Silly ideas: Jellomancy

[oiseaux]

I've made this thread to explore an area of Crawl I've wanted to expand on for some time. I'm working out how to compile the sources at the moment with a view to trying some of these ideas out, but I appreciate they might be redundant, unbalanced or totally mental.

So with tounge firmly in cheek: Jellomancy! That is, a spell school based around the theme of slimes, jellies, acid and corrosion. First of all, the name "Jellomancy" is totally preposterous and serves only as a placeholder for something sensible. I love this idea and I love the theme. There should be more of it in Crawl, in some fashion.

I just wanted to throw this down as a sketch rather than a serious suggestion and see what you all thought, because I really like the theme but I feel like Jiyva isn't really an option for most builds, especially 3-runers. The main problem is that this, as a spell school, would make Jivya almost redundant. I don't know how over/underpowered it is at the moment but there is the obvious option to allow some kind of passive synergy with her worship. There is the other problem that I can't see anyone wanting yet *another* spell school.

Say this was a spell school, it might have synergy with Earth and Transmutations, maybe Poison. I think the main thing would be to establish what is unique to an acid element of damage. The player is affected by corrosion in the form of "elemental damage" and weapon/armour corrosion - but I have no idea how acid+/++/+++ works on NPCs at this time. Obviously those without it should receive additional "elemental damage".

Spell resist should be based on non-magic resist factors like... HD for transmutations, and acid resist for straight damage? Again, something to seperate it from magic and other elemental resists. I've put spell ideas I particularly like in bold.

Rust - Reduce tohit/todam of weapon wielded by target - effect permanent so you might not want to do this on a weapon you hope to pick up.

Consume - Destroy something on the floor for minimal amounts of HP/MP. Could be restricted to weapons or objects of a certain material.

Aspic degeneracy - Acid/transmutations - Polymorph creatures in AOE into TEMPORARY hostile (nerfed) or friendly (buffed) slimes, with chance to resist. Number of friendlies, duration scales with power?

Trine / Gelatinous prison - Target is effectively paralysed for x turns, encased in a gelatinous cube. Unlike Zin's imprison, this just affects an individual square. A nice overlay tile with a big green cube would be ace.

Jellification - Like ignite poison but instead of fire clouds, slime tiles that slow movement. Would be lower level than ignite pois.

Vitrification - As per the card. Turns walls transparent 'n shit

Gelatinous form - Acid/transmutations: Turn into a jelly! Equipment merged, spit acid attack, slow movement, horrible melee, corrosion/acid resistance. The idea is to become a kind of long range turret.

Gelatinous shield - Corrosion/acid resistance for x number of turns. Perhaps could be buffed to include a reflection property.

Acid splash - Low level, low dam, low range level 1/2 spell. Maybe, like Sandblast, works better with some kind of item.

Acid bolt - Level 6 conj/acid bolt spell ala the other elemental bolts

Summon Jelly - Speaks for itself, ramps up in power but could be at any kind of level. Conflicts with Jiyva's power but there could be several of these types of spells (Summon Jelly, Summon Greater Jelly etc). It would be thematic, I feel if they have risk of hostile jellies (ala summon scorpions); of course a Jiyva follower would benefit from this. May require food items for the higher power spells?

Acidic rain - Acid/poison AOE spell that does damage over time

Abjure Jelly - Dispel undead for jellies. Will probably need to be extended to a greater class of creatures to be wortwhile

Secondary to the spell class, there's the idea of the Jelly race. Slow movement, good apts in transmutation, poison, acid. Actually, this has already been raised here: https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php? ... pose:jelly

I might try something a bit more down to earth but still absurd (the glaive of prune warrants it!), like a gelatinous artifact that could harbour one of these powers. Need to look at the source some more.

So anyway, like I say, not an idea to take too seriously. If you have any ideas/constructive thoughts I'd like to hear them. It doesn't necessarily have to be a spell school, perhaps some of the ideas could be merged into Jivya's abilities to make it more desireable.

[TehDruid]

I'm not in the development of the game, but here's my two cents;

In general, some creative ideas... I like it. I've once mentioned the Jelly race (or Amorphous which in case you don't know comes from the Greek word "άμορφος", meaning "shapeless") in Crazy Yiuf's corner for fun, some months ago. Just a silly idea but I'd like to try playing it nevertheless in any way it would be implemented... Anyway. You can always make a branch of the game if you have the time and abilities if you'd like to contain something that the devs would rather not include in the main branch.

On the subject of "too many elemental schools already", what I have to say;

I think Ice magic should be renamed to Water magic basically. Like there's no Thunder magic spells but Air/Conjurations etc... I think we should stick to the 4 core elements. Fire, air, earth, and water. Ice is just frozen water after all. Of course this is just a name. I prefer water though . Then Poison spells could be translated into water / air / earth / conjurations combos so the Poison School can be removed. Of course that's too much work and would cause massive rework on the balance of every spell (even the skill system, probably) for the sake of flavour. I just don't like the idea of poison, acid/slime or whatever other silly (no offense) element people come up with. Everything comes from the 4 basic elements and their combinations under certain situations. Conjurations or if I may "The Arcane" School should stay as the non-elemental magic school and combine with the 4 basic natural elements to make spells like it does now. On the other hand since it's the generic school for magic it could be merged with the Spellcasting skill and Spellcasting would become more expensive to level up.

I personally am not aware of the fact that many people don't like it that we have a bunch of extra schools other than the 4 basic, so If they don't, they should say it. We're supposed to tell the dev team of what we like and don't.

But the game is already built around some stuff and if you mess with that you'll end up with a different game which some may not like as much as the current one anyway and that's something a dev doesn't want to do. So it's probably more trouble than it's worth since people like the game the way it is and don't usually respond well to massive reworks of stuff they're used to. And, on top of that, who's got time to make all the changes? This is a free game.

Hope i don't come off as an asshole.

[Cyrus]

Be careful what you joke about. Once upon a time I wrote up the Slime God as a forum joke, and a few years later, behold there was Jivya.