God Proposal -- God of the Flesh


Although the central place for design discussion is ##crawl-dev on freenode, some may find it helpful to discuss requests and suggestions here first.

Snake Sneak

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Post Tuesday, 15th February 2011, 21:24

God Proposal -- God of the Flesh

Since I know that specific game mechanics will always need tweaking, I'm mostly concerned with suggesting the god's philosophy here (although I will make suggestions on how gameplay will work)

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I'll call this god Carn. He is the god of the flesh--to him, life is sacred above all else. However, he places little importance on individual life, if he finds anything worthwhile in the concept of individuality at all. He views life more as a constantly changing, amorphous force, and he recognizes death as a vital part of the continuation of this force, and he does not make qualitative comparisons between one form of life and another. In fact, he welcomes even the death of his champions--perhaps especially his champions--so long as their bodies provide sustenance for maggots.

Naturally, Carn detests the Undead, who he views as unnatural interruptions in the cycle of life, and beings that come from worlds he considers not entirely corporeal and 'illegitmate', such as demons and summoned beasts.

Carn also detests those who rely on forces beyond their own physicality--like Trog, Carn prohibits the use the spellcasting.

Followers of Carn become more in tune with the transition of death into life. When they eat, they absorb more than just nutrition:

Mutations

In game terms, this is the primary benefit of worshiping Carn. Eating the bodies of the fallen allows you to influence the way your body is shaped, i.e. you gain mutations based on what monsters you eat. Carn encourages you to partake in the transfer of life as much as possible--he grants followers the ability to eat any chunk of meat without fear of ill effect--even normally poisonous meat or the flesh of death drakes and other "HCI corpses" (Carn greatly encourages the reintroduction of the undead flesh into the natural life cycle). However, Carn also expects you to partake in the act of eating very often; the first change to Carn makes to your body is a fast metabolism mutation (perhaps even two or three levels of it). This is how Carn's main piety gain works--for every satiation level above normal, you gain piety per X number of turns, the more full you are the more piety you gain. For every level of hunger below normal, you lose piety.

This means that you have an ever-changing set of mutations based on what you eat. You have some control over the mutations you get, but because you have to constantly eat, you may be forced to eat flesh you otherwise wouldn't. The mutations you get are based off of the enemies stats when you examine an enemy, so there should be little trial and error. You can get bad mutations as well--for example, eating a killer bee corpse may give you poison touch, but it may also make you susceptible to poison.

The actual changes take effect at intervals, with the mutations determined from the pool of monsters you recently ate. Especially powerful monsters and uniques are weighted more heavily than other monsters. A diet completely consisting of meat rations will enact no change.

Powers

Nothing aside from what you get from mutations (since Carn believes followers should rely on their own flesh). However, I think it would be cool if in addition to the cycling mutations you get from eating, there is a set of semi-permanent, Carn unique mutations that you acquire through piety. I was thinking that this would work like how Chei grants power, except in reverse. As you rise in piety, Carn transforms your body so much that you cannot use armour at all, and instead must rely on the powerful mutations he gives you. One mutation would obviously include an armour substitute--I'm still not sure how a player would be able to choose between an EV or AC playstyle. Perhaps the mutation is influenced by what armour you were wearing when you were gaining piety. Anyway, your armour skill should still train with this mutation. You will still be able to use jewelry and weapons, and maybe cloaks--though perhaps Carn should still favor worshippers who forego all equipment and rely only on their own bodies.

Perhaps praying over a corpse, which costs piety, will give that meat a stronger weighting when you eat it, with the possibility of making that mutation semi-permanent like the Carn unique ones.

Penance

Since Carn has little regard for individuals, I was thinking that he would't care should you choose to stop worshipping him. I was actually thinking that if you stopped worshipping him he would bring your metabolism back to normal, but take away the ability to eat any chunk of meat. He could also give you mutation resistance 2 or 3. However, if you ever choose to worship another God or to take up spellcasting, you will quickly be subjected to his wrath--which, of course, includes taking away your positive mutations and giving you bad ones.

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Anyway, what do you guys think? I don't like how, currently, if you are going to go in a non-casting direction there's little reason not to just start a berserker, and I thought that this would be different enough from the others gods we currently have.

Snake Sneak

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Post Tuesday, 15th February 2011, 21:30

Re: God Proposal -- God of the Flesh

I see there are already two suggestions for somewhat similar gods at the Brainstorm database, here are the links:

https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php?id=dcss:brainstorm:god:glutton
https://crawl.develz.org/wiki/doku.php?id=dcss:brainstorm:god:glutton_different

Dungeon Master

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Post Tuesday, 15th February 2011, 21:40

Re: God Proposal -- God of the Flesh

I feel the flavour is pretty close to that of Fedhas. And god-specific mutations can always work, but are already employed for Xom and Jiyva.
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Vestibule Violator

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Post Tuesday, 15th February 2011, 21:54

Re: God Proposal -- God of the Flesh

I really don't like the idea of butting into Trog's flavor. No casting is His thing.

I could see the shaping your mutations with what you eat could be detrimental- it would encourage spoilers and potentially tedious micromanaging. Not that you couldn't make it interesting, but massive customization always carries that risk. The whole thing isn't bad, per se, it just seems an odd mismatching of pieces of existing gods into one. Seems kinda like Fed+Jiyva+Chie to me.

Vaults Vanquisher

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Post Tuesday, 15th February 2011, 22:13

Re: God Proposal -- God of the Flesh

The game as it is already encourages spoilers, Mageykun, so that's not really a negative point to make. :p

Vaults Vanquisher

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Post Tuesday, 15th February 2011, 22:30

Re: God Proposal -- God of the Flesh

2 things I immediately like about this:

1) A pure melee god. Right now, there is only one, and I think there should be more.
2) A gourmand god that rewards being full. This is awesome.

Snake Sneak

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Post Tuesday, 15th February 2011, 22:31

Re: God Proposal -- God of the Flesh

I see how flavour is close to Fedhas, but IMO it's more different than Trog is from Okawaru. edit: I mean, when we're talking about flavour, what's more stark than the differences of brocolli and steak? :P

And I think it's kind of lame how Trog is the only non-spellcasting god. I like melee only characters and I want more of a choice. For instance, Monks don't use weapons, and so that significantly decreases the attractiveness of Trog. Okawaru is an okay choice, but still, you'll end up with a lot of weapon gifts that aren't useful (even more than usual).

Like I said in the OP, you shouldn't get any special ability eating corpses that you can't see from examining a creature, or that you wouldn't know from just successfully defeating a creature. I do see the potential for micromanaging, but the idea was that if you already need to eat a lot, you don't have a whole lot of room to pick and choose.
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Halls Hopper

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Post Wednesday, 16th February 2011, 02:37

Re: God Proposal -- God of the Flesh

Eating corpses for benefit feels very Nethack to me...

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Post Wednesday, 16th February 2011, 03:08

Re: God Proposal -- God of the Flesh

except in nethack, isn't its permanent? (it is not permanent with this god)

my biggest concerns are:
a) the spoilery aspect of what mutations from what corpses
b) the code counterpart, cleanly associating mutations with monsters without tons of special cases or putting one in each of their definitions, both of which are icky and make for spoilery play

Vaults Vanquisher

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Post Wednesday, 16th February 2011, 10:38

Re: God Proposal -- God of the Flesh

>_> Again, IMO the game already requires spoilers to survive.

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Post Wednesday, 16th February 2011, 10:42

Re: God Proposal -- God of the Flesh

szanth: You are a broken record with that message. Can you please stop it? We are aware of the existence of spoilers, and we actually do something about it. The game is winnable without spoilers.

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Post Wednesday, 16th February 2011, 10:53

Re: God Proposal -- God of the Flesh

My point being people were using "encourages spoilers" as a reason to not use the god, which seems silly. And even more irritatingly so, Monkey did it after I'd already made my point the first time, and he didn't acknowledge it. :p

Vaults Vanquisher

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Post Wednesday, 16th February 2011, 14:06

Re: God Proposal -- God of the Flesh

It's not necessarily a problem. If it was, the biggest tip you could give a newcomer wouldn't be "Look up every monster you see". I don't think they did this on purpose, but it's ended up being a pretty huge part of Crawl. And it's not going away, because they don't want that level of transparency in-game, so people pretty much have to go to learndb and here and the chat to find answers.

So what I'm saying is that if it's a problem, it -can't- get any bigger than it already is. Certainly one more thing to look up doesn't equal the straw that breaks the camel's back while the guy riding it looks up what a Boggart does.

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Post Wednesday, 16th February 2011, 14:07

Re: God Proposal -- God of the Flesh

szanth wrote:It's not necessarily a problem. If it was, the biggest tip you could give a newcomer wouldn't be "Look up every monster you see". I don't think they did this on purpose, but it's ended up being a pretty huge part of Crawl. And it's not going away, because they don't want that level of transparency in-game, so people pretty much have to go to learndb and here and the chat to find answers.

So what I'm saying is that if it's a problem, it -can't- get any bigger than it already is. Certainly one more thing to look up doesn't equal the straw that breaks the camel's back while the guy riding it looks up what a Boggart does.

This is such an incredible nonsense that I am going to ignore all your subsequent messages. You probably even believe it.
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Vestibule Violator

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Post Wednesday, 16th February 2011, 16:04

Re: God Proposal -- God of the Flesh

Am I that predictable?

(I've locked I think a total of two threads)

But yeah, this seems to no longer be fruitful. However, maybe I'll just leave it open so that dpeg and szanth can entertain each other, everyone else seems to have dropped out of this one.

Snake Sneak

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Post Wednesday, 16th February 2011, 16:54

Re: God Proposal -- God of the Flesh

This thread hasn't even been open for 24 hours--I haven't "dropped out", I just have other things to do.

Anyway, I still don't see how it would be spoilery--is the ultimate goal to remove enemy descriptions from the game or something? I thought it was just considered good playing to constantly e(x)amine and (v)describe monsters you run across--as I said before, I wouldn't argue for hidden mutations that couldn't be inferred from the monster descriptions, although I was mostly saying that mutations should come from that list that looks like this:

It is very resistant to hostile enchantments.
It is resilient to fire, and susceptible to cold.
It can breathe fire.
It regenerates quickly.
etc...

I don't see how that would be spoilery. I guess the trouble would be explaining this in-game, but I'm not sure that wouldn't work in the detailed god description.

That said, I'm not going to keep pushing this god, since it's clear he hasn't struck the fancy of any of the devs. I thought it would make for a fairly unique game, anyway.

I still would like to see at least one more melee god, though.

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Post Wednesday, 16th February 2011, 17:10

Re: God Proposal -- God of the Flesh

Meh, I'm in too good a mood to dance with dpeg today. For what it's worth, seth, I liked the idea.
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Dungeon Master

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Post Wednesday, 16th February 2011, 19:06

Re: God Proposal -- God of the Flesh

seth wrote:Anyway, I still don't see how it would be spoilery--is the ultimate goal to remove enemy descriptions from the game or something? I thought it was just considered good playing to constantly e(x)amine and (v)describe monsters you run across--as I said before, I wouldn't argue for hidden mutations that couldn't be inferred from the monster descriptions, although I was mostly saying that mutations should come from that list that looks like this:

It is very resistant to hostile enchantments.
It is resilient to fire, and susceptible to cold.
It can breathe fire.
It regenerates quickly.
etc...

I don't see how that would be spoilery. I guess the trouble would be explaining this in-game, but I'm not sure that wouldn't work in the detailed god description.

That actually sounds kinda interesting. Before this explanation I also thought you were talking about arbitrary matches of monsters to mutations. The above is a much better idea!

I agree with Minmay that forbidding spellcasting is Trog's shtick and also that forbidding Necromancy makes sense, but it might be interesting to have a god dislike another branch of magic like Conjurations, Fire or Earth.
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Mines Malingerer

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Post Wednesday, 16th February 2011, 19:31

Re: God Proposal -- God of the Flesh

And here I was expecting this to be about the "Swinger God".
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Halls Hopper

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Post Wednesday, 16th February 2011, 20:41

Re: God Proposal -- God of the Flesh

coyo7e wrote:And here I was expecting this to be about the "Swinger God".


Haha, hell yeah, now we're talkin'! :P

Snake Sneak

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Post Wednesday, 16th February 2011, 21:14

Re: God Proposal -- God of the Flesh

Well, I still prefer the no spellcasting, but sing dpeg already said the flavor was a little too close to Fedhas, maybe we could shift the focus. I was actually less excited about a "circle of life" type of god than I was about a materialist or existentialist type of god, if that makes any sense. Obviously this god wouldn't be foreign to manipulating the physical world through magical means, but maybe he would be opposed to magic that went beyond that--anything that created "something from nothing". So stuff like Charms, Transmutations, and Necromancy would be okay since they merely manipulated the physical world, but Conjurations and Summoning would be out.
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Post Wednesday, 16th February 2011, 21:17

Re: God Proposal -- God of the Flesh

How many gods are there currently, by the way? I'm starting to lose track. There are already so many that I have never even thought about trying because I'm still trying to get a grasp on the "standard" gods.
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Post Thursday, 17th February 2011, 09:33

Re: God Proposal -- God of the Flesh

danr wrote:How many gods are there currently, by the way?

18
<+Grunt> You dereference an invalid pointer! Ouch! That really hurt! The game dies...

Snake Sneak

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Post Thursday, 17th February 2011, 16:30

Re: God Proposal -- God of the Flesh

I like the idea of a god who twists you into something that can't wear armor, its a mechanic distinct enough to make him different from Trog and Oka (who instead values armor). But how would Carn work for races such as Draconians that don't get much in the way of armor anyway?

Oh, and if the "gold god" gets implemented, we get a "materialist" god anyway.

Snake Sneak

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Post Thursday, 17th February 2011, 17:29

Re: God Proposal -- God of the Flesh

That's a different definition of materialism than what I mean, I think. It'd be paradoxical to have a materialist god, of course... but that's what I like about it.

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