Dungeon Master
Posts: 332
Joined: Friday, 15th July 2011, 22:43
U!ktaska, God of Surprise
Description
A mischievous trickster god, U!ktaska irritates and amuses the rest of the pantheon in equal measure. It is known that the first basilisk may have been born when U!ktaska snuck up on a stone and shouted at it, startling it into hatching. Even great orbs of eyes can't see U!ktaska coming. Followers of this god spread bewilderment and amusement where they can, practicing discretion and silence at one moment and letting loose with a thunderous cacophony the next.
Conduct and Piety
Like many gods, U!ktaska becomes bored quickly, but in U!ktaska's case it happens quite quickly. Followers gain piety by waking and startling monsters, and gain even more by waking monsters with shouts.
This follows a model of "volatile" piety -- while most gods have a piety mechanic that works on the strategic level, slowly building up to full and slowly falling again, this god is intended to have a tactical piety scale, allowing players to gain six stars of piety over several hundred turns, and lose those stars over a similar (perhaps slightly longer) period of time.
Piety goes up when monsters wake up. This occurs even if the monsters are not on screen, so that especially noisy characters (firestorming, shattering, shield-of-the-gonging folks) gain the proper benefits of this god, albeit with less control.
U!ktaska likes it most of all if players can wake sleeping monsters by shouting -- bonus piety is awarded for proximity. In practice, this means that players who want to gain a lot of piety quickly should sneak up next to sleeping monsters and press tt. Stabbing doesn't award any piety unless the enemy survives the attempt.
Piety goes down over time, and is spent on several powers. Willfully using any form of Silence bestows penance.
Powers
*..... -- Deafening Shout
Shouting (with tt) has a chance of bestowing several status effects, depending on monster HD and piety/invocation skill. It affects all enemies that are in earshot but is limited to LOS. Players can always shout, even when silenced.
Invocation skill and monster HD govern success -- perhaps HD isn't the best thing to check against, I'm open to suggestions. Piety determines the pool of status effects that can be bestowed: at one star and above, this ability causes deafness (more on this later); three stars and above, deafness and confusion; five stars and above, deafness, confusion, and paralysis. It is harder to cause confusion and hardest to cause paralysis with this ability -- but each status effect should be rolled for separately.
Coding-wise, this ability should check for piety change first and then bestow status effects [/i]second[/i] -- or to put it differently, if shouting and waking enemies would bring a player's piety level up, they won't have to shout again to gain the benefits of the higher piety level. Otherwise, players would have to approach sleeping enemies and shout twice to get the full benefit of this ability -- not my intention.
Players shouldn't be able to shout repeatedly at enemies until they're affected, either. The effectiveness of the ability against any particular enemy should decrease each time it is used.
Deafness: Penalizes an enemy's ability to track the player while out of sight, and also decreases EV. Non-living and undead creatures are immune, though I'm not sure if all demons should be or not. That's up for discussion, I suppose.
**.... -- Muffled Surprise
At two stars and above, U!ktask passively prevents monsters from attracting one another with shouts/barks/other loud noises. Alarm traps are not completely disabled but have diminished effective range. This is a similar ability as found in other recent proposals. I am not sure if it should merely reduce enemy shout distance and scale with piety, culminating in complete muteness at six stars -- or if it should be complete at two stars. I'm leaning toward the latter, as I want it to be noticeable. If you wake up half the level to hit six piety stars, it's a paltry compensation to prevent the other half from noticing.
If this ability seems in need of buffing, it could extend to cover player spell noise and combat noise, scaling up with piety. I'm not entirely sure this is necessary or appropriate, but it's an option I considered.
****.. -- Piercing Voice
Another ability seen in other recent proposals, an activated passive ability (like Yred's injury mirror) that allows players to cast spells and read scrolls through silence.
****** -- Surprise Trip (all of these powers need better names but this one especially)
Consumes all (or almost all) piety, an ability that noisily self-shafts with a strong preference for dropping players next to monsters. Automatically utilizes a full-powered Deafening Shout on arrival; potentially players will get a good amount of piety back, if they wake up enough enemies upon arriving on the deeper level. Perhaps it should take a few turns to warm up -- I dislike the idea of players reading a teleport scroll right before shafting into a new level, but then again that tactic isn't necessarily a safer one. Problematically, this opens up the god to allow some seriously faster win times, so this ability should perhaps be limited by some other factor.
Penance/Wrath
Short bouts of the following effects: Loud noises centered on the player's location; enemies around the level passively teleported to the player's location; one-tile silence centered on the player. General stealth penalties could be applied, enemy shouts could be buffed. I understand god wrath is going to have some big changes sometime soon, so I'm going to leave this section general/sketchy for now.
Post-script: Stealth is typically a pre-fight strategy -- the gameplay this proposal is designed to open up is a risky post-fight stealth option, while also giving players new ways of getting into trouble. dpeg suggested some kind of echolocation ability, but I am not sure where to fit it in, and I don't want to step on Ash's toes too much.
Thoughts?