Piety system flavour change

[snicka]

My proposal is simple and mostly flavour based. It consists of two things:
1. Separate Piety-ranks and Piety-for-use

2. God restrictions becoming strictier with Piety - rank advancement

Ad.1 Taking a look at the situation now. For example, an okawaru follower - a high priest of okawaru who uses fineese too much, at some point gets demoted to an altar boy, due to using it one time too much, and becomes a high priest once again 5 seconds later, after slaying a nerbay orc. While this is essentiall for game mechanic at the time being, it's quite silly. Hence, a separate piety counter for ranks (which would not reverse after using piety for abilities) and piety - for - use (call it however you wish, the name is mostly to reflect the idea) counter which determines which abilities one can use and how many times, working just as it does right now, simply without changing the religious title status.

Ad.2 Should one look at some Holy Books, for example, the Bible, it becomes clear that during the course of history God's teaching advance to their "true" forms, just as followers' understanding of them advances - they are never too complex to understand and obey by the belivers. It would be quite flavourable to reflect this process in the crawl's piety and religious titles gaining systems - as your character advances in the ranks of a god's followers, the rules should become more and more strict (while being not - so - strict at the beginning). For example, at 1* Elvylion would not mind you eating humanoid corpses (treating you as a freshly - converted barbarian) while at higher piety ranks it would be forbidden ( due to the character's advancement in ranks and knowledge of the faith). Something like " Due to your advance in grace (piety), you can use power x, but also are forbidden from doing y " . It also somewhat reflects the philosophy that with power comes responsibility.

I understand that these proposotions are not really core to the game, and don't need to be implemented at all - however, I stronlgy belive that implementing them would make the religious side of crawl that much more flavorable while not turning uspide down the core "mechanical" aspects of the game.

[odstmarine]

the second proposal sounds good but the first probably wont go

[njvack]

I could see a god where conducts got more restrictive as power increased; I could also imagine system turning into an annoying piety-micromanagement minigame. So the mechanics of it would need to be thought through pretty carefully.

I don't think it's something that would be fun on all (or even most) existing Crawl gods.

[ebarrett]

"Thresholds: the game, or how we learned nothing from food reform"

[Davion Fuxa]

I don't think having increasing god restrictions would work for some of the Gods because some of them are pretty simple. If it only applied to some of the gods then it might be okay, Good Gods in particular have a lot of restrictions so it might work well with them somewhat - though I see having those restrictions as a pretty solid way to balance out the fact that they can be really strong Gods.

A new God might also work with increasing restrictions, so designing a god that way might be more feasible.

[KoboldLord]

I don't think a conduct against savagely dismembering one of your own people and devouring the flesh raw is a particularly arcane restriction for a religion to prohibit, even on a relatively new convert. In general, I tend to imagine that the various Crawl religions have a whole host of religious commandments, prohibitions, rituals, etc. that aren't relevant to spelunking through a dungeon and killing monsters for loot. It simply doesn't matter if in your world Zin priests open their sermons by tapping a silver bell with a silver gavel, because that situation doesn't come up in the dungeon and your character will never be tested on that knowledge. Only the very most basic and uncompromising prohibitions, like Thou Shalt Not Use Magic or Thou Shalt Not Corrupt Thine Bodily Form, are sufficiently likely to actually come up in play for the game engine to bother tracking.

Further, I see player characters as really significant religious figures in the Crawl universe. Your character isn't Pastor Bob of Beogh from the little chapel down the street; your character is Orc Jesus. Really high-profile religious figures get to do lots of things and often get away with all sorts of sacrilege, and your current title is really just how you'll be remembered generations in the future. Win the game at full pips and you're the Buddha of your religion; burn off all your piety on the way out and you're Samson instead, pulling off some impressive feats but ultimately not all that important.

[pratamawirya]

Ad.2 Should one look at some Holy Books, for example, the Bible, it becomes clear that during the course of history God's teaching advance to their "true" forms, just as followers' understanding of them advances - they are never too complex to understand and obey by the belivers. It would be quite flavourable to reflect this process in the crawl's piety and religious titles gaining systems - as your character advances in the ranks of a god's followers, the rules should become more and more strict (while being not - so - strict at the beginning). For example, at 1* Elvylion would not mind you eating humanoid corpses (treating you as a freshly - converted barbarian) while at higher piety ranks it would be forbidden ( due to the character's advancement in ranks and knowledge of the faith). Something like " Due to your advance in grace (piety), you can use power x, but also are forbidden from doing y " . It also somewhat reflects the philosophy that with power comes responsibility.

It wouldn't work nicely, unless the god punishes the player for letting their piety drop. It would be silly if the player could just waste their piety so they could eat humanoid corpses while under Zin, or such.

(Gods punishing their followers for letting their piety drop wouldn't be trivial to implement, though.)

[sanka]

Joining the two proposals would work better. You need to keep the rules for the highest piety you have achieved for the god.

[odstmarine]

well im making a god right now and im kinda stuck on some of the details i have his abbilities set out but no back story and read the might be good for aq specific god made me think maybe that could ad some flavor to him because right now he sucks

[njvack]

Joining the two proposals would work better.

"better" != "well." Working to keep piety low so you don't get hit with restrictions would suck. And if the benefits outweigh the restrictions, you wouldn't bother.

Yes, you could imagine something where that balance would change in, say, the demonic branches -- but keeping piety down for the living branches sounds incredibly tedious.

I'm not saying there's no god design for which this might work, but I can't imagine it at the moment.

@odstmarine: Something like this would need to be an absolute core mechanic for the god; it'd be worse than useless as flavor.

[ebarrett]

What about a god that gives its followers the ability to snark at bad ideas and purposefully bad grammar

[Jabberwocky]

Sorry, but "E" is already taken for the first letter of a gods name.

[jejorda2]

Imagine if while it only requires 9 MP to cast firestorm, you still have to have 30MP to attempt to cast it. It would be annoying.

Isn't that pretty close to the way piety works currently? You may only use up 8 of your 170 piety using that ability, but it drops you below the threshold to use it again, so you may as well have used 150 of it.

For spells, we have two different ways to show the amount of casting power available. The spellpower is influenced by stats, skills, and equipement, and changes slowly as long term XP investments pay off. Spellpower determines the power and success rate of magic abilities.

Then there's mana, which is is depleted as spells are cast and regenerates before the next fight. It's a short-term concern.

But we try to use piety to represent both things for some of the gods. I don't know if this is really a problem, of if it is just an opportunity that is used to make gods differently from spells.

I think Trog might be better if there was some sort of timeout on his abilities instead of a piety cost, and just let kills per turn be the measure of how much Trog likes you and grants you power. And it seems silly to lose access to finesse so easily as an Okie, but I don't know the best way to limit its use without using piety. Pistachios of finesse as god gifts?

[njvack]

Imagine if while it only requires 9 MP to cast firestorm, you still have to have 30MP to attempt to cast it. It would be annoying.

Isn't that pretty close to the way piety works currently? You may only use up 8 of your 170 piety using that ability, but it drops you below the threshold to use it again, so you may as well have used 150 of it.

Divine abilities have different mechanics than spellcasting, because religion is a fundamentally different system than spellcasting. Both feel pretty good to me as-is.

You may cast Fire Storm hundreds of times in a game, but you'll only use Finesse occasionally.

[Grimm]

How about a deliberately challenging god, that made certain things harder for you, or gave more punishments the higher you went so the whole point would be to avoid currying "favour" with it. You'd only pick it if you wanted to really stretch yourself. Maybe its restrictions could be rolled randomly each time you follow it.

[JeffQyzt]

How about a deliberately challenging god, that made certain things harder for you, or gave more punishments the higher you went...

Chei does make you slower as you gain piety...

[BlackSheep]

It's not a bad idea on its face, but I don't think it fits with the current pantheon. The trick would be to invent a vampire-esque scale that makes for meaningful decisions about piety level along with tools that let the player manipulate piety relatively easily. It would be a very different style of play from the existing gods, which could be a good thing, but I don't think it should apply to a current god.

[Bomanz]

This rabbit hole goes deep.

Also, flavourable. Twice.

[varsovie]

Imagine if while it only requires 9 MP to cast firestorm, you still have to have 30MP to attempt to cast it. It would be annoying.

Isn't that pretty close to the way piety works currently? You may only use up 8 of your 170 piety using that ability, but it drops you below the threshold to use it again, so you may as well have used 150 of it.

For spells, we have two different ways to show the amount of casting power available. The spellpower is influenced by stats, skills, and equipement, and changes slowly as long term XP investments pay off. Spellpower determines the power and success rate of magic abilities.
***
I think Trog might be better if there was some sort of timeout on his abilities instead of a piety cost, and just let kills per turn be the measure of how much Trog likes you and grants you power. And it seems silly to lose access to finesse so easily as an Okie, but I don't know the best way to limit its use without using piety. Pistachios of finesse as god gifts?

According to me, the main problem with piety is the representation. You never really know what is your piety, a number of * doesn't show if you can use finest once or trice or ten time. With spell you know you can do your spell MP/spell level number of time (+ or - mp regen and other MP gains and loose). Sure we often use god abilities less than spells, but I still like to know if the BIA may be the last for a while or not, since it's a very important resource.

I see two solutions, first allows the player to see the piety in numbers (maybe on the god screens 155 instead of *****) but I don't think it's all that useful or interesting doing maths for piety.
The second is a quick fix, if the ability you use have a *chance to cost enough piety to not be used a second time, first the ability appears in gray in the a screen, second a y/n prompt asking if you are sure you want to use it (this one must be de/activable as an option though). Alternatively turn the last * gray instead of only the ability, because seriously who check the a screen?

*(chance, because some have variable costs or repay themselves, e.g. yred's mirror or chei's slouch. So the formula should only include current piety minus maximum basic cost of the ability)

[crate]

In fact almost every god ability that costs piety has a variable piety cost. You're also not really supposed to know your exact piety value because additionally piety gain and decay are somewhat random. At a certain point in the game you can usually figure out roughly what your piety is (or if you've gotten a ton of piety you can safely assume you're at 200 with chei or fedhas sometimes) but that's as good as you get.

[odstmarine]

i agree with crate your not suposedto know how much piety you have becaue you dont know how much your god loves you and you figure that out by god gifts and abbilities