Barkeep
Posts: 3890
Joined: Wednesday, 14th August 2013, 23:25
Location: USA
Nemelex reform
1.) You no longer manually sacrifice stuff. Instead, Nemelex has an "auto-sacrifice" conduct.
How this might work:
Stuff in vaults (so the treasure room(s) in Elf, Tomb, etc.) are spared, as are treasure troves and everything in stores, stuff you acquire, and hides generated from butchering. Corpses are auto-sacced upon generation. So loot and corpses that would have otherwise generated have a % chance to not generate. That chance to be auto-sacrificed should vary depending on item type: for potions, scrolls, evocables, and jewelry the chance is low, for corpses the chance is high (say ~50%), everything else falls somewhere in between.
Things sacrificed this way are (invisibly) tallied upon level generation and translated into points in a single pool, and as you explore the dungeon the value (or weight, in the case of corpses) are disbursed, giving you more piety and decreasing countdown toward getting a new deck. (So you don't get a sudden piety spike the moment you enter a new floor.) Randomly generated decks are never sacrificed, as well. Corpses auto-sacrificed are added to "pool" the moment the body disappears. You never hit "p" for anything, but if you worship Nem you will on average see less loot and corpses over the course of the game—noticeably less, but not cripplingly less. All the value you are getting from these auto-sacrifices goes into *one* pool, and on the ^ screen you simply set what decks you prefer to receive. (You aren't guaranteed anything, but you can shift the odds against or in favor of certain decks by selecting them on the ^ screen.) Compared to how it is now, the value of items and weight of corpses should be scaled up somewhat in order to accommodate the fact that players will no longer be sacrificing *almost* everything, the way you play Nem now.
Rationale:
The benefit of these changes is that Nemelex game play will be streamlined and made much more enjoyable; worshiping him will actually have a downside or cost other than tedium (currently you can just sacrifice trash, so it isn't really a sacrifice, you are just cleaning up the dungeon after yourself like a maid service—and it is about as much fun as doing dishes); and these changes would also prevent the scummy and excruciatingly boring (yet highly beneficial) practice of going back through the dungeon sacrificing all the junk right after you begin worshiping Nemelex. Also I guess no more accidental sacrifices if you accidentally hit "p" at a bad time. It also seems fitting to me, thematically, that the trickster god wouldn't wait for you to sacrifice stuff. The moment something fetches his eye, he snatches it up. He doesn't wait for you to pray over it and give him the go-ahead.
2.) Ditch "Peek at Two" ability, and ditch the weird easy-to-miss while playing, info-leak "A symbol of _foo_ appears before you."
How this might work:
Instead, Nemelex just tells you the type of deck that he gives you, as well as any decks that you come across in game—they are automatically inscribed as Wonders, or Destruction, or (from floor) Changes or whatever. It doesn't tell you the top card though, obviously, unless you burn an ID scroll on it.
Change the "Peek at Two" ability to "Power of Two": You draw the top card of any deck in your inventory, and get its effect with a small boost in power (comparable to a around a single spell enhancer, maybe a bit weaker than that), however the next card in the chosen deck is discarded as an additional cost. No special effect or piety cost if that happened to be the last card in the deck. (If used on last card in deck, Power of Two is functionally identical to Draw One.)
Rationale:
I like the pun in the name, but "Peek at Two" isn't an interesting ability. You just pay a very small piety price and ID decks, either you ignore the ability and take a (small) risk with draw-IDing, or else, the moment you start possibly getting Wonders and/or Dungeons, you use peek at two on every new deck you get. The latter is probably technically best play but it makes Nemelex even more of a nuisance so I often don't bother. We've rationalized wand IDing, this seems like a logical step in a similar direction. Just have Nemelex tell you the decks he gives you. A lot of them have some built-in risks with drawing from them, already, it isn't necessary to add to that by having you blindly draw or do *even more* fiddling outside of combat to use Nemelex to full advantage.
I think 1.) and 2.) together would go a long way toward making Nemelex less spoilery and less tedious, while keeping everything that is fun about him.
Finally:
3.) Minor suggestion
Not a huge deal, but while we are at it, can we change the name of "Triple Draw" to "Pick from Three"? The current name breaks the pattern, and the actual effect of the ability is much better described as "Pick from Three" rather than its current name, anyway.