Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup 0.3 release [Crawl]

External Since: Nov 03, 2007 Posts: 24

billy wrote:

> HOWEVER, I get this a little better now. The point of praying to
> Elyvilon is to get protection, and the 'cost' of the protection is
> that you can't kill.

Precisely.

> The point of praying to the killer deities is
> something else (what?), and the cost is something else.

This is the problem. We all like the way that the Dissect command behaves
differently whether you are praying or not. This is just great and kept us
from just making 'p' sacrifice a corpse (as was contemplated). So there is
no tradeoff for the blood gods (except the old one: your corpse or god's
corpse?)

> OTOH, I'd now like to correct my gut feel for what praying to other
> deities, specifically the killer ones, is 'for'. As far as I know, it
> USED to be in order to dedicate your kills. Now that it doesn't do
> that, what's the purpose?

To be clear: the prayer for _announcing_ kills has been removed, but the
prayer for _sacrificing_ corpses is still there.

> Crawl's prayer system was, IMO, the best one I've seen, and the only
> one where prayer actually interacted with the game (modern games would
> call it a "minigame"). I'd like to see it pursued and developed, not
> minimalized...

Yes, I understand. One suggestion was to throw out prayer altogether (the
bit that's still there could be achieved with godly abilities as well).
However, that does not feel right. What we demand from (new) prayers are
the following:
* it should not be a no-brainer to use (which the old kill announcing
prayer was, apart from the very occasional thinking about the one turn
it takes)
* it should be thematically related to the god in question

This is a tradeoff: prayers must be good enough to see use, but have a
drawback strong enough to not see constant use (we shouldn't have overtly
obvious costs, lest the prayer looks just like an ability). Elyvilon's
prayer does just fine on both, especially as in 'addressing your god and
asking for help'.

Feel free to come up with ideas on prayers for the specific gods. Here are
some brainstormily collected ideas:

Blood gods (gods that like you to kill): under prayer, they watch your
performance. They will boost your efforts (in a way befitting them: Vehumet
by improving your damage spells, Okawaru by improving your weapon damage
etc.) but they will be disappointed a lot if you fail to satisfy them. In
order to not just reintroduce autoprayer by the back door, it should be
clear what they want see: exceptionally great opponents. They (or the game)
could announce the presence of such opponents, or the player has to develop
a feeling for this. (A D:2 ogre would qualify, a D:15 ogre mage not, for
example - though the D:2 ogre would only be an option for Trog.)
This would be a lot of work, but I can image it to be worth the deal.
There'd be more to do (what about the current sacrifice prayers), but that
could be achieved, as well. (The easiest way by having offer prayers start
when you stand on a corpse, and addressed prayer else.)

Weirder gods (Nemelex, Xom, Sif Muna) are harder to come by. For Nemelex, I
could imagine that praying could help with honest and serious card drawing,
increasing card power somewhat. (Again, we have the interface issue of
distinguishing between sacrifice prayers; could be solved as above.) No
effects for Xom and Sif seem fine.

The remaining good gods (TSO and Zin) could get protection-like prayers. Not
related to life saving, of course (that's Elyvilon's realm).

David

External Since: May 01, 2004 Posts: 148

billy <wtanksleyjr RemoveThis @gmail.com> writes:
> If not, I'll do something else fun Smile

. Maybe I'll try to add prayer
> effects to Omega. (Man, I'm really behind on my responsibilities to
> that program!)

Wait, are you the Omega maintainer?!?

I have a real fond spot for that game....

-Miles

--
Freedom's just another word, for nothing left to lose --Janis Joplin