Fortnight Discussion: Altars and Sacrifices

[Madguy]

Altars have been a staple of the roguelike genre dating back to its very early days. Some notable examples: Nethack[nethackwiki.com] and Spelunky[spelunky.wikia.com].

As of Alpha 35, Streets of Rogue allows you to sacrifice dead (or knocked-out) bodies that are lying within the building that houses the Altar. Beyond that, I haven’t put much thought into rewards, punishments, and overall functionality of Altars. So, what do YOU think?

[Silverias]

I feel like the sacrifice should probably feed some kind of currency. Hell, maybe make it a class.

A cultist puts down an altar, and everyone that dies near it adds to a currency that they can use to...summon things or something. The altar could also be used as the class unlock

If you don't want to use the class thing, maybe use the altar as a way to feed an item you get for sacrificing a number of people to an altar.

You could also have different gods. Silly gods, to silly things, which you sacrifice different things to. Chad, god of bros, you please by drinking alcohol near his shrine. So on so forth

[Jobhard]

Madguy you best!

[Tombot]

Sacrificing could give health and ammo or items. You could get unique items if you sacrifice enough.

Maybe a mission where you bring a specific person to the altar given to you by said altar?

[Freedom's Flame]

Something that could be fun would be to have a secret disaster event for sacrificing a certain number of people where you spawn Not-Cthulhu® and he follows you between every level, destroying everything in his wake (Effectively he could function like a gigantized character with a unique sprite and a few extra attacks). It would be like having a persistent killer robot that you couldn't kill (unless there were further secret things that would weaken him to the point that you could kill him).

After completing a summoning you could unlock the Cultist, a magic-oriented character, and if you manage to somehow complete the game after a summoning, you unlock the Yithian, a character who, similar to the Shapeshifter, can occupy the bodies of others, but unlike the Shapeshifter they can't escape a body when it dies, so they have to be careful with their fragile captives. When playing as the Yithian, you start with Not-Cthulhu® following you, but you have magical abilities that will allow you to survive the early levels. Then in later levels there could be a unique structure that spawns only when playing the Yithian that allows you to acquire an item to defeat Not-Cthulhu®. The idea here being that the Yithian transported themselves back in time to defeat the boss, but they could potentially have to do that multiple times.

As for how magic works, they could take the form of items that start in your inventory and you can acquire more spells from rare arcane libraries that you can only access as a magic user. When casting a spell, it consumes a certain amount of your life proportional to how useful the ability is.

[Sunset Sullivan]

I would perhaps do it Spelunky-style: have a tree of usable upgrades that give the player better abilities, such as the "kill enough enemies and you get some health back" item from Spelunky. The downside would be that doing it in front of anyone makes people hostile to you on that floor, or perhaps there's a potential downside if you use it (like, say, cursing the player).

I could also see a sort of "Cultist" class working here. For them, give them like a Sacrificial Dagger that lets you oneshot any unaware enemy, maybe even give them an item that lets them teleport one body to an altar and automatically sacrifice it per floor, and make it so it's impossible for you to get cursed from sacrificing people on the altar. The downside? Police officers are openly hostile, and their combat abilities are fairly weak (guns are medicore and melee weapons are pathetic).

[tedeaoliveiras]

maybe a random chance of getting insane and start seeing things that are not there and having the sprites for diferent characters and itens change , the color scheme too. A chance of getting a random ally with diferenttraitts, that you pehaps havent unloked, or that have random disabilities. Getting random traits would be awesome. O have random creatures or monsters apear some times your alies others not...Praise Cthulhu !!! having worshipers in some altars and having them worship you would be awesome too.
Getting tentacles for hands, becoming almost an octopod.

[Supernewtonbros]

I imagine Altars working a bit like how Devil Deals work in The Binding Of Isaac,you can sacrafice an entire stat point off your character in exchange for usually,very rare items(Possibly even items exclusively obtainable by using the Altar.),or traits and abilities(once again,maybe exclusive oens as well.)

[No emaN]

Haven't been playing this game as of lately. The idea sounds nice, but altars would require gods or other high beings of power. I'd focus on creating the god/deity's first to make the altars have more of an interesting twist.

For every floor there are a set amount requirements of sacrifices or kills to gain or keep buffs from the altars. You can create different types of altars to different gods/deity figures. If you take on too many separate altars, you can create a problem for yourself as either the other gods will defy one another or require a large sum of kills before advancing a floor.

Failing to meet the requirements will dissappoint the God(s). Removing all current buffs of those whom didn't get those sweet sacrifices. Then a major debuff will occur to the player character for several seconds or minutes.

Starting off with an altar of selection should have a downside to it. This will only affect the normal classes and not the new one.

A new class is a must to add on to this additional feature. Basically it's gotta be a glass cannon kind of class, with all altars present in inventory and they CANNOT be removed, the one downside is that it takes up space. Though you can decide which Gods to sacrifice to and what kind of buffs you will recieve from the task at hand. This new class will not have to meet a requirement of sacrifices per floor, instead the buffs will decay if you haven't sacrificed anyone within a set amount of time. Will he/she be overpowered? Yes, with a kill requirement and more of a clunky inventory.

The new class's special ability should be to consume bodies and use them to raise a more powerful version of undead. It will remove -10HP from his 80 HP pool. On paper you will have to decide whom to sacrifice for the Gods or be undead servants for yourself. * A nice hidden mechanic would be to make certain other classes have a point system. Say a Police Officer would have a sacrifice point value of 5 compared to a random street runner/dweller with a point value of 2. *

[pizzasoda]

the altar should give either special buffs, satanic followers or special demonic items/weapons depending on the strength of the enemy.

[PKblaze]

It would be cool if you could pick up or drag bodies in my opinion ala Spelunky as to sacrifice them.
Alternately Slaves could come into play as you could sacrifice them to the altar.
Another idea would be cultists that you can find and if you appease them i.e complete a side quest or give them stuff etc they'll let you join their cult for the run and then sacrifice them. As a way to counter balance this you are attacked on sight by the cops or demons start popping up or some crazy thing to make it more of a risk to play the game.

As for rewards, a seperate item pool would be cool. Demonic, possessed or supernatural items, more magical things overall would be neat to come from this.
Alternately avoiding this route they could work in a way akin to Soilent Green so it turns out you're grinding people up for some corporation which gives you things.
It really depends in which direction you want to take it I guess. You could do both,

Punishment for the culty spoopy one - ghosts spawn from it and attack you, Lightning strikes start going off, earthquakes that damage the map. Just overall big bad negative things that would occur if you triggered a god or built your house on an Indian burial ground.

As for Soilent Green, you could have them be like the guys from Oddworld where they run everything and have cyborgs and robots and such that hunt you down if you blow up their grinders.

[Yes, I have a Mic.]

You don't really need me to tell you what kinds of blessings or curses should be put in. You're about to be up to your eyeballs in that.
I would rather discuss the mechanics behind it. Heres my 2 cents. A roll on a sacrifice outcome should have three seperate criteria; temprement of the god, quality of the sacrifice and dumb luck.

- Temprement
Different gods have different temprements. The God of "I will totally shove lightning bolts up your ass" is a powerful yet angry god with a low base chance of blessing and a high base chance of cursing. The risk is balanced by the potential reward. The more forgiving the god the less you stand to gain.
Deliah, God of Cooking for example will very likely give your food items a nice boost if shes pleased or if you're unlucky cause them to spoil. Charlie, God of Winning on the other hand will permanently increase your speed by 2 if by some miracle he looks kindly upon you... but he'll almost certainly send intensely powerful Tiger-Man hybrids after you instead.
Risk = Reward

- Quality.
Each god will have its own criteria for what constitutes a sacrifice. Jack, God of Daniels prefers alcohol. Now you could give him some store brand beer, sure. But don't expect that to increase the odds of a blessing by much. OR you could give Jack some rare 18th century port from the basement of the vatican and what do you know? The odds go up substantially.

- Luck
Pretty self explainitory. Needless to say the four leaf clover would help here. Some characters would have better luck than others.

[Dark Judas]

The more people sacrificed, the higher rewards you get. If you hit X number of people sacrificed, Satan comes gor a visit.

[Dark Judas]

The number of sacrifices could carry out between all runs, lile your first run, uou make 3 sacrifices. On your next run, if you sacrifice 5 people, it will show 8. Make rewards per run and throughout multiple runs. If you sacrifice 5 people in one run, you get a gun that shoots snakes. If you have a total of 30 sacrifices throughout multiple runs, more things will spawn around the alter, like cultists and whatnot.

[DeeEcks]

Money reward. Let's not overthink this.

[Ophi]

A chance of different positive effects such as a reward item, a stat increase, nuggets (if below max), a good status effect or a trait unless the corpse was loyal or aligned (no betrayals for easy kills). Stronger effects would be less likely but voodoo doll (unused drop from ghosts) could make those effects more likely.