until that happens, I don't mind offering some extras here as long as they're not unique to some existing god/species or not seen anywhere else in the game. I think introducing completely new mutations exclusive to this god would be encroaching too far into Jiyva's design space.

The use of menus is valid concern, but I haven't been able to think of any better option. The only other way I've thought of to control mutations is to prompt the user to accept or reject any mutation that's about to happen, but that has its own set of problems and would break the design I'm going for in 2 places. I think the best we can do here is to make the selection UI as painless as possible, which I think mostly means minimizing the amount of time a player has to spend scanning through lists to find the right key to press. But with the feature contained in a god, I think there's more room for leeway than with core game features, because it's easy to avoid if players don't want to deal with it.

I like the randomness of the mutation system too (I've long been a Jiyva fan), but I'm not always in the mood for it, and occasionally I just feel like being able to choose some mutations. So far, I've relied on Wizard mode to scratch that itch, but not having to earn them makes the experience much less satisfying than I'd like. Also, I think regardless of how interesting or powerful the good mutations list might become in the future, many players would still avoid mutations entirely unless they had a way to selectively remove unwanted mutations.