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Thinking about nagas as a species I'd agree that they start out weaker than average and end up stronger, and I'm glad bel came through with actual numbers to show this. My general opinion is that species should maintain around the same relative difficulty (i.e. even if the game becomes easier, minot...

In 1., human is now biased towards strength because it gets it first. The current system doesn't have this problem. In 2., now players can figure out which stat(s) they'll get next by looking at which stats they've already gotten, which is extra work. The current system doesn't have this problem. 1...

My main point was that picking which identified consumable to use is an important decision making skill that's relevant throughout the game, and that the ID game is not only a weak gameplay decision but is a gameplay decision (rather than Russian roulette) if and only if the player has spoiler knowl...

By +2/+2/+2 I meant +2 str, +2 int, +2 dex by level 27, not changing the interval. The level-to-level implementation doesn't matter as much, but I see two obvious ways of doing it. 1. Follow a set pattern, like str>int>dex, for something like Human 04: +1 str 08: +1 int 12: +1 dex 16: +1 str 20: +1 ...

There doesn't seem to be a flavor argument for choosing all stat gains, as if anything species-based stat gains increase flavor. Crawl leans heavily on the idea that in the long term species has the strongest effect on gameplay. A DEFi picking strength every 3 levels (the strongest+dumbest deep elf)...

Identification mini game isn't such a one dimensional annoyance that it should be removed. It tests players' decision making in the early game. You need to prioritize what to identify and leverage the RNG and decide if using an unidentified consumable is the play to make and when to make it. The ID...

Thinking about it, I have to agree with the OP. First, races with fixed stat gain (HO, Og, Tr, Gh, Ha, and DE) are arguments against random stat gain, as these races work fine without it. Second, the argument that a human manually pumping int will always make a perfectly acceptable wizard regardless...

This seems like the opposite, as strong characters are much better at killing everything in a level while exploration is something of an equalizer. A minotaur will never need to ninja a rune, but the fact that you don't need to kill everything on the level is always on the table for felids. Stealth ...

DMsl isn't cast enough for spell hunger to be a meaningful effect, especially when compared to conjurations which are cast multiple times per encounter. I'd say the only reason for spell hunger to exist right now is that it gives a reason to cast lower level spells (e.g. throw flame if you can cast ...

Dungeon is probably my favorite branch of the game. There's a lot of variety (instead of a few gimmicks like the lair branches or Orc), and it's not Oops, All Bullshit like Depths. In my mind I tend to sort it into pre-Lair (10 and below) and post-Lair (10+). On the later levels you can start to see...

If you look at the top players this week, pretty much all of them spend the first 1-3 XLs training stealth exclusively. The tournament page seems to be down right now but IIRC it was similar but slightly less pronounced with last week's KoGl challenge. I'd say that if you aren't planning to use armo...

teaching the player that running away is a viable option, without actually splatting them, seems like it's worth a monster This is definitely true. However, as a new-ish player, it didn't really do that for me. Any attempts to run weren't really successful and I always end up fighting them and bein...

It's a good suggestion. The freezing clouds can do a lot of damage, but they're just an uncomplicated rC+ check with no tactical play, especially because the squares aren't marked.

Ice caves are already the deadliest of the Lair portals so removing the freezing clouds won't hurt.

I've always felt that Swamp is a more solid design than Shoals. It's a synthesis of narrative theme (a swampy environment) and mechanical effects (you have to use land effectively to avoid getting bogged down). Shoals has a bunch of weird RNG mechanics (the constantly shifting water level), an empha...

FR: Replace down/up stairs in The Snake Pit with snakes and ladders

Personally, as a player I have always liked the imp archetype of being a monster that causes you trouble in ways other than merely being a physical threat or damage sponge as 99% of monsters are. I remember when I first started out in Crawl and encountered imps, and realized I was dealing with a mo...

- Grants a massive amount of XP, more than an iron imp and over four times as much as a white or shadow imp That's very, very, very unexpected, especially since my experience with "call imp" gave me the impression that the spell was built around the concept that red imps are the weakest o...

The crimson imp has three problems: - Incredible defenses (more EV than any other imp, more HP than any non-iron imp, the ability to regenerate, and blinking) - Almost no power to kill the player (apart from the rare case of spawning with a wand) - Grants a massive amount of XP, more than an iron im...

Crawl follows a fairly consistent policy that most sources of power have hard or soft caps. Character level caps at 27, skills cap at 27 (and give less after you hit min delay or a low failure chance), you can get better artifact equipment but at a certain point it becomes "more fitting to my b...

I don't think it's a good fit for the existing tournaments, but I'd love to see something like Crypt of the Necrodancer Online Racing (CoNDOR) or A Link to the Past Randomizer Racing, basically a split screen with 2-4 people running at once. I don't think Crawl is as suited as those games as it's no...

The immediate mechanical problem with MP return is that with skilled play (i.e. the simple rule of not fighting below 50% HP) it might as well just be +30-60% MP, and a straight MP buff is much easier for a new player to understand than a random chance of return based on health. I get that this migh...

Is "pure summoner" an archetype that should be supported in Crawl? Is standing back and summoning waves of creatures for every fight interesting gameplay? Crawl doesn't have pure invokers, pure charmers, pure translocators, or pure evokers to name a few despite these being very strong scho...

Gnolls don't belong in simple and humans definitely don't. Playing gnoll well means having a mastery of all of the game's systems instead of just one. It means optimizing from every armour/weapon encountered and every spell found to make up for not excelling in any one particular area. It can make f...

My hypothesis is that after a certain point time invested starts giving diminishing returns in terms of both rank and raw score. It is written in rules. 1) There is a severe stepdown for combo points. For example, top 2 players from last tournament: 7187 Total 2656 Adjusted Total 4298 Total 2138 Ad...

I think the simplest way to do this would be a flat time limit (i.e. scoring stops after x total hours logged in eligible games). It would be the easiest to implement, easiest to explain, and wouldn't penalize any particular play schedule as it has the same effect on someone who binges on the weeken...

The problem is that inventory choice for potions and scrolls is either a no-brainer or trivially decided by character build. Think about how much time is spent playing inventory tetris versus how rarely you die due to not having a specific item in your inventory. Some consumables operate entirely at...

This is a good change.

Other things we should goldify:
Food
Ammo (other than throwing)
Scrolls
Potions
Wands

Basically goldify anything that doesn't have unique modifiers

I'm not sure how 'lack of natural regeneration' is fundamentally contradictory to any perceived tactical focus. Regeneration, itself, is a fundamentally strategic concern, the amount of hps you naturally regen during combat isn't usually relevant at all. I mean you might have legitimate concerns ab...

Honestly, Deep Dwarf's lack of natural healing is so fundamentally contradictory to the game philosophy's focus on the tactical layer that the only real fix is to remove or radically rework them.

I think duvessa nailed the issue. Let's compare demigod to human. On D:1, ++ A demigod has 34 total stat points, 42% more than human's 24 = Excluding zealots no one has gods or piety = Mediocre aptitudes don't have a significant effect on low-level characters = Experience modifiers don't have a sign...

Any change that removes minotaurs should definitely contain a new unrandart hat, The +2 horns {Horns 2, Headbutt}.

Overall I'd say demigod is mostly in a good place. "No gods" is the most elegant species drawback in the game, and it's no wonder everyone wants to rework demigods in order to steal it. Combined with stats it makes for an interesting but easy to understand character concept--through your p...

What about Beogh? It would make more sense to merge Minotaurs into Orcs to keep Beogh. In this proposal everything that used to be Orcish is now Dwarven. So you watch out for dwarven priests on D:3, take gold from the dwarven mine, and can recruit a dwarven adventuring party by worshipping Beogh, g...

ololoev wrote:
cliffracer wrote:MD merge for HO and Mi

This makes sense both in terms of gameplay and because of how epic will it be!
For years people whined: "MD was removed, get MD back!", and now it's here!

I meant "merge HO into Mi like MD was merged into HO", but your idea is much better.

thread

One of the issues brought up in the delete everything thread is that there's significant overlap between Minotaur and Hill Orc. A HO built for heavy melee is almost indistinguishable from a similarly built Mi, and Mi will almost always build for heavy armour as they have abysmal intelligence and mag...

Discussing 9 races at once is just too broad. There are actually 16 races on trial at once here. In order of mention: Ba, Ha, HO, Hu, Ko, Mf, Og, Te, Vp (ololoev) DE (Nordlicht) Mi (Shtopit) Gh, VS (bhauth) Ce, Fe (Shtopit) DD (Octopode-monk-of-XOM) Joking aside I am finding this airing of grievanc...

Keep Merfolk is a textbook on how to design a species using aptitudes. You have great melee apts and good magic apts, but you can't go pure melee due to an abysmal armour apt and can't go pure caster due to a bad conjurations apt. The spread of high apts defrays the XP splitting of hybridization ju...

The big question, from both a mechanics and flavor perspective, is what do vampires do? - Fangs, which like most flavor mutations work pretty well - Bat transformation, which complements the hexer gameplay style by providing a needed escape mechanism - Blood drinking, which is a fundamental part of ...

I like Sif. In some contexts I think she's even better than Vehumet. Sif is more of a generalist, but the less obvious difference is that while Vehumet rewards momentum by allowing the player to spend MP to gain MP, Sif offers more options for dealing with running out, both by giving MP (divine ener...

Of the current races I'd say there are three archetypes for newbie casters: the wizard (DE), the reaver (Te), and the tanky caster (Dr and Gr). DE has the most int (on average 8-10 more than the others) and the widest variety of spellcasting aptitudes. An elf can cast anything they find with minimal...

If the character is squishy and has to manage MP eventually I could see difficulty arising because it's better to teach how to handle these things on D:1 than L:1. MP discounts making low level spells into cantrips is an interesting idea but I'm not sure if it makes a race easier to win with. I'd co...

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