The Tavern

After seeing a report of a Naga Chei worshipper being killed by Zot for backtracking through the dungeon once, I checked the Zot cost of movement for such characters, and at full piety, it's almost 3 Zot points per tile moved, on average. This is enough to scare me off of playing Naga Chei worshippers, one of my top 10 favorite ways to play DCSS. Is this an unintended consequence, and if so, maybe a hard ceiling of 1 Zot point per tile travelled would be a good idea?

If you're talking about the reddit post, (a) they misunderstood the zot clock rules (didn't realize it was per branch) and that death was entirely avoidable -- basically they reentered a branch where the zot clock was entirely out after many warnings, and then autotraveled to a shop; and (b) there was actually a bug at the time where chei was supposed to slow the clock but didn't. The chei clock slowing works not by changing the decrement, but by increasing the clock by 50% -- so to take an artificial example, a 1-turn char starts with 6000 on the clock counter, but on joining chei this converts to 9000. It doesn't fully balance out the max full piety movement cost, but the average time spent for an action on a chei char is quite a bit less, even for Na, than the max of 2.8-3. It's not intended to have a meaningfully different effect on chei games, and I don't think it will.

We've also added some better messaging and warnings aimed at players who do have the misunderstanding in (a).