sundaye wrote:Kill-based piety is bad.
Killing enemies is already one of the main things you do in the game and you already receive exp and sometimes loot and food for doing so, why should they give piety other than flavor reasons?
bel wrote:Firstly, why should there be two piety mechanisms? Is anything gained from this?
Yes, for instance, if i am playing a weak race or having a hard time early on, or i am a spriggan, i can base my god choice around one that allows me to gain piety without facing enemies so i can use that piety to defeat enemies and gain exp.
bel wrote:stuff like Abyss existing screws up the mechanism even more.
The existence of abyss screws up kill-based piety just as much. Also you can kill-based piety farm hell by standing still in a staircase.
bel wrote:Secondly, what is piety gain meant to accomplish?
Piety is the middle ground between magic and consumables, but not always. If you worship gozag/Zin piety is your money, is you worship Ru/Xom there is no piety, if you worship Usk piety is "bizarro" magic, that fills up to be used instead of drained as you use it to defeat foes. Different piety systems leads to more dynamic gods.
bel wrote:Piety through kills approximates this intuition quite well. Exploration-based piety does not.
Its explained within each god how one obtains piety. There is nothing unintuitive about it.
bel wrote:Exploration-based piety does not adequately capture the density of monsters, nor the hardness of the floor.
Kill-based piety SPECIALLY doesnt do that! How much piety is a d:3 two-headed ogre worth? How much piety is a d:6 two-headed ogre worth if i fell down a shaft from d:3? 10 goblins = 5 orcs = 1 ogre? How much piety is each of those things? If its too weak i dont get any piety even if i get the message "accepts your kill"?
bel wrote:There is an obvious and decent proxy for how difficult the floor on which you are right now: the XP which you get from the monsters you kill, together with how much you need to rest in between. The obvious way to handle this situation is to have kills-based piety, together with piety decay.
There never was and its even worse now that monster spawns over time have been removed, you can litteraly explore a empty level where no enemies have spawned(or the few who did fell down a shaft), so not only you dont get loot, you dont get experience, your piety decays and you are less prepared for the next floor, who will have stronger enemies.
Even though kill-based piety is bad, i can aknowledge is does bring something to the game, so let me ask you:
How does removing exploration-based piety makes the game better? All your reasonings so far are arbitrary, wrong or they also apply to kill-based piety.
I find fisking annoying and hard to read, so I'll respond in one piece. Hope that's ok.
First, I agree with you on one point: farming XP by standing on an upstairs in Hell is an exploit. If it were up to me, I'd make the spawns in Abyss and Hell durable summons, but that's not on the horizon, so I don't talk about that.
Second, to remove an irrelevance: you mention gods like Uskayaw, Ru and Xom, gods which I specifically excluded from my post. I have no problem with different piety mechanisms if they make sense. I am strictly talking about two basic systems: kills-based and exploration-based piety.
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Now to the main point of disagreement. I suggest that you're starting from the wrong place. The correct place to start is the following: suppose there was no piety gain mechanism, and we are interested in designing it from scratch.
The first question to ask would be: what is the goal of the piety gain mechanism? As the saying goes: "if you don't know where you want to go, any direction is fine". The game does not outline any goal. So, I suggested a plausible goal which one should follow: piety is a consumable which you get from following a god, to help you on your way. This rough goal is true for both exploration and kills-based piety, so I started here. From this starting point, I went on to a simple extension: as you progress through the game, the piety you get should increase. Again, this extension is true for both kills- and exploration-based piety.
In contrast, I don't see an answer to this basic question in your post, except "flavour". Flavour is mostly meaningless, because anything can be justified as "flavour". Besides, what is flavourful about giving Elyvilon or Nemelex exploration-based piety? The answer is: nothing. They are the way they are because their old piety gain systems were bad, and someone changed it to the current system as a placeholder.
Once we are clear about the goal, we can look at proposals to achieve that goal. Two of them which exist in the game are: kills-based piety, and exploration-based piety. Which is better? Is one unambiguously better than the other? Is anything gained by having two mechanisms? Note that nobody claimed that kills-based piety is perfect, just that it is much better than exploration-based piety.
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Once we use this starting point, the answers to a few questions of yours become clear. For instance, you ask: why should kills give both XP and piety? The simple answer: this is the wrong way to think about it. Kills give XP either way, so it's completely irrelevant. The question is: "how does one get piety"? Should one get piety from killing monsters, or revealing new tiles? I say: the first is better -- much better.
You claim that kill-based piety doesn't capture the hardness of the floors or density of monsters. Yet, you fail to say how exploration-based piety does it either. The case of exploring the empty Temple makes this clear. Why should you get piety for exploring Temple? This bizarre outcome is because of a simple reason: simply revealing tiles does not entail any risk; it is only a risk if the tile contains a monster on it. But if the risk is tied to the monster anyway, then why bother going this roundabout way? Again: I am not claiming that kills-based piety is perfect, but that exploration-based piety is worse -- much worse.
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Lastly, you (and crawlnoob above), raise the concern that having exploration-based piety supports a different playstyle, so cutting it out could cut out something worthwhile. Here, one has to actually look at the evidence -- one can't simply make things up. I have played Crawl for years, and I have yet to hear of anyone who picks a god based on whether they give exploration- or kills-based piety. If you look at the top speedrunning gods (Chei, Trog, Makhleb, Vehumet), they all give kills-based piety. I do not observe many people playing Spriggan stabbers of Elyvilon simply because Elyvilon gives exploration-based piety. So what is the evidence for the claim that exploration-based piety supports a unique playstyle?