Becoming God-Proof

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Let's face it: You can't play a whole game of POWDER without pissing off at least one of the deities. And, like all angry gods, they'll wait until the most inconvenient time to smite you into a smoking pile of ash. So, how do we avoid getting sniped by a god in the middle of a great run?

One route to avoid these problems is to keep the deities happy. except that it's impossible to keep all of the Gods happy. If you keep some happy enough, they can protect you, but you may miss out on some boons. The most dangerous punishments (and some others) can be handled with chosen intrinsics as below. Note that artifacts can also provide any of the needed intrinsics. The three biggies all require 100 God Points, so you can keep an eye on the prayer screen, and start preparing when an angry god is building up enough points to punish you.

Contents

Agnosticism

There is one general route to avoid having to worry about the deities. If you follow No One God, then none of the other deities can punish you. You also won't receive any boons. You won't gain any skills or spells on level up, and you get pretty pathetic dice. So, this is a poor long-term option. However, Agnosticism does let you stay safe for a level or two while the gods work out their anger, especially when you want to to switch from one god to their enemy.

Lesser Punishments

Curses and disenchants can generally be handled by keeping a stock of equipment to remedy them: Holy Water, and scrolls of Remove Curse are obvious, and keeping your equipment blessed will help limit the inconvenience of curses. Save some scrolls of Enchant Weapon and Enchant Armour for when your key artifacts get nerfed, and spares for more commonplace equipment. Sleep and paralysis can be blocked with scarce intrinsics from artifacts, or just toughed out. Summons can be teleported away from, and then treated as a free fight.

Flamestrike

Flamestrike is the easiest punishment to protect ourselves from: 6d6 points of fire damage. It's common, and easily prevented with Fire Resistance. This is quite easy to acquire: A Ring of Fire Resistance is the most reliable solution. You can also get temporary Fire Resistance from a suitable corpse, but watch out for the vulnerabilities to cold or silver that might come with it! If you're currently playing as a spellcaster, you might use Preserve to keep some of these corpses around. As of version 116, you get a few turns warning ("You smell sulfur") before the flamestrike, making it much easier to prepare.

Poison

Poison is the next punishment we need to concern ourselves with. It's a little easier to deal with, but still nasty if you're caught unprepared, and ALL of the gods do it. Without a remedy, you will suffer an average of 48 points of damage over the next 20 turns! The key to surviving this punishment is, of course, Poison Resistance. Your best bet is to keep an eye out for an Amulet of Poison Resistance, or learn the Slow Poison spell. Having the Cure Poison spell or a Cure Potion is also helpful, since that will also prevent the final damage (average 8 points).

Polymorph

Polymorph is the last and nastiest of the punishments to worry about -- you will be turned into one of a few wimpy monsters, and Polymorph Control won't help with this polymorph. As usual, if you get killed (did we mention wimpy?), you get slammed with System Shock, permanently losing 10% of your hit points! The Unchanging intrinsic will prevent polymorphing altogether, including this one, and it's provided by the Amulet of Unchanging. If you have some other way to polymorph, even a random result will probably be better than the punitive form... but polymorph control will let you choose a better form, or just change back to yourself. It's also wise to keep a wand or scroll of teleport on hand in case you're in the middle of a fight.

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