Random gods

[nicolae]

Powers:
- "Freeze Time": Monsters can't do anything for, say, 10 turns or so, and will ignore you during the duration of the power, but you can move around freely. Interacting with the world beyond walking through it -- attacking a monster, dropping or firing anything, picking up anything, digging, opening a door, using stairs -- makes time return and monsters move again.
- Summons in your vicinity are more likely to fail, and successful summons are likely to arrive with fewer HD or having already taken damage. (I had an idea for a Hex/Sum spell along these lines, but maybe it'll work better here.)
- Animate Dead.
- Animate Skeleton, but a more intense version -- animates all skeletons in LoS, including those still within bodies. Creatures with skeletons take incredible damage as the skeleton tries to free itself, and if this damage would kill them, chunks go everywhere and the monster's skeleton is yours to control.

Wrath effects:
- Summon hostile beings. If the god has a power for granting summons, use those summons (but stronger).
- Corrode your equipment.
- If the god hates some particular kind of item, that item will explode when you approach it.
- Teleportitis.
- Shopkeepers charge double.
- Blurry vision.
- Penalties to all aptitudes/skills while wrath is in effect.
- During wrath, the god yanks away your equipment (worn armour, weapon) and dumps it somewhere else on the level (never in deep water or lava, but maybe in that room full of orcs.)

(I was gonna think of more, but I got hungry.)

[o_O]

I like this idea a lot.

+1 to giving Xom something like this. Xom now forbids followers from eating fruit! Xom now allows you to launch butterflies out of your sling! Xom now gives you a smite targeted attack with a range of 0!

[dpeg]

Glad you like it. If you want to add content, please use the wiki page: https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php? ... random_god

I won't move content from here to there anymore. However, I do plan to make an ultrasmall prototype proposal on the wiki page, to see whether this can actually become serious at some point.

[dpeg]

So exactly one year later, an update. The following wiki pages have seen modifications: overview, piety and conducts, powers and wrath.

Furthermore, there is hope that actual progress may be made. For that, we need a very minimal set of a few piety rules and powers. Here is an attempt: miniature

[twelwe]

So exactly one year later, an update. The following wiki pages have seen modifications: overview, piety and conducts, powers and wrath.

Furthermore, there is hope that actual progress may be made. For that, we need a very minimal set of a few piety rules and powers. Here is an attempt: miniature

Holy smokes. This is a lot to take in. Here are my first reactions:

Distortion storm should go straight to Lugonu immediately. GREAT IDEA

Shoplift sounds like it is shoehorned into a divine ability because a. someone thought of a great idea but b. it doesn't balance right if it is a spell like berserk, nor a ring/artefact effect. I cannot see this ability existing in crawl except as a divine ability, which doesn't necessarily mean it should still exist. I don't have an opinion about this yet, just enough to say it is really interesting.

Divine ring fingers: octopodes are just flat out restricted from this conduct, right? What about, say, felids, who have paws instead of tentacles, but still have no fingers? The "lock in" effect could be a punishment if the ring if, say, ice. What happens when someone tries to lock in an unidentified cursed ring of teleportation? What if a caster somehow ends up locking in a -CAST artefact? The game is over for them.

Summon uniques sounds so fun, but is this a perma-ally with perma-death, or does the unique kill list stay intact after each temporary use? Or, are they temporary summons who cannot be used twice? Perma ally with perma death is too much like Yred to me.

Guardian genie sounds way too strong.

Amok sounds abusable with flying/swimming characters, or characters with the invisibility spell or activated ability. You would have to make amok force everyone out of invisibility, stealth, and prevent flying/swimming ("Are you sure you want to so and so over lava/under water?")

Mutation master is screaming to be scummed, and it will happen. Mutation master should also confer some mutation resistance. It should not be an ability revealed at *

Tame by food has the same problems with food spawns. You either have a game where you get 120 sultanas and 60 grapes, or what few fruit you do get needs to be saved and consumed. This game needs less divine consumable use, not more.


The damage/monster and characters effects for the most part seem very well done. I'll keep checking for more stuff. This is great work as always!

[dpeg]

twelve: Thanks for feedback. Yes, it is a major endeavour. I am convinced that it will add so much to Crawl that I'm working on the design over the years
There is actually coding support since recently (all hail the Cold Pie!) which is absolutely awesome. The plan is to build the database first, which will be able to read the text file definitions of powers and stuff, and hooks to the actual code.

Distortion Storm should not go to Lugonu, because that god is well working already Rather, the idea is that Foo Storm with different flavours are relatively easy to code (can start with Ice/Fire Storm and tweak) while providing theme and still a unique experience. A randgod with Distortion Storm might get other Abyss-related powers, though, assuming there's a tag /allies/.

Shoplift is one of the things that make little sense as a spell or otherwise repeatable effect. It could be used as an one-off effect (think a miscellaneous item) but even so I claim it fits better on a god: with such an item, you'd just check the most expensive item you want, steal it, done. A god, on the other hand, can combine the Shoplift power with funny conducts about gold (for example, that you have none), and then the Shoplift comes really into its own. And finally, I have my doubts if a normal god centered around this theme would be feasible, but with a randgod we can get away with it.

Divine ring fingers: I wouldn't exclude octopodes. Okay, they may end up running around with 8+6 rings in the end, but hey The point is that the random gods are (a) random and (b) really rare, so it's impossible to scum this. Felids need no extra care: we are talking about *divine* fingers -- your god provides them. One point of the power is that it provides some choices: yes, more rings are good. But since the rings are locked, you may wait until you have really good rings to put there. But if you wait for too long, the potential of the god goes to waste -- at a time when you may need the support most. So perhaps put that mundane ring of regeneration (or wizardry or whatever) anyway? I assume that the player thinks for a little bit before the power: putting unidentified or plain bad rings there is a stupid idea. No need to worry about it. It's like making a +0 club pain/holy branded.

Summon uniques: they're supposed to come back, so you can have Sigmund die by your side several times, but I need to come up with a simple and reasonable system for that.

Guardian genie: Power is of little concern at this stage. I am confident that the power can be arbitrarily strong. On the other hand, the amulet of Guardian Spirit sees occasional use but is not a no-brainer. So there will be some middle space that makes the god power balanced.

Yes, Amok may need thought. Most of the list you see there is from brainstorming with nicolae (some ideas are from this very thread). If I put it on the wiki, then it means I believe that it can be done well (i.e. not too much coding effort and decent balance) but some powers need more thought than others. Amok is one of them.

Mutation Master: you can call it abuse, but it would that god's highest, i.e. signature power. Yes, the character would run around with a great mutation set but (a) you have to find the god, (b) you have to be willing to take it on, and (c) you have to get piety up to ***** or so, before we can talk about "abuse". Needless to say, there are ways to make sure that the power is not overpowering.

Tame by food and Amok were inspired by Nethack. We'll see if something actually comes out of them.

[Roderic]

It is a good start, congrats!

May I help in some way to contribute/organize/balance the DB ?

[dpeg]

Roderic: thanks!

This is a very slow-moving target but by now I have the feeling the thing *might* eventually arise from the depths... Help is welcome: new ideas for powers etc. It would also be interesting to list actual god powers in the fake db format (Okawaru's Finesse/Heroism, Trog's Hand etc.), as well as the actual numbers for piety gain. That would allow us to make the numbers for the randgod features less arbitrary

[Roderic]

I've thought and written down a few generic god powers (i.e. the sort of powers that any god could provide) and other more theme-related. I'm more fond on classifying the conducts and piety rules rather than making powers. I especially like the algorithm to roll a god and the tags strategy to pick the rules. The creation of programmatic descriptions also seems feasible with the tags.

I think that this effort, if conveniently carried out, can lead to better and faster major god designs and to take profit of good ideas that have not seen the light.

Where should I start to contribute ?

I do code, so eventually I could code but I'm not so skilled in C as I wish and frankly no idea of doing commits and such yet. I would need some hints to locate the god stuff.

[dpeg]

Roderic: the idea is that at least early powers should use no or very little coding anyway (just recycle existing stuff).

There is a coder (ColdPie on ##crawl-dev) working on the setting up the database: i.e. code that can read the textfile entries and store them for lookup (with weights, and according to force/forbid rules). Help is certainly appreciated -- would you drop me a line? (Send me a forum message, and we'll get going.)

As far as I see it, the first step would be to have "dry gods": i.e. an algorithm that rolls piety, conduct (if any), powers etc. and lists them, so that we can watch it and contemplate whether none/some/many/all of these would make fine random gods. That'd allow playing with tags and weights immediately and also to test different approaches to building gods.

[grisamentum]

I was excited to see the idea about gods generated from players ("player gods" is a bit misleading). I was thinking about something similar over Christmas. Particularly one could have a branch (or a tournament) where the game started with no gods at all, and the only gods available (during the tournament)/(in the branch) were those generated by play.

(My apologies if this is a sufficiently old necro, but I didn't want to derail the other thread.)

[tasonir]

As this idea is apparently not dead from what dpeg said, I suppose having a thread on it that is active isn't a bad thing. I find the whole section about Endurance on the wiki page (https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php? ... random_god) to be rather odd. I always imaged them as being randomly generated from code, and not based on player runs or saved on the server for a period of time before being deleted. If they do end up being based on player characters based on score, this will also heavily influence them towards characters that are good for speedrunning or extended in general - fire elementalists will be a large component, spriggans, etc.

[grisamentum]

As this idea is apparently not dead from what dpeg said, I suppose having a thread on it that is active isn't a bad thing. I find the whole section about Endurance on the wiki page (https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php? ... random_god) to be rather odd. I always imaged them as being randomly generated from code, and not based on player runs or saved on the server for a period of time before being deleted. If they do end up being based on player characters based on score, this will also heavily influence them towards characters that are good for speedrunning or extended in general - fire elementalists will be a large component, spriggans, etc.

That's true. One thing I was thought of was defined niches or portfolios that would be filled. Sure, there could be some overall score gods. On the other hand, you could have also have conduct and racial categories, something like "highest score where the player made at least 8,000 melee attacks" (or whatever number. I think in my last 6-rune win I did about 8500). I suppose there is always the danger of people gaming that, so it would need robust requirements.

The idea is to build a pantheon that covers relevant niches, but sometimes in unexpected ways.

[dpeg]

tasonir: This is true, but then again, there is actually some range among speedrunners. Then again, the rules are ours to make (e.g. if you already created X gods, chances for another one slowly decline; if the number of atheist troll wins is low, increase chances from such wins to create player gods, even at lower scores etc.).

The overall appeal should be that (a) *your* character can lead to a playable god (complete with distorted, but hopefully recognisable name) and (b) players can compete to win such a god (only finitely many attempts). I think this can lead to fun situations, on both ends, god makers and god users.

But yes, the basic premise is to make procedurally generated gods. However, once we have enough tags for random gods, we can try to fit tags on atheist wins. That is a later step, of course.

[mps]

Hi -- I can't say I've read the whole thread, but here's a related idea: Ascended demigod religions.

It would work like this: When a player ascends a demigod, the game looks at his final skills, stats, spells, and equipment, as well as his in-game achievements, kill numbers, and frequency with which he takes certain actions (e.g. casting spells, evocations, etc.) and selects passive abilities and invocations to confer on worshippers based on these factors.

So for example, a stereotypical fire elementalist type character might generate a religion that confers a (probably weaker) firestorm-like invocation, maybe some kind of fire cloud generating passive, some kind of support for spell casting, like extra mp or fire magic enchancer, etc. A melee oriented axe fighter might generate a religion with a passive Ashenzari-like axe skill bonus, a brand gift ability based on his most used endgame weapon or just straight out gifting the weapon he ascended with in the late game, perhaps manual-like aptitude passives for combat skills based on skills the character trained to a high level, if the character frequently used a certain kind of evocation, like rage or flight, confer a similar invocation, stat bonuses if the demigod had an unusually high score in str, dex, or int. Obviously, it would all have to be carefully balanced, so the demigod religions are approximately as good as the standard ones.

Altars for demigod religions would generate randomly, outside of the ecumenical temple, usually early in the dungeon. Maybe one or two per game. Since on a public server there would be plenty of such religions available, it would not always happen that a demigod religion would make sense for a given character and you couldn't plan a character in advance around such a religion.

I think this would add some very amusing dimensions to online play. First of all, it would make demigods a lot more attractive, just for the prestige of it. Secondly, you could see some pretty funky characters following these religions. Third, of course on WebTiles, you'd see players' names in the god column.

(It might be smart to disable the feature by default in offline versions...)

[grisamentum]

I don't know that you'd need to restrict it to demigods - just atheist games generally. And that would make demigods probably the best choice for a god-creating game, but would maybe create more "turnover" in the player god realm. Maybe if there were "god slots" for the least common atheist racial wins, so that there would also be something Beogh-like (in race, not necessarily powers or playstyle).

[mps]

Yeah, I suppose, but then why not allow characters with a religion to have their own "hero religion"?

I think the position of demigods in the game is a little dubious in that they just ignore a core part of what makes crawl distinctive. A change like this would tie them into the religion aspect of crawl in a unique and interesting way, without changing their gameplay mechanics -- they'd still be atheists and play the same as ever.

I think there's also something in the fact that demigods have great, highly customizable stats, and very flat aptitudes so you can make a huge variety of characters with them, though perhaps with greater effort than with races that have more specialized stats and aptitudes. This gives demigods a lot of "personality." There's also the fact that you have to make a choice to be a demigod before you know anything about how the game will unfold. So you don't have the situation where your minotaur finds a vampiric executioner's axe on D:4 and decides to go it alone so he can become a god. You also have to consider that with the demigod religions, you have an incentive to play demigod where not much incentive existed before, whereas if you allow any character to spawn a "hero religion" but require atheism, this is a disincentive to take up religion on characters that otherwise could (and should -- this is a core aspect of crawl's design).

So I think there are both thematic and gameplay/metagame reasons to spawn religions for demigods only.

[grisamentum]

Yeah, I suppose, but then why not allow characters with a religion to have their own "hero religion"?

I think because that makes "religion" into a different thing than it is, or than it would be if at least atheists could achieve apotheosis.

I think the position of demigods in the game is a little dubious in that they just ignore a core part of what makes crawl distinctive. A change like this would tie them into the religion aspect of crawl in a unique and interesting way, without changing their gameplay mechanics -- they'd still be atheists and play the same as ever.

The focus here is on extending the religion system in general, and creating more systems that generate replayability. It's not about making demigods cooler, although it will do that anyway since the vast majority of atheist wins are with demigods. But there's no reason to restrict it to them.