Crypt Cleanser
Posts: 689
Joined: Saturday, 12th December 2015, 23:54
Remove Beogh
1. It is a deliberate parody of Judaism and Christianity. The piety titles are all real-world religious terms and you get a water walking ability that is pretty obviously based on a biblical story. As if that wasn't bad enough, Beogh is explicitly evil in DCSS lore and is portrayed as a racist that wants to exterminate other species. Orcs have often been used as a stand-in for minorities in other fantasy works (where they are often treated as uniformly violent and evil), so it is fairly easy to draw the implication (intentional or not) that orcs are supposed to represent Jewish people. At best you can argue that instead the intent is to mock the religion of a couple billion people, which isn't really any better and has no place in a fantasy videogame.
2. It lacks clear design space. There are two other permanent ally gods. While Hep and Yred are fairly dissimilar to one another, Beogh overlaps almost entirely with Yred in terms of design and role, being a god that gives a large number of permanent, primarily melee allies (the priests and wizards suck, you're only using warlords for the most part) and rewards invocations investment. Beogh is also less good than Yred for approximately the entire pre-extended game and is available to a whopping one species, meaning the number of games where you pick Beogh for optimal play is exactly zero and the number of games where you can pick Beogh to have fun is extremely small unless you really love playing hill orcs. As the more limited of the two redundant options, Beogh is the better candidate for removal (minmay thankbait option: remove them both).
3. It has several bad, fiddly mechanics even outside the intrinsic fiddly nature of permanent allies. Recalling allies multiple times in order to get the right set of orcs and self-zapping wand of flame over water so you can get rid of your wizards and priests are not mechanics that should exist in Crawl.
While some of these problems could be resolved with a rework, Crawl's pantheon is big enough as it is. Beogh is and has always been about flavor over gameplay, the opposite direction of Crawl's design philosophy and trends, and the flavor is not actually something that anyone should want in DCSS. The best option is to just remove Beogh outright.