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Ah, the travails of a game that started off as a NetHack clone and got rewritten into, well, what it is now. Reminds me of how remnants the pre-DCSS Holy spell school (healing) survived until 0.5 in the code. FWIW, I've seen roguelikes (some 7DRLs, and I think Infra Arcana) that implement corpses th...

Realistically, I think a tournament banner and YAFM or two are about all that's likely to come out of "saving" Ignis. Anything more would require substantial balancing work, something the devs seem unlikely to do for an obscure conduct. Though a nice easter egg with no balance implications...

LOS reduction would certainly make sense as an offhand (there was even once an item whose name would be perfect: the lantern of shadows). I'm sure some people would argue it would be too powerful: the original item was "balanced" by being a double negative spell enhancer, occupying a weapo...

Unintentional bias in pseudorandom results isn't rare at all. Oh, you don't even need to go that far. That melee bug was due to something as simple as a developer putting a "+=" instead of a "==" somewhere in the code. NetHack had a bug that persisted for nine years that was due...

While Siegurt's test shows this to merely be a coincidence, I feel like people are being a little overly snarky here. Remember, there was once a bug that doubled all melee damage that made it into a stable release. A bug that causes a rarely-used scroll to always give the same reasonable result? I c...

How about "Sacrifice Loyalty" or "Sacrifice Leadership", with "No being of any kind will fight for you" as the description? That keeps it "Sacrifice <abstract quality>" while still being a lot clearer than "Sacrifice Love", and the description avoids...

It's been proposed before, but I still think heal-on-explore is a workable option. The rate could be variable, so that short/small but intense branches (think Tomb) don't become hopelessly difficult; variable rates could even balance out the most common criticism of heal-on-explore, namely that Craw...

Without a food clock, DCSS, like nethack, is a game where you should do every tedious trick in the book to eke out marginal improvements. Are there monsters that you can infinitely divide and kill to get god gifts and random drops? Are you mathematically guaranteed to get a certain set of items, in...

An easy way to eliminate the "swap to a different weapon at low HP" problem would be to make the Sword of Power be cursed unless you're at full HP. That actually might go well with making it scale with INT in addition to HP - it would be a weapon for characters who use melee but in a pinch...

Not to mention that your loot filter wouldn't be static - not even over the same character's lifespan. Your L1 fighter-type character is probably very interested in runed/glowing hand axes and war axes. Your L20 bruiser who already has a nice battleaxe isn't.

I had my own proposal for reducing item clutter a couple years back, which is similar but not identical to the "strong" version of duvessa's. I still think it's a good idea, and should be extended to monster armor. If you wanted to keep the "loot box" element of killing monsters,...

The flavour change is easy for Pikel and Kirke But I like the flavour of freeing the slaves, "their enchantments persist" turns it into just a band of humans led by a kobold. Couldn't neutrals be changed to never attack instead? Seconded on making neutrals never attack. Honestly, that's m...

Suggested revision: When Ds get the first mutation of a facet, they have a chance to veto it. Doing so removes that facet from any subsequent generation, and instantly gives another facet of the same tier, along with its first mutation. This way, you don't have a noob trap of delaying mutations. You...

Things that get even less traction than the usual Tavern idea: - Items that are very powerful, but whose power is heavily dependent on the player remembering to use them properly. - Things that require a substantial amount of coding - NetHack ideas Given that this is basically an amulet of life savi...

I would argue that if you're taking >25% max HP from conventional sources, you're probably in a LOT more danger than if you're taking that damage from torment. Neither situation is good, but torment is unable to kill you directly, and it's also fairly likely the tormenting monster is near the edge o...

As duvessa mentioned, the weirdly gimped nature of D:1 really needs to go. Slogging through a morass of bats and hobgoblins and daggers and leather armors gets really dull really fast. Put it this way: would the game suffer much if you started as an XL2/XL3 character on D:2, and everyone began with ...

I know that means that if you're totally safe and want to regen and then go back to bloodless you've got two extra keypresses, and I'd be happy to hear a suggested solution; however I feel it's important for a bloodless vampire to not be able to regenerate and stay bloodless easily if they're in on...

And here I was hoping we'd start seeing petty wights on D:1 and small wights on D:3.

I really dislike monsters that exist primarily to teach some tactic or mechanic. It would be less intrusive to display a splash screen saying "you can walk away from monsters" at the start of each game. I feel that it's fine for a monster to exist to teach some tactic - as long as the con...

The issue here is that there are a ton of no damage hits and a ton of misses. Did any of you play Morrowind? That game is notorious for its combat system and this imp situation reminded me of exactly that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNXYrAkUntU Having your character do an action in a video gam...

1) It's an arbitrary breakpoint, one which makes fights occurring at 99% XP significantly different from those occurring at 1% XP. I'm guessing that by "healing on experience" they meant "healing on experience", not "healing on level up". Oh true. The problem of wasted...

I'm sure this has been suggested before but I forget what the arguments against it were: Give deep dwarves (generous) healing on experience, no other sources of healing besides potions of heal wounds. Bonus: do the same for MP (but really, really generous and fairy dragon-style MP-shaving The p...

Invisible states like this seem pretty much unworkable. Crawl is open-source. Therefore it's possible to build a tool that will track these states, given that they depend on information that is at some point available to the player. I can easily imagine doing this programmatically by directly readin...

Double or even triple melee damage? Increased melee damage is a distinct design space from the other amulets, and fits into the theme established by staves of earth and statue form. Name could be something like "Amulet of crushing hands". The only other option would seem to be a massive bo...

Specific idea: A single-target conjuration whose damage is proportional to the number of non-wall squares around you. If that's too gameable, it could be instead based on the number of non-wall squares in a 5x5 or 7x7 square around you. The damage/MP of the fully "open" version of the spel...

A while ago I suggested "abstracting away" all monster weapons, a proposal that got some attention but ultimately went nowhere. Perhaps hobgoblins would be a good way to test that concept: up their damage to 8 or 9, and disable weapon use for them. That would probably be better than giving...

You've got two major things going here: ⋅ Size and stats changes based on nutrition ⋅ Innate Evolution mutation The first is a major pain in the butt, which is what I believe duvessa is trying to say. Having to juggle food to manage your character's current state causes a ton of ...

Okay, I understand now. I don't think you can realistically avoid said convergence in a roguelike such as crawl though. The natural tendency will be for loot/XP to normalize and make hard starts easier rather than leaving them hard...while also making some of the easy start advantages less meaningf...

Bikeshedding thing: Handbooks and manuals are pretty close to the same thing IRL. I'd suggest a more 'magical' name like grimoire, tome, or volume.

Don't unify the commands. Both the contexts in which you use (W)ear and (P)ut on commands, and the results of using them, are completely different. Even unifying the equip times between jewellery and armor would only (partially) solve the second problem and do very little for the first. With a unifi...

"the central place for this kind of discussion is on the CDO wiki," -from forum description. Is it talking about this wiki? crawl.chaosforge.org How is that suppose to be done? No, they're talking about this wiki . You know, the one that looks like Wikipedia circa 2002 and has literally r...

and also by giving immunity to being netted again and again. The easiest way to do this would be to limit monsters to carrying one net each. There would be no spoilers to look up, whereas a new immunity invites questions like: how long does net immunity last/is it like paralysis immunity/do the two...

*just by rN, not by torment immunity: undead players aren't affected It checks torment but not RN? How is that anything but a bug? Because the damaging miscast effects predate rN+ giving torment resistance. And more generally, because (non-plain) mummy death curses haven't changed in like a decade.

how about only counting the first game played for each species/background? I can't believe that you guys are actually seriously discussing this idea. The bar is pretty high for the "worst idea ever" title, but this certainly qualifies as a candidate. An average player probably loses 20-so...

I think the loss is more minor than you think, but a way to do both would be to make a "ghost bank": for each Pan lord that comes somewhat close to matching a ghost (similar stats, matches a couple spells, etc), just rebrand it a ghost, or maybe as a Pan-twisted version of the player, with...

Personally, I think that randomly replacing some Pan lords with old-style XL25+ player ghosts during the Orb Run might be fun. It's thematic, and basically a lateral move in terms of difficulty. I suppose there's still the issue that people would check bones files, but I'd think that would be less p...

I personally think a time-based limit is better, combined with duvessa's suggestion of making scores independent of when the game is played, while using stats to handicap combos based on difficulty. In theory, an overall time limit shouldn't change the metagame much, since there already is an overal...

Character-based dungeon generation is almost always a no-go (yes there are exceptions, and yes they are controversial). That being said, a Xom-themed vault with powerful but perpetually confused monsters sounds like an interesting idea, and would probably be a good fit for Pandemonium.

Okay, so I can understand (and don't feel like analyzing) all the arguments about why Jiyva shouldn't be allowed in the early game. But what on earth is up with Lugonu? The fact that you can start with her from turn one indicates that she's not ill-suited to the early game, so why is it that you onl...

I always thought the removal of MD was a huge mistake from a flavor standpoint. As the OP says, dwarfs' mythological roots go back way beyond Tolkien, while minotaurs being a generic fantasy monster is pretty much straight out of D&D - at best you can date it to CS Lewis. The creature from Greek...

Hmm, turns out they indeed don't give HP, but do give piety: http://s-z.org/neil/git/?p=crawl.git;a=blob;f=crawl-ref/source/mon-death.cc#l2293 http://s-z.org/neil/git/?p=crawl.git;a=blob;f=crawl-ref/source/god-conduct.cc#l772 The relevant lines would seem to be && !mons_is_object(mons.type) ...

It would be pretty easy to make armor give both an additive penalty and a multiplicative one, so that it doesn't get any easier to cast low-level spells in plate, but you have a more logical difficulty curve. It would be a strict nerf to heavy armor spellcasters, of course, and I don't know that it'...

It seems like monster-castable shaft would just encourage people to put travel exclusions on those monsters, then come back and deal with them once the next few levels are cleared out. Also, Hellmonk's second point is well worth considering. Breaking game flow is unlikely to violate any lofty 'philo...

Not to mention that many modern laptop keyboards make those keys pretty inconvenient to access. Also, there's no obvious way to access them on a Chromebook. While that particular case is a non-issue at the moment as anyone playing DCSS on a Chromebook is either a) playing it on webtiles which alread...

I always feel like discussions like this want to bring the game closer and closer to simply being a randomized sequence of tactical encounters gradually increasing in difficulty. No, I'm not saying nothing should ever be removed, but the "simulationist" aspects of a game should not be disc...

I've always been a fan of Brogue's "At worst, it could kill you in <x> hits" description on monsters. If something like that could be made to accurately include GDR, it would go a reasonable way towards demystifying the property without being misleading.

Monster vs Monster sounds like a good idea in the abstract, but the reality is that it encourages incredibly tedious behavior, where you're constantly luring difficult monsters towards each other to soften them up. Hell, I could imagine a heavily armored character dragging a bunch of weaker orcs aro...

Why not add rTorm to !resistance instead? That's a potion that gets pretty useless late-game, as your AC, EV, and innate/equipped resistances take over protecting you against elemental damage. This would make the potion useful for the whole game, while adding a strategic element to its use early on....

I like the idea - non-caster assassins are ridiculously weak outside the early game (to the point of unplayability), and giving them a god is a good way to address that. However, high MP costs will do nothing to deter using Hexes. Your average enchanter is spending just enough MP to get the target u...

A good simplification of this idea that won't vomit a huge amount of mostly-meaningless digits on the screen would be to somehow distinguish messages that came from *this* turn. No, Crawl does not strictly advance by turns, but showing the player which messages came from the last 10aut could be usef...

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