Swamp Slogger
Posts: 162
Joined: Wednesday, 4th May 2016, 06:04
Tuesday, 31st May 2016, 02:19
fr: remove piety decay (from all gods but Uka)
I apologize if I'm reopening a topic that has been hashed out already. I am not aware of it.
I am going to put the TL;DR up front. Piety decay constitutes a clock pushing the player deeper into the dungeon by depleting an important strategic resource as time passes. But it (both its existence and importance) is spoilery and interferes with the other thing piety is prominently supposed to do (be the limitation on how much and how quickly you can use your god-given abilities and gifts.) It would be better to remove the clock role from piety by removing piety decay.
______
Here is the long version.
This is a speculative idea, not a proposal for immediate action. I am going to assume that either food is reformed (or a different long-term clock is implemented), or that the idea of a clock pushing the player down is abandoned entirely. For I mean to argue that piety decay as it is now makes for a poor clock, in comparison to a properly done food (or whatever else) clock.
It is frequently, and I think plausibly, pointed out that a root problem with food is that it is overloaded by trying to be both a tactical and stragetic resource. This makes it difficult to balance how much nutrition should be in the dungeon, and from what sources. Going forward I will basically assume that decoupling these roles is one of the changes made by food reform, and nutrition (or whatever the long-term clock turns out to be) is no longer used tactically.
Another sort of redundancy is that there exists multiple clocks, at least both a food clock and a piety clock. For several gods, if the player follows them, then the player's piety gradually drops as time passes. Since it is usually good to have higher piety, this gives you motivation to not spend turns needlessly. Since you often want to have piety consistently above some (perhaps fuzzy) threshold, in order to have access to some ability at some (perhaps fuzzy) level of effectiveness, you often want to spend those turns on things that please your god and get you piety (usually, effectively, killing stuff).
I do not think there is a convincing reason to have more than one long-term clock operating. For reasons of space I have omitted more detailed discussion of the possibilities for why this may be a good thing; if someone wishes to talk about that, they can raise the point. So, tentatively, say that at most one clock pushing the player forward is desirable. Why not piety decay? Here are three issues with piety decay.
First, piety decay is (for some gods at least) important yet quite spoilery. Depending on your god, piety decay is important because it limits your access to important abilities and gifts. But it is unclear to new players that this is important. For my own part, I did not know that piety decay was actually a concern that should ever motivate my speed in descending until I started lurking on Tavern.*
How is piety decay supposed to function as a clock, anyway, if players do not even realize it is playing that role? I am not sure where in-game the fact that piety decays over time is even mentioned. It seems not to be mentioned on the ^ screens or in the religion section of the manual. Changing that (on the wrath part of the ^ screens, ''Okawaru does not appreciate it when you dawdle, and gradually loses interest if you do nothing he likes.'') seems like a minimal improvement that could be made right away. But in any case, players only interact with their piety level in a very granular way, and mostly they are constantly gaining piety and often losing it by using abilities. So it is very difficult to tell how much of a drain piety decay actually is on your piety level only by watching how your piety fluctuates as you play.**
Another way in which piety decay is spoilery and overly complex (I literally only found out about this today) is that the rate of decay is significantly different for different gods. Sequell tells me that Troglodytes lose 1/16 every 20 turns; Sifus lose 1/100. For some gods (Chei, Ru, Fedhas) the rate of piety decay is zero. With the exceptions of Ru and Uka, I thought this divergence was quite surprising.
Second---and this is the reason I suspect it is not enough if piety decay is fixed or streamlined or clarified, but should be removed altogether---the piety system has a similar sort of overloaded structure as food does right now. Piety gives you access to tactically useful abilities, useful passives, and gifts. So your amount of piety is a strategic resource limiting how often you can use Heroism, how many books you'll get and when, etc. Piety decay makes it play another role in addition, as a clock that drives you deeper into the dungeon lest your character get weaker. Just as it would be better if food cleanly implemented a strategic clock and was not a tactical resource, it would be better if the piety mechanic cleanly implemented a limit on god-abilities/gifts and did not try to serve as a general purpose clock as well.
It may have a certain elegance when a mechanic discharges multiple functions at once. But it makes it much harder to tweak the mechanic in order to adjust the balance of this or that; the more things your mechanic does, the more likely your tweaks are to have knock-on effects that you don't want. Anyway, ''one tool that is perfectly fitted to its one job'' has a certain elegance too, to my mind. Similarly, the more mechanics are relevant for a function, the harder it is to change how the function is discharged by tweaking only this or that mechanic: the problem of motivating the player not to dawdle may turn out to involve fiddling with several mechanics instead of one.
Finally, the piety clock pushes the player to descend by gradually removing abilities. Having low food motivates you (theoretically) to go deeper, but doesn't actually change your character's abilities (until you abruptly die). You're just aware that if the clock really kicks in, you're going to starve to death. On the other hand, piety weakens characters that are already taking too long: the weak get weaker. As the piety clock gradually kicks in, it puts pressure on your falling increasingly behind the power curve. I actually think this is a bad feature of a mechanic, because I do not like it when games draw out a death into a long inevitable-seeming descent into weakness. Although piety decay is seldom influential enough on its own to accomplish that, it has the same structure of weakening the weak characters and forcing players to try and stay ahead of the ''power curve.'' But at the moment, I am not prepared to defend this as more than a matter of taste; so if you disagree, you're going to find this a weak point in the argument.
______
Footnotes, yes, footnotes:
* By the way, I am open to the possibility that the importance of piety decay has been overblown on Tavern, and it is actually basically unimportant. I am just taking this on based on testimony. But if it is not actually important, then there is fine reason to get rid of it: in this case it's an unimportant and spoilery mechanic that is potentially (and actually) confusing to players. If it is important, then I marshal the above considerations.
** Contrast this with food: you are constantly eating a chunk after the ''hungry'' indicator lights up and then notice when it does so again, and mostly you aren't getting nutrition unless you eat. So it is easy to get a fairly good feel for how much nutrition a chunk has (in units of turns), even though the display of your nutrition level is very granular. And of course it is easy to tell how fast you are chewing through your permafood. This is much less true for builds that significantly use nutrition tactically, but I guess that many new players at least try non-berserker melee characters as well, so that from that they get a bead on how fast nutrition depletes without ability use.
I am going to put the TL;DR up front. Piety decay constitutes a clock pushing the player deeper into the dungeon by depleting an important strategic resource as time passes. But it (both its existence and importance) is spoilery and interferes with the other thing piety is prominently supposed to do (be the limitation on how much and how quickly you can use your god-given abilities and gifts.) It would be better to remove the clock role from piety by removing piety decay.
______
Here is the long version.
This is a speculative idea, not a proposal for immediate action. I am going to assume that either food is reformed (or a different long-term clock is implemented), or that the idea of a clock pushing the player down is abandoned entirely. For I mean to argue that piety decay as it is now makes for a poor clock, in comparison to a properly done food (or whatever else) clock.
It is frequently, and I think plausibly, pointed out that a root problem with food is that it is overloaded by trying to be both a tactical and stragetic resource. This makes it difficult to balance how much nutrition should be in the dungeon, and from what sources. Going forward I will basically assume that decoupling these roles is one of the changes made by food reform, and nutrition (or whatever the long-term clock turns out to be) is no longer used tactically.
Another sort of redundancy is that there exists multiple clocks, at least both a food clock and a piety clock. For several gods, if the player follows them, then the player's piety gradually drops as time passes. Since it is usually good to have higher piety, this gives you motivation to not spend turns needlessly. Since you often want to have piety consistently above some (perhaps fuzzy) threshold, in order to have access to some ability at some (perhaps fuzzy) level of effectiveness, you often want to spend those turns on things that please your god and get you piety (usually, effectively, killing stuff).
I do not think there is a convincing reason to have more than one long-term clock operating. For reasons of space I have omitted more detailed discussion of the possibilities for why this may be a good thing; if someone wishes to talk about that, they can raise the point. So, tentatively, say that at most one clock pushing the player forward is desirable. Why not piety decay? Here are three issues with piety decay.
First, piety decay is (for some gods at least) important yet quite spoilery. Depending on your god, piety decay is important because it limits your access to important abilities and gifts. But it is unclear to new players that this is important. For my own part, I did not know that piety decay was actually a concern that should ever motivate my speed in descending until I started lurking on Tavern.*
How is piety decay supposed to function as a clock, anyway, if players do not even realize it is playing that role? I am not sure where in-game the fact that piety decays over time is even mentioned. It seems not to be mentioned on the ^ screens or in the religion section of the manual. Changing that (on the wrath part of the ^ screens, ''Okawaru does not appreciate it when you dawdle, and gradually loses interest if you do nothing he likes.'') seems like a minimal improvement that could be made right away. But in any case, players only interact with their piety level in a very granular way, and mostly they are constantly gaining piety and often losing it by using abilities. So it is very difficult to tell how much of a drain piety decay actually is on your piety level only by watching how your piety fluctuates as you play.**
Another way in which piety decay is spoilery and overly complex (I literally only found out about this today) is that the rate of decay is significantly different for different gods. Sequell tells me that Troglodytes lose 1/16 every 20 turns; Sifus lose 1/100. For some gods (Chei, Ru, Fedhas) the rate of piety decay is zero. With the exceptions of Ru and Uka, I thought this divergence was quite surprising.
Second---and this is the reason I suspect it is not enough if piety decay is fixed or streamlined or clarified, but should be removed altogether---the piety system has a similar sort of overloaded structure as food does right now. Piety gives you access to tactically useful abilities, useful passives, and gifts. So your amount of piety is a strategic resource limiting how often you can use Heroism, how many books you'll get and when, etc. Piety decay makes it play another role in addition, as a clock that drives you deeper into the dungeon lest your character get weaker. Just as it would be better if food cleanly implemented a strategic clock and was not a tactical resource, it would be better if the piety mechanic cleanly implemented a limit on god-abilities/gifts and did not try to serve as a general purpose clock as well.
It may have a certain elegance when a mechanic discharges multiple functions at once. But it makes it much harder to tweak the mechanic in order to adjust the balance of this or that; the more things your mechanic does, the more likely your tweaks are to have knock-on effects that you don't want. Anyway, ''one tool that is perfectly fitted to its one job'' has a certain elegance too, to my mind. Similarly, the more mechanics are relevant for a function, the harder it is to change how the function is discharged by tweaking only this or that mechanic: the problem of motivating the player not to dawdle may turn out to involve fiddling with several mechanics instead of one.
Finally, the piety clock pushes the player to descend by gradually removing abilities. Having low food motivates you (theoretically) to go deeper, but doesn't actually change your character's abilities (until you abruptly die). You're just aware that if the clock really kicks in, you're going to starve to death. On the other hand, piety weakens characters that are already taking too long: the weak get weaker. As the piety clock gradually kicks in, it puts pressure on your falling increasingly behind the power curve. I actually think this is a bad feature of a mechanic, because I do not like it when games draw out a death into a long inevitable-seeming descent into weakness. Although piety decay is seldom influential enough on its own to accomplish that, it has the same structure of weakening the weak characters and forcing players to try and stay ahead of the ''power curve.'' But at the moment, I am not prepared to defend this as more than a matter of taste; so if you disagree, you're going to find this a weak point in the argument.
______
Footnotes, yes, footnotes:
* By the way, I am open to the possibility that the importance of piety decay has been overblown on Tavern, and it is actually basically unimportant. I am just taking this on based on testimony. But if it is not actually important, then there is fine reason to get rid of it: in this case it's an unimportant and spoilery mechanic that is potentially (and actually) confusing to players. If it is important, then I marshal the above considerations.
** Contrast this with food: you are constantly eating a chunk after the ''hungry'' indicator lights up and then notice when it does so again, and mostly you aren't getting nutrition unless you eat. So it is easy to get a fairly good feel for how much nutrition a chunk has (in units of turns), even though the display of your nutrition level is very granular. And of course it is easy to tell how fast you are chewing through your permafood. This is much less true for builds that significantly use nutrition tactically, but I guess that many new players at least try non-berserker melee characters as well, so that from that they get a bead on how fast nutrition depletes without ability use.
Last edited by andreas on Tuesday, 31st May 2016, 02:41, edited 1 time in total.
. That's a concrete example of what I meant by saying that piety is ''overloaded,'' because the mechanics around it are trying to do too much at once. There is really good reason for followers of Ru not to have piety decay, but it's an unintended and silly side effect that they are therefore exempt from what is arguably the currently most functional clock in the game.
