A deity or species that emphasizes 'crowd control'?

[dolemite99]

It'd be interesting if some mechanism of the game (either a god or perhaps a species trait) emphasized crowd control in a specific way, by helping you level the playing field specifically against monsters that either summon or 'call-in' allies, or that buff their nearby allies.

Some ideas of what this could look like via a deity.

A passive effect that is similar to Aura of Abjuration, that starts out "weak*" and gets "stronger*" as you progress in either piety or XL.
*Maybe "weak" vs. "strong" could be based on proximity to the player? Or if "strength" of effect is better represented by how long the aura last; in which case it'd have to be an active effect.

If a monster in LoS has been "buffed" by one of its allies, the deity applies some passive "N% chance per turn" possibility of removing that buff. Not sure if "strength" of this effect should be
gated by XL or piety. Seems like making this a passive effect would be a lot easier and less annoying than as an ability you have to activate on-demand, because good luck trying to watch and remember exactly how any monster on the screen received its current buff (via a potion, an evocable item or via a support-ally.)

You're either fully prevented from using allies, or if permitted, you are somehow penalized for doing so. Probably not via outright wrath/punishment, but maybe slowed/halted piety gain.

Maybe some kind of passive ability could/should deal with the concept of "tension", as a way to deliver at least some benefit when a large #s of 'non-summoned, 'non-buffed' monsters are around.

The argument could surely be made that if implemented as a deity, there are a lot of zones in the game where these 'anti-summons, 'anti-buffs' abilities won't help you much. Early D and Lair, for example. Very few things in Lair are summoned by others, or buffed by others.

If this kind of thing is better delivered as an innate trait of a species:
I'd probably suggest Demigod as an existing species to consider. Same 'abilities' as mentioned above for a deity, perhaps all passive, and have them ramp up with XL. The 'limitations / prohibitions' aspect would be a little tougher though, since a Demigod that cannot call in summons & necro-allies sounds pretty awful to me. I suppose you could allow such ally-producing actions, but apply some existing style of 'spam-prevention' limiter, like exhaustion or skill drain?

Anyway, wanted to see if some pieces of this concept seem worth considering. CYC seemed like the right spot to park this.
(Edit 1: punctuation is a good thing. Run-on sentences, not so much.)

[Siegurt]

As a universally-useful god ability, rather than aura of abjuration, how about an ability that passively teleports monsters in LOS, which scales with (peity?, invocations?, both?, maybe chance of teleporting is piety based, and chance that it will veto placement in current LOS is invocation based?) This is similar to abjuration against summons, but is useful for non-summons too.

Perhaps make it togglable for when you just don't want to send things away...

Honestly summoning creatures are rare enough generally, that it's not worth spending your god slot on it. (And things that buff themselves and other things are equally rare)

If you want to suggest some kind of "anti-magic" field, that might also be generally applicable enough (where it can abjure, cancel buffs, apply a little antimagic effects, or perhaps do some kind of other passive bad status effect, although we have gozag/ru that do that passively already, and Zin and fedhas that do it actively)

[tasonir]

There's definitely a start here, although it'd need more work. I'd definitely do it as a god; people are always suggesting large additions to demigods, and really, the race doesn't need it. The point is they don't get a god, don't add god abilities to them.

Anti-summoning and anti-buffs are both good abilities, either passive or as actives. If I had to pick, I'd say a passive aura of abjuration effect and make the buff removal active. Either a smite targeted remove buffs from a single target, or just a "wave of cancellation" which removes all buffs from enemies in LOS for some piety cost.

As you said, those two abilities aren't going to be very impactful in some branches which don't have summoners/buffers, especially early game. So you'd need some sort of other ability/passive which has somewhat more general application. My suggestion to continue the idea of being anti-pack is to have a debuff get applied to monsters if there are multiple monsters next to it. So two monsters have no penalty, but three monsters in a line would result in the middle monster being debuffed, but not the two on the ends. This would also prevent debuffing the lead monster in a corridor since it would only have one monster behind it, but could end up debuffing nearly the entire pack if you're fighting in the open. Exactly how you debuff the monster is fairly wide open, maybe reduced damage/ac/ev. I'm not sure if monsters have spellpower, but reduce their HD or whatever would lower spell damage as well, and you should have a debuff which applies fairly evenly to any type of monster.

The theme/flavor of the god would center on self-reliance and individualism, inner/innate strength instead of teamwork, and could possibly disallow player summons/allies, but doesn't have to.

As I've written that's 2 passives + 1 active, so you probably want a 'capstone' active for 5* which feels "epic" to finish off the proposal.

As to the teleport away ability instead of abjuration, I'd definitely make that an active ability and not a passive. Use it as an escape ability, not something that's just always on, or things will get teleported away when the player is trying to kill them for exp/items or even just to thin the monster density on the floor.

[dolemite99]

Honestly summoning creatures are rare enough generally, that it's not worth spending your god slot on it. (And things that buff themselves and other things are equally rare)

I'd agree with that. If a deity was your 'crowd control' mechanism, then it'd have to deliver more than just anti-summons and removal of monster buffs. Otherwise the god would be somewhat useless in zones where you don't see much of this monster behavior going on. I like your idea of mixing in a chance to teleport monsters away, that would retain some crowd control benefit even if the monsters weren't summoned or buffed.

I see the point that it would need to feel a bit different from Ru's passives, Gozag's passive gold distraction and Chei's Temporal Distortion & Step-from-Time. Those are all pretty good ways to temporarily shut an opponent down or position them into a more advantageous tile for you.

[dolemite99]

There's definitely a start here, although it'd need more work. I'd definitely do it as a god; people are always suggesting large additions to demigods, and really, the race doesn't need it. The point is they don't get a god, don't add god abilities to them.

Anti-summoning and anti-buffs are both good abilities, either passive or as actives. If I had to pick, I'd say a passive aura of abjuration effect and make the buff removal active. Either a smite targeted remove buffs from a single target, or just a "wave of cancellation" which removes all buffs from enemies in LOS for some piety cost.

As you said, those two abilities aren't going to be very impactful in some branches which don't have summoners/buffers, especially early game. So you'd need some sort of other ability/passive which has somewhat more general application. My suggestion to continue the idea of being anti-pack is to have a debuff get applied to monsters if there are multiple monsters next to it. So two monsters have no penalty, but three monsters in a line would result in the middle monster being debuffed, but not the two on the ends. This would also prevent debuffing the lead monster in a corridor since it would only have one monster behind it, but could end up debuffing nearly the entire pack if you're fighting in the open. Exactly how you debuff the monster is fairly wide open, maybe reduced damage/ac/ev. I'm not sure if monsters have spellpower, but reduce their HD or whatever would lower spell damage as well, and you should have a debuff which applies fairly evenly to any type of monster.

The theme/flavor of the god would center on self-reliance and individualism, inner/innate strength instead of teamwork, and could possibly disallow player summons/allies, but doesn't have to.

As I've written that's 2 passives + 1 active, so you probably want a 'capstone' active for 5* which feels "epic" to finish off the proposal.

As to the teleport away ability instead of abjuration, I'd definitely make that an active ability and not a passive. Use it as an escape ability, not something that's just always on, or things will get teleported away when the player is trying to kill them for exp/items or even just to thin the monster density on the floor.

Thanks for your ideas, these are good suggestions. Let's see, what could a good "Capstone" ability be? I play a ton of Crawl, but this is my first god proposal, so bear with me.

"Battlefield Control":
Available @ max stars of piety.
Reverses the positions of monsters, so that enemies that use ranged weaponry or smite-targeted abilities come closer to you, and enemies that solely use melee attacks, move further from you.
Applies a removal of beneficial statuses to all monsters in LoS, including invisible monsters (they become visible once more). Maybe also apply some malus to whatever monster had their beneficial status stripped away from them? Something that doesn't step too hard on the toes of Ru's Apocalypse or the Yara's Violent Unravelling Spell ... but along those lines.
Create a honey-combed pattern of solid terrain tiles around you, similar to the diagram below. I'm using "#" as solid walls, "-" as open terrain, and "@" as our lovable player character. This would essentially be the creation of a series of kill-holes. I think you'd need to somehow enforce the "needs some open terrain to succeed" concept, similar to the spell Summon Forest. Otherwise this would become some weird hybrid of Zin's Sanctuary + LRD & Shatter, which is not really the spirit of this proposal.

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[Plantissue]

I don't see the point of an anti-summon, anti-buff diety/species, when those are the main means of adding volatility to kill you.

[dolemite99]

I don't see the point of an anti-summon, anti-buff diety/species, when those are the main means of adding volatility to kill you.

Trust me, I have no problems getting killed routinely by non-buffed & non-summoned monsters.

The idea is more around giving you passive % chances to level the playing field against groups of monsters that work together .... and if something makes sense to be an on-demand ability, it'd be prohibitively expensive (from a Piety or skill drain / exhaustion perspective) to activate it routinely.

Anyhow, the idea's out there and at the moment I'm having a mental block on what might differentiate this proposal better, so I'll park it and see if anyone has other thoughts about it.

[tasonir]

I don't see the point of an anti-summon, anti-buff diety/species, when those are the main means of adding volatility to kill you.

I mean, you answered your own question. Why would you want this god? Because it's countering the things that kill you. You could certainly argue it would be too strong, but I think it's kind of like cleave: really strong when you're doing something bad (fighting packs together) and not very good when you're fighting one on one.

So ultimately it's either OP if you're lazy or useless if you're playing optimally. Also, at this point the god is a lot more of an outline so I'm not really sure it's possible to judge it's power level. It'll probably never exist, but I do think the concept has at least a little merit

The battlefield control ability is interesting but I'm not sure how practical it would be, seems kind of like a fear scroll that only affects melee, and then you fight the casters. If the casters have no choice but to walk towards you (aka, they're silenced) that'd probably be quite helpful. This is probably enough of an ability - adding terrain modification gets tricky. Could you cast it near vaults? does it remove walls that were there? There used to be a spell Tomb which put up walls around you, but it's been removed, I'm not really sure we want the player to be able to create walls.

[Stonar]

Why not something that affects packs of like enemies, rather than summons? It could do <insert effect here> to groups of yaks, or orcs, or blink frogs, or summons, since summons are usually alike in some way (demons, mushrooms, etc.)

The issue I have is that "A (mostly-)passive CC effect that does something beneficial to mobs" is hard not to be "basically Uskayaw." I like the idea of more non-damaging but enemy-affecting abilities, but I'm not sure yet what that might mean. Maybe some sort of repulsion field that makes it difficult for multiple of the same enemy to become adjacent to you? A windy effect that gets stronger the more <yaks, ugly things, etc> are close to you and forces most of them away?

[tasonir]

The God Of No Seriously Don't Use Axes prevents more than one enemy of the same name to be in melee range of you. It'd be useful, sure, but you'd probably still have several things in melee range at once (assuming you aren't using terrain to prevent that) since most areas have quite a few monster types in most packs. Ranged monsters of any type (including anything with a polearm) can still hit you normally.

It might seem odd since if this is going to be a passive it'd just always be holding melee monsters out of range without giving you any message as to why, or else it's spamming "the X can't seem to get any closer" messages every turn. Maybe making it an active ability with a decent duration (say 20-30 turns, long enough to clear a "pack") might be better.

[dolemite99]

I like Stonar's suggestion that monster "packs" (or monster density) is a better dungeoneering problem for this proposed deity to help you solve, as opposed to my original narrower focus on on summoners encounters + 'support' mobs (like Orc Knights / Warlords / Convokers).

Tasonir, I see your point about the potential headaches with a capstone ability that applies some kind of 'terra-forming'. I think the spirit of a good capstone ability WOULD influence the positions of the monsters of the screen in a structured way. Whether that involves any kind of alteration of terrain, I'm not sure. I'm fond of kill-holes I guess. Maybe this below would be less situational and clunky than some kind of terrain alteration? Basically with one turn spent activating this ability, you get dice rolls for the following possible outcomes, with "power" of the effect oriented around how near you can bring the 'pure ranged' things towards you, and how far you can push the 'pure melee' things away from you?

Battlefield Control

* Caster-type monsters (smiters, summoners, 'pure mage' style opponents) have a chance to move closer to you. A Lesser Beckoning-style or "mesmerise"-style effect that could theoretically grab multiple opponents.

* Melee-only monsters have a chance to move further from you. Basically a Force Lance-style effect (minus any direct damage) that could theoretically impact multiple mobs at once.

* As a handling tool for monsters that can dish out pretty good damage up-close or at range (like dragons, Fire Giants etc), maybe this is the situation where a 1-tile solid obstacle or a fog cloud, placed temporarily, would be beneficial.

[tasonir]

One kind of generally useful ability which doesn't exist currently would be some sort of stasis/imprisonment ability. It would lock away a monster, basically paralysis + immunity to damage (so you can't stab it), for a certain amount of time. Basically you can remove it from a fight and focus on the rest of the things, or if it's the only thing, imprison it and run away. Would need to have a decent piety cost to not be super spammable. Is a somewhat weaker version of Lugonu's banishment, but is hopefully powerful and different enough to not overlap entirely. You could make it imprison 2 monsters if you wanted to make it slightly stronger, tweak its targeting, etc.

[Siegurt]

One kind of generally useful ability which doesn't exist currently would be some sort of stasis/imprisonment ability. It would lock away a monster, basically paralysis + immunity to damage (so you can't stab it), for a certain amount of time. Basically you can remove it from a fight and focus on the rest of the things, or if it's the only thing, imprison it and run away. Would need to have a decent piety cost to not be super spammable. Is a somewhat weaker version of Lugonu's banishment, but is hopefully powerful and different enough to not overlap entirely. You could make it imprison 2 monsters if you wanted to make it slightly stronger, tweak its targeting, etc.

Note that Zin has an ability called 'imprision' which wraps the target creature in temporary walls (accomplishing most of what you describe here)

[tasonir]

One kind of generally useful ability which doesn't exist currently would be some sort of stasis/imprisonment ability. It would lock away a monster, basically paralysis + immunity to damage (so you can't stab it), for a certain amount of time. Basically you can remove it from a fight and focus on the rest of the things, or if it's the only thing, imprison it and run away. Would need to have a decent piety cost to not be super spammable. Is a somewhat weaker version of Lugonu's banishment, but is hopefully powerful and different enough to not overlap entirely. You could make it imprison 2 monsters if you wanted to make it slightly stronger, tweak its targeting, etc.

Note that Zin has an ability called 'imprision' which wraps the target creature in temporary walls (accomplishing most of what you describe here)

Ah doh, that's basically exactly what I was thinking of; I didn't realize that was a separate ability, I thought it was just a possible recite effect. I haven't played Zin much. Probably too redundant then.