Merge demigods into humans (serious)

[cerebovssquire]

Human, and Demigod both want to cast a level 3 spell. For the purposes of this demonstration, I'm going to remove Backgrounds and stat levels(which both help the human)

Wait, what? I might be missing something here, but how is taking starting stats (which I assume is what you mean by "stat levels") out of the consideration helpful to Dg? Dg has 11/12/11 while Hu has 8/8/8.
(Also, this outperforming godless humans at everything stuff is really pedantic. Dg still has higher HP and that alone more than compensates for the 5% difference in failure rate that would exist if your calculations were still valid after removing starting stats.)

[duvessa]

[stuff that's wrong]

No. You are wrong. You do not understand how aptitudes and skills work. A skill of 6 on a human costs more experience than a skill of 5 on a demigod. The equivalent skill levels are actually 6 versus 5.445.

Human:
60 - 6[(6/2)+(6*2)] - 2(8) + 70 + X
60-90-16+70+X = 24+X

Demigod:
60 - 6[(5.445/2)+(5.445*2)] - 2(14) + 70 + Y
60-82-28+70+Y = 20+Y

Hey look at that, the truth is the exact opposite of what you said!
Incidentally, your arithmetic was also wrong: 60-75-28+70 is equal to 27, not 29.

Also:

I will be using X and Y as placeholders for armor and shield penalties...which are even more favorable to Humans, because their skills in armor/shields would be higher or the same assuming all else equal.(tl;dr X < Y)

Strength reduces armour penalties. Demigods have dramatically smaller armour penalties than humans. It is true that shield penalties are slightly harder to remove, though, yes.

Also:

No, go ahead, keep saying that over and over despite me giving repeated evidence that that is a logical fallacy.

I don't like the use of "fallacy" to refer to a premise being untrue; it is not a formal logical fallacy. It renders an argument unsound but does not necessarily mean the argument is invalid.

[NessOnett]

Human, and Demigod both want to cast a level 3 spell. For the purposes of this demonstration, I'm going to remove Backgrounds and stat levels(which both help the human)

Wait, what? I might be missing something here, but how is taking starting stats (which I assume is what you mean by "stat levels") out of the consideration helpful to Dg? Dg has 11/12/11 while Hu has 8/8/8.
(Also, this outperforming godless humans at everything stuff is really pedantic. Dg still has higher HP and that alone more than compensates for the 5% difference in failure rate that would exist if your calculations were still valid after removing starting stats.)

Starting stats based on Backgrounds. Perhaps I should have made that clearer. I left Humans with 8 Intelligence(as opposed to the 18 they'd have if they were a Wizard), and Dgs with 12+2(as opposed to 24). Because 14 is almost double that of 8, where 24 is only a 25% increase over 18, which trivializes the "advantage" that Dg are supposed to have in their stats.

And regardless if 10% HP makes the character better overall(I'd argue it's a very minor advantage in the tradeoff, but nowhere near the value of a God), that was not the issue here. The issue here was people constantly spouting off "Demigods would be better in every way than Godless Humans despite lower skills." Which isn't true. It isn't true at all.

[NessOnett]

[stuff that's wrong]

No. You are wrong. You do not understand how aptitudes and skills work. A skill of 6 on a human costs more experience than a skill of 5 on a demigod. The equivalent skill levels are actually 6 versus 5.445.

I question strongly if you've ever actually...played the game.

If you've ever played a character who uses spells, you will notice something. You won't constantly see your spell failure rates dropping a percent at a time every so often. You'll notice that when you gain a level in the relevant skill, be in spellcasting, conjuration, etc. That your Spell failure rate will drop in a single discrete chunk. Which means that for the purpose of math, going into the formulas, 5.445 enters into the equation as 5.

[Sar]

Actually partial levels do count since... I don't remember really, but they do count.

[cerebovssquire]

If you've ever played a character who uses spells, you will notice something. You won't constantly see your spell failure rates dropping a percent at a time every so often. You'll notice that when you gain a level in the relevant skill, be in spellcasting, conjuration, etc. That your Spell failure rate will drop in a single discrete chunk. Which means that for the purpose of math, going into the formulas, 5.445 enters into the equation as 5.

This is simply wrong. Check for yourself, e.g. MuIE with 2.4 Ice Magic has 11% Freeze failure, 2.5 Ice Magic gives 10% failure.

[Sandman25]

Right, just checked in wizmode
Starting HuCj has Magic Dart at 4% (Cj 4.0), it is 3% at Cj 4.9.

[and into]

From wizmode test:

Mephitic cloud is a good early-game test case. So trying DgWz and HuWz. DgWz starts with 22 int, HuWz with 18 int.

Normalizing experience levels:
Right at start, killing one ogre and two gnolls puts DgWz at level 4, 21% toward level 5, and HuWz at just over level 5, 4% toward level 6. For simplicity I rounded this to level 4 DgWz and level 5 HuWz. Note that this favors HuWz slightly.

Mephitic cloud success rate test:
Now, started a DgWz and HuWz and entered wizmode to increase level to 3 with skill training, while training only conjurations manually, then memorizing mephitic cloud and splitting the rest of the experience between poison and air. Did this for both. Then for Dg increased level to 4, for Hu increased to level 5. Set stats at 24 int for the Dg and 20 int for Hu. Note that this technically favors Hu slightly also. (Level 5 Hu has one random stat up and one chosen stat up; I put both into Intelligence. The level 4 Dg gets *two* random stat ups and one chosen stat up; I put only two of these three stat ups into Intellligence.)

HuWz success rate for mephitic cloud: 17%
DgWz success rate for mephitic cloud: 17%

[duvessa]

If you've ever played a character who uses spells, you will notice something. You won't constantly see your spell failure rates dropping a percent at a time every so often. You'll notice that when you gain a level in the relevant skill, be in spellcasting, conjuration, etc. That your Spell failure rate will drop in a single discrete chunk. Which means that for the purpose of math, going into the formulas, 5.445 enters into the equation as 5.

You are assuming that the demigod player trains skills in the dumbest possible way. Yes, spell success has breakpoints at every 0.5 effective skill levels, that's why you train one skill at a time instead of training spellcasting and fire magic to exactly the same level and taking a snapshot when both are at the most favourable position possible for the human and the least favourable position possible for the demigod. You can get rid of the effect by adding 20 more skill points, putting the demigod at 5.5 skill and the human at 6.055.

You might as well construct it the other way around and be deliberately unfavourable to the human: use 594 skill points, giving the demigod 4.0 fire magic and the human about 4.35, making their effective skill the exact same.

[Sandman25]

Sorry, I am not clear. Does it mean 2.4 is the same as 2.0 and 2.9 the same as 2.5?

[duvessa]

Interestingly it looks like there may be a bug right now causing spell success to only use whole levels instead of 0.5 levels like it used to...

edit: nevermind, was wrong, they still work normally.

[Sandman25]

Interestingly it looks like there may be a bug right now causing spell success to only use whole levels instead of 0.5 levels like it used to...

Depending on what?

Starting HuCj has Magic Dart at 4% (Cj 4.0), it is 3% at Cj 4.9.

[File200]

Allow demigods to use GSC and large rocks. Bam, Dg is now viable as a melee and hunter character while still being distinct from Og/Tr due to atheism.

[Bart]

I have actually found what is the problem of my idea. Trying to change demigod is simply wrong...

We could continue arguing over demigod being stronger than human, except I think the truth doesn't actually matter. Difficulty should not be a problem per se, unless the species becomes unplayable due to its difficulty. That's not the case here. Being strong in early game is not an unique or distinctive feature - there are already troll fighters who basically do not die on d:1-2 and deep elf wizards who die on d:1-2 only if you prefer to tab instead of casting spells.

A Hu in D: 1 (any Hu, unless they have a god background but that's just cheating) will always be drastically weaker than a Dg in D: 1. D: 1 is a rather important level of the game.
Sometimes this massive disparity in terms of weakness will carry on for even the next two levels. These two dlevels are very important levels as well.

This proposal is in all strictness a direct nerf to Dg (except current Dg would not exist under this proposal). The HP and MP muts kick in exceedingly late to have anything at all to do with the impact high HP and MP apts have in Dg, so do the attributes (except this is even worse because all you get is completely based on the roll of the dice).

Now, this does not just remove Dg and its play style from the table but it also removes the option of playing an atheist Hu for no reason. That is bad, but worse yet is that the new species Dg is under this proposal hidden behind fourteen levels of experience and the label Hu now. And it is not even a species, it's a god you start out worshiping and you cannot rejoin if you leave. That is just a straight up ridiculous way to add a god, I think.

I care about this because Hu and Dg are probably in the top three of best designed races and the proposed changes would ruin both significantly. Similarly I can see why you would choose to focus on TheDefiniteArticle's choice of words and tone rather than what he's actually saying but he's giving very constructive feedback on why this idea isn't very good or would fit in crawl at all (particularly in current crawl).

I thanked you because you explained your point rationally. I completely disagree with it, though.

D:1 to D:3 levels are barely important. Why? Because I can replay them in 10 minutes, yet I'm stuck with my character possibly for many hours and these hours decide whether something's fun or not. If I splat several times on d:1, but have outstanding and funny experience later on, it's much more convincing to a species than surviving D:1 always, yet having to deal with boredom and huge limitations afterwards. The game is about fun to me, not about being strong on d:1.

This proposal is a nerf in the early game, yet you exaggerate. Human is not terribly worse than demigod and proposed solution instead outperforms current Demigod mid to late game. You get different gameplay and difficulty shifted towards early. Your stat mutations go throughout the whole game, giving stat boost higher than current Dg version. You might be great player who wins 99.9% games after getting to, let's say, lvl 14, but many other gamers do not. There are also people who go into extended and any HP boost will matter to them. Eventually, as I have said, if that's desirable, HP/MP mutations might also appear earlier. My proposal is meant to CHANGE demigod, not keep it the same as it is, so of course outcome will be different.

Removing an option to play atheist human is not going to be terrible loss, is it? How many games will it affect? Really, do we have to count this as disadvantage? I can see how my idea resembles a proposal of a new god, except some minor flavour. My reply to this is: current Demigods start with a god that passively gives them increased stats, HP and MP. They cannot change this god. The benefit from the god stays the same for the whole game. How do you like your argument now?

As long as somebody's criticism comes in a rude way, I'm going to combat rudeness first. If TheDefiniteArticle has something interesting to say, let him write a private message to you so he can learn from you how to post in a polite way encouraging to actually respond to it. Last thing: the point of the topic is not really to remove demigod if he is highly valued amongst players - and I did not even imagine how many ardent supporters current demigod has. The point is to receive *constructive* criticism and possibly learn something valuable from it. I proposed few posts after the first one to evaluate whether system of increased stats and HP/MP would be interesting on atheist characters. Maybe that's just a material for god, although from flavour point of view I'd prefer to call my proposal "atheist hero" rather than "champion of another god". This seriously removes current atheist experience... do you bother commenting on that?

[zardo]

D:1-D:3 are only unimportant if you don't care about winrate/streaking. Which a lot of people do and certainly this is the vantage point minmay comes from incalling them a top 5 race. But yes, in fact, all this arguing about power level is pointless because the truth is that a certain number of us here consider Dg to be one of the best designed ~= most fun races is the game, and therefore don't want it changed at all.

And I already gave my unscientific reasons for finding the popularity stats unconvincing - Dg looks dull on paper to a new player and I never had any interest myself until I saw the aforementioned minmay rankings post. But when I tried it I realized it's not only much, much stronger than I thought but more interesting. It excels in the early game of course, but not in the one-dimensional way something like Tr does - rather you have the hp/mp/stats that just kinda support whatever you want to do. Then as the game opens up the lack of a god and middling apts promote early diversification but.. within limits that keep things interesting? Anyway, back to popularity, there are lots of cool things (certainly lots of strong things) in Crawl that aren't very popular, whereas MiBe and MiFi (which are good for sure, but I find deadly dull) make up a huge percentage of games. Why? Because there are a lot of players just trying to eke out a first win, getting their information from guides and word of mouth and rumor, which causes all sorts of weird self-reinforcing trends. A straightforward example - Ko tends to get played over Ha in tournaments, presumably because Ko has better in-game flavor, which leads more people to try Ko, which leads more people to write about Ko, which leads more people to try Ko - this despite the fact that Ha is very similar but almost certainly much stronger.

[damiac]

DG are interesting because they can easily get through D1-3? Extra numbers in your HP pool is what passes for interesting... ok...

I sort of like this proposal, but then, I don't think it's radical enough. Then, there's probably nothing to be done short of scrapping DGs and starting from scratch to make them not the absolute snorefest they are currently. As it stands, they're apparently just easy mode for streak players?

I'd like your version, where humans can become 'demi-gods' by going godless, but at the same time, leave current demi gods. Probably would have almost no impact on the game, but then at least you create a little more choice.

[duvessa]

DG are interesting because they can easily get through D1-3?

ffs this has been explained like 1000 times: Dg are interesting because they can't worship a god

[and into]

1.) Dg cannot worship a god. This is the main thing that makes them interesting in terms of their design.

2.) A nice thing about Dg gameplay is that they are pretty tough and survive the first few floors well, during the period when their restriction is not much of a limitation anyway.

3.) Later on, their slow leveling and not-great aptitudes keep the game interesting, as you have to be very careful in the strategic decisions you make, and you still do not have powerful god abilities to keep relying on tactically, either. You gotta make use of what the RNG gives you, often in creative ways, but you do at least get good stat to help you adapt. The experience really is very different from other species.

Tweaking this or that wouldn't hurt anything, though it doesn't really seem necessary either. (I really doubt that those who do not like Dg now will suddenly love them if they had slightly better aptitudes, so it just feels like fiddling for the sake of fiddling.) But whatever, I'm agnostic about that.

However, anything that majorly alters 1., 2., or 3. will fundamentally change Dg, which is a very well designed and balanced species for the particular niche it occupies, and thus the change is likely to be for the worse. Fortunately, I think anything that majorly changes one of those three things is very unlikely to be implemented.

[nogardark]

**DISCLAIMER ENGRISH AHEAD PROCEED WITH CAUTION**

Personally I do not think that demigods and humans are alike at all, I see it from the story viewpoint: when I was learning about the game and trying all the races I didn't knew a thing about strengths or abilities, I only could make decisions based on past experiences and the little description that the game gives you, there was one species that caught my attention from the begging and that was the Demigod, when I finally managed to try all the species and found that some species didn't match my expectations, for example the fragility of the ogre, or the tankyness of the centaur, the Demigod fulfilled all of them. As a slow starting character " they advance very slowly in experience", that has great potential "but have excellent attributes (Str, Int, Dex) and are extremely robust", but has to rely in his(only itself) inner strength and cunning "cannot worship the various gods and powers available to other classes of being" to survive the perils of the dungeon, this species resonated with me in a philosophical level in such a way that my only goal with this game became to be able to beat it using a demigod even when I had no previous wins (that I did after a month and a half of playing).

besides the aforementioned flavor delivery demigods feel like the species of freedom, not having a god besides sometimes being a penalty feels like a blessing after you are strong enough, you find a spell? learn it and use it with your great int and average aptitudes you can cast it easily, trog can bite his elbow you don't care; you find a good Armour but already know some spells? well with your great strength you will be able to wear it and cast spells BETTER THAN ANYONE ELSE IN THE GAME(barring conjurations and vehumet I think is the name of the god), fuck everything, you want to stab stuff, no problem great dexterity and a good stealth aptitude will help you get it online in no time go and stab that sleeping enemy with a poisoned dagger as a big middle finger to the shining one.

On top of being a bad-ass, strong, agile and smart combatant you might end the game with 273 HP and 46 MP while having normal movement speed no bad mutations and being able to wear any kind of Armour, no puny human will stand the might of a hasted blade hands demigod that can pelt you with high powered spells from afar while having great Armour, dodge, and deadliness up close.

The only problem of the demigod seems to be that they can step into the human toes as the adaptable species, because humans do not have it so easy when they want to change their strategy on the fly given their low stats; it seems to me that it is better to focus your stats in what you plan to do primarily, casting or fighting, and stick mostly to that plan.