The Tavern

If a character reaches level 12 without (ever) choosing a religion, he/she can opt to become agnostic. An agnost gains some of the benefits of a Demigod: ie a tendency toward good mutations, magic resistance, increased stat bonuses; in addition to any racial bonuses (or detriments). After becoming agnostic, a character may never join a religion: how can a god trust a doubter?!

"Agnosticism" doesn't really make sense in the Crawl universe. At least not in the Dungeon, where you can watch with your own eyes as the gods set people on fire.

"Atheism," here, is more like a pointed refusal to worship the gods. It seems like the gods would have diverse perspectives on this, as a matter of principle. Xom certainly doesn't care, for instance, but Zin might have an Axiom of Law stating that all mortals should obey a god. (Hell if I know!) But then, it's hard to imagine any of them are angrier about it than TSO is angry about ghouls' existing. Life's about compromises.

Odysseus respects the gods but doesn't trust them a centimeter. At one point he demands a binding oath from a god before he'll do their bidding, and they just say, "Smart move." DCSS isn't Greek: there's a much stronger concept of allegiance to a particular god. But perhaps because of that, it's only sensible for a mortal to think carefully before making a decision.

But agnosticism or atheism ought to be a flavorful choice. That's my problem with DG. Rejecting the gods should be anything but boring!

Why would this improve the game?

Why not just play a Demigod from the start?

I think it's implied that this would replace the Dg species.

No, I just thought it would be a fun challenge to have a reward for getting relatively deep into the game without committing to a religion.
MM

If you don't pick a god, Xom should pick one for you (With a random level of piety weighted towards being higher than you'd be able to reasonably get normally by XL12)

He may or may not also make you immediately abandon them.

In all seriousness though, I like the idea of rewarding a player for challenging themselves by not choosing a god. Even if thats just in the form of a god "Recruiting you" by offering you elevated levels of piety or insta-gifts to start serving them.

Whatever it is though it has to be better than simply playing a demigod from the start, or just picking a god before D:9.

From a lore standpoint, atheism doesn't make much sense in a world where there is hard evidence in its reality that gods exist. So it would be more like an anti-god stance than a non-belief or belief against. But it's not clear why this should give a benefit, and if you just want the challenge of not taking a god any species/most backgrounds can do this.

Having some god that is anti-other gods give you some kind of incentive could work, but I would actually advocate against making this better than just picking a strong god for your setup ASAP so it doesn't become the meta-option and remains a challenge.

That said I also don't see much need to deviate from what the game is already doing in this regard.

Truthfully, under status quo, I don't see the wisdom in Demigods' existing at all. They just reward unfun behavior, because gods are fun. I imagine nearly all players agree.

Some people will go atheist as a challenge, but Dg (or any other reward) takes the challenge out. Some beginners might be intimidated by the added complexity of the religion system, but if Dg is for them, then it should be classed as a beginner species.

Ideally, spurning the gods should be an interesting choice rather than a boring or false choice. But worst of all would be for it to be (relatively) boring and be further incentivized.

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FWIW I disagree, There's been a non-insignificant number of pro-demigod voices in the past, so I suspect the "nearly all players agree" is not true.

I like Dg.

And I don't understand the complaints against Dg. There are 20+ species which are allowed to follow gods, one species that isn't. And some people hate on the latter? It makes no sense.

"Fun" is subjective. If you don't like Dg, don't play them. I don't play Mummies, yet there are some people who play nothing except Mummies. If you have any design arguments against Dg, I'm happy to listen.

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Anyway, back to the OP (which doesn't want to remove Dg, but rather wants to add this feature). I don't really think that it's meaningfully different. Essentially, the feature is "you are not allowed to follow a god, but you'll be stronger innately.". That's basically what Dg is.

Certainly I could be wrong about Dg. (I said I can't see what purpose they serve, but there could be a purpose I'm not seeing.) And to be perfectly clear, this is just idle discussion for me. The dev team has their own opinions which I'm not trying to sway, and I probably couldn't anyhow.

But "Some people like it" has not historically been a reason to keep a species in the game, according to the prevailing development philosophy? Mountain Dwarves and High Elves had lots of fans, and they were only considered mechanically redundant, not even bad designs. "You can just not pick them" was also rejected, mainly because new players don't have the information to make that decision.

Of course, lots of people disagreed (and still disagree) with that stance; you can too. Not much point rehashing that argument here; I'm more curious why a dev team that accepts that stance (or at least isn't bringing those other species back) would still want to keep Dg.



Picking Dg excises a ton of strategic depth and interesting choices—fundamental design goals—and leaves nothing in their place. At least nothing that I can see, or has been pointed out to me, except indeed "fun."

To be sure, I'd have no comment if demigods were just an easy difficulty mode with atheism optional. The biggest thing about Mummies is that they're a hard mode, which is fine. (The second thing is Mummies can't drink potions, which I guess is a rather small sacrifice of gameplay depth in return for further difficulty. The third thing is no hunger, which is less relevant these days, but lets them rely more heavily on their highest-level spells.)

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The purpose of Dg is to play a species without worshipping a god. It's so obvious that it takes effort not to see.

I'm pretty sure that you're trolling, so I won't be commenting any further.

His point is that you could just pick human and not worship a god.

However, Dg gets advantages over other species to compensate the lack of god. Many would argue these advantages don't come anywhere near actually compensating the lack of a god, but you still get them (stat focus, more mana initially, otherwise beneficial list of non-standard muts). Dg can focus a single stat up to Chei levels without getting triple-tapped around a corner too, so that's something.

I find them okay to play. I wouldn't mind seeing their "no god worship" aspect get expanded a bit based on some combination of player actions/stat allocation choice/some interaction with the mutation game (though muts desperately need their own rework first in that case). Could be interesting.

Many crawl gods (especially among the ones that are actually worth picking) warp playstyle to a significant degree. Prohibiting god usage should require players to have more flexibility wrt, among other things, their skilling and equipment strategy. You can argue that crawl is too easy for this to matter but I think you'd have to concede that much of crawl's god strategy is superficial in that case.

I think it's desirable to retain an explicit atheist conduct species as long as crawl doesn't provide additional game options/conduct tracking. Whether it would be necessary if crawl had more significant conduct tracking or whether that species ought to be implemented differently are separate questions.

Apologies if I've caused any offense. Clearly I'm new here and I could probably do well to remember that actual game devs take this stuff more seriously than the average forum nerd. I can't blame anyone for feeling this discussion isn't worth their time, but for anyone else, I'll try to acknowledge my limitations.

Demigod is fun to me just because Crawl's so good in the first place. You can lop off one of its most interesting subsystems and still have a great game! (And yet, ...)

The lack of other conduct tracking is a very good point. It's probably obvious that I don't play Dg or conducts in general. I honestly don't know where it stands balance-wise, but if it's of interest to those sorts of players, that's nice.

My perception is people play with these sorts of restrictions because:

1. They're desperate for replay value. (But Crawl has tons; it's long prioritized replayability. And if that's an issue surely we/you could add a marginally more interesting N+1st religion, hidden from beginners and weaker than any other god.)

2. They're desperate for challenge. (But Crawl has many difficulty knobs, and if you're that good, do you really need Dg? I guess I wouldn't know.)

3. They want the bragging rights. (Why not? If atheism didn't exist, someone would have to invent it. So why does the developer need to invent it? Only to make sure it's fun, no?)

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Atheism is more like: "These super powerful entities call themselves 'gods'. But they're really just that: Super powerful a...holes. Nothing metaphysical or divine here, and most certainly no moral authority."

Amusingly, most of the gods in crawl don't even seem to care for a pretense of moral authority. A few do ("good" gods, ones that give penalty for attacking allies). Most of them are very much self-interested or interested in you attaining their goal, and that's the only thing guiding their actions.

The question is what a player should get if eschewing the gods and why. I don't think it adds enough to be worth including, beyond what Dg already does. This is why I'd like to see Dg get some limited powers based on their actions, training, or which stats they pick...but not really an anti-god god.

Ah, as to that: I happen to play atheist most of the time with non-Dg species. Why? I like a) the slightly increased challenge, b) the simplicity of game play, c) the flavour of being a bad-ass god-defyer and d) (ever so slightly) the micro-rebellion of going against the path that the game has laid out before me.

Rewarding atheist conduct in game mechanics would completely destroy that. I guess tracking the conduct and greeting me with a message "You escaped with the orb without ever worshipping a god, you stud!" would be sort of alright. But even that would spoil d). So, as a dedicated atheist player, I prefer that nothing whatsoever is done. Virtue is its own reward.

Dg has nothing to do with an atheist conduct. Anyways, they are fine as they are, really.

Really.