duvessa wrote:The thing about dissociating xp from kills is that you want to kill monsters anyway when it's safe to do so, since monsters can hurt you and killing monsters gets rid of them. So handing out piety or xp for exploration is not much different from handing it out for kills, but it leaves the player with less incentive to kill the hard-to-kill monsters instead of avoiding them. So unless you really want players to fight uniques less often, there's not a lot of purpose in these changes.
I realised that wanting to be able to play without having an incentive to kill uniques is exactly the reason for this request. I like it when DCSS gives me options. To use an analogy:
I recently played a mummy of Gozag. I really enjoyed it, because there was no clock. Don't get me wrong; I like it that there usually is a clock. But it was still liberating to play one game in which I could wait around as much as I liked. I don't think the scumming gave me an advantage, because the mummy was harder to play than my current demigod. However, for just this one game, it was fun.
I think the same effect could be achieved if there was a way to remove the reward of killing difficult monsters.