Ianu the Silent, God of Antimagic


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Post Friday, 25th October 2019, 15:11

Ianu the Silent, God of Antimagic

One of my recurring thoughts is that silence is like rage, a powerful effect that gives you a boost but can easily kill you.
Another one is that silence is odd, because you need to be able to cast lvl 5 spells to use it, but it removes your spellcasting while it's active.

So I thought, "rage is a god ability, and to use spell-like stuff without learning to use spells you worship a god, so what about making silence a god invocation?"

So here it is, a god built around the concept of opposing magic and magical abilities.



A meditative god worshipped by ancient mage-warriors to protect themselves from the spellery of their enemies, Ianu does not however oppose the use of magic per se.

With every star you are granted +MR.
. Antimagic affinity
* Silence
** Cast light
*** Aura of abjuration, Sorcerer's Mirror
**** Summon allies
***** ∞ MR
****** Enchant antimagic weapon

  • Antimagic affinity: You can wield and unwield antimagic weapons without negatively affecting your MP. You are immune to the antimagic brand, and have a 2/3 chance of resisting draining gaze.
  • Silence: active ability. (cost: like Trog's Hand, has all the usual negative effects)
  • Cast light: you gain a timed halo and light bathes all in your sight, revealing invisible monsters. Essentially a timed, all-LOS TSO halo effect. (cost: like Heroism)
  • Aura of abjuration: passive.
  • Sorcerer's Mirror: passive. You gain +4 SH, reflect, and you can block penetrating attacks.
  • Summon allies: Depending on power, you summon allied mana vipers, Lorocyproca, or some sort of levelled vine stalkers. (cost: like summon divine warrior)
  • ∞ MR: You become completely immune to all effects that check MR. Passive.
  • Enchant antimagic weapon: you get to enchant a weapon once.

Uses Invo to determine ability power & success.

No conduct, XP on kill.

Any thoughts?
Last edited by Shtopit on Friday, 25th October 2019, 22:32, edited 1 time in total.
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Post Friday, 25th October 2019, 16:01

Re: Ianu the Silent, God of Antimagic

I usually don't respond to these, but it's a better form proposal than I've seen in a long time. Where I find it lacking is its extreme compatibility with physical combat-oriented characters. Tons of great utility essentially for free. It is a nice opportunity to remove some awkward or overpowered spells though. It's a good idea for a god theme.

I would suggest a piety system based on training magic skills, so you have some built in trade-off with the cheap silence effect. I would say base piety on some combination of absolute number of skill points in magic skills and fraction of total skill investment in magic so that a typical book background character/build will reach ****** at about the same time as they generally would for other gods and use magic skill draining instead of conventional piety costs. Thematic, encourages a mixed playstyle, pushes you away from what Trog does.
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Post Friday, 25th October 2019, 22:29

Re: Ianu the Silent, God of Antimagic

You are right that it favours melee too much, and I see that I committed a big oversight, since I had not considered that antimagic weapons take away 2/3 of your MP pool. In joining Ianu, you should gain immunity to this effect, in a way similar to how Lugonu protects you from the negative effects of unwielding distorsion weapons.

To help spellcasters, Ianu could give immunity against antimagic-flavoured attacks. I would extend this to draining gaze, but then you have eyes of draining, who cannot do anything else. Maybe resist draining gaze 2/3 times. If the god becomes too full, something else could be sacrificed.

I am not in favour of piety from skilling, because I remember it from old Sif, and I didn't have much fun with it.
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Post Friday, 25th October 2019, 22:47

Re: Ianu the Silent, God of Antimagic

Without some major intervention, such as I suggested, it will be a primarily physical combat oriented god in my opinion. Your problems with old Sif were probably due to an arithmetical error in the previous iteration of it that dropped the piety growth too low to maintain ****** most of the time with normal play. Anyway, I'm not suggesting Sif-like mechanics.
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Post Saturday, 26th October 2019, 07:44

Re: Ianu the Silent, God of Antimagic

I like the idea of this god, but it's a bit of it would be extremely strong against (some) Wizards, and provide 0 benefit when fighting melee monsters (like stone giants etc).
Your MP protection mechanism would make it a bit better in that regard, but not much, because there aren't many MP-draining enemies in a normal game.
I like the idea of a god who makes you hex-immune. In this light the extra MR also makes sense. Granting hex immunity to any allies would broaden the usefulness to summoners, allowing tactics like summons+fear, which might be desirable.
I also like the idea of being able to enchant a weapon with a specific brand. I don't know if this is what you meant, but being able to enchant an antimagic weapon up to.+9 would be very different from anything available in the game right now.

I think this god would benefit from a buff which works against everything, and a conduct to nerf it a bit. Adding conducts Is more fun than removing powers imo :)
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Post Sunday, 27th October 2019, 11:59

Re: Ianu the Silent, God of Antimagic

tealizard wrote:Without some major intervention, such as I suggested, it will be a primarily physical combat oriented god in my opinion. Your problems with old Sif were probably due to an arithmetical error in the previous iteration of it that dropped the piety growth too low to maintain ****** most of the time with normal play. Anyway, I'm not suggesting Sif-like mechanics.


Making the god combat-oriented isn't a problem in and of itself. There are a few already (but maybe THAT makes it a problem). However, if it is a problem, using spell skills to gain piety would create the same problem on the other side, making it an exclusively spellcaster god. More importantly, the express intention is that of making it possible to use silence without being a spellcaster.

But it's completely possible, that, as-is, silence is too easily accessible. Maybe it should be a top ability with big cost or long cooldown. But then it should be less dangerous that it is now. Maybe it can stay where it is, but have some added disadvantages, like slow after use, or one of those odd Ru effects as after-effect (can't drink a potion, can't read a scroll, a slaying penalty...) that also affect fighters.

To make it better for casters, Ianu could give a "spell rage" ability. I was thinking about an active ability that lets you syphon power from enemies on-screen to increase spellpower and success chance. The more enemies, the more powerful the spell. The other option is using tension, which however is rather opaque, so it would need to be a passive for ease of use.

petercordia wrote:I like the idea of this god, but it's a bit of it would be extremely strong against (some) Wizards, and provide 0 benefit when fighting melee monsters (like stone giants etc).
Your MP protection mechanism would make it a bit better in that regard, but not much, because there aren't many MP-draining enemies in a normal game.
I like the idea of a god who makes you hex-immune. In this light the extra MR also makes sense. Granting hex immunity to any allies would broaden the usefulness to summoners, allowing tactics like summons+fear, which might be desirable.
I also like the idea of being able to enchant a weapon with a specific brand. I don't know if this is what you meant, but being able to enchant an antimagic weapon up to.+9 would be very different from anything available in the game right now.

I think this god would benefit from a buff which works against everything, and a conduct to nerf it a bit. Adding conducts Is more fun than removing powers imo :)


Thinking of a conduct that would not damage casters more than warriors, the only one I could find was "you may not wear armours with encumbrance rating above 11". I actually rather like it. But yes, it would need a buff.

There probably was a misunderstanding with the enchant weapon; it's similar to TSO and Lugonu, enchant with a brand. You meant "take a weapon with this brand and bring it to +9"?
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Post Sunday, 27th October 2019, 12:36

Re: Ianu the Silent, God of Antimagic

Whatever, I'm just trying to uphold a certain level of analysis here. Silence-on-demand needs drawbacks along the lines of the existing spell. Once the discussion is down to "well everything else sucks, so this can suck too" I don't even know. Whatever.
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Post Monday, 28th October 2019, 13:32

Re: Ianu the Silent, God of Antimagic

If it is to be a "mage-warrior" god, maybe (some of the active) abilities could use spell schools instead of invocations?
Silence: Hexes
Cast light: Charms
Summon allies: Summonings

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Post Monday, 28th October 2019, 16:05

Re: Ianu the Silent, God of Antimagic

rigrig wrote:If it is to be a "mage-warrior" god, maybe (some of the active) abilities could use spell schools instead of invocations?
Silence: Hexes
Cast light: Charms
Summon allies: Summonings


The problem with this is that a player could just use the actual spells instead. Even if the god lets you cast in armour, it's still a minimal selection, compared to a whole school.
But I think it becomes usable, if it is kept at fairly low levels, like how Oka doesn't need very high Invo to use its abilities, and if it's a single school for all the abilities. It still suffers from competition with simply going for the spell school, though.
In general, an effect of using a certain skill is to make a god better for certain species. E.g. trolls have a -4 Hexes aptitude, while a Spriggan has +2. Invocations also aren't equal across the board, but the differences are smaller. This would allow to aim for certain species.

Using a different skill than Invo could work as a soft nudge towards using spells. I need to think more about how it can be integrated.

tealizard wrote:Whatever, I'm just trying to uphold a certain level of analysis here. Silence-on-demand needs drawbacks along the lines of the existing spell. Once the discussion is down to "well everything else sucks, so this can suck too" I don't even know. Whatever.


I guess that this is a parody of something that I am not familiar with? I wrote about other possible drawbacks and that "..." has nothing to do with what I wrote.

Anyway, I think there is another problem with using spellcasting skills to gain piety. Sif Muna used spellcasting skills because, as a god, it was already meant to empower spellcasters. So gaining spellcasting skills was the normal development of a Sif follower. Instead, with Ianu, it would be just a way to inconvenience non-spellcasters. It would be an external imposition, instead of an organic part of how the god is played.

But the strongest argument for me remains that I had no fun with it, even on Sif Muna. In general, I wouldn't add a feature I never enjoyed.

I took a look at why it was removed:

  Code:
26b8ecb | gammafunk | 2019-06-25 19:27:57 -0500

Sif Rework Part 1: Piety on kills
Sif Muna has some major design issues that weren't resolved the last
time she was changed in version 0.19. This commit is the first in a
series to change Sif's piety gain, her MP-related abilities, and to add
a new high piety cost spell casting active ability.

Sif's biggest issue is piety gain. She receives some piety from kills
but also piety from training schools related to casting spells. The
latter system has never worked well in practice. Players starting with
spells want to train spell skills in order to get spells castable but
generally want to switch to defensive skills or other suitably
lower-cost skills afterwards. Sif currently tries to encourage training
spell skills past this point to get gifts, but players trying to survive
ignore this incentive for some time. The decision of whether to train
spell schools for gifts is thus not an interesting one, since the answer
is generally just to wait for them to happen naturally.

This commit gives Sif normal piety on kills. We lose a distinct piety
gain system, but her skill training system never worked well in either
the full or partial versions.


Skill training follows its own strategy, dictated by survival. This makes it very hard to use it for something else, and would require putting special thought into how it would reflect on the use of Ianu's given abilities, piety cost, etc. Piety on kills simply doesn't interfere.
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Post Thursday, 21st November 2019, 18:45

Re: Ianu the Silent, God of Antimagic

Some ideas for this god design:

Paranoia: attempt to effect all monsters in LOS with fear or Discord. HD-resisted. Monsters immune to fear have a greater chance to be effected by Discord. Invocations can increase the chance to effect monsters and/or the chance of Discord.

An ability to inflict magic vulnerability (either as a piety-powered vulnerability scroll or as something more different)

Conduct: Ianu forbids Evokables/wands/attack wands. (Depending on what's most balanced and fun.) If Ianu allows you to inflict magic vulnerability, hex wands definitely should be banned.

This combination of powers & conducts would make hexes both stronger and weaker than they usually are, which could be interesting.

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Post Monday, 9th December 2019, 12:46

Re: Ianu the Silent, God of Antimagic

I have had a bit of a similar god idea, that I posted a good while back to Crazy Yiffs. (it was not fleshed out, so no room for it here)

The main idea was that it was a God of silence who disliked noice. The god would silence you if you made too much noice. You could still cast big noisy spells, but not chain cast them.
The abilities would have also reflected this, but I did not have too many of them ready. The main one would have been "Shhhh!" which would silence a single monster with smite targeting. (Or melee range, if smite targeted silence was too powerfull. This would be debatable depending on the costs and what not)

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