dislekcia wrote:Gods are mysterious when you first play for a reason,
Except, in actual practice, they won't be mysterious when you first play, because there will be a wiki detailing all of the information (and to a much lesser extent they're not mysterious even now if you look hard enough). You should expect people to read the wiki because the whole point of the game is making careful strategic decisions and each god has the potential to ruin half a dozen dungeon runs before you understand everything there is to understand about them. Trying to guess what the gods like or dislike by trial and error is just an annoying detour from the core gameplay, and not even reliable, since you can't possibly guess every possibility. (For example, +1 piety from Glowing Guardian,
only if you kill a Wraith, Vampire, Zombie, Serpent, Imp, or Warlock, of course, and
only if they're equal or higher level,
unless you finish them with BURNDAYRAZ... of course. This example is from Alpha.)
(Tangentially: If you weren't providing the in-game wiki it would be even worse because a player is not going to necessarily remember relevant details, if they, like me, play every now and then. This is frustrating.)
dislekcia wrote:even once we have the nice shiny codex (think integrated wiki, kinda) in the game, we don't want to tell you about gods from the word go. You have to discover what they do through playing...
This is a fine and good solution. I would like to suggest that for gods you've unlocked, you list the number of facts about the god that the player has not yet discovered, thus giving them something to work toward and eventually granting them confidence that the god isn't going to surprise them with some bizarre hit way down the road. Again, this is information that the player will have any way if they just inconvenience themselves a little more.
dislekcia wrote:Yes, this sometimes means you lose a round, but so does accidentally clicking a higher level monster.
That's another thing I would suggest changing, and I know a number of other people have suggested it here on the forums that it confirm before letting you make an attack that will kill you (unless you dodge). There's a reason chess forces the players to play into checkmate instead just letting their king be taken due to an oversight.
dislekcia wrote:God strategies and knowledge are a sign of mastery of the game's first set of systems, we want players to feel like they're uncovering awesome new knowledge and being smart when they figure out how to use a particular god. That's what they're all about.
Plus roguelikes traditionally have unidentified item drops, the gods are our take on a non-full-knowledge system. It's just that you learn it over multiple plays instead of during one, longer, play session. Frankly, if we simply gave you everything about the gods up front, they would lose a lot of their value to the game.
One of the things I appreciate about DD in contrast with roguelikes is that, with the exception of god information (in the beta--eventually there will be full info on a wiki somewhere anyway), it doesn't generally require memorization or note-taking, from previous games. Such notes are really just spoilers anyway since the represent knowledge about the game that cannot be achieved within a specific game session itself.