Let Ashenzari consider your hands cursed

[tasonir]

So Ashenzari doesn't allow for you to curse your hands, and so it can't buff your UC skill, making it a somewhat weaker god for unarmed characters (although still useful for other bonuses).

I think it would be fairly simple to create a system where your hands are (considered) cursed - I'd recommend modeling it after elemental evokers. When you start worshipping Ash, your hands are "inert". As you get experience, it goes towards recharging your hand's cursed status, and after killing a few hundred things, your hands are considered cursed. Wielding a blowgun, bread, or anything immediately reverts your hands to inert, and you have to go back to charging them up again. You get a warning before wielding something if your hands are currently considered cursed. You could even make this require a remove curse scroll.

The gains of allowing UC characters to get the full benefit of ash should be obvious; it does come at the cost of slightly more complexity to ash, but it doesn't impact weapon users at all, so I don't think it's too terribly much complexity. I'm not sure how discoverable this would be, although a line in the god's description might be enough?

[byrel]

Or simply allow a curse weapon scroll read when your hand are empty to curse your hands. Probably prompt first.

[tasonir]

If I recall that's a bit more technically challenging because your hands aren't considered an object by the game's code, but if someone wanted to change that, byrel's solution would avoid introducing a new mechanic/complexity, which is good.

[tedric]

Is there a reason why a god needs complete parity between backgrounds? It's already untrue of most of the pantheon.

Anyway, worshipping Ash with uncursed hands is not that bad, it just takes a bit longer to build initial piety -- about on par with the not-enough-RC games that are being discussed elsewhere. Losing the buff to your weapon skill is compensated by all the XP you can save on your other skills, and it's not unique to Tm since plenty of characters would rather be able to swap to launchers, rods, weapon brands, etc.

[njvack]

Losing the buff to your weapon skill is compensated by all the XP you can save on your other skills

It isn't, as training UC very high is good, and skills get much(!) more expensive at high levels.

[le_nerd]

Sooo can we get an extra evo boost if one curses a Rod? I think the "non enhancer magical staff boosts spellcasting" is awesome, and having something similar for the last, third class of wieldable items would be awesome.

[neil]

Sooo can we get an extra evo boost if one curses a Rod? I think the "non enhancer magical staff boosts spellcasting" is awesome, and having something similar for the last, third class of wieldable items would be awesome.

They already do that: a cursed rod (or staff of energy) gives twice as much evo boost as for an elemental staff (the same as the spellcasting boost from non-enhancer, non-evocable staves), but no weapon skill boost:

  Code:

        // Rods and staves with an evokable ability but no melee effect.
        else if (is_weapon(*wpn)
                 && item_is_evokable(*wpn, false, false, false, false, false))
        {
            boost[SK_EVOCATIONS] = 2;
        }


[le_nerd]

Oooohhhh. Thank you, Neill! Your commentary is always appreciated.

[chequers]

Funnily enough I'm working on this right now: https://github.com/crawl/crawl/pull/113

It currently works by adding two new god abilities that consume scrolls, but I'm reworking so it uses the same interface as everything else (this is not so hard, actually, I have it working but with unacceptable UI).

[partial]

how about just letting cursed rings give uc buff?

i don't play alot of ash so idk if this would be good, just an idea