The Tavern

I propose to allow Demigods to continue gaining stats after reaching level 27 (similar to how Felids continue gaining lives), either at the normal rate of +2 stats per 3 levels, or at a reduced rate of +1 stat per 3 levels. To explain why, we need to examine 3 use cases:

1) 3-rune win: This change would have little-to-no impact on short games like this, which is appropriate because these are the games Demigod is best suited for.

2) 15-rune win: Demigods are at more of a disadvantage here, because they don't have access to divine methods of dealing with bad mutations, and because post-27 XP gain is less valuable for them. The additional stat growth would be balanced by these innate disadvantages and would provide players more of an incentive to try taking on extended game challenges without divine assistance.

3) Ziggurat challenges: This is the big draw, the potential of astronomical stat growth to reward players skilled enough to survive repeated ziggurat runs despite Demigod's limitations. This would open up new decisions generally otherwise unavailable, and the scaling difficulty of the ziggurats would balance the continued stat growth.

sounds fun

They have access to the general method for dealing with bad mutations, which is quaffing some potions of mutation.

I like this idea, opens up demigod late game and gives them a neat toy to fill the void having no god leaves them with.

Why buff characters that can complete megazigs?

At the point that you can reliably complete megazigs, does it even matter if you continue to get buffed?

Which characters can't do megazigs?

More stats won't solve the mutation/degenerate pot farming incentive issue regardless. INT and STR could both scale to silly values, especially INT.

Megazigs are fairly repetitive. Speaking as someone who is very familiar with them, the biggest draw to doing absurd numbers of zigs, at least for me, is the gradual numbers increase as your character becomes increasingly absurdly strong. Whether or not Demigods need this feature is irrelevant, but there is a reason to want more character strength even if you have "enough".

This was kind of my point. So far as I know, megazigs are considered THE endgame power level measuring tool. It's the "ultimate challenge" of crawl and most characters will only dive a megazig if they have nothing else left to murder. Given that that's the case, and we can safely assume that a megazig is the hardest challenge a character is going to face in a given game, if they can complete that challenge there's really nothing left stopping them from becoming an absurdly powerful god in their own right. At that point, you've capped the power curve, to some extent, and further boosts in power are almost meaningless so why not let the player get them?

Crawl follows a fairly consistent policy that most sources of power have hard or soft caps. Character level caps at 27, skills cap at 27 (and give less after you hit min delay or a low failure chance), you can get better artifact equipment but at a certain point it becomes "more fitting to my build" than strictly better and every piece has to replace a slot of already very good equipment.

Demigods have limited means of dealing with extended (statue form, necromut, ddoor, blasting things with level 9 spells), but that's more a flaw with extended as a whole than something specific to demigods.

Stats are capped at 125!