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Ashenzari brainstorm

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Edgar A. Bering IV edited this page Dec 12, 2021 · 1 revision

Implementation decisions (approximately tracking the PR)

  • Conduct: cursing slots
    • Every so often get offered a curse: bind a slot with a curse and associate a skill to it
    • Skills chosen at random weighted by something (current training? apt? mix? neither?)
    • Offer remains until new curse is generated
    • Cursed slots are locked
      • If already a randart, rename
      • If an unrand, just curse
      • inscribe with the skill benefit
    • Free choice of slot to curse, but an item must be there (no cursing an empty slot)
  • Piety: *s come from curse level proportional to the players curse fraction: cursed slots / available slots
    • No faith (not sure how to make this go; weird incentives with accelerating the curse timer but being useless at 6*...)
    • Players with fewer slots have an easier time with piety, but will get fewer skill boosts
    • Monk/Ecu altar: get a curse right away
  • Shatter the chains
    • Once you have at least one curse, you can activate shatter the chains to destroy that item and lose associated piety
    • Also lose the currently offered curse (if any); want to be sure shattering is felt
    • Undecided (ebering leaning no): add a delay to the curse timer before the next one
  • Benefits
    • In the broader context of the crawl pantheon, another all-passive-benefit god would be nice from a design space point of view, this draft has gone in that direction: the only Ash interaction is via (un)cursing.
    • 0* Ashenzari wealth of knowledge
      • portal detection
      • passive mapping scale w/ piety
      • monster detection, radius scales w/ piety
      • item detection and identification
      • trap avoidance
    • 1 * Skill boost, boosted skills tied directly to the "curse" applied in each slot
      • total boost scales on piety level as well as the number of cursed items granting that boost, so shattering the curse on your only ice-magic boosting ring will be very noticeable
    • 2 * sinv
    • 3 * clarity
    • passive scrying (always on), scaling from radius 2 at 4* to radius 4 at 6* (rough idea suggested by mdonais)
      • could present technical problems with autoexplore but does not do any worse than vaults with transparency
  • Abandon:
    • All cursed items SHATTERED.
    • Plus the rest of Ash wrath.

Pre-implementation notes synthesis

  • Conduct: cursing slots
    • Every so often get a choice of 2-3 slots to curse
      • If you reject curses timer increases until next curse
    • Cursed slots are locked
      • If an item is in the slot, it is randartified (no more enchants) with a flavorful Ash name
        • If already a randart, rename
        • If an unrand, just curse
        • inscribe with the skill benefit
      • Otherwise, that happens the next time you equip something there
        • Prevents you from gaming the system by unequipping items before the curse slots are chosen to manipulate which is which
        • Possibly: require the curse be applied before starting the timer again and only offer curses for slots where at least something has spawned in game to receive the curse
    • Piety: *s should come from curse level
      • TBD: Should full piety be available with not all slots cursed?
      • PFs sketch for normal races aims at 6 total curses approximately (some count twice)
        • Hard to adapt to weird races, ru interactions
      • A simple formula to consider: round( (cursed_slots / available_slots) * 6, ROUNDING_RULE_TBD)
        • Possibly too good for Felids, but then again they don't have much to curse anyway
        • With rounding up or nearest the first curse always gets to at least one *, rounding down makes it a bit harder on many-slot species
        • At the top end, round up allows 1 free slot and still 6*
  • Shatter the chains
    • Once you have at least one curse, you can activate shatter the chains to destroy that item and lose associated piety (and curse offerings start again a bit later, if applicable)
  • Benefits
    • In the broader context of the crawl pantheon, another all-passive-benefit god would be nice from a design space point of view, this draft has gone in that direction: the only Ash interaction is via (un)cursing.
    • 0* Ashenzari wealth of knowledge
      • portal detection
      • passive mapping scale w/ piety
      • monster detection, radius scales w/ piety
      • item detection,
      • trap avoidance
    • Skill boost, more closely tied to items cursed:
      • something like base-type/slot type -> skill
      • skill selected at curse offering time
        • Rough slot - skill list map for curse offerings for non-weapon slots
          • Armour slots (including shield?): Armour, dodge, stealth, shield, fighting(? boost grant hp?)
            • too good for combat skills, big loss for magic skills
          • Jewellery slots: magic schools plus evocables
          • Weapon slot: special cased to correspond to the type of the cursed weapon, otherwise too often a useless curse will be offered
            • maybe interpret "type" as Spellcasting for enhancer staves
    • total boost scales on piety level as well as the presence of a cursed item granting that boost, so shattering the curse on your only ice-magic boosting ring will be very noticeable, starting from 1*
    • 2 * sinv
    • 3 * clarity
    • passive scrying (always on), scaling from radius 2 at 4* to radius 4 at 6* (rough idea suggested by mdonais)
      • could present technical problems with autoexplore but should be solvable
  • Abandon:
    • All cursed items SHATTERED.
    • Plus the rest of Ash wrath.

Some ebering commentary based on the initial rough notes

  • Slot bad props

    • There's some concern this steps on Ru, but Ru's downsides are permanent, Ash downsides can be wriggled out of
    • Item props are (mostly) less extreme than Ru downsides (exceptions -Cast, -Tele)
    • This seems like it could generate a lot of noise and make the decisions more obscure
    • A locked, unenchantable slot is quite a downside, especially if a shatter the curse-type destruction+timer increase is in play
    • the "Curse - Bad" flavor is strong, so might be a shame to lose; however for Ash Curses are a proxy for a kind of religious asceticism (bind yourself to receive secret knowledge)

  • Not convinced the current skill buff system is something to emulate - should every ash character be a jack of all trades? Is there something more interesting we can do with skill buffs?

    • The skill boost system still requires training to take advantage of (though it reduces the requirement)
    • Making the skill boost more focused (e.g. each curse offered will boost particular skills, instead of the current slot->skills mapping system) could tighten the binding->knowledge flavor while making the system a bit more of a trade off

ebering's rough notes

  • Periodically Ash offers to curse a slot, curses work as before; if you reject curses timer increases, like Ru.
  • Piety 's roughly match Ash bondage levels currently, to get 6 must be fully bound.
  • Skill boost, monster detection, trap prevention are granted according to *'s like current ash.
  • Uncursing is free and can be done at any time; automatic on abandon.
  • Scry costs (stat) drain
    • unhappy with wd40 costs here, but this rough sketch is hewing pretty close to current ash.
  • Skill transfer is removed

PF's rough notes

  • Conduct: cursing slots
    • Every so often, get a choice of 2-3 slots to curse
    • Cursed slots are locked (as now) and get a few randart props
      • Could include some strongly nonstandard options, e.g. hp, skill buffs, weapon delay, other weird things
      • Primarily focus on skill buffs, and weight those skills toward something appropriate for the item and/or towards skills the user has?
        • Not convinced the current skill buff system is something to emulate - should every ash character be a jack of all trades? Is there something more interesting we can do with skill buffs?
      • Players intuitively expect curses to be bad in a way beyond just “the item is stuck to you”. If Ashenzari is the last and only source of curses, it would be fun to play more in that space by associating more Bad Things with curses (with tradeoffs, ofc!)
    • Can see what props you’ll get by examining the ‘choose a curse’ ability
    • If you have an item in that slot, it’s instantly cursed, turned into a randart (if not already), and gets the given props. Also, you get piety
      • Name is always stuff like ‘Ashenzari’s Remorse’, ‘Ashenzari’s Failure’, etc
      • Allow enchanting these slots?
      • What to do about unrands?
      • Instead of randartifying the item itself, just inscribe the name & effects and keep the details in god screen / props?
        • probably
    • Otherwise, that happens the next time you equip something there
      • Prevents you from gaming the system by unequipping items before the curse slots are chosen to manipulate which is which
    • Piety:
      • For normal races, 2x for weap and 2nd ring, 1.5x for 1st ring and shield, 1x otherwise; require 6 total sacs (so weap+rings+1 other, or all armour + 1 shield or non-armour)
      • Cap at 6* as with ru
      • Todo: plan other races
  • Shatter the chains
    • Once you have at least one curse, you can activate shatter the chains to destroy that item and lose associated piety (and curse offerings start again a bit later, if applicable)
  • Benefits
    • These need to be fairly strong to make it a potentially interesting decision to take a suboptimal curse, and to make it noticeable when you’ve shattered the chains and are down on piety for a bit
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