Slime Squisher
Posts: 392
Joined: Sunday, 11th September 2016, 17:21
God of the Forge
A god of the forge that strengthens and customizes the non-artefact equipment of loyal followers. Artefacts are works of art that should not be tampered with, as a matter of respect for their creators.
Goals:
Normally, players tend to eventually replace most or all their equipment with artefacts as the game progresses... which is fine, but it tends to result in the no-brainer decision to discard the non-artefact equipment and tends to make non-artefact equipment feel less exciting. This god is meant to do 4 things: make the choice between artefact and non-artefact equipment more meaningful, make non-artefact equipment more exciting, provide the ability to occasionally choose to quickly and reliably adapt to a dangerous situation at an increased cost, and tempt the player to use that ability while rewarding their patience if they choose not to.
Definitions:
A gear is a weapon (including magical staves and stacks of throwing weapons), armour (including shields, orbs, and scarves), or jewellery, excluding artefacts.
The player owns every gear in their inventory and every gear they have seen on the ground.
A gear is obsolete if the player owns enough identical or strictly better copies of that gear to fill all applicable equip slots or to fill enough such slots that equipping the item in question would provide no benefit. Throwing weapons are never obsolete.
Abilities:
------ Smelt: Destroy a gear in inventory or at the player's feet to gain piety proportional to that gear's value. Passively destroys obsolete gear the player owns as if it had been manually selected, prioritizing those with the longest pathing distance from the player.
*----- Fit: Passively improves the reduction to ER of worn non-artefact body armour from STR and the Armour skill.
**---- Maintain: Passively grants bonuses to everything the corrosion status penalizes.
***--- Expertise: Scrolls of brand weapon now imbue a brand/ego onto a chosen gear in the inventory.
****-- Strive for Perfection: Scrolls of enchant weapon and enchant armour can now improve weapons and armour beyond their maximum values, and jewellery beyond their default values, but doing so applies the Instability status to the player which gradually reduces bonuses on gear the player owns to their normal maximums.
*****- Temper: Provides gifts in the form of improvements to equipped gear and throwing weapons in inventory. This can be +1 to enhancement level to a gear below max, or a brand/ego for a weapon/armour that does not yet have one, prioritizing brands/egos.
****** Flash Forge: For a large piety cost, instantly optimises a single chosen gear by increasing enhancement level to maximum and applying a brand/ego. The brand/ego is random if the gear didn't already have one or chosen if it did.
Formulas:
(Each constant is unique and is meant to be a lever for balance tweaking for the ability it appears in.)
Smelt: Add its price if it were to be sold in a standard general store to a hidden count, then as many times as possible, subtract a constant and add 1 piety.
Fit: Multiply ER reduction by floor([Piety*n*c]/[200*e]), where n is the number of gear currently equipped, e is the number of gear slots available, and c is a constant.
Maintain: Bonus potency is floor([Piety*XL*n*c]/[5400*e]) where n is the number of gear currently equipped, e is the number of gear slots available, and c is a constant.
Strive for Perfection: Instability, each AUT, add the sum of the excess bonus points on gear the player owns to a hidden counter. When that counter exceeds a constant, randomly remove 1 bonus point weighted so that each gear the player owns has one chance per excess bonus point, then subtract the constant from the counter. When the last excess bonus point is removed, remove the Instability status.
Temper: Gifts cost the larger of 1 or v*c piety, where p is the new enhancement level if it was increased or the stack size if a brand/ego was applied to a stack of throwing weapons or 10 if a brand/ego was applied to anything else, and c is a constant.
Flash Forge: The piety cost is twice the total cost of all gifts that would be required to transform the gear from its original state to its resulting state. Note that if applied to a gear with maximum enhancement while selecting the previous brand/ego, no gifts would be needed, as there is no change, so the piety cost would be 0. Depending on the value of c, this can result in piety becoming negative if used on, e.g., a +0 crystal plate armour, in which case ------ should be displayed until piety climbs out of the negatives and back to the *----- threshold.
Devotion:
Piety gain/loss occurs only through ability usage and gifts. The player is not excommunicated for having less than 1 piety.
If the player abandons this religion, then for every weapon or armour the player owns, set its enhancement level to 0 and remove any brand/ego it may have. For every jewellery the player owns, set its numeric value to the default for that type of jewellery.
If the above penalty alone is insufficient, then also apply a corrosion effect that scales with the ratio of equipped artefacts to equipment slots and stacks with other sources of corrosion until the god is mollified.
Concerns:
I feel like this god overlaps somewhat with the design spaces of both Gozag and Ashenzari, though I think it's distinct enough from both that there's room for it to exist. Gozag's advantages are the ability to provide a much wider variety of items, the ability to bypass unwanted fights entirely through bribery, and the ability to gain entirely new items instead of merely improving existing ones; whereas the god of the forge allows retrieval of dragon scales and troll leather armours and is more reliable in providing equipment improvements which makes it much more likely that a particular brand/ego will be available when encountering early branches liked timed brances and the Lair. Ashenzari provides bonuses to a wider range of activities, provides the highly valuable clarity intrinsic, and safer dungeon navigation; whereas the god of the forge again allows for more reliable early-game performance improvements, allows for far more flexibility in reacting to threats, and allows for more specialized performance improvement in the sense that more points can be invested into a single skill without rendering the divine bonus to the activities governed by that skill obsolete.