chengband and virtues

[chem]

Does anyone actively pay attention to their alignment and virtues in chengband? I realize that I never worry about it or optimize them. I'm not even sure how much they can help.

Playing a Demigod Mauler, if anyone has race/class specific comments.

[HugoVirtuoso]

Does anyone actively pay attention to their alignment and virtues in chengband? I realize that I never worry about it or optimize them. I'm not even sure how much they can help.

Playing a Demigod Mauler, if anyone has race/class specific comments.

Nope, I never paid any attention to virtues. I think chris should change the virtue system to make greater impact on gameplay.

My two cents,
HugoTheGreat2011

[chris]

Virtues matter for spellcasting and pets, but the effects are small.

For example, if you are evil trying to cast spells from a good realm, you get a penalty to your fail rates (2% or 5% depending on whether you are an Int caster or a Wis caster ... Hengband is 4% and 10%). Similarly for good players trying to cast evil spells, or non-neutral characters trying to cast Nature spells.

For pets, if you are good, you can't summon evil monsters and vice versa.

EDIT: Also, alignment effects whether certain monsters are friendly to the player. If you are evil, Saruman will be friendly. If you are good, Ents and Mycen will be friendly, etc.

[AnonymousHero]

(This was Entro, but I guess the same applies to Cheng.)

I always ignored them or metagamed them. IIRC the "rules" for how these are calculated are weird and obscure, so I think it would be best to just remove them.