Remove Beogh


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Crypt Cleanser

Posts: 746

Joined: Thursday, 5th December 2013, 04:01

Post Sunday, 28th May 2017, 08:27

Re: Remove Beogh

watertreatmentRL wrote:@Implojin: DCSS is not a commercial title. It can never have the kind of brand that carefully planned and marketed games like the AAA titles you mention have.


Undertale isn't exactly a big-budget AAA title. There are plenty of small indie games that have good stories without huge budgets or marketing campaigns.

But I think that's also besides that point. Different games seek to accomplish different things - there's no set of universal rules for what a game always should be or what priorities games should always have, and anyone who disagrees is probably just confusing their own personal tastes with objective quality. Some games are all about telling a story that was written by the game creator (possibly one that the player can influence, but not necessarily an emergent one - in Undertale, for example, the player can affect the direction of the story, but ultimately they're still just playing between one of several versions of the story written by the same person). Some games are about the player creating their own story. In some games, the story is a major part of the game, and there are cases where the story even gets prioritized over gameplay. In some games, the story exists but is more just a narrative to explain the gameplay forward than a core part of the game. In some games, the story's just an afterthought, or completely non-existent.

So what matters isn't what other games try to do, but what DCSS tries to do. That's why DCSS has clearly-defined design goals in the first place - those goals aren't meant to be general rules for making a good game, they're rules for the kind of game DCSS is supposed to be. And the kind of game DCSS is supposed to be is generally one that prioritizes gameplay over flavor or storytelling, particularly relative to many other classic roguelikes that have features that make things more "realistic" or can create entertaining stories at the expense of bad gameplay.

But flavor is still important in DCSS, and creating fun stories is still part of the game, it's just lower priority than gameplay. And I do think Dpeg makes a valid point about the stories Beogh creates being a big part of the god's appeal. Whenever I read about someone playing Beogh, they're not talking about the gameplay style, they're talking about the experience of amassing an orc army, about how big their army was when they made it to depths, about the massacre that killed nearly everyone off in a vault somewhere, about their one orc warlord who survived from Orc 2 until Zot 5 and nobly sacrificed himself to an OoF in one of the lungs, and so on. I think that's part of what makes Beogh cool, it's part of what sets him apart from Yred, and ideally, a rework could preserve that.

One thought on the resurrection front: If resurrection hurts the emergent narrative component by making the deaths of long-standing followers less significant, maybe it could be reflavored. For example, you could flavor it as a different orc taking on the dead orc's legacy, rather than the orc coming back to life. So you can still have your story of that one warlord who survived for ages and then died to an ancient lich in depths, but now you get the extra story of the orc who continued his legacy and lived to see the Orb of Zot brought to the surface.

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Tartarus Sorceror

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Joined: Monday, 14th October 2013, 01:05

Post Monday, 29th May 2017, 19:09

Re: Remove Beogh

I don't think that's as meaningful as an orc actually dying. It would feel very surface level, if they were just replaced it wouldn't feel like anything actually changed. So who cares? But when an orc dies permanently, it has real gameplay consequences.

Lair Larrikin

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Joined: Friday, 3rd March 2017, 15:24

Post Tuesday, 30th May 2017, 05:59

Re: Remove Beogh

Glenn was a man who was turned into a frogman. Afterwards he was quite miserable, but when he finally accepted himself for who he was, a frogman, he learned all kinds of powerful frogman skills and became a great swordsman. I think there's a lesson here, and it ties back into Beogh somehow.

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Halls Hopper

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Joined: Sunday, 15th December 2013, 19:43

Post Thursday, 1st June 2017, 00:18

Re: Remove Beogh

I'm not really much of a Beogh player, but here's my provervial two pieces of gold.

Flavour: Whilst I can see the whole "haha, evil Jesus" thing being... well... immature and silly, I think it's possible to still have that but not in a mean-spirited kind of way. Mythology, fantasy and RPGs especially are rife with demons and evil gods getting their kicks from making twisted versions of stuff that's good. You have Christ, you have the Antichrist. You have paladins, you have blackguards. You have elves, you have orcs. Basically, it'd take just one line to turn it from the game itself being slightly dickish to Beogh himself being slightly dickish.

Mechanics: Incredibly clunky and off-putting. But, also unique. Unlike other gods that grant allies, this one is much more about the you making do with what you find in the dungeon than summoning them out of the ether. So, it gets points for offering something unique. But man, is it tedious and stressful and easier to worship literally almost any other god than babysit a bunch of suicidal orcs. And keeping the uniqueness whilst cutting out tedium seems unlikely.

Exclusivity: Alright, whilst it makes some degree of flavour sense to need to be an orc to worship the orc god... it's not really necessary. I mean, hill orcs are already considered outsiders amongst cave orcs and they're able to convert them. And there's multiple ways you could explain it away with fluff if it really bothered people ("he's an orc conqueror who was deified and now tries to expand his power, by gathering worshippers from across the world and culling the non-believers", "he's a malicious corrupter who created orcs as a cruel mockery of the peaceful elves", "he is a spiteful deity, worshipped only by the cruelest of creatures... which includes the sadistic orcs".)

Tradition: Probably the biggest argument for him sticking around. Beogh has been here a long time. Sure, if he was proposed today by someone, he'd be kicked out of GDD in an instant. As it stands, he has a place in the hearts of many players, even those of us who don't really touch him that much. So, I can't see Beogh going anywhere. However, I can see a bunch of work being done to improve the... well... everything about him.

Lair Larrikin

Posts: 29

Joined: Monday, 27th July 2015, 18:58

Post Sunday, 4th June 2017, 10:19

Re: Remove Beogh

So, I've been playing a lot of Yred and Beogh recently and I'd like to say the two are different. Yes they've both got armies, but a living army that can be confused and use polearms behind you is pretty different from a demon army with heavy resistances but no reaching (so you end up with the polearm.)

The flavour? Yeah, it should go. No, I'm not offended by it, but it doesn't fit with the philosophy and I'm sure we can come up with a variant that's just plain better. Water walking is nice. It'd be nicer if it extended to lava :)

Idea: Beogh believes the Orb of Zot was stolen from him, and that's why the dungeon is crawling with orcs. (I'm sure people will have better ones.)
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