User:Phol ende wodan/FavorProposal
This is a proposal to overhaul NetHack's religion system.
Contents
Main Points
- Sacrifice no longer grants gifts; prayer does that.
- Change god anger into favor, which can be either positive or negative.
- Remove alignment record. Alignment gains and penalties now influence favor.
- Fully disentangle Luck from Religion. Luck is not removed, but it no longer interacts with your deity or vice versa.
Points that this will not address
On the big list of ideas for overhauling these systems, there are also some other categories. In the interest of keeping this proposal as minimal as possible while also being comprehensive, it does not include them. They may still be considered as additions to this, but aren't necessary to make this work.
- Complete Luck removal.
- Other ideas for rebalancing Luck around the lack of religion. The main effect of this proposal on Luck should be that you can no longer altar farm it, which may create an undue need for unicorns in the game; but fixing that isn't a priority here.
- Alignment differentiation (the sort of things like lawful characters having extra divinely enforced penalties and restrictions).
- New item gifts. Assume in this proposal that artifacts are the only valid item gifts are the regular artifacts.
- New prayer boons. This proposal treats gaining an artifact as a prayer boon; apart from that the prayer boons remain the same as in vanilla and are described below.
- New crowning effects.
- Priest donations routine and effects.
- Alignment record fixes (incompatible with this proposal).
Core Mechanics
You can now sacrifice any food (with the possible exception of tins, depending on whether tins allow abusing sacrifice via making it easy to package up corpses and tote it all to an altar.)
Sacrificing only increases favor (and converts altars); it does not grant gifts. You obtain gifts by asking your god for them, e.g. via prayer when you have no troubles.
Prayer timeout is not changed at all, in how it is calculated and set every time you pray. The difference is that praying before the timeout is gone can still work, depending on the amount of favor you have; see below. However, it is no longer possible to reduce prayer timeout through sacrifice.
This proposal assumes that the nutrition system has previously been changed such that there is a finite amount of permafood in the dungeon, and there is no way for the player to survive indefinitely (ignoring extinction, assuming monsters generate indefinitely) by eating only monster corpses.
Godly Favor
A stat that represents your standing with your god. Positive values indicate that your god is happy with you; negative values indicate that your god is unhappy with or angry at you. Favor takes over from Luck for a lot of religion-based effects, such as deciding whether you'll get a gift from your god.
It doesn't have to be so granular as anger is in vanilla. The domain of possible favor values is, tentatively, -10,000 to +10,000. At 0, your god is indifferent towards your progress; at the maximum, they are prepared to seat you at their right hand when you ascend; at the minimum, they are barely restraining themselves from busting out the wide-angle disintegration beams.
Favor has no timeouts, and will only be changed by your character taking actions that concern your god or your devotion to your role or alignment. Characters begin the game with +500 favor, as they have been heralded from birth as their god's instrument. (Possibly, Priests will start with extra favor, and separately, possibly the 500 should be fuzzed a bit).
When you pray, if you have remaining prayer timeout, 2.5 times its amount is first subtracted directly from your favor. This can bring it below 0, and it is resolved before the actual prayer is. If you have a ton of favor, this would allow you to pray two or more times in quick succession without angering your god (though it would get used up quickly).
If your favor is negative when you pray, you do not become invulnerable, and your god smites you when the prayer is finished, with effects determined by how in disfavor you are. The effects are the same as vanilla, with the added penalty that your favor is reduced even further.
Converting yourself at an altar is mostly the same: you must pray on a crossaligned altar while in disfavor with your god. Possibly you need to be below a certain threshold of disfavor.
Effects of favor
Favor's effects are primarily realized when you pray to your god.
In order to enter the Quest, you must have a certain positive amount of favor, as the equivalent to the current testing for pious alignment record. The one exception is if you have so far been atheist; in this case, you are not beholden to the gods, so this test is skipped. (This is to prevent atheists being forced to play the game in a way that satisfies the god they don't believe in).
Attempts to convert altars are also influenced by favor; the main effect is that if your favor is negative the attempt will fail most of the time. (Your experience level still plays a larger factor, though.)
Prayer benefits
In general, the terminology used is that troubles are ailments your character has that get fixed by your god, gifts are physical items granted by your god (currently only artifact weapons), and boons are any sort of benefit (including gifts) granted by your god.
You will only ever get beneficial effects from your god when your favor is positive. When your god does so, some favor will be spent, decreasing it (the god has provided for you, and expects you to be more competent after receiving their aid). Fixing problems will generally spend less favor than giving you things; for example, fixing a minor trouble like a single lost ability point would cost very little favor, comparatively. In general, you need to have the requisite amount of positive favor in order to get some effect from prayer; this prevents favor from being dropped below 0 by getting the effect.
The order in which troubles are fixed is not changed from vanilla; this table doesn't denote the order in which they'll be fixed.
| Effect | Favor cost |
|---|---|
| Major Troubles | |
| Petrification, sliming, strangulation | 200 |
| Stuck in lava or rock | 150 |
| Fainting from hunger | 300 |
| Lycanthropy | 250 |
| Illness or food poisoning | 200 |
| Overtaxed or worse, and your Strength is 4 points below where it should be | As much as you have to restore the requisite Str |
| Low HP | 100 |
| Cursed levitation source | 100 |
| Cursed blindness source | 120 |
| Minor Troubles | |
| Punishment | 100 |
| Cursed fumbling source | 90 |
| Cursed worn or wielded item or loadstone | 80 per cursed item |
| Cursed saddle | 80 |
| Wounded legs | 70 |
| Attribute loss | 30 per lost attribute point |
| Temporary blindness, stunning, confusion, hallucination | 1 per remaining turns |
Praying with enough positive favor and no troubles can result in your god giving you a gift or a boon, if you are favored enough. Like fixing troubles, this subtracts the listed amount of favor from your current favor.
| Amount | Boon | Ineligible if |
|---|---|---|
| 1000 | Your wielded weapon is blessed if not already blessed, and any erosion is repaired. (It can't be cursed - that would have counted as a trouble.) | Your wielded weapon is already blessed and uneroded. |
| 2000 | Golden glow: either regain a lost level or gain 5 max HP, and restore any lost HP or Strength. | You are at full Strength AND have no lost levels AND are at full HP AND your max HP is no more than 10 times your XL. |
| 3000 | Light blue aura: uncurse all possessions. | You have no cursed possessions. |
| 4000 | Grant a spellbook. | You have not trained any spell skills. |
| 5000 | Grant an appropriate artifact. | |
| 6000 | Grant intrinsic telepathy, speed, or stealth, in that order. | You have all three of these already. |
| 8000 | You are crowned. | You are not standing on a coaligned altar. |
Smiting
Effects resolved when you are disfavored by a god and try to interact with it. These effects are more or less the same in vanilla with some minor changes; the important part is the favor ranges.
| If favor is below | Effect |
|---|---|
| 0 | God is displeased. No further effect. |
| -1000 | Wisdom and maximum Wisdom decrease by 1, and lose a level. |
| -2000 | Your inventory is randomly cursed. |
| -3000 | You become punished. |
| -4000 | A hostile minion is summoned. |
| -5000 | Your whole inventory is unblessed, then randomly cursed. |
| -6000 | You are zapped by a non-fatal but very highly damaging lightning bolt that ignores reflection. If you take no damage due to shock resistance, the wide-angle disintegration beam comes out. |
| -7000 | You are blasted by a wide-angle disintegration beam. If you survive, three hostile minions are summoned. |
After you are smitten, your favor is decreased by between 200 and 600 points.
Smiting by gods that are not your own will randomly resolve either the -2000, -3000 or -4000 effect.
Ways to influence favor
Many of the old alignment bonuses and penalties and Luck interactions are folded into this.
The exact amount of favor gained or lost will be fuzzed up or down by a random amount of up to 20% of the listed amount or 20 points, whichever is greater. If this fuzzing would make the favor change contrary to its intended purpose (say a +5 favor change got fuzzed to a negative number for a Positive effect), the favor change will be 0.
If an effect as listed as "Either", it counts as neither Positive nor Negative. This is helpful for alignment-dependent effects.
Note that "crossaligned" here means "non-coaligned", and includes Moloch-aligned things.
In the following table, let X = 1 for Chaotic, 2 for Neutral, and 3 for Lawful. Let Y = X-2 = -1 for Chaotic, 0 for Neutral, and 1 for Lawful (for simplicity).
If a corpse is involved, let S = the amount of sacrifice value for that corpse, where S = 20 * difficulty.
| Killing-Related | ||
|---|---|---|
| Cause | Type | Value or Range |
| Killing a quest friendly | Negative | -1200 |
| Killing the quest leader | Negative | -8000 |
| Killing an always-peaceful (murder) | Negative | (X-1)*-400 |
| Killing a tame monster (including your steed) | Negative | -800 |
| Killing a coaligned unicorn | Negative | (X-1)*-300 |
| Killing a monster while it was peaceful (didn't anger it first) | Negative | (X-1)*-150 |
| Killing a non-renegade priest of your own god | Negative | -2000 |
| Killing a crossaligned priest | Positive | 120 |
| Killing your quest nemesis | Positive | 500 |
| Sacrificing | ||
| Sacrificing a former pet | Negative | S * -20 |
| Sacrificing a coaligned unicorn on a coaligned altar | Negative | -500 |
| Sacrificing on another god's altar and failing to convert it | Negative | -200 |
| Sacrificing an unidentified imitation Amulet of Yendor | Negative | -10 (identifies the amulet) |
| Sacrificing an identified imitation Amulet of Yendor | Negative | -100 |
| Same-race sacrifice | Either | -2*S*(1 + 2*Y) |
| Regular corpse sacrifice | Positive | S |
| Sacrificing a crossaligned unicorn on a coaligned altar | Positive | 500 |
| Converting an altar successfully | Positive | 400 |
| Sacrificing permafood | Positive | Half the nutrition value of the food |
| Interacting with Priests | ||
| Angering a priest of your own god | Negative | -800 |
| Donating 0 to a coaligned priest | Negative | -40 |
| Donating 200*XL to 400*XL to a coaligned priest, while in disfavor | Positive | 100 |
| Donating more than 600*XL to a coaligned priest | Positive | 150 |
| Prayer | ||
| Praying on a crossaligned altar while disfavored after you have already permaconverted | Negative | -1000 |
| Praying on a crossaligned altar while not disfavored enough to permaconvert | Negative | -400 |
| During the permaconversion process, before you change gods (used for smiting purposes) | Negative | -2000 |
| Praying with nonzero prayer timeout | Negative | Your remaining prayer timeout * -2.5 |
| Having your god fix a trouble or bestow something on you | Negative | Depends on what you got |
| Completing a prayer and getting no effect, while not on an altar | Positive | 30 |
| Completing a prayer and getting no effect, while on a coaligned altar | Positive | 80 |
| Completing a prayer and getting no effect, while in a coaligned temple | Positive | 120 |
| Praying in Gehennom | 0 (god can't do anything even if they wanted, but isn't mad) | |
| Role-specific | ||
| Archeologist digging up a grave | Negative | -160 |
| Rogue paying for an item in a shop normally | Negative | -10 |
| Knight caitiff/glutton behavior | Negative | -30 |
| Samurai attacking a peaceful or trapped monster | Negative | -30 |
| Monk eating meat | Negative | -70 |
| Alignment-dependent | ||
| Angering a peaceful non-priest | Negative | X*-15 |
| Lawful lying to a vault guard | Negative | -30 |
| Genociding anything | Negative | (X-1)*75 |
| Lawful attacking with poisoned weapon | Negative | -15 |
| Catching a peaceful creature in a trap you created | Either | -20 * Y |
| Non-Archeologist digging up a grave | Either | -25 * Y |
| Consorting with a foocubus | Either | -20 * Y |
| Direct theft from shop / declining shop damage | Either | -30 * Y |
| Freeing a prisoner | Positive | X*30 |
| Lawful helping a monster out of a trap you didn't create | Positive | 15 |
| Other | ||
| Cannibalism | Negative | -600 |
| Kicking or engraving on your god's altar | Negative | -150 |
| Kicking or engraving on another god's altar | Positive | 50 (but other god smites you) |
| Bringing your quest artifact back to your leader, completing the Quest | Positive | 50 |
| Entering Gehennom for the first time | Positive | 100 |
| Returning from Gehennom with the Amulet of Yendor | Positive | 200 |
| Entering the Planes | Positive | 400 |
| Every 10th turn you spend with zero prayer timeout | Positive | 1 (not fuzzed, and will not bring favor above 500) |
Sacrifice clues
Sacrificing and gaining favor will give you a clue as to your updated favor.
| New favor is at least | Message | Hallucinatory message |
|---|---|---|
| Below -4000 | You sense only that <god> incredibly hates you. | Your mouth tastes bitter for some reason. |
| -4000 | <god> still seems furious. | <god> still seems cosmic (not a new fact). |
| -2000 | <god> still seems angry. | <god> still seems tenebrous. |
| -1000 | <god> still seems annoyed. | <god> still seems heavy. |
| -500 | <god> still seems displeased. | <god> still seems bummed. |
| -200 | <god> seems mostly mollified. | <god> seems less allergic. |
| 0 | You have a feeling of reconciliation. * | Overall, there is a smell of fried onions. |
| 1 | You're not sure whether <god> noticed. | You feel washed out. |
| 500 | You feel that <god> is mildly pleased. | The air seems full of benevolence. |
| 1000 | <god> seems appreciative. | <god> is sending you good vibes. |
| 2000 | You feel that <god> is pleased. | <god> is pleased as punch. |
| 3000 | You feel fulfilled. | You feel pumped up. |
| 4000 | You feel an inner fire. | You feel spicy. |
| 5000 | You feel strangely zealous. | You have an urge to become a missionary. |
| 6000 | You feel spiritually satisfied. | You feel eudaimonious. |
| 7000 | You feel close to <god>. | You feel a deep empathic connection with <god>. |
| 8000 | You feel favored. | You hear <god> place a bet on you. |
| 9000 | You feel especially favored. | <god> is rooting for you. |
The reconciliation message is used in place of the regular one when your favor goes from negative to positive.
If you sacrifice in such a way that you lose favor, you get only the message "The altar trembles. <god> seems to disapprove." regardless of where your favor ended up. If hallucinating, you get "The altar's massage function activates."
