Thoughts on Fedhas

[CyclopB]

Hello everyone! I am a fairly new player to Crawl, since v0.21. I can't say I am terribly familiar with Fedhas - much of my knowledge comes from the wiki - so I would love to share what a newbie may think of Fedhas rather than doing a professional in-depth analysis.

Fedhas has always been very fascinating to me for the reason that Fedhas affects neither the player nor the monsters but the Dngeon itself, and permanently. As I played through Abyss, Crypt, Pan, and Hell, however, I do not feel like using Fedhas there at all. While it is feasible to reserve Eleven Halls, Vaults, and Zot for piety, venturing under-leveled, super cautiously and having to run up and down stairs form time to time can be really troublesome. Switching from Fedhas is not too easy either. Although the punishment is easily mangeable, the fact that the plants you wasted all your rations growing becoming hostile is just dispiriting. So I am now here to give my random thoughts!
(1) A new skill 'Harvest' at piety **. Transform a plant into rations. The number of rations collected ranges from 1-2, probabalistically scaling with the portion of health the plant has. Cost 10 piety.
(2) Apart from / instead of corpse rotting, followers of Fedhas gain piety from 'the spreading of vegetation' (after all Fedhas is the god of plant, not the god of rotting ). For each plant/fungus on a Dungeon level you see (including those that you plant yourself), you will gain some piety. Say, the first plant gives ~15, decreasing by 5 for each until zero. Piety gained this way will be removed if the plant is destroyed or Harvested.
This offers some startling amount of piety, maybe we can have followers gaining piety only from plants they plant for themselves or rework the other skills? The idea of (1) and (2) is that you can transport your plants and piety around the Dungeon with but a slight loss so that players have to, and may enjoy to, plan strategically to conserve them in the extended game. For example, while a hueg Oklob farm is great for combat, it will be a bit less effective in conserving piety than spreading them everywhere in the Hells.
(3) Although by no means necessary, it will be nice to be able to call a greater variety of plants, especially for a limited duration in places like Pan where permanent change is less useful. Examples are Thorn Hunters and their brairs that keep monsters in/out, or Shambling Mangroves and their grasping roots.

The ideas are not intended to be implemented directly onto Fedhas as is of course. They are rudimentary. I just hope that they may stir up some inspirations, perhaps?

[Shard1697]

(2) Apart from / instead of corpse rotting, followers of Fedhas gain piety from 'the spreading of vegetation' (after all Fedhas is the god of plant, not the god of rotting ).

Fedhas is not the god of plants, they are the god of the natural order of life and death-which is to say, the circle of life, life feeding upon death. Which is why there's so much to do with the decomposition of corpses, and dislike of necromancy.

Flavor aside, I do not think I would ever pay piety to gain food. Even if the food was free I wouldn't join a god for that, food is just not rare enough for that to be helpful. There's plenty of chunks and rations in a game already.

[PseudoLoneWolf]

You wouldn't join a god to get free food, but when your useful god abilities require rations, being able to replenish them easily is something you should like. Right now, several of Fedhas' active abilities are effectively consumable, because you WILL run out of rations eventually if you use them often. You can survive on chunks but you can't cast Evolution/Growth on them. Compare with Okawaru for example, you can use Heroism and Finesse infinitely all game so long as you keep killing stuff. That's not to say that Fedhas and Oka need to be on the same power level, but it's a good example IMO because most god abilites run off MP and/or Piety, which are easily replenishable resources from anywhere in the game (for the most part). Whereas a given game will have a specific number of rations in it, and you can't get any more than that short of using !acquirement on food.

Since Fedhas burns rations to use abilities, it seems fitting that they could give an ability to create rations. Gozag burns gold for his abilities and, accordingly, gives the player so much gold that they don't even know what to do with it. Last time I played Gozag I was walking around with 14k+ just jingling in my pockets.

[Fingolfin]

Or you could just do away with food as a secondary piety system

[CyclopB]

Really happy you get the point, but just to be clear:
(1) Fedhas has the problem of piety shortage in extended game.
(2) Fedhas has ration as a "secondary piety system"
(3) Rather than dismissing ration as a nuisance, incorporating it in a unique 'piety' system is more fun.
(4) My suggestion is to allow an exchange within the triad of ration (perhaps for heavy spellcasting), plants, and piety so as to give greater flexibility in strategy to players; plus
(5) Being able to stack ration in early Dungeon and carry them as a form of piety to the extended game. This of course may make Fedhas an overpowered one in a standard game but is also exactly what the limited piety per Dungeon level (through "spreading of vegetation") was trying to address.

You don't have to be just responding to my ideas. Post some interesting discussion you have seen before or your very original brilliant ideas!