u/Advanced-Ad3026

It's quite a simple suggestion, when Okawaru offers you the capstone ability of an acquirement choice of weapons and armour, the player could also be offered the choice to reject the offer (as with Ru or Ashenzari) and then you have to wait an experience level (or some other measure of time) before it will be offered again.

Beyond that though everything is the same, you only get one acquirement of each for the whole game.

Why do this?

Currently I think there are two issues with Okawaru, both of which this solves

1. Perverse training incentives early game that rely on meta knowledge

If you are going Okawaru, and for any reason you want to stick to a single weapon type or a particular weight class of armour (heavy vs light), then you are incentivized prior to getting the acquirement reward not to train any other weapon skills.

This stops you playing naturally during the early game, and forces you to restrict your training to optimize the acquirement reward. The same is true for light vs heavy armour, if you are a melee brute like a minotaur or a formicid who wants plate armour or above then you should avoid training dodging at all costs early game and instead dump unnecessary XP into armour to weight the rewards odds in your favour.

I can see the argument that the current system forces you to re-build around a good acquirement result, which is interesting, but Okawaru is already a restrictive god (no allies), and you can already game the system by weighting your training and putting off the acquirement.

If the ability offered a "reject and re-roll later" option, then all of these issues vanish, without actually increasing the power level of the god (as it will still almost always be optimal to take the first offer for the power spike).

2. Okawaru has a very high variability in their utility which doesn't become apparent until it's too late

I think this one is also not necessarily a problem, but it feels very bad when you've sunk a lot of time into a character, and around mid-lair you suddenly realise you aren't getting anything useful from your god for your build.

It rarely happens, but not that rarely, and I don't think any other god is like this. There is a degree of this with a few gods, and that's fine, but with Okawaru it's really all or nothing.

I also think it's a flavour miss that the martial god is the one who isn't the best at handing out weapons and armour (versus gozag for example, who you can generate shops with all game).

Being able to re-roll the reward fixes this too, and takes out a lot of the pain when you get a bad roll.

I get that the skill is leaning into what you are offered, but it really does feel miserable when your power fantasy of being an axe cleaving specialist is cut short because you trained for a polearm for a bit in the dungeon.

Overall, I think the real issue with current Okawaru is the first point above. You play in such a stiff and artificial way if you pick him, and it just doesn't feel right for the martial god.

I don't think this is necessary, but if the option to re-roll the acquirement at higher levels is seen as too powerful, you could add a single "wrath effect" when you do so.

"You decline Okawaru's gifts. The god of battle wishes to test your worthiness..." (then he hits you with the durably summoned hostiles wrath effect)