This is a little off-topic, but when I saw this video I immediately thought of the discussion of the blood ape powers here.
I felt bad about leaving it at this after all the time I spent arguing for something like the POWDER approach, so here is a sketch of a system that takes some inspiration from that game:
- Gods are dyadic: When a god is worshipped, the envy of his counterpart is awakened and the latter also takes an interest in the player.
- The player is free to ignore religion if she wants to. Only once she decides to worship a god does religion enter the game.
- While a player worships a god, that god grants a permanent boon (rescinded once the player ceases worshipping that god).
- Once the player is involved in religion, certain of her actions will please or anger either the god she worships or his dyadic counterpart.
- There is, however, no immediate response to the player’s actions from either of the gods in the dyad; instead, each action either raises or lowers the god’s approbation score.
- Once the approbation score reaches a given threshold, there is a chance that the god in question will grant either a boon (if approbation is positive), or a punishment (if approbation is negative).
- Gods may also grant boons as a reward for special feats.
- Punishments from the god a player worships are worse than punishments from the opposite member of the dyad.
- I haven’t thought much about the concept of transferring allegiance to a different god. There’s an argument to be made that it ought to be relatively easy, so long as it doesn’t allow us to cheat the rewards system. Perhaps we can switch allegiance to the opposite of the dyad only if we have a positive approbation score with him. Switching to a member of another dyad altogether might be as simple as praying to that new god; however, if we have negative approbation with one or both of the gods in our current dyad, those gods get a chance to hit us with a punishment one last time before the switch. Thereafter, the old dyad ceases to watch over us; only the gods of the new dyad can send boons or punishments.
Here’s an example of how the basics of a dyad might look:
God of Caution
Permanent boon: Higher levels of concentration amplify the effects of tension (for player only, not for opponent).
Approves: Tension above a certain threshold, ranged attacks (including scrolls), attacks from stealth (e.g., via cloak of shadows), attacks on enemies of lower level than yourself (but not level 0)
Reproves: Ment, fragmentation grenades, the Essence of Rage
Boons granted might include such things as bonuses to dodging or parrying, or possibly even a gift such as the scroll of shadows.
God of Heedlessness
Permanent boon: Player gains bonuses to initiative and to hit against enemies of higher level than her highest-level soul.
Approves: Spend less than 5 turns between one combat engagement & the next (i.e. move quickly to next combat), attacks on undead
Reproves: Concentration, retreat, the Essence of Caution
Special reward: Kill an enemy of your own level or higher without concentrating at all to receive an additional melee to-hit bonus for the duration of your next combat.
Probably these aren’t very well thought out and there are better ways to structure the awarding of approbation points. My goal is simply to suggest how a system like this could encourage certain styles of play, while also allowing the player to make deviations from those styles as needed/desired. If well structured, many more decisions become tactical/ambiguous: for example, worshipping the God of Caution puts me into a relationship with the God of Heedlessness such that, if I want to avoid the latter’s retribution, I will need to find a way to fight while avoiding the game’s basic concentration mechanic as much as possible. Or maybe I’ll try to win some favor with Heedlessness by seeking out undead. In combat, I’ll need to weigh each use of concentration–can I avoid concentrating this round? Should I really retreat from this enemy that I stumbled on while exploring?
But clearly the system is also complex, and there are difficulties in making it reasonably transparent for players (in addition to the authoring difficulties). So whether it is a good model for Kerkerkruip is something I’ll leave to better minds than mine.
Lot of stuff I still have to react to, which I will, but a couple of thoughts.
Mindslug
I implemented the enslave power. It is an ability with a cooldown; you use it against a single person. In order to enslave someone, you must make a mind check against [opponent’s mind + opponent’s health + 5 + 2 * (concentration of opponent - concentration of player). This formula might need to be tweaked based on testing, of course. Here’s an example:
The player has 8 mind and 2 levels of concentration. The enemy has 5 mind, 4 health left, and no concentration. Target number is 5 + 4 + 5 + 2 * (0 - 2) = 10, for an almost guaranteed success. If the enemy has 2 levels of concentration, the target number is 14, for about 50% chance of success. If the enemy is also at full health, there is almost no chance of success.
At the end of the game, a player putting all her points in her mind score could have a mind score of about 20, making a target number in the 25-27 range quite doable. Malygris currently has a mind score of 12. This means that you would have to get Malygris down to about 10 health before you could enslave him, which sounds about right: the power gives you a significant boon at the end, but you’ll still have to fight Malygris most of the way.
It turned out that implementing backstabbing your slaves was the hardest part, in terms of programming, because ATTACK wasn’t built with the idea that you could have combat outside of combat. (And it seemed obvious that you should also be able to slay your slaves outside of combat.) But I think I managed to make this work. Backstabbing a slave gives you a +6 attack bonus and a +4 damage bonus, and the slave cannot dodge or parry. It will turn the slave hostile.
Your slaves will now desert you when you attack one of them, or when you lose the power of the mindslug. Anyone who has ever been enslaved will get a +20 higher target number if you try to enslave them again. (Which means that it is basically impossible.)
(Also, Kerkerkruip now determines randomly at the start of the game whether you are male or female! This determines whether your slaves call you “master” or “mistress”.)
Tentacle
I’m not satisfied with the power of the tentacle. Summoning several tentacles will be very messy on screen (lots of attack rolls). Having a tentacle that grapples your opponents, conform Erik’s other idea, makes it a lot like the chain golem’s lash ability in terms of its use (stop a powerful attack), while leading to some of the pitfalls of the original stun skill (only being able to attack without being able to concentrate). I’m not dismissing the idea, but I’m not sold yet.
Let me propose two other ideas, and see whether any of them strike you as interesting, or whether we can combine some of this stuff into a good power.
Idea 1: go with the elder horror Cthulu stuff. The “sprout” command (or something like that) makes you sprout an unimaginable number of horrible tentacles. Everyone in the room must roll a mind check. If they fail this mind check, they go insane. Insane creatures have weird AI: they concentrate and attack at random, are likely to not dodge/parry attacks, attack random people including themselves, follow the player but with a very low follower chance – all in all, they are quite ineffective, except that they sometimes get a maniacal burst of strength which allows them to really hurt someone. (Too bad that could as easily be themselves as the player.) When the player uses this power, she permanently loses 1 (or 2? or 3? or a random small number?) mind. If her mind drops to 0, she herself goes insane as well.
Idea 2: Your body permanently receives a single tentacle (until you lose the power of the tentacle), which attacks people and cannot be killed. As a player, you control the size of this tentacle. It starts out small, but you can tell it to grow to tiny size (which would make it passive), or normal, large, huge or gargantuan size. The bigger it is, the more powerful tis attacks; and the greater the chance that it goes on rampage and starts killing the player.
This all sounds good. Should be fun!
Fantastic. I’m very glad that you don’t ask the player which he/she wishes to be, along with all the other rigamarole that usually accompanies “character creation”. Might I suggest an intersex gender as well, so that the slave calls us “mother-father”? 
I didn’t think about that, but it’s very true.
Yes, and the grapple only made sense to me as part of a package with a more offensive capability. Just to parse nits, in my mind the grapple power was an act- stage power rather than a react-stage one (the golem’s lash). I saw it as providing an option for those situations when you can see that the enemy is going to beat you to the punch: the enemy is probably going to hit me with a good concentration bonus on the next turn, but I don’t have enough concentration built up to have a reasonable chance to hit him. So, I grapple instead of concentrating or heedlessly striking out, hoping to cut him off at the pass. The situation is a common one (at least in my playthroughs!), and it can be difficult to recover from, if the enemy continues to remain ahead in the concentration cycle.
I forgot that you had introduced cooldowns along with the new powers. That will be useful to keep in mind when brainstorming.
I’ve taken to heart your earlier guideline that level 3 & 4 powers should be “game-changers” so Idea 2 (the resizable tentacle) seems the less interesting. At least on its own–maybe combined with another power, as you suggest, it would be more exciting.
Idea 1–the eldritch horror!–does sound interesting (and fun). What if the player could elect to spend mind points on it to improve the horror’s capacity, a la the blood magic mechanic? That is, she automatically loses 1 point, but can elect to shove up to, say, 5 points of her sanity into it?
Some other powers that could potentially ride along with sprout include:
- Plunge the room into supernatural darkness.
- Wheedle enemies (using the whisper of the elder tongue) into dropping their weapons–or natural defenses–so that we can get in a free strike.
- Fill the room with pestilential vapors.
I like your Idea 1!
I like this! We could have something like this.
“sprout 1”: enemies roll a mind check or go insane.
“sprout 2”: the mind check becomes more difficult + even those who make it lose concentration
“sprout 3”: the mind check becomes even more difficult + even those who make it lose concentration, stop any attacks they might be performing, and are stunned
“sprout 4”: the mind check becomes even more difficult + even those who make it get all of the previous negatives + something else
This ability wouldn’t need a cooldown: spending your own mind score on it serves as an effective limiter.
I think that powers should bare some resemblance to the behaviour of the monster you get the power from. So would there be some way for the tentacle to use this power itself?
Possibly the tentacle’s ability to confuse could be recast from shaking to extradimensional horror…
Some New Ideas:
Duel Wielding: being able to equip and attack with two weapons at the same time could be interesting if the weapons grant complimentary effects. This could be a power offered by consuming one of the monster souls or something everyone can do off the bat. Obviously, attack and speed penalties would apply.
New weapon: (something like) The Rubber Mallet: low damage, fair-to-good accuracy, reduces tension with every hit. Rationale: sometimes (rarely?) you might want to reduce tension, especially if you already have an advantage or you want to draw out a fight (say, with the blood ape) or safely do low damage (say, when attempting to possess something). This might gel well with the strictures of one of the new gods. If we’re going to have lots of weapons it makes sense to have at least a few of narrow tactical use.
New monster: Just throwing around some ideas here… So thematically, the enemies in Kerkerkruip are a mixed bag: the defining feature being that for the most part they’re not seen in other games. Following that spirit: Ghost in the Machine. It’d be two enemies you’d fight one after the other: the one a mechanical contraption vulnerable to rust spores, the other a minor undead that is freed on killing the Machine. After defeating the machine you’d gain the power to ingest undead- a passive power giving you health back after you fight undead (which doesn’t normally happen, am I right?) A beefed up version of the same power would be to add the ghost’s full health onto yours, but give it an increasing chance to escape when you get hit in a fight.
I promise I won’t post about every new illustration, but I have posted a new drawing, of the tentacle, to the Pinterest board: pinterest.com/eriktemple/kerkerkruip/
The new illustration experiments with background texture: What do folks think? Are the textures and stuff good, or are we better off with the simpler style of the Reaper (also at the same link)?
–Erik
I think that Victor mentioned a while back that he wants to expand the role for ranged weapons in Kerkerkruip. I want to offer a sketch of a system for ranged weapons as a first step toward that goal.
This model of ranged combat requires three new verbs. Two of these are shared with many other roguelikes, so I’ll use the terms common in that genre: QUIVER and FIRE.* The third would, I think, be unique to Kerkerkruip: DISENGAGE.
The player doesn’t need to change weapons to use a ranged weapon in combat. Instead, she can designate a ranged weapon for automatic use with the FIRE command via the QUIVER command. Thus, an extract of combat commands might be: QUIVER FLINTLOCK, FIRE (i.e., with “quivered” ranged weapon), CONCENTRATE, ATTACK (i.e., with readied melee weapon).
However, ranged weapons cannot be used at will. Instead, they are appropriate for use in only two situations: 1) before opposing sides close for combat (practically, before any party to the combat issues its first ATTACK command), or 2) after an actor has DISENGAGED from combat (see below).
Ranged attacks do not benefit from concentration. Instead, they gain bonuses based on the current tension; these are in addition to those bonuses generally granted by tension. The specific value of bonuses should be on the same order as the bonuses from concentration.
An actor engaged in melee combat can attempt to DISENGAGE from the other combatant(s) at any time (there may be some debate as to whether disengagement should be allowed during Act, React, or both). Some type of check should need to be made in order to disengage successfully; very possibly the enemy may have a chance to hit or a bonus against the would-be disengager. If the actor disengages successfully, he gains a significant bonus to initiative on the next turn (only), and has also bought the time needed to use a ranged weapon: if the initiative bonus allows him to strike before any of his enemies can attack him in melee, he will be able to use the FIRE command to attack with his QUIVERed weapon. The FIRE command will remain available to him until someone closes for melee combat. In fact, ranged weapons will be available to all actors until the next melee blow is attempted: while the disengager is the only one who gets an initiative bonus, all combatants are able to use ranged weapons while combat is disengaged.**
Astute readers may wonder whether the player could disengage, gain the initiative bonus, and then attack with a melee weapon again, without using a ranged weapon at all. That is true, and it is an intentional side effect of adding the concept of disengagement to the game. Disengagement with a melee weapon allows the player to make a tactical calculation–whether to risk the punishment from a failed disengagement for the chance to (very likely) attack first.
The goals of this system may be obvious, but I’ll list a few: 1) To be tactically interesting, ranged combat needs to be markedly different from melee combat. 2) Disengagement adds a new axis to the tactics of the game, almost but not quite orthogonal to the concentration mechanic. 3) Having to-hit bonuses for ranged weapons tied to tension should help to elevate the visibility of the latter–I know I don’t always pay enough attention to it as a player.
Ranged weapons also provide an opportunity to develop other parts of the game system. I’m thinking particularly of the environment: for example, we could have a room with distinct zones betwen which melee combat isn’t possible, but ranged weapons could be used. Kerkerkruip’s existing Broken Staircase room could conceivably be modified into this kind of arena, with an enemy sniper positioned on the upper part of the stair. Multi-room battlefields with intervisibility between rooms might be another possibility, though that sounds like a nightmare to code…
A potential problem with the system as outlined is that it may be a bit fussy. The new dynamic hinting that Dannii has been working on should be a help here. Another issue is that this system would mess with the minimal behavior that already exists for ranged weapons in Kerkerkruip.
–Erik
- It may also be a good idea to add a new basic statistic to Kerkerkruip/ATTACK for ranged weapons (i.e., alongside the melee and defense stats).
** Some limitations on disengagement might be desirable for situations in which there are 3 or more factions involved in a fight, due to the field being too crowded for missile combat.
I feel like I’m posting way too often to this thread… But I can’t stop! The work day goes by so much faster!
This sounds like it could be fun.
Obviously Victor is the last best arbiter of new monsters, but I have 2 cents. Which are: I like the idea of the Ghost in the Machine quite a bit, but a couple of things do bother me. One is the metaphysics: The in-game reason that killing undead doesn’t heal the player is that undead have no souls; the health and powers that the player receives from other enemies is due to his/her absorbing their souls. The other concern is that I think the prohibition on healing from undead is good and that it shouldn’t be lifted–healing ought to remain a rare and precious thing.
But how about a few modifications to the mythology to address these concerns? Maybe we say that the ghost is not undead, but instead a disembodied soul. The ghost has yoked itself to the machine for the purpose of harvesting their magical capacity for action, in the hope that one day the ghost may be able to use this to bind itself to a living host. When the machine is destroyed, it drops vials of some of these “capacities”–a random number of essences (by which I mean the Essence of Caution, Essence of Rage, etc.).
Kerkerkruip doesn’t currently have (m?)any ways to combat non-corporeal foes, but assuming that we can kill the ghost, as a soul it should grant abilities. Perhaps the power absorbed from the ghost might include the ability to raise a stat (temporarily?) on killing an undead creature. Or maybe killing an undead immediately grants the player the power of a random essence. In addition to this, though, I think that absorbing the ghost ought to give us a power that we can use in combat as well, otherwise choosing to absorb it may not be a good strategic decision.
What do you think?
–Erik
Erik, you’ll just have to stop writing and start coding! (I gave you access to the repository btw.)
Your discussion on souls reminded me of this classic Dinosaur comic:
Yeah, I see what you’re saying about the metaphysics. Indeed, as a monster, the ghost in the machine epitomises mind-body dualism, so it should stand to reason that it should follow the same dualism present in the rest of the game: soul and body.[1] So having the ghost be a soul possessing the soulless machine. Given that it’s just a soul, would you be able to ingest it straight off after defeating its host? Maybe there could be weapons that attack the spirit of other creatures and such weapons would also do direct damage to the ghost-in-the-machine (to balance this additional weakness, the machine could be particularly resistant to physical attacks).
- There is the deeper question as to how souls, spirit and mind all relate to one another. Any thoughts?
Maybe that is the solution, though I did like the idea of fighting the “same” creature twice. If you only have to kill the machine to harvest the soul, it becomes more of a golem (i.e., a mechanical golem)…
I’ve been busy with “real life” things, but finally managed to put some more work into Kerkerkruip. The power of the tentacle is implemented as I described it earlier (everyone must make a mind check or go insane; the difficulty of the mind check depends on the number of tentacles, the concentration of the player, and the (lack of) health of the person concerned; with 2 tentacles, people lose concentration even if they make the mind check; with 3 tentacles, all attacks against you are aborted; with 4 tentacles, everyone except you is stunned).
I also tweaked the power of the minotaur a little bit. With that power, you can now use the minotaur’s axe to maze people. (For those who haven’t played recent versions of the game on hard difficulty: being mazed basically means that you and your enemy are transported to a magical arena, the maze, from which no escape is possible until one of you is dead.) This is of course very useful against groups of people, because you can now kill them one-by-one. To make it more interesting against other people as well, I have now made it so that the player gets +3 to body, mind and spirit while in the maze. This means that effectively, a successful use of the power of the minotaur makes all your other powers more powerful. Finally, the player has a (body)% chance of dealing 10 extra damage whenever she hits someone with an axe.
Do you guys think this is interesting enough? (We may need to play the new version of the game to find out, of course.)
Which brings me to the final two powers: the fanatics of Aite and Bodmall. Now, I had some ideas about the first, but they will depend on the big religion update that wa have been talking about. I would prefer to defer the religion update to a later version of Kerkerkruip – for now, the complete overhaul of all powers seems enough for one update. I’d like to finish that as soon as possible (perhaps this weekend), and then start to test it. So may basic idea would be to just tweak the existing power of Aite a little, but keep it more or less as-is for now.
Bodmall, I’m still not sure. I’ll reread our discussion and try to come up with something.
An idea: we should have an message in the game somewhere asking players to come here (or to the Github page) with feedback, saying that the game is constantly changing and we’d like more players opinions. Each version could ask for feedback on specific changes.
But where? Old players might not check the menu in new versions. Maybe at the end of a game, whether you win or die?
What changes did you make to the reaper? I have never once wanted to use the reap skill.
Neither have I. I think it would become somewhat more useful if you happen to look at the drawing first–as I understand it, you could then zing to whichever creature you wanted to take out next, w/o worrying about accidentally meeting up with other nasties on the way.
Is that 1d10 damage, or full-on +10? The latter seems high to me, especially in combination with the +3 to body that one gains when mazing. But I haven’t played on Hard difficulty or encountered the minotaur, so this may be due to my ignorance about how damned hard Hard is!
Another little idea for the thorns power: Anyone damaged by our thorns is exposed to the metal-to-wood power as well, so that there is a chance that a random metal object being wielded, worn, or carried turns to wood. (I’m not sure if the Chain Golem’s attacks are considered ranged attacks for the purpose of the thorns, but if they are not, this would make Bodmall’s power particularly effective against the Golem. Perhaps the thorns themselves do little damage to it, but the chance of instantly changing the chain golem into a vine golem makes using the power worthwhile…)
EDIT TO ADD: Another idea: Or maybe the thorns are of a special variety, with anticoagulant or biotoxic properties, so that wounds inflicted by them have a good chance to do damage to flesh-and-blood enemies on turns subsequent to their first contact with the thorn?
I think you can only reap to people you’ve met in person… (ie, ones that come up in your remember list.)
I thought I read a review recently that suggested that simply seeing enemies in the drawing served to make them reapable. Anyway, if that were the case it would make the power a bit more useful.