[Proposal] The New Pakellas, a god with randomized abilities

Back Room Game Design Discussion
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Pakellas the Inventive believes in impossibilities of intricate devices.

Followers would receive a mystic gadget to empower their blows. Later, Pakellas would reveal more and more secret ways to invoke that gadget, achieving a large variety of effects on the battlefields.

The power of Pakellas’s abilities is governed by Invocations.

The god gives you a new resource, “gadget charges”, which you can spend on god abilities. They are regained as you gain experience. The maximum number of charges you can store equals to the piety level (so 6 at ******).

At *, you gain Empower Weapon. It consumes 1 charge, grants you the empower status, which deals extra damage and effects on your next weapon (or UC) hit target.

The exact nature of extra damage varies from game to game, but they usually at least include a portion of inresistable damage. Below are some examples I have in mind.

  • Fire blast. Fire damage on the target, and all neighboring grids.
  • Heat absorption. Cold damage on the target, fire damage on the farthest away monster in LoS.
  • Vacuum. Asphyxiation damage scaling with the number of surrounding occupied grids.
  • Neurotoxins. Poison impact damage, poisons and attempts to silent target for one turn.
Interactions with stuff

Works on Melee, Ranged and UC. Not sure about throwing, probably don’t need to.
Only hits the primary target, so doesn’t apply the damage on axe cleaving, penetrating, etc.
Triggers only once in Manifold Assault.
Quickblades only trigger the effect once.
Coglins and g&g trigger it twice because these are the only cases where there are physically two weapons.

Note that the last clause intentionally makes Coglin stronger, because they have the worst invocations skill but share the gadget theme.

Takes 1 turn to activate but time reduced by invocations, so that using this still has some value in late game in terms of damage-per-turn.

These are all minor details (and probably just overthinking at this stage) though.

design notes

I know that I cannot judge the relative strength of options, so I leave that out, and admit that I think neurotoxins is probably very unbalanced. Just give an example, not something I feel like sticking to.

I think what would work best are simple abilities offer situational advantages. Fire blast and vacuum help with crowds, heat absorption might help you snipe that orc priest, etc.

At **, you gain Performance Booster. It consumes 1 charge and grants you a temporary buff. Some examples I have in mind:

  • Shroud. Just… does what Shroud of Golubria does. When it collapses it blasts everyone nearby, with the same effect as in Empower Weapon.
  • Regeneration. Gives both HP and MP regen.
  • Stat boost. Increase all stats for a while.
  • Courage. Slaying bonus that scale with number of enemies in LOS.
design notes

Since the Charms removal, combat buffs are mostly a consumables and god power thing.

Regeneration and stat boost are included to showcase that plain, vanilla options could work. Though they tend to step on other gods a bit.

Shroud showcases that one can make the abilities linked. But probably not worth it to do it at every chance. Shroud prematurely broken was a sad and undesired event though, so I personally feel tying in some damage wouldn’t hurt.

There is also the question about defensive vs offensive buffs. I think if I have to choose one side, I prefer defensive.

At ***, you gain Emergency Module. It consumes 1 charge and some piety, and performs an action. Some examples I have in mind:

  • Blastblink. Blinks, damages surrounding monsters and attempts to push them away. As usual, the damage is flavored by Empower Weapon.
  • Flankcharge. Charges to the farthest target with a LoF, damages it, attempts to slip to the other side if there is space.
design notes

This is where I cannot judge what’s good. But in general I think Imprison-level strength is desired.

At ****, you gain Unleash Power, which consumes 2 charges, and unleashes the same power as Empower Weapon, but on more targets.

  • Ball. Fireball shaped.
  • Ring. Irradiate shaped.
  • Beam. Beam shaped.
  • Remote Control. Smite target.

At *****, you gain Magnum Opus, giving you a power that does big, lasting, battlefield-wise things. Consumes 3 charges and piety.

  • Towers. Summons a number of defense towers near you, who automatically shoots Empower Weapon-flavored attacks.
  • Guardian. Summons a mechanical guardian, prebuffed by the Performance Booster and permanently in Empower Weapon.
  • Trance. You enter a state where all your attacks are empowered by Empower Weapon, and each kill would renew the duration.
  • Inferno. hits everyone in LoS for a few turns.
design notes

This is the only category where I put mixed stuff in (there are summons, AOE and offensive buffs). The only overarching theme is “things you want in a big, sustained fight”.

Is this a good idea? Questionable. I’m fine if all options are summons, for example.

At ******, you do not gain new abilities, though you can hold one more charge.

Being the god of technical secrets, Pakellas will punish those who abandon them with only the abilities they already know. Those who reached * would often find monsters enhanced by Enhance Weapon, those who reached ** would see monsters buffed mid-combat, etc.

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A general note about numbers: they can be adjusted with spellpower.

So if we find Ring being less useful than Beam, we could compensate this by giving it a higher spellpower – a spellpower 100 ring invokes spellpower 120 Empower Weapon, etc, but a spellpower 100 Beam only invokes spellpower 100 Empower Weapon.

Since this kind of adjustment isn’t hard to make, I would not encumber the original post with these numeric stuff.

But this doesn’t preclude other types of balance problems, of course. Just don’t worry about problems like “doesn’t shroud always do more than empower weapon?”.

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Parallels to existing gods:

Most obvious example is Nemelex, which uses a similar “item count” mechanism and gives destruction, escape and summoning powers.

The other similarity goes to Makhleb, which has randomized flavors.

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It’s not super clear for later abilities whether you can chose one when you use them, or just get one randomly each run (like Ds mutations, or Makhleb flavours). I would prefer the second option personally.

Differently shaped damage explosions are maybe not special enough? There are plenty of gods who do that already. Charges system can be interesting, depending on how fast you get them, though, like you note, it does step on Nemlex toes a bit.

Abandonment mechanic probably should not depend on piety level, cause it’ll encourage uselessly spamming abilities, faith amulet swapping, or just waiting for piety to decay to get a lesser punishment.

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Get one randomly each run.

Note that the explosions are not just vanilla AOE damage with different elemental flavors, but applies the Empower Weapon effect on each tile it hits. For example, if you get Fire Blast for Empower Weapon, and Ring for Unleash Power, then the effect of Unleash Power becomes to create 8 explosions, potentially hitting the same monster multiple times.

And to be sane, I think any “weird AOE effect” like Fire Blast would receive the Ignition treatment so they never accidentally hit you or your allies.

The number of times each monster would be hit by the “Ring of Fire Blast”:

12321
23531
35@53
23531
12321

And for the “Beam of Fire Blast”. (Bolt was probably a bad terminology for this, I edited the original post too)

12333321
@2333321
12333321

And “Ring of Heat absorption” might trigger the auxiliary fire damage on a faraway Orc Priest 8 times.

I intentionally made those shaped explosions “simple”, because, well, I think it’s safer to start from the simple side, and their interaction with the modular Empower Weapon effects is already somewhat complex.

If they still feel too vanilla, we can of course make them more complex.

The abandonment is not dependent on “piety level”, but “maximum piety level you have ever reached”. Flavor-wise it’s “god cares about punishing you but also cares about not showing you any further secretes”. Anyways, the intention is if someone wants to abandon early because of getting something they don’t like, they get punished less severely and can prepare for that damage type and/or status effect.

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6

Okay, I see, that could be fun.

My point was less that it’s vanilla and more that in the end it doesn’t matter that much how it does damage mechanically, if the end effect is “AoE damage of certain magnitude”. Like it would make certain combos better against packs and stuff, but for me personally an appealing god has something special special. Like Endless Night and noise dampening of new Dith, or Bind Soul and torch mechanic of Yred, or perma ancestor and ancestor swap of Hep, you know, something that other gods or spells just don’t have at all. Something a bit lateral to the whole “do damage” thing.

Anyway, good luck with coding it :), seems like a bunch of quite complex interactions.

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7

Good point. I kind of wish the 5* abilities are like “they are all special, you just don’t know which special power you would get”. However,

  1. the current examples do not achieve that, and
  2. I’m not sure “players waiting til 5* then find out it’s not something they like” is a positive experience.

The solution to 2) is to make each randomized option useful in many situations, but I think that would hurt 1) even more.

I don’t really have an answer for that at this moment.

Also there’s an intentionally missing part that is randomized conduct. dpeg’s old proposal of randomized god has that. Perhaps we can have randomized limitations. Like

  • You can no longer close doors
  • Your god abilities can only be used if you stand near monsters
  • Your god abilities can only be used if you stand near wall
    etc

I feel Qaz is also such an example. Most of his abilities are not that unique – smite AOE damage? more smite AOE damage? summon elementals? autodamage? But what really sets him apart is the noise. We know he’s noisy and we know he offers big returns if we can overcome that noise.

Ditto for Trog, berserk, regen and summon are not so exciting on paper, but “you cannot cast spells!” makes him distinct.

The good thing about limitations is that we can make the abilities just very vanilla but strong, and let overcoming the limitation to be the fun part.

The bad thing is… yeah, I feel these are even harder to balance. At least when I talked about Rings and Beams I knew they had pros and cons. But when I said “you can no longer close doors” I absolutely do not understand what gameplay impact it would have.

Hence not included in the proposal. But perhaps it’s a direction I should think more about.

I think as a whole this proposal needs more inputs and criticism and revision. And in the meantime I would look at smaller changes to make first.

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8

I wouldn’t worry about that too much, Ds, Dj and Oka all work that way and are popular with all kinds of players. The “bad” times accentuate the “good” times sort of thing, I think.

This sounds quite interesting, though you probably can’t have that and an easy abandonment at the same time, especially if you find out your conduct right away.

FWIW, “can’t close doors” is more or less irrelevant outside of niche situations in the early game (where you’re unlikely to have a specific god), the other two IMO are significant, comparable to something like Zin, but probably lighter than Qaz or Chei.

I kinda also think that it’s better for conducts to be generic, rather than tied to god ability usage (or at the very least either “all generic” or “all tied to god abilities”). Tying it to god abilities is sort of like putting an extra cost on them, which can already be done with piety and/or charges, but on the other hand “god abilities usage” conduct is somewhat of a novelty mechanic in DCSS I think, though maybe it has to do with gameplay/balance considerations.

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I think good generic conducts/limitations are rare, and if we found one, not making it the basis of a full-fledged god feels like a mistake.

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10

It feels like a missed opportunity to have a device god use forgecraft, no?

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I might do a forgecraft god (and other school-focused deities) in my own crawl fork in the future.

I would imagine such a god center around gifting you Manifold Assault / Sawblades / Paragon and enchance them though. Just like the way Kiku interacts with Necromancy.

This proposal’s relationship is more like Yred vs necromancy.

Basically, I think using forgecraft only makes sense if every believer of said god is going to spam lots of forgecraft spells. The “device god” wants to be broader and works nicely with noncasters though.