Lair Larrikin
Posts: 16
Joined: Thursday, 30th August 2012, 17:38
Piety system flavour change
1. Separate Piety-ranks and Piety-for-use
2. God restrictions becoming strictier with Piety - rank advancement
Ad.1 Taking a look at the situation now. For example, an okawaru follower - a high priest of okawaru who uses fineese too much, at some point gets demoted to an altar boy, due to using it one time too much, and becomes a high priest once again 5 seconds later, after slaying a nerbay orc. While this is essentiall for game mechanic at the time being, it's quite silly. Hence, a separate piety counter for ranks (which would not reverse after using piety for abilities) and piety - for - use (call it however you wish, the name is mostly to reflect the idea) counter which determines which abilities one can use and how many times, working just as it does right now, simply without changing the religious title status.
Ad.2 Should one look at some Holy Books, for example, the Bible, it becomes clear that during the course of history God's teaching advance to their "true" forms, just as followers' understanding of them advances - they are never too complex to understand and obey by the belivers. It would be quite flavourable to reflect this process in the crawl's piety and religious titles gaining systems - as your character advances in the ranks of a god's followers, the rules should become more and more strict (while being not - so - strict at the beginning). For example, at 1* Elvylion would not mind you eating humanoid corpses (treating you as a freshly - converted barbarian) while at higher piety ranks it would be forbidden ( due to the character's advancement in ranks and knowledge of the faith). Something like " Due to your advance in grace (piety), you can use power x, but also are forbidden from doing y " . It also somewhat reflects the philosophy that with power comes responsibility.
I understand that these proposotions are not really core to the game, and don't need to be implemented at all - however, I stronlgy belive that implementing them would make the religious side of crawl that much more flavorable while not turning uspide down the core "mechanical" aspects of the game.