Why is Divine Retribution always set to same number?

[Sharkman1231]

This isn't really a serious proposal, but I was curious as to why deities penance counter is always set to 50 after abandoning them. A ****** avatar of Vehumet is wrathed as often as a *''''' worshiper after leaving. I think having them be punished equally is odd. I think it should scale with piety, the more the god likes you, the more they wrath you when you leave them. Though being able to reduce your piety to get less wrath shouldn't work.

The way I see it, the penance counter for leaving starts at 25, and gains 5 for every * of piety to 50 for *****'. If it kept track of highest piety reached, it would make it impossible to waste piety to achieve a lower penance. Anyway, I was thinking about this a while back when a character of mine ditched Vehumet after about one floor of the dungeon, and the wrath took forever to finish, even though Vehumet hardly cared about me in the first place.

[PleasingFungus]

Choosing a god should be a very serious decision. If you run into an altar to a sub-optimal god on d:2, right now, there's a meaningful choice between "take the god now (and hope it helps you survive the early game)", or "skip it and hope the god you want appears soon". If god wrath scaled with max piety, this wouldn't be a choice; you'd just always take the first god, and then switch the god you actually wanted if it appeared soon enough, since the switching penalty would be so low.

There aren't any actual benefits to the change you suggest, besides your idea of flavor; and personally, I find the current flavor much more thematic. No matter how little a god cares about you, you pledged your worship to them; if you go back on your oath, you've scorned your god, and the wrath of a god scorned is never to be taken lightly!

[Aule]

Not to mention, such a mechanic would basically eliminate the threat of wrath for anyone. Just wait out the piety clock before you abandon.

I think it should have some kind of definitive indicator, though. There should be a way to tell how close the god is to being mollified. How about the religion screen giving details not just on current worship, but also past worship, including any lingering retributions? It is still part of the character's religious experience, especially if he is suffering a god's wrath, so it fits there, no?

[Arrhythmia]

Also, not every God sets it to 50. E.g., Gozag sets it to 25 on abandonment. Basing how angry your God is about your betrayal on their personality seems plenty flavourful.

[PleasingFungus]

I think it should have some kind of definitive indicator, though. There should be a way to tell how close the god is to being mollified. How about the religion screen giving details not just on current worship, but also past worship, including any lingering retributions? It is still part of the character's religious experience, especially if he is suffering a god's wrath, so it fits there, no?

Ctrl-o shows wrathful gods with a different color (possibly two colors, depending on remaining wrath? I forget), and (p)raying at the altar of a wrathful god will tell you how close they are to mollification, in vague terms.

Both of these things are made somewhat obscure by crawl's UI.

[Bloax]

If anything then the more problematic part of wrath is that it can result in anything from 16 to 50 rounds of retribution.

which means that yes, a group of berserk iron/deep trolls and stone giants can get up to 50 attempts at killing you (very fun with the amount of spike damage in crawl combat)

[Galefury]

There already is a kind of scaling built in. Since you gain levels more quickly early on, and wrath lasts for a few levels, wrath is a lot more compressed if you switch early. You still get just as much wrath, but faster.

[XuaXua]

I'd make retribution an ongoing total amount that accumulates and doesn't decrease until abandonment.

1) Starts at 0 wrath for each deity.
2) Start worshipping, get X added to the total, where X depends on *developer's choice*.
3) For each AUT worshiping a deity, add 2 x (piety-*-count + 1) to that deity's total.
4) For Xom, randomize whether wrath is added or subtracted.

There you go; wrath.

[tabstorm]

There already is a kind of scaling built in. Since you gain levels more quickly early on, and wrath lasts for a few levels, wrath is a lot more compressed if you switch early. You still get just as much wrath, but faster.

No it isn't, what actually happens is that gaining XP in some sense fills up a "wrath counter" that is then distributed over time - specifically, every time you gain 1% of an XL, you have a 1/10 chance to be wrathed in the next 200 aut and have your penance go down by 1d3. It dosen't matter how fast you level, 1%/100 turns is a small enough amount that you basically always need to be prepared for wrath at any time, it's very difficult to game the wrath counter. Even if you chugged a bunch of XP potions for instance, it just fills up the wrath counter earlier but dosen't really change the frequency or number of wrath events. At least, this is how I read it. Well, aside from the fact that you can be wrathed 3 times as often in one game as in the next and that the penance counter varies greatly between gods so you won't really know without looking it up.