Pragua, God of Fortune (and leprechauns)

[LoopyLeo]

Pragua, God of Fortune and Leprechauns... yes, I'm serious.

Pragua is a jovial and ancient god, who reigns supreme over the wheels of fortune. He blesses his followers with Leprechauns and good luck, even allowing them to choose an outcome of fortune at times -- and smites his enemies with the worst that luck can give.

Starting at 0 piety, Pragua enables his followers to buy luck with piety.

0* (passive) Blessing of Fortune -- whenever a piece of equipment (weapons, armour, jewellery) is identified, Pragua opens a menu with the following: Accept given luck, the equipment remains unchanged... OR Adjust stats of item to increase enchanments, gain stronger ego OR... Spin the Wheel of Fortune, anything goes -- the equipment may grow immensely in power of stats/ego, stay the same/similar, or become disenchanted/cursed/egoless. Whilst the first option is free, the second is quite expensive, and the last even more so. (NOT EFFECTED BY LEPRECHAUNS).

1* (Active) Lucky Dart -- fire a weak dart at an enemy, this disenchants the enemy's equipment (effectively corroding them, disenchantment is not permanant) and reduces their EV. It also reduces MR (slightly), and increases the chances of a miscast. Starts quite weak but scales with piety. However -- this ability also begins with a 25% chance to do the opposite. This dart passes through Leprechauns.

2* (Active) Lucky Dodger -- increase EV significantly for a brief duration. Amount and duration increases with piety. Also has a small chance to decrease EV, but chance scales down with piety.

3* (Active) Polymorph -- smite targets a 1x1 area (grows with piety?), and polymorphs everyone in the area (Leprechauns are immune to being polymorphed). As piety increases, the chances of monsters being transformed with lower HD's increases, and increases the chance of a stronger form when targeted on the player/allies.

4* (Active) Summon Leprechauns -- randomly summon 1-6 Leprechauns. These are durable summons -- killing them incurs penance. Cannot be reactivated until all Leprechauns have died. As for Leprechauns, they are small, with high EV. They move super fast, like bats, are invisible (revealed to player however), magic immune and have an incredibly weak attack. Their bonus is that they cumulatively increase luck: increased power and chance of positive outcomes from god abilities, as well as more EV; lowered miscast/fail chance (very small however) when in sight of player.

5* (Active) Curse of Misfortune -- large MP cost, checks MR, smite-targeted. Superpowered 'Unlucky Dart' without a backfire chance, reduces EV to 0 (or thereabouts), miscast to 50%, completely disenchants equipment, and reduces MR by a large amount.

6* Nothing new.

ABANDONMENT -- I have not planned this out, but it should be pretty extreme to prevent scumming for Blessing of Fortune.

...

So the purpose of this god was create one that depended a little bit more on luck, like Xom and Mahkleb, whilst also exploring the concept I had for Blessing of Fortune, which I considered rather interesting -- giving the player a greater sense of control over the quality of equipment, whilst also exploring the unclaimed grounds of an equipment god. I also liked the idea of being able to divinely disenchant enemies, though this would effectively act the same as corrosion (subtle corrosion god).
I'm not really sure how balancing would go, so I haven't assigned any hard numbers. but I do feel this would be an interesting and unique god to include in Crawl.

More than open to criticisms, thoughts and discussion

[tasonir]

As much as you seem to like leprechauns, I don't think giving the player a cloud of summons which don't really do anything themselves - ie, damage or tanking, is really a good idea. It brings in ally management and line of fire blocking and it isn't really a summon spell, the point of them is just to give a bonus to luck. You can do that without the summons - just have it be a buff which starts out high and decays over time, and can't be refreshed until it fully ends. Technically I suppose the leprechauns will take some hits once monsters can see them or if they randomly bump into the space, but I'm not sure if this is that critical to the ability. Summon butterflies exists for this, although I don't use that as much as I should.

5 actives is also pretty high, although not a deal breaker. You might still want to cut maybe lucky dodging, as it it's just an EV increase (or decrease) which isn't terribly impactful.

Has the slight issue that all the improved gear could carry forward if you switch gods, but Gozag has the same issue (and Okawaru) so this is also tolerable.

[LoopyLeo]

As much as you seem to like leprechauns, I don't think giving the player a cloud of summons which don't really do anything themselves - ie, damage or tanking, is really a good idea. It brings in ally management and line of fire blocking and it isn't really a summon spell, the point of them is just to give a bonus to luck. You can do that without the summons - just have it be a buff which starts out high and decays over time, and can't be refreshed until it fully ends. Technically I suppose the leprechauns will take some hits once monsters can see them or if they randomly bump into the space, but I'm not sure if this is that critical to the ability. Summon butterflies exists for this, although I don't use that as much as I should.

5 actives is also pretty high, although not a deal breaker. You might still want to cut maybe lucky dodging, as it it's just an EV increase (or decrease) which isn't terribly impactful.

Has the slight issue that all the improved gear could carry forward if you switch gods, but Gozag has the same issue (and Okawaru) so this is also tolerable.

Tbh, Leprechauns were kind of a last minute thought I had to try and add some form of uniqueness to the god -- allies that were non-combative, instead buffing the player, they're by no means a staple. The main idea of the god was instead to *improve existing equipment* and have a god still reliant on luck, but more playable than Xom.

And yeah, I considered that switching the god could be considered an issue -- but we do already have god wrath, simply make it stronger? If it's a risk the play is willing to take I don't really see why it's too much of an issue.

Lucky Dodging could also be cut -- or merged with the buff you suggested to replace Leprechauns.

Looking back, I'm not sure this is the brightest god idea tavern has seen, but it was interesting in my head. If I could code it to see how it worked out, I would, but I'm in the middle of exams atm -- and can't code

[Chicken]

I think that changing items may be problematic to balance. Besides, usually something is like +1 or +0, or +9, +11, +12 ... doesn't seem like there's a lot in between. How high will you let characters go? Because if you can't get higher than a good item, there's no merit to messing with the plus. And what players really want is to get rElec or rCorr or something like that anyway.

I think a God of Leperchauns is a nice idea, but I would make it all different...

Granted powers:

Permanent teleportitis. That's an old Nethack tradition. Random teleporting is really dangerous, hence really fun, and it gives us an excuse to shower other benefits on the believer to make up for it. Optionally, it can omit the "near monsters" feature, but that would make the implementation more complicated. -Tele should not work on it (see "rainbow surfing" below for an explanation)

Necklace of lucky charms. This is a permanent shackle to show that the believer is owned by the leprechauns (only slightly like the movie...). But with increasing piety, it becomes a super nifty item, because with each pip or two of piety you get a charm, and those charms are, of course, magically delicious:

a) Lucky horseshoe - equivalent to boots of running
b) Fuzzy dice - when you first see an artifact, you get a choice of two of the same general type. The catch is, unless the item is pre-identified you don't know more than you can see (do you want a sparkling halberd or a shining rapier?). Other catch is, a monster may be holding it, and there's that to contend with.
c) Holy medal - immunity or protection from some combination of pain, flaying, torment, rotting, and/or attribute losses, as people think will balance.
d) Four leaf clover - each time you get malmutated from any source, you get four choices as to what it will be. Or something like that. I think it would be really neat if we could balance it so that it actually pays off to eat mutagenic meat when you are unmutated, but not past a certain point ... I'm not sure if we can balance that out though.
etc. It should be an impressive assortment. If some aren't as good you can give players more charms. I should note that since charms shouldn't get rerolled by losing and gaining piety, it would make sense that leperchaun piety should never go down; hence there should be no piety gated abilities. It might take longer to go up also.

Rainbow surfing - after you get to some minimum piety, you can teleport whenever you want, and the delay is reduced by half or so. Leaves behind a cloud of rainbow colors, naturally.

Pot of gold - when you get to maximum piety, you should be able to tap into the Leperchauns' fabulous pot of gold ... once.