Thanks for the feedback everyone. I'll respond to different points below.
watertreatmentRL wrote:This is a variation on another, in my opinion better, proposal. There is a slot locking proposal where instead of using curses on items to make things work, you "bind" equipment slots directly locking them so that you cannot change what's in them without unlocking them first. This would allow you to lock your slots empty. You would then have god abilities that lock and unlock with piety costs.
This is interesting. As far as I can tell, this would have only two significant differences from what I've proposed, both of them positive:
1. An unarmed fighter could lock one or both of their hands for piety and an unarmed bonus.
2. A player in the early game could choose to lock slots for which they haven't yet found equipment, allowing them to get piety faster (currently with Ashenzari, it can be a good idea to curse whatever's around in the early game and/or rely on not-too-detrimental precursed items).
Otherwise, the two proposals would be the same, i.e., locking a slot with something equipped would be functionally the same as cursing or binding an equipped item. I would support this proposal, but poetically I prefer "bind" to "lock".
watertreatmentRL wrote:Why have a second god that basically just boosts your skills? It cries out for the Pakellas solution.
It's a cliche on this forum that almost any proposal to reform anything will get a "just remove it" response. I think Ash is unique and interesting; as I said, playing with an Ash-worshipping character changes the game pretty substantially, even if it's not necessarily optimal. Other responses on this thread indicate that I'm not the only one who appreciates this dynamic. Maybe Ash just isn't to your taste? I'm the same way with Fedhas. I've found Ash especially helpful for hybrid characters who rely on melee to kill and want to branch into whatever support magic they find. You get to mindelay on a weapon as well as the various defense thresholds faster, and with fully bound jewelry it's trivial to get low- to mid-level spells online in a variety of schools. Anyway, it strikes me as a little strange that you call for removal after proposing such a nice modification to my proposal.
Nekoatl wrote:I would suggest making binding free and available at ------, and make un-binding moderately expensive and available at *----- (maybe 30 piety or so, i.e. enough to reset piety to 0 if used immediately when acquired). So, a player could choose to bind everything immediately to maximize piety gain, but every time they wanted to switch a piece of equipment, they'd have to pay a big chunk of that. Alternately, they could take a more conservative approach and only bind items they didn't expect to swap for a long while, gaining piety more slowly, but keeping it.
Thanks for this, this seems like precisely the appropriate piety cost-structure.
watertreatmentRL wrote:edit: regarding the divinations effects, in my opinion they provide almost no value. Knowing where monsters you haven't seen are makes almost no difference by the time those effects are available. Knowing where monsters you have seen but cannot currently see makes even less difference. Knowing where traps you haven't seen are makes still less difference. The portal effects are sometimes useful, but mainly in optional parts of the game. For example, they provide almost no value for finding timed portals because you have usually have magic mapping enough to deal with those few floors that have them.
In my opinion, this is the kind of means-ends logic that will eventually destroy the game. Let's just make the only species minotaur and the only god Trog so everyone can optimally gun for a win every time they play. If that seems absurd to you, it's the kind of conclusion you're headed towards when you think like this.
Siegurt wrote:I think giving ash something directly useful when things are already pear-shaped would go miles towards making it a top notch god. Thematically there's lots of choices (I'd suggest something in the realm of preventing monsters from moving, without actually paralyzing them, would be interesting, or alternately petrification, if we want to make it a more powerful ability)
This would be interesting to explore, although I question whether it's really necessary. I feel like a lot of Ash benefits (see my hybrid comments above) are good but "unsexy" in the same way that demigods are.
Siegurt wrote:The OP is really "lets remove curses, here's a way to handle ash if we do so"
I think you have it backwards, but maybe I'm insufficiently aware of my own motives. I had thought about reforming Ash before, maybe simply by allowing the player to curse 1d3 items on joining to alleviate the possibility of not finding scrolls, but as I said, what pushed me to write this was that great sword of holy wrath. This caused me to ask myself why curses existed at all; not finding a good reason, I guessed that Ashenzari was at least partly responsible. But the main thrust of the proposal is to improve Ashenzari, and I would want to see these improvements regardless of whether curses remained in the game or not.
Siegurt wrote:So breaking this down we have two proposals:
1. Reflavor "curse" to "binding" and remove the interaction with holy weapons.
2. Give Ash abilities to deal with cursing/binding irrespective of the presence of consumables for that purpose, with the intention of removing Ash's dependency on the curse/binding system, so that it can be removed ultimately.
I think this is basically accurate, except for your attribution of motive in 2. The more important thing for me is that Ash not have a good/evil association at all, because that's not consistent flavour, and that Ash's cursing/locking/binding abilities don't depend on consumables because it can lead to arbitrarily difficult situations with those trying to worship the god. Ash is good and cool and works but needs tweaking. Even 'optimized', I think Ash is destined to remain a niche choice, and as such we don't need to punish early Ash worshippers with the possibility of having useless god simply because of Floorgod's whim.
Nekoatl wrote:The way I read the OP, it doesn't propose to remove curses, but rather to decouple Ashenzari from curses. As I read the proposal, there would be 4 combinations of cursed/uncursed and bound/unbound on equipment, of which only "uncursed and unbound" items could be removed. Holy-branded weapons can't be cursed, but could be bound.
This is a reading of the proposal consistent with my own reading. Thank you for paying attention.
Siegurt wrote:None of that was really mentioned in the OP other than kind of an oblique reference to RC scrolls being useless past the early game for non-ash chars (mostly true) and being less likely to generate past the early game (I have no statistics on that, but I don't share that experience) I'm not sure how "Ash using an item that's otherwise not very useful" is something that's bad such that it's removal is a benefit. In short I reject the OP's notion that Ash's reliance on RC scrolls is a drawback from a game design perspective, obviously not having an RC scroll when you want one is a drawback for the player, but that's kind of the point.
My experience with Ash is what led me to reflect on the role of scrolls of remove curse more generally. I didn't mean to literally suggest that RC scrolls generate less after the early game; I tried (apparently ineffectively) to make a joking reference to the common crawl experience of confirmation in which you always find bardings except when you play a naga or centaur, or find sweet unrands that your character can't use. In the same way you always seem to have tons of scrolls of remove curse except when you worship Ash. I personally don't like when bad item-generation rolls totally handicap a god, as can happen with Ash and Fedhas, but of course you're welcome to disagree.
chequers wrote:Perhaps Ashenzari binding should be permanent. Once you bind a slot, you can never equip or unequip the slot. This would be similar to a Ru sacrifice in terms of permanence. Some consideration would be needed about transformations and slot mutations.
I don't like this; too similar to Ru, as you note, and too drastic.
watertreatmentRL wrote:The first thing you guys have to understand is that all the things you think are interconnected are actually totally unrelated and separate issues. They can be considered totally independently. Indeed, they have to be.
Now you may think it makes sense to do what you're talking about first, but in order to do that thing, you have to have this other particular thing in mind and that thing actually has to be done first. In fact, all the separate and unrelated issues above are also being considered here in the wrong order. The fact is to do any one of these things, you have to do another one first. If you really think it through, you'll find this whole thing is impossible.
Now if you want to get really serious about this, you're going to have to get buy in from a lot of different parties. The main thrust of what you're saying: Never gonna happen. No one is going to get on board with that. But this small piece I mentioned before? You may think it wouldn't actually amount to anything, but that will be a Strong, Well Received Move. And I know something about Strong, Well Received Moves.
I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to here. If it's about the locking proposal, I hope you can confirm or deny my reading of it above. Otherwise, for now we're just talking. We haven't reached anything close to a consensus yet, letalone a will to try to organize politically to make the change happen. But if I do decide to agitate, I'll seek your counsel first, since you seem to be an expert.
Thanks again for the feedback! This has been a good discussion so far, and hopefully it can continue that way.