Siegurt wrote:Game design discussion is really intended for the discussion of complete proposals, rather than "trying to sketch out an idea and come up with a fully formed proposal"
Alright. I thought the wiki was for fully formed proposals and this was not-fully formed ones where we are looking for feedback.
About the proposal, after what you said I thought there could be these piety gifts:
Piety: *
Cost: piety, 1 MP
Effect: increase your armor skill and lowers it's encumbrance
Duration: determined by invocation
Piety: **
Cost: piety, 2 MP
Effect: equivalent to potion of resistance
Duration: determined by invocation
Piety: ***
Cost: none
Effect: random presents (following the Trog/Okawaru model) but only of wearable types
Piety: ****
Cost: some piety, 4 MPs
Effect: immunity from all damage, but stasis and no mobility (or alternatively movements take twice)
Duration: determined by invocation
Alternative ideas:
- Physical damage received is converted into healing, but not things like damage caused by spells, poison, god's smite, terror, etc. This would force the character to use it during a fight (can't wait a couple of turns of peace to heal up) but it's also risky to use when HPs are very low.
- Instead of the * ability, there's a permanent decrease in encumbrance that increases with invocation.
3. You propose using "getting attacked" as a way to gain piety, in the normal use case that's pretty much the same as gaining it on kill, however being attacked is abusable, you can drag out non-risky combats to gain piety rapidly, at no risk, just by waiting. A measurable gain with no cost other than tedium is one of the no-nos in crawl design.
In terms of being similar to gaining it on kills, that's true as long as you get in the middle of fights. But if you prefer to kite or kill from afar, or even just prefer high EV rather than high AC, then you would gain piety much more slowly. In fact it would encourage using high AC because it lets you gain a lot more piety without suffering much real damage.
In terms of avoiding players dragging out non-risky fights I haven't figured the solution. I thought if they are non-risky then they probably don't cause much damage so as long as the piety depends on the damage received (pre-armor) divided by the player's level or their max HP, then it would mostly solve it. Additionally if necessary the player could lose piety with time (like it happens with other gods) so that wasting a lot of time to gain piety very slowly becomes counter-productive. Alternatively if the abilities/prayers cost is considerable piety, but piety would be gained relatively quickly in a big battle, it would encourage the player to continuously use the skills and recharge the piety.
I'm no expert, and I think balancing these sort of issues is not easy. Hence why I'm putting it here for people who know more about these sort of things.