God of pleasant life

[Roderic]

Hello, last night I barely sleep and this idea came to my mind, so I have developed it to your consideration, suggestions, additions and constructive criticism. Take into account that I have recently started playing Crawl so maybe there are more things to consider.

Deliki the hedonist

Deliki is a bon vivant god of comfort, pleasures and joy in life. While having the majority of followers in the rich cities of the overworld, he appreciates really much when an adventurer decides to follow his life-style in the hostile environment of the underworld whenever possible.

Worshipping Deliki is essentially a matter of doing things that are good for you: recovering health, recovering from some ailment, eating and keeping yourself alive with high HP levels, which means that you avoid unnecessary and unpleasant conflict. In the other hand, being harmed, poisoned or whatever that affects you badly, has a negative effect in the relationship with him. It is a double edge worship: when things go smoothly Deliki is with you, when things go wrong, don't count with him.

The level of piety increases from the beginning with you simply staying alive. It increases at a variable ratio, depending of your percent of HP, the higher the better. It is a quite low increase. Therefore there is a second source of piety based on sacrifices of money or amulets and rings. It seems that Deliki finds good to be surrounded by jewels and gold.

Deliki likes when you recover your HPs after resting, when you eat after being hungry, when you recover from some ailment affecting you. Deliki likes when your allies kill beings instead of you, for you avoid to get your hands dirty in that unpleasant activities.

Deliki dislikes when you reach your low HP level warning. Deliki dislikes when you kill asleep beings -because sleeping is a sacred activity-, when you eat carrion or poisonous things or when you wear cursed things.

A good devotee of Deliki can expect to be rewarded with gifts to avoid having a bad time while exploring. Thus, you can receive food when you are hungry; Deliki will never let a follower to die from starvation. He provides assistance to avoid brawls and losing health like a protective shield, blinking, temporal invisibility or making close hostiles either asleep or neutral towards you.

Deliki is not a god for oblivious action characters whose gods exige them to kill while risking their own life, like Trog or Makhleb. Deliki is a god for conflict-avoiding, cunning characters who follows a sensible and non risky activity with a high preservation instinct. Then stealthy roles may benefit from Deliki worship as well as summoners and necromancers by using their allies, while no brained fighters may find it useless. For the same reasons, Deliki is a choice for races like deep dwarves or nagas; undead are banned because Deliki only cares for true living beings.

Would you follow him?

[KoboldLord]

I suppose the first issue that would need to be addressed is the fact that a goddess who rewards you for avoiding all sorts of risk would encourage players to camp on a cleared level as long as possible. The direction of development is to make sure every deity forces the player to, you know, actually play the game in order to develop a relationship. In general, I think this is a good direction.

[Roderic]

It's not a matter of avoiding risk per se but keeping your HP stats as higher as possible. I assume that camping is a boring thing that does not reward either the character in the game nor the player in his room, so probably would be some sort of reducing factor which affects the level of piety when you procrastinate too much.

[starless]

I don't think worshiping this God will have any change in gameplay or benefit to most people's playing styles.
For example I always rest, try to stay out of trouble, protect my HP and eat when hungry.