Demigod Suggestion


Although the central place for design discussion is ##crawl-dev on freenode, some may find it helpful to discuss requests and suggestions here first.

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Tomb Titivator

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Post Thursday, 1st August 2013, 03:08

Demigod Suggestion

I think it would be cool if demigods had no level cap so they can really start feeling godly.

Snake Sneak

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Post Thursday, 1st August 2013, 03:15

Re: Demigod Suggestion

What.

... was this supposed to be in CYC?
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Post Thursday, 1st August 2013, 03:26

Re: Demigod Suggestion

No. It's a feature request and I think it would fit demigods nicely. At the moment they don't feel godly at all.

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Post Thursday, 1st August 2013, 03:48

Re: Demigod Suggestion

It would also completely break the game. People WILL level them to the point of having 27 in every skill. Pointless, but people will do it. And when they get there, the game's balance - and challenge - will be almost nonexistent.
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Post Thursday, 1st August 2013, 04:04

Re: Demigod Suggestion

Sporkman wrote:It would also completely break the game. People WILL level them to the point of having 27 in every skill. Pointless, but people will do it. And when they get there, the game's balance - and challenge - will be almost nonexistent.


People do this anyway, for races that aren't Dg. I've seen it done with Na, Mu, and Dj.
take it easy

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Post Thursday, 1st August 2013, 04:10

Re: Demigod Suggestion

Arrhythmia wrote:
Sporkman wrote:It would also completely break the game. People WILL level them to the point of having 27 in every skill. Pointless, but people will do it. And when they get there, the game's balance - and challenge - will be almost nonexistent.


People do this anyway, for races that aren't Dg. I've seen it done with Na, Mu, and Dj.

Yes, but they stop gaining health and MP at level 27.
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Post Thursday, 1st August 2013, 04:13

Re: Demigod Suggestion

which barely matters at that point

more importantly everything in extended is already "completely broken" so who cares

so all in all this proposal would do basically nothing and serve no purpose
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Post Thursday, 1st August 2013, 04:19

Re: Demigod Suggestion

Better stats instead. :)
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Post Thursday, 1st August 2013, 04:39

Re: Demigod Suggestion

Demigods are eventually going to get that totally awesome abstract followers thing. I'm really looking forward to it.

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Post Thursday, 1st August 2013, 04:48

Re: Demigod Suggestion

I mean, demigods have higher stats, but is it really good enough to justify their somewhat lousy aptitudes+having no religion?
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Post Thursday, 1st August 2013, 04:59

Re: Demigod Suggestion

dck

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Post Thursday, 1st August 2013, 11:32

Re: Demigod Suggestion

If some self-worshipping piety minigame is added to demigods I'd like it to be easy to circumvent because while maybe cool, I can't see it staying interesting enough for it to be something every character of one species has to do every game.

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Post Thursday, 1st August 2013, 12:50

Re: Demigod Suggestion

dck wrote:If some self-worshipping piety minigame is added to demigods I'd like it to be easy to circumvent because while maybe cool, I can't see it staying interesting enough for it to be something every character of one species has to do every game.


It called an amulet of faith. Admittedly you have to find it, but it does the job.

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Post Thursday, 1st August 2013, 13:40

Re: Demigod Suggestion

What does that have to do with not screwing up a functional species for everyone who doesn't want to play a weird religious minigame?

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Post Thursday, 1st August 2013, 14:07

Re: Demigod Suggestion

I'd suggest playing it before you comment, but you can probably just ignore the minigame if you so desire.

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Post Thursday, 1st August 2013, 15:29

Re: Demigod Suggestion

Grandiloquent Gentleman wrote:I'd suggest playing it before you comment, but you can probably just ignore the minigame if you so desire.


I wouldn't really recommend anyone to play it in the current state unless they're already very interested in it, since it's functionally very incomplete and will probably just leave these people with an even worse impression! It does certainly frustrate me how people continue to comment on it without actually understanding anything about it, but then I've learned to ignore this by now ;)

Anyway it definitely will get finished at some point, this summer is just turning out to be rather busy so I don't have a lot of time for dev right now.

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Post Thursday, 1st August 2013, 16:17

Re: Demigod Suggestion

It does certainly frustrate me how people continue to comment on it without actually understanding anything about it, but then I've learned to ignore this by now

This is because these people (like me) do not understand at all why any change to demigods is desired, especially a change that takes their one defining feature (no gods) and replaces it with something that is very like a god.

It's kind of like if I suggested changing humans to have sludge elf aptitudes. Hopefully I don't need to explain why that would be a bad thing to do.

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Post Thursday, 1st August 2013, 16:22

Re: Demigod Suggestion

crate wrote:
It does certainly frustrate me how people continue to comment on it without actually understanding anything about it, but then I've learned to ignore this by now

This is because these people (like me) do not understand at all why any change to demigods is desired, especially a change that takes their one defining feature (no gods) and replaces it with something that is very like a god.


Well I think you actually have a better understanding of the proposal than the commenters I'm referring to, but still it's only anything like a god in terms of the implementation. Functionally it's nothing like a god. The "changing humans to have sludge elf aptitudes" comparison is kind of meh, I'm sure you can do better.

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Post Thursday, 1st August 2013, 16:24

Re: Demigod Suggestion

From everything I've heard it sounds an awful lot like a god.

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Post Thursday, 1st August 2013, 17:42

Re: Demigod Suggestion

minmay wrote:mumra is just trying to make you go away. It's exactly like other gods, complete with a piety meter, conducts, and Xom-like creating monsters adjacent to you (often with 40+ HD) every few hundred turns. Really the only unique thing aside from the flavour fluff in the ^ screen is that you're not allowed to renounce religion.


This is why comparisons to the current branch aren't helpful.
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Post Thursday, 1st August 2013, 19:00

Re: Demigod Suggestion

Jeez, you guys are hard to please. I thought the proposal was awesome. It's not terribly intrusive and you get really cool flavour. If you hate that stuff you can just ignore it without much consequence.

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Post Thursday, 1st August 2013, 20:04

Re: Demigod Suggestion

rosstin wrote:Jeez, you guys are hard to please. I thought the proposal was awesome. It's not terribly intrusive and you get really cool flavour. If you hate that stuff you can just ignore it without much consequence.


Having extra super-buff uniques occasionally randomly appearing in your LOS (which my 2 minute perusal of the proposal leads me to believe is the current idea) sounds brutally intrusive for minimal gain, as most items are crap. If you want to do this in a way that can genuinely be ignored, you could have a chance to generate a demigod-unique portal vault (presumably this could be implemented a lot like a Trowel card.) This would be way better.

I do agree that demigods are already inherently one of the more interesting races and don't really need this sort of tweaking.

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Post Thursday, 1st August 2013, 21:24

Re: Demigod Suggestion

AFAIK the current plan is to spawn portals instead, and you can fight dudes by entering them, or just go away. Also, some speculation: I suppose these extra super-buff uniques will be toned down to saner levels.

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Post Friday, 2nd August 2013, 10:45

Re: Demigod Suggestion

minmay wrote:
mumra wrote:
minmay wrote:mumra is just trying to make you go away. It's exactly like other gods, complete with a piety meter, conducts, and Xom-like creating monsters adjacent to you (often with 40+ HD) every few hundred turns. Really the only unique thing aside from the flavour fluff in the ^ screen is that you're not allowed to renounce religion.


This is why comparisons to the current branch aren't helpful.
The planned future version doesn't involve a piety system or conducts?


I was referring to "Xom-like creating monsters adjacent to you (often with 40+ HD) every few hundred turns.".

But then of course you already knew that and are just being intentionally obtuse; so, whatever.

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Post Friday, 2nd August 2013, 11:47

Re: Demigod Suggestion

A lot of the Demigod proposal is by me. One thing that I've learned over the years is how it is futile to try to persuade players about future features. If they happen to like the idea, they'll be all eager and it's alright; if they happen to dislike the idea, they will come up will all kinds of objections, most of them at most partially related to the concept... hence the futility.

I really know what I want with the abstract worshippers; some others do as well. I am extremely grateful to mumra for picking it up, and I apologise for being too busy to help the cause right now. It will come. though.

Because some of you seem to care, I'll add some information, but I won't feel responsible to keeping this talk up: demigods are supposed to be challenged by the standard gods who dispatch their minions in a battle against you. This is done by setting up a portal in LOS with a short duration (you can heal up but not much more). If you don't enter, your worshippers will be unimpressed (as with all portal vaults, you can also just enter and exit right again, for the same effect). If you enter and beat the unique, your worshippers will be impressed (and grow), plus you get whatever the guy carried. That's basically it. You can completely bypass the new feature; it does provide a somewhat religious undertone to the DG species; it does not play like an ordinary Crawl god; there is no new conduct. Players who like it - and there will be some - will of course accept the challenge and try to get as many worshippers as possible. That would be indeed a new, an intended, part of demigods.

Complaining about too hard uniques at this stage is ludicrous.

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Post Friday, 2nd August 2013, 12:18

Re: Demigod Suggestion

dpeg wrote:Complaining about too hard uniques at this stage is ludicrous.


It is, but it helps me to fell better about some of my cocky YASD's :P

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Post Friday, 2nd August 2013, 12:23

Re: Demigod Suggestion

I'm still really confused about why demigods should have this change.

I mean mountain dwarves were optional, something you could completely bypass. Obviously, they were removed. So clearly things being completely optional does not mean they are a part of crawl worth keeping or adding. Personally I feel the same should happen to labyrinths (and in fact I have removed them from my crawl via making them effectively impossible to find if you use my rcfile).

As a player I don't really care very much about the change since I will just make the portals inaccessible in the same way I did labyrinths (well I will probably give it a try once, I did that even for forest branch). I would like to know if there's an actual reason for this though, since I really like the way demigods are right now and I have no understanding at all of what this proposed change adds that is actually good. In addition, adding a religious flavour the the demigod species is actually completely against what the current flavour of the species is ... which is that you have no god and nothing to do with religions at all.

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Post Friday, 2nd August 2013, 12:41

Re: Demigod Suggestion

crate wrote:In addition, adding a religious flavour the the demigod species is actually completely against what the current flavour of the species is ... which is that you have no god and nothing to do with religions at all.

The flavor of the demigods is that they are going to ascend to godhood eventually and the gods refuse to help a potential competitor.
This change will just add mechanics to that flavor.

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Post Friday, 2nd August 2013, 12:46

Re: Demigod Suggestion

crate wrote:I'm still really confused about why demigods should have this change.

I mean mountain dwarves were optional, something you could completely bypass. Obviously, they were removed. So clearly things being completely optional does not mean they are a part of crawl worth keeping or adding. Personally I feel the same should happen to labyrinths (and in fact I have removed them from my crawl via making them effectively impossible to find if you use my rcfile).

As a player I don't really care very much about the change since I will just make the portals inaccessible in the same way I did labyrinths (well I will probably give it a try once, I did that even for forest branch). I would like to know if there's an actual reason for this though, since I really like the way demigods are right now and I have no understanding at all of what this proposed change adds that is actually good. In addition, adding a religious flavour the the demigod species is actually completely against what the current flavour of the species is ... which is that you have no god and nothing to do with religions at all.


But you have a divine blood, so it's not unrelated... Personally, I think the idea is fun and I will play a DG just to try it out. I also think that the majority of players will be interested and find the idea fun, so I don't think it's a good idea to judge this idea by your standards(I hope this doesn't sound too rude and I don't mean to be rude)

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Post Friday, 2nd August 2013, 13:02

Re: Demigod Suggestion

When I first started, I definitely felt that demigods were one of the least interesting character types to play; their "advantage" looked like it was that they were human but worse at everything and lacked access to a major aspect of the game. When there was that Crawl poll a couple years ago, I even suggested a demigod "fix" to liven them up a bit (let them pray at altars until they find their parent god and gain some small boon). I don't see them as nearly as lacking as I once did, but I can definitely understand the urge to spice up what appears on the surface to be a junk species.
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Post Friday, 2nd August 2013, 16:29

Re: Demigod Suggestion

Better stats!

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Post Friday, 2nd August 2013, 16:50

Re: Demigod Suggestion

crate's question is certainly very valid - do Demigods need any change? Really my frustration on this topic comes about because reasonable discussions like that tend to get lost under an avalanche of misinformation and doubt.

In short, no they don't need to change. They're balanced and also fun to play once you get used to not being able to pick a religion.

However, "ain't broke don't fix it" is not enough of an argument on its own, otherwise we would never add any new content. A more relevant question with any feature no matter how good is, "can it be improved?"

To some extent we have to balance the needs of both experienced and new players. With Demigods we have a situation where (in general) experienced players are very happy with Demigods and want no change, whereas new players are somewhat underwhelmed by them. This is itself is not a reason to demand change, but it certainly presents a case for considering options. The same could be said for humans; and options have actually been considered for humans, but were rejected.

With the worshippers proposal we have an option where we can make the species more appealing to the latter category of player whilst not actually changing the mechanics in any meaningful way for the former category.

Regarding the assertion that this is saddling Demigod with a religion: Quite simply, no. Internally it is implemented as a god because this saved having to write a bunch of new code. But whereas piety is a measure of your devotion to your god, the Demigod's bar is a measure of the number of followers they have. And the counter works differently: whereas a piety bar gives you new powers at high levels, the worshippers counter gives you nothing, except that it will slightly influence the toughness of minions. Again the conducts are very different: a god's conducts typically limit your play in some fashion, whereas these do not, they are just a yardstick to measure progress with your worshippers. If you can't see that this is completely different to a god (whatever the internal implementation) then I am not sure what else to say (and I have nothing else to say on this anyway).

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Post Friday, 2nd August 2013, 16:53

Re: Demigod Suggestion

By the way, minmay's reaction is a prime example of why it just does not pay to have lengthy conversations where developers try to convince players. I have no clue what he means; I am sure he has something sensible in mind; I suspect that even if I understood what he means, I'd be unmoved.

So let's wait and see how it plays, regardless of whether it looks like X or not.

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Post Friday, 2nd August 2013, 17:28

Re: Demigod Suggestion

if you change humans you are insane, they are the best race in all of crawl

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Post Friday, 2nd August 2013, 18:37

Re: Demigod Suggestion

crate wrote:if you change humans you are insane, they are the best race in all of crawl


I fairly specifically stated that options that were considered were rejected.

In point of fact, the main option that was discussed (at some point, probably in ##crawl-dev, I forget) - was removing the antitraining penalty. This was an extremely minor change, so minor in fact that there would be very little point in making it at all; hence no, humans will not be changed.

The point here is that there is never a problem with considering options, and frankly most of us don't care whether players think we're insane or not.

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Post Friday, 2nd August 2013, 19:25

Re: Demigod Suggestion

mumra wrote:The point here is that there is never a problem with considering options, and frankly most of us don't care whether players think we're insane or not.

This thread is why most games do not have a forum like this :(
I am not a very good player. My mouth is a foul pit of LIES. KNOW THIS.

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Post Friday, 2nd August 2013, 19:47

Re: Demigod Suggestion

Based on reading the devwiki (and this thread) I am forced to come to the conclusion that this entire proposal is being designed and implemented by people who don't play demigods, for people who don't play demigods. Which is why even though I actually want demigods to be tweaked somewhat, I find myself hoping that nothing changes.

khalil wrote:The flavor of the demigods is that they are going to ascend to godhood eventually and the gods refuse to help a potential competitor.
This change will just add mechanics to that flavor.

In future, please don't HALLUCINATE GAME FEATURES WHICH DO NOT EXIST.

Here is what the manual and game have to say about demigods and religion:
"due to their status, cannot worship"

In other words, crate's description of the flavour is entirely correct.

dpeg wrote:A lot of the Demigod proposal is by me.

Ah, yes, the man responsible for the two most broken mechanics in stable crawl, one of which directly contradicts god flavour.

but whereas piety is a measure of your devotion to your god, the Demigod's bar is a measure of the number of followers they have.

The piety bar has nothing to do with your devotion, it is a measure of how much your god currently likes you. Which makes it exactly the same.

as with all portal vaults... You can completely bypass the new feature

You mean the portal vaults that now bombard the player with meaningless text every ten seconds for no discernable reason?

the worshippers counter gives you nothing

I don't know why you're trying so hard to convince me that this proposal does nothing. All that means is that you're adding a bunch of useless message spam to demigods for no reason (and this thread is rapidly convincing me that "demigods don't have enough message spam" is the whole motivation for changing them).

Again the conducts are very different: a god's conducts typically limit your play in some fashion, whereas these do not, they are just a yardstick to measure progress with your worshippers. If you can't see that this is completely different to a god

Have you ever worshipped Vehumet?

Vehumet's only requirement is "kill stuff" which you're gonna do regardless. But Vehumet still limits the player's choices implicitly.

frankly most of us don't care

This is the problem. You can be insane all you want, in fact it's arguably a requirement for the position.

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Post Friday, 2nd August 2013, 19:53

Re: Demigod Suggestion

Uhh, what? Maybe if you don't understand what people are saying you should either shut up or ask for an explanation, instead of just bitching. Mumra and dpeg have both improved crawl quite a lot in the past, so maybe give them the benefit of the doubt.

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Post Friday, 2nd August 2013, 20:05

Re: Demigod Suggestion

I know a lot of people don't like changes in things they like(including me). And you might be right about "this entire proposal is being designed and implemented by people who don't play demigods, for people who don't play demigods", but then again, now they might want to try them out. Me, for example. Besides, you will have the option of playing an older version without the new demigods, but I won't have an option of playing the hypothetical-future-new-spiced up demigod if it's not implemented.

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Post Friday, 2nd August 2013, 20:13

Re: Demigod Suggestion

Resistance to change isn't unique to software development, each and every change regardless of how little it should impact someone, or how much it's desirable, will cause *someone* to dislike it:

http://www.xkcd.com/1172/

I do disagree with some, but not all, of the game design decisions that have happened for this and previous versions, the fact is, people have opinions, and you're going to disagree with some of them. Pissing all over work that someone's done and calling it horrible decisions and denigrating the thought and effort that goes into the project just makes people less inclined to do *anything* in the future, or at least less inclined to discuss the plans and solicit your input

Just because someone has a different opinion than you do doesn't mean they're stupid, wrong, ignorant, short sighted or evil.

There's a simple solution for the "demigods are perfect, don't change anything about them" camp... Don't upgrade. Play .12 or heck, play .11 or .10 if that's your boat. Or if you're really sick of it all, go play some other game.
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Post Friday, 2nd August 2013, 21:14

Re: Demigod Suggestion

I know a lot of people don't like changes in things they like(including me).

There's a simple solution for the "demigods are perfect, don't change anything about them" camp... Don't upgrade.

I know this comes as a shock to you and dpeg, but what he or you or I like is not important. This is about what will make Crawl a better game. I know you're not concerned with that, but some of us are.

And you might be right about "this entire proposal is being designed and implemented by people who don't play demigods, for people who don't play demigods", but then again, now they might want to try them out.

And if romantic comedies had more decapitations, I'm sure more boyfriends would be happy to watch them. There are two problems with this scenario that you seem unwilling or unable to grasp:
1--There are already other movies with plenty of decapitations.
2--The lack of decapitations is actually a selling point for some people.

Galefury wrote:Maybe if you don't understand what people are saying

"the worshippers counter gives you nothing" is pretty ****ing hard to misunderstand.

But please, enlighten me on my misunderstanding, rather than, as you say, "bitching" at me.

Mumra and dpeg have both improved crawl quite a lot in the past, so maybe give them the benefit of the doubt.

First of all, dpeg proudly claims responsibility for 2 of the 4 worst things in crawl (and there are GDD threads in which he vehemently defends the third). I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt simply by assuming he's not responsible for Dj.

And I was giving mumra the benefit of the doubt. Right up until he said:
"a god's conducts typically limit your play in some fashion, whereas these do not"
If they don't limit your play in some fashion, then what DO they do?!
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Post Friday, 2nd August 2013, 21:19

Re: Demigod Suggestion

Volteccer_Jack wrote:
If they don't limit your play in some fashion, then what DO they do?!


Conducts limit your playstyle, taking away your choices. Providing a new decision, i.e. "should I enter this portal or not" actually does the opposite of taking away choices. That is, it gives you choices.
Last edited by Arrhythmia on Friday, 2nd August 2013, 22:02, edited 1 time in total.
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Post Friday, 2nd August 2013, 21:28

Re: Demigod Suggestion

That is not a conduct. A portal is not a conduct just like a godgift lajatang is not a conduct.

The conduct is, "you must enter this portal to increase your piety."
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Post Friday, 2nd August 2013, 21:38

Re: Demigod Suggestion

Volteccer_Jack wrote:A portal is not a conduct just like a godgift lajatang is not a conduct.


God-gifted lajatangs don't usually try to kill you though.
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Post Friday, 2nd August 2013, 21:39

Re: Demigod Suggestion

It looks to me like you choices are "Enter this portal to potentially raise your piety and maybe get some reward with commensurate risk" or "Don't, and play demigods exactly as if this wasn't added to the game at all"
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rosstin

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Post Friday, 2nd August 2013, 21:42

Re: Demigod Suggestion

mumra wrote:To some extent we have to balance the needs of both experienced and new players. With Demigods we have a situation where (in general) experienced players are very happy with Demigods and want no change, whereas new players are somewhat underwhelmed by them. This is itself is not a reason to demand change, but it certainly presents a case for considering options.


That's fine, but it seems like new players are underwhelmed by probably half the races. Having a race which gets more interesting as you learn more about the game seems like a very positive thing.

I think the argument for conservatism with Dg is just that Dg offers a natural and unique type of tradeoff, combined with flat aptitudes (which is what a lot of the more experienced players like about it). It sounds like the proposal has advanced to a point where you can basically ignore it if you don't want to deal with it, which is good.

Dungeon Master

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Post Friday, 2nd August 2013, 22:10

Re: Demigod Suggestion

I certainly shouldn't comment on this nonsense anymore, and I stand by the design debacles I've committed (although Volteccer_Jack's uncanny ability to neatly list all of Crawl's faults and to attribute it to certain persons is astounding). I am sure there will be no shortage of perfectly designed games out of the quill of Mr Jack.

ackack: Every other month, there is a new proposal to liven up the demigod. This desire exists for a good reason. As mumra explained nicely, there is no need to give in; the species works as is. On the other hand, perhaps the divinely handicapped guys get a bit more interesting with a modest modification (which is really all we're talking about).

I had very, very similar discussions on other occasions (also calling on my doubtful abilities, as it happens). I really liked the one when I tried to convince people about Elyvilon pacification and completely failed.

Everyone who's been around for more than a few months should have seen that commits have been reversed; that included fairly big things as well. If the abstract worshippers are a fluke, then so be it. mumra did all the work, so he'll rightfully be grumpy on me; it was my idea, so you can add it to your list of "things that dpeg fucked up" -- what else is your concern? Are you so afraid it could actually work out?
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