New Species Proposal: Angel


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Crypt Cleanser

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Post Saturday, 12th September 2015, 01:13

New Species Proposal: Angel

Specifics

The angel (An) is an holy being created from the substance of Zin, by Zin, for Zin, therefore they cannot exist without worshipping Zin. They begin at XL:1 with 0 piety, but cannot gain piety until they have reached XL:3 (see below). They can never convert to another god, and indeed if an angel even kneels before the altar of another god, it would be destroyed by Zin. This action, and any other action for which Zin would excommunicate another worshipper, invokes the "Really commit suicide? (Y,n)" prompt. This is simply because to unmake the bond between Zin is to unmake the essence of an angel's very being.

Since they are made of the light of Zin, angels do not need to eat at all.

Angels rise through the ranks of seven "tiers" as they gain experience.

Angels have seven names. All are angel (An), but in the spelled-out form (as in morgue files), the actual name of what they are called depends upon their tier.

Angels cannot train Invocations as other skills, however they do gain invocations skill, also based on their tier.

Angels cannot be mutated. They "evolve," but in a quite different sense than the evolution mutation. As they gain experience and rise through the tiers, they gain abilities and powers (including Invocations skill) unlike any natural or unnatural creature. At each tier, they are given new names, all of which are followed by "of Zin". The table below summarizes the tiers of angel evolution.

  Code:
XL  Name          Ability           Evolution              Inv
--  ------------  ----------------  ---------------------  ----
 1  Conscience    --                Clarity                0.0
 3  Advocate      Piety             rPois+                 2.0
 6  Star          Halo              rF+                    5.0
10  Messenger     Slow Time         rC+                    9.0
15  Cherub        Flight            MR+, rN+               14.0
21  Seraph        Healing           rElec, rCorr           20.0
27  Archangel     Invulnerability   rTorment, rHellfire    27.0


Explanations for the angel abilities are as follows.

Piety

Until the angel reaches this tier, no piety can be gained as Zin's worshipper. Mettle must be proven before being allowed to rise in Zin's favor. This ability is automatic and passive.

Halo

This is the same halo of other holy creatures in the game, and provides the same effects and benefits. This ability is also automatic and passive.

Slow Time

This is similar to the Bend Time ability granted to Chei worshippers, but cannot be resisted. This ability must be invoked, and costs some piety to use.

Flight

This is the same ability used by other creatures in the game. This ability must be invoked, costs a bit of piety to use, and produces light draining when the effect ends.

Healing

This ability cures all maladies (removes all status effects, including draining), and restores all HP, MP and attributes. This ability must be invoked, costs a great deal of piety to use, and immediately produces medium-to-heavy draining.

Invulnerability

This most powerful ability temporarily (2d7 turns) makes the angel invulnerable to all forms of damage. This ability must be invoked, costs one full rank of piety to use, and produces exhaustion, breathlessness and severe draining when the effect ends.

In conjunction, to counterbalance the potency of the ability, I also propose a new malus to layer onto the others, called enervation, which lowers all attributes by a scaled amount.

Restrictions

Angels are forbidden from using Necromancy, Transmutations, or Poison. As a consequence of this and their absolute allegiance to Zin, the following backgrounds are also unavailable to angels:

Assassin, Berserker, Abyssal Knight, Chaos Knight, Transmuter, Necromancer, Venom Mage

As commanded by Zin, angels must be unadorned and pure, so they cannot use body armor, cloaks, hats, gloves, boots, rings, or amulets. There is one exception to this: when the angel becomes an Archangel of Zin (XL:27), Zin will gift the angel a special holy randart amulet that can be worn, and this is the only exception to Zin's law.

Starting Attributes and Aptitudes

Str: 7
Int: 7
Dex: 7

Angels gain one attribute point every 2 levels, randomly distributed.

Their aptitudes are distributed as follows.

  Code:
Skill             Apt        Skill             Apt
----------------  ---        ----------------  ---
Fighting           0         Spellcasting       0
Short Blades       0         Conjurations       1
Long Blades        1         Hexes             -4
Maces & Flails     3         Charms            -3
Axes              -2         Summoning         -3
Polearms          -1         Necromancy        N/A
Staves             1         Translocations     3
Unarmed Combat    -2         Transmutations    N/A
Throwing          -1         Fire Magic         2
Slings             0         Ice Magic          2
Bows               2         Air Magic          3
Crossbows          1         Earth Magic       -4
                             Poison Magic      N/A
Armour            N/A                     
Shields            2         Invocations       N/A
Dodging            2         Evocations        -4
Stealth            4


Summary

Angels bring a new kind of play to the game, and are significantly different from either Demigod or Djinn to ever be confused with them. They are also foodless! Their native abilities at high levels seem absurdly powerful, and when combined with Zin's abilities they seem positively overpowered, but there are real deficits to overcome, with worse equipment use than Felids, and entire schools of magic and classes of items banned from their use. I tried to balance the aptitudes well, while keeping it flavorful.

I'm interested to see your responses.

Spider Stomper

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Post Saturday, 12th September 2015, 02:55

Re: New Species Proposal: Angel

Well, first off, if an angel is going to be a follower of anyone it'd probably be TSO. I mean, you summon angels as TSO haha, not to mention the halo, torment resistance (rN+++) etc.

Secondly, I don't see much point in a race that basically mimics an existing god.

Thirdly, this sorta of existed as a background at one point ;) http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Paladin, before being axed, so you can see how much the devs like the idea xD

Lastly, you're making a race that is essentially inferior to other races in the beginning but superior in the end. See octopodes for how that turned out ;)

I don't think it's a bad idea actually, I just don't see it happening in trunk given crawl's history.

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jason0320, partial
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Post Saturday, 12th September 2015, 03:03

Re: New Species Proposal: Angel

Tis could be the seed idea for a race which changes its aptitudes/innate mutations based on what god it worships. EG angel when worshipping good gods, profane servitor when worshipping evil gods, some other forms when worshipping neutral or chaos gods.
Comborobin Admin

Dungeon Master

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Post Saturday, 12th September 2015, 12:00

Re: New Species Proposal: Angel

There's a lot going on here, way more than for any other race, including demonspawn:

1) wildly restricted equipment slots like felid, a species that I'd love to remove
2) starting god like a zealot, and I want to remove zealots
3) Zin conduct plus random bits of TSO conduct
4) Zin powers plus bits of TSO/Ely powers
5) Buffed Death's Door without any training requirement
6) Omniresistance
7) Hungerless and torment immune like mummies
8) Hellfire immunity, which also means complete fire immunity, and generally isn't something we want players to ever have
9) Exhaustion, breathlessness, stat drain and draining as costs, and one of the draining abilities that fix stat drain.
10) A new type of cost/status that's redundant with stat drain.

The gameplay for this would be remarkably limited: your defenses against most attacks will be terrible (worse than an octopode or felid) and you won't have felid movespeed to make up for it or octopode equipment slots, stealth and attack speed. Meanwhile, non-physical attacks are mostly pretty weak against you or literally do nothing at all. Orbs of fire would literally do nothing you care about.

You don't get to pick a god or equipment for the most part, you can't use armour or stealth or poison or necromancy or anything evil, and you can't train invocations. This seems like it would create really linear, repetitive games by virtue of the narrowness of the options you actually are allowed to choose.

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Post Saturday, 12th September 2015, 12:16

Re: New Species Proposal: Angel

greedo wrote:Lastly, you're making a race that is essentially inferior to other races in the beginning but superior in the end. See octopodes for how that turned out ;)

Turned out to be a fun and unique race? Not that I support this one.

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Arrhythmia, jason0320, JFunk, le_nerd, Sar

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Post Saturday, 12th September 2015, 13:05

Re: New Species Proposal: Angel

Aule wrote:The angel (An) is an holy being created from the substance of Zin, by Zin, for Zin, therefore they cannot exist without worshipping Zin.


  Code:
Profane Servitor
This blasphemous being used to be an angel of the Shining One. Now it stands as unliving proof that not even the holiest of beings are beyond Yredelemnul's grasp.


This really messes with lore...
Usual account: pblur on kelbi

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Arrhythmia

Crypt Cleanser

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Post Saturday, 12th September 2015, 18:34

Re: New Species Proposal: Angel

greedo wrote:Well, first off, if an angel is going to be a follower of anyone it'd probably be TSO. I mean, you summon angels as TSO haha, not to mention the halo, torment resistance (rN+++) etc.

It was a coin flip to me when I was conceptualizing it. It's actually quite interchangeable, working just as well if you replace "Zin" with "TSO" in the description. Nothing about it mandated that it had to be Zin. I just though it synergized better with Zin. But...

I don't think it's a bad idea actually, I just don't see it happening in trunk given crawl's history.

Given the generally negative feedback, I would have to agree, so any discussion of particulars seems truncated, already.

Oh, well. I thought it would be something fun to try.

If I could just get the dame game to compile without complaining about ddraw.h, et al., I'd play around with stuff like this myself.

Spider Stomper

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Post Saturday, 12th September 2015, 22:29

Re: New Species Proposal: Angel

Yeah I would just pm me or probably better one of the real developers here if you're having install issues, or better yet post on the coding forum, nobody likes those problems xD I do know that the Windows/MinGW way worked for me, just have to make sure to run the much longer the git sdk installer, the one the site says not to install if you're an end user.

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Monday, 14th September 2015, 20:15

Re: New Species Proposal: Angel

I've long wanted a race similar to this - one which has severe item restrictions but which grows into a powerful character through racial abilities including resistances etc. I think there's absolutely room for such a race, but a few things that have been added to this angel proposal makes it less likely to be accepted. You don't want to tie it to only one god; removing hunger entirely probably isn't a good idea*. Some of the abilities are too strong, or step on various god's toes - healing is way more powerful than even revivification for even less cost (no amount of piety/drain cost is enough to balance "restore healthy status with full hp/mp" - reviv costs max hp for a reason). Slow time seems unrelated to angels and I'm not sure why taking one of chei's abilities is appropriate.

* That should happen as part of hunger reform, not a race; yes, there's already hunger free races, this one is kind of murky.

For comparison, I took the core idea (race gets abilities/stats as they level up and not from equipment) and called them Elementals, giving them a perk/facet every X levels which gives them some power. An old writeup of them is here: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=14798&p=203248, but I think I'd prefer to move them away from having one type picked at the start/evolved at some level, and instead let players pick facets every few levels and not be any rigid type. You could be a (partial) fire + earth + ice elemental, depending on what facets you take. This would help them stand out from draconians, which the old proposal was a bit too close to. In any case, it'll likely never happen :)

Crypt Cleanser

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Post Tuesday, 15th September 2015, 03:32

Re: New Species Proposal: Angel

greedo: The advice to use the SDK version if the Git installer (also spoken by gammafunk in devchat, according to the logs) seems to be another success story for defeating compiling woes. I didn't even uninstall the older versions first. Should probably wipe everything and start fresh before I begin anything constructive.

tasonir: I didn't find yours when I did my search. That is interesting. There is no shortage of species proposals, indeed. :lol:

I think I was limiting it so much due to the fact of how powerful it could be at its zenith. And the linearity of it was by design. After all, speaking mythopoeically, angels should have limited free will.

But, yeah, probably not crawl-like. But neither are felids.

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Tuesday, 15th September 2015, 20:24

Re: New Species Proposal: Angel

Thinking a bit further on the healing ability, as written it's too strong, but I believe there is still unexplored design space for a healing ability. I think it should be a channeled heal, something like 20-30 hp per turn, and takes 3 turns. You get the healing for that turn as it passes, but can't cancel the heal once started. So you get the healing first, take 10 auts of damage, get the second tick of healing, take more damage, etc. That'll prevent you from just dying before getting a sudden 90 hp heal, and keep it balanced in that it won't pull you back from major problems, but will be enough to get you through medium problems. Probably shares the most similarities with ambrosia, but I feel it's different enough, and more powerful than ambrosia.

This alone wouldn't carry a race, of course, but hey.

bel

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Post Wednesday, 16th September 2015, 19:13

Re: New Species Proposal: Angel

tasonir wrote:I've long wanted a race similar to this - one which has severe item restrictions but which grows into a powerful character through racial abilities including resistances etc.

Isn't this simply Op? You can wear tons of rings on your extra tentacles, which is the same as getting resistances as you level (you will probably find useful rings as you explore). Of course Op never becomes "powerful", but that is ok.

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