Deity differentiation

Deity differentiation
*********************

This is a topic that comes up from time to time and always seems to
get a gentle murmur of approval, but no-one ever seems prepared to
discuss it in depth. I'm starting this thread in the hopes some of us
will want to get our teeth into it a little.
The idea is simple: Give each of the deities in nethack a unique
personality. This would make the game much broader, giving each class
and alignment an interesting flavour and learning curve all of its
own. If done properly, I feel this could really improve nethack, and
I'd love to get some more discussion going on it.

So how do we go about differentiating deities? There are some ideas
below. Please note that these are mostly borrowed/ stolen from other
threads on this group. If you see your own words or ideas copy/pasted
here, I hope you don't mind.

Different ways of helping the player:
*************************************
Some Gods are wrathful, others are benevolent. Some will help the
player directly, others may encourage the player to help himself. It
would be nice if each God favoured particular methods of helping
players out of sticky situations. For each circumstance that can be
alleviated by prayer, there should be a list of possible methods of
divine intervention. Each time a deity receives a prayer, it would
select a response according to weightings designed to fit their
character. They may also modify their choices according to the
player's exact situation and standing with the deity at that time. Any
problem in nethack has a number of diferent solutions, so why should
the Gods always use the same one?

For example, a hunger prayer to one deity might give the familiar
"your stomach feels content" message we all know and love. A caveman
deity, however, might summon a large, nutritious, corpse-guaranteed
monster for the player to hunt, kill and eat. After all, that's how a
caveman is expected to get his food. A wizard's god might just drop in
a spellbook of food detection, or maybe a horn of plenty, expecting
the wizard to sort out his problems by magical means.

This issue raises a question of play balance. For example, you can
think of being surrounded by monsters and low on hit points as two
seperate problems:
1) surrounded by monsters
2) low on hitpoints.
Wombat characters are good at dealing with problem 1 (ie, they are
good at killing stuff) but less equipped to deal with problem 2 (ie
they are less likely to have the means for healing themselves).
Healers, priests etc are the opposite: They can deal with 2 far more
easily than 1. As the game currently stands, a wombat's God will help
out with the problem they are less able to deal with themselves (the
HP), leaving them to casually mop up the monsters once healed. They
get the best of both worlds. On the other hand a healer's god will
help out wth the thing they could do for themselves anyway (healing),
and leave them surrounded by nasties that will just strip those HP
right back down again. This is probably one of the reasons (though not
the only reason by any means) that barbs and valks seem to be more
ascendable than healers and priests.

So, a low-HP prayer might yield an instant HP top-up from say, Set or
Odin. A healer's deity might might choose to smite/paralyse and neaby
hostiles instead of/ in addition to addressing the low-HP problem.
Then again, maybe healers are supposed to be harder to play, so the
Deity would just give out a POW boost, or a memory refresh of the of
the healing spell, since the god expects healers to cast their own
damn healing spells. By customising the way Gods interact with the
player, play balance for each class/alignment can be very delicately
fine-tuned.

This would also make conversion mid-game a far more interesting
proposition. Imagine if (for instance) the chaotic healer God favoured
smiting, while the lawful and neutral ones just wanted to heal you all
the time, which you are perfectly capable of doing for yourself,
thankyou very much. Suddenly converting to chaotic immediately post-
quest could become the optimum behaviour for ascension, so that lawful/
neutral ascensions gain kudos.


Differing tolerances:
*********************
Closely connected to the above, gods might have differing ideas about
what constitutes a problem worth solving.
Perhaps Huan-Ti is a hard-liner when it comes to nutrition and will
only relieve hunger when the player is weak from hunger, but Crom will
happily feed you the moment you tip into 'hungry'. Some Gods might
even refuse to feed you they see comestibles in your inventory.
Conversely, Huan-ti might gladly help you out when you are down to
15HP, while Crom considers anyone with more than 5HP well able to look
after themselves.

Deities might also have individual ranges for prayer timeouts. Some
might be more forgiving than others regarding the slaughter of
peacefuls. Some might be quick to welcome converts from the other side
of the pantheon, others might require more convincing than a single
unicorn sacrifice. Some might not be too bothered if you kill their
priest and convert their altar, others will chase you from one end of
the dungeon to the other with divine minions if you even try.

The Voices of the Gods:
***********************
It has been noted that all the nethack deities -even the godesses-
have "booming" voices. A few different adjectives for would help
characterise the gods a little. It has also been suggested (and even
patched, IIRC) that one of the tourist gods should have a lisp, true
to the discworld source mythos.

Favoured/ persecuted animals:
*****************************
Some gods may have favoured animals that they wouldn't want to you to
kill and/or sacrifice. Odin had 2 pet ravens, for instance, and so
might expect his followers therefore to treat ravens with the same
respect they do co-aligned unicorns.
Tyr, in the other hand (pun intended) might give extra brownie points
to anyone who can kill a wolf and offer it up, after that nasty Fenris
episode.
Many, if not most of the gods have animals with which the can be
associated, and which appear in nethack.

Gifts:
******
When conferring gigfts, some gods will prefer to dish out spellbooks
or spell-knowledge, others weapons, others blessings/ golden glows/
words of wisdom/ AC/ pets/ whatever.

NPC-Priests:
************
The temple-priests of the different Gods could have deity-appropriate
attributes, spells, speech and inventories.

PC-Priests
**********
Wow, now that would really be interesting! Suddenly the fact that
priests don't have a pantheon of their own becomes a real feature
rather than a cute gimmick.

Other means of differentiation:
*******************************
I'm sure there are loads, please post them as you think of them.


OK, So what?
************

Now, a patch to implement all of this represents a major coding
challenge, I know, and sadly I'm no coder otherwise I'd already be
working on it. What I was hoping from this post was to start
generating ideas about the characters the different Gods might have.
My myth-fu is weak, but I know some of you lot are very well versed in
the source mythoseses. If we can start building behaviour profiles for
the individual deities, maybe we can start to whet the interest of
some patch writer or even TDT themselves. If a total-deity-
differentiation patch is unfeasible, maybe a set of smaller patches
could be made: A "voices of the Gods" patch, a "deity-appropriate
spells for NPCs" patch, and so on.

The Gods of nethack:
********************
(This handy quick-reference list blatantly stolen from
http://boards1.wizards.com/showthread.php?p=12481308 (which attributes
it to a nethack wiki). The URL above also includes a very handy
rap*** for each deity.

Archeologist: Quetzalcoatl/Camaxtli/Huhetotl
Barbarian: Mitra/Crom/Set
Caveman: Anu/Ishtar/Anshar
Healer: Athena/Hermes/Poseidon
Knight: Lugh/Brigit/Manannan Mac Lir
Monk: Shan Lai Ching/Chih Sung-tzu/Huan Ti
Priests have any god
Ranger: Mercury/Venus/Mars
Rogue: Issek/Mog/Kos
Samurai: Amaterasu Omikami/Raijin/Susanowo
Tourist: Blind Io/The Lady/Offler
Valkyrie: Tyr/Odin/Loki
Wizard: Ptah/Thoth/Anhur

.

Quantcast