Search found 451 matches

Saturday, 4th May 2019, 14:20

Forum: Dungeon Crawling Advice

Topic: Dumb AM ranger question 11: Cure for stupidity

Replies: 3

Views: 1835

Re: Dumb AM ranger question 11: Cure for stupidity

Your problem is that you don't use heroism and you don't use good spells. You should use heroism in every nontrivial fight. So like, fighting Mara would be an example of a nontrivial fight. You also train your skills as if you don't have heroism, for example you train bows to 16.8. Everything past 1...

Saturday, 4th May 2019, 03:30

Forum: Crazy Yiuf's Corner

Topic: If Each Monster Had Max 1 Spell

Replies: 15

Views: 4491

Re: If Each Monster Had Max 1 Spell

The big problems with pack monsters, pack splitting etc., are really problems with crawl and obviously cannot be solved by changing monsters alone. On the other hand, replacing a lot of trash monsters in packs with monsters that can actually do something would change naive group combat dynamics in a...

Friday, 3rd May 2019, 08:02

Forum: Game Design Discussion

Topic: Make resistance pips consistent and uncapped

Replies: 25

Views: 7568

Re: Make resistance pips consistent and uncapped

Another suggestion involving a numerical parameter whose value should obviously be zero.

Friday, 3rd May 2019, 01:59

Forum: Dungeon Crawling Advice

Topic: Blaster caster questions

Replies: 13

Views: 5011

Re: Blaster caster questions

The +10 pain/+5 str trident and +10 elec hand crossbow really stand out in this dump, as well as the 11 points in shields. You could easily win this game without putting any further skill points into conjurations and that may be the best way to go. I would be working on getting more ac with this cha...

Thursday, 2nd May 2019, 11:13

Forum: Crazy Yiuf's Corner

Topic: New race: Down dwarf

Replies: 10

Views: 3652

Re: New race: Down dwarf

Orb run is addressed in the OP, though I would see no problem with ending the game when the player gets the orb. That would be an interesting species distinction. With the "stairs rotation" ability, you would have to think about the new stair dancing possibilities, probably place some clev...

Thursday, 2nd May 2019, 09:33

Forum: Game Design Discussion

Topic: Shafts - Too common now?

Replies: 159

Views: 60675

Re: Shafts - Too common now?

I just mean the hardest part of the game is the first few floors. The factors you're talking about contribute to the fall off in difficulty later and the weird learning curve.

Thursday, 2nd May 2019, 06:34

Forum: Game Design Discussion

Topic: Shafts - Too common now?

Replies: 159

Views: 60675

Re: Shafts - Too common now?

As far as the shaft effect goes, the first thing that happens to a player when they start the game is they get "shafted" into d:1, i.e. if they do not fight their way out of the immediate vicinity of the entrance, they lose the game. Incidentally, this is where the vast majority of unwinna...

Thursday, 2nd May 2019, 04:36

Forum: Game Design Discussion

Topic: Shafts - Too common now?

Replies: 159

Views: 60675

Re: Shafts - Too common now?

See, this is what I'm talking about re: not appreciating the actual probabilities involved.

Thursday, 2nd May 2019, 02:51

Forum: Game Design Discussion

Topic: Shafts - Too common now?

Replies: 159

Views: 60675

Re: Shafts - Too common now?

I did not say that no-downstairs is the solution to front-loaded difficulty.

Thursday, 2nd May 2019, 01:22

Forum: Game Design Discussion

Topic: Shafts - Too common now?

Replies: 159

Views: 60675

Re: Shafts - Too common now?

sanka is more or less on target and I basically endorse his views on the questions IveGoneSupine asks me (the point about the importance of simple, transparent rules is particularly good), but I would add to the d1-d15 shaft scenario that this is a highly, highly improbable situation and that makes ...

Thursday, 2nd May 2019, 00:48

Forum: Crazy Yiuf's Corner

Topic: New race: Down dwarf

Replies: 10

Views: 3652

Re: New race: Down dwarf

A reasonable way to avoid the downstairs -> trapped scenario would be an ability that allows you to "rotate" stairs by going up, so going up has the effect of replacing you on a different staircase on the same level. There are other issues with eliminating stairs in dcss, which have been w...

Tuesday, 30th April 2019, 16:00

Forum: Game Design Discussion

Topic: Shafts - Too common now?

Replies: 159

Views: 60675

Re: Shafts - Too common now?

VAF uses this weird reasoning a lot where he'll say there was an infinitesimal but nonzero chance that the player could have died and therefore he went on to win the game only by luck. This is like saying it's bad luck you didn't get rich by finding a winning powerball ticket in a parking lot. There...

Tuesday, 30th April 2019, 10:41

Forum: Game Design Discussion

Topic: Shafts - Too common now?

Replies: 159

Views: 60675

Re: Shafts - Too common now?

Chess is a silly comparison. It's a deterministic game. Crawl is a dice game, more like backgammon. In backgammon there is a clear difference between better and worse players that shows up in statistics across numerous games. The confounding factor is that crawl is absurdly long, so the importance o...

Tuesday, 30th April 2019, 09:25

Forum: Game Design Discussion

Topic: Shafts - Too common now?

Replies: 159

Views: 60675

Re: Shafts - Too common now?

I'm not sure I can speak for the devteam on shafts, but the way I read the position (and I think this is correct) is: shafts are good, getting shafted twice is good, getting shafted three times is good. If you got shafted from d:1 to d:3 then to d:5 and so forth all the way down to d:15, that would ...

Tuesday, 30th April 2019, 06:48

Forum: Dungeon Crawling Advice

Topic: SpBe

Replies: 15

Views: 5056

Re: SpBe

The demon whip will be much better for general combat than any short blade you're likely to get. -3 aptitude should not scare you away from an early demon whip for a melee-oriented spriggan. And indeed, it is 1-handed spriggans.

Sunday, 28th April 2019, 16:44

Forum: Game Design Discussion

Topic: God: Ixool the Masked

Replies: 14

Views: 5072

Re: God: Ixool the Masked

In my opinion, the way character building works in crawl is already too loose, but species at least somewhat constrains or at least shapes the long term possibilities for a given combo. Existing gods, e.g. Okawaru, Cheibriados, and especially Ashenzari undermine these distinctions among characters b...

Sunday, 28th April 2019, 14:36

Forum: Crazy Yiuf's Corner

Topic: Leo Littlebook's thread

Replies: 76

Views: 28022

Re: Leo Littlebook's thread

Learning a lot in this thread.

Sunday, 28th April 2019, 06:54

Forum: Dungeon Crawling Advice

Topic: New to casters, MP issues?

Replies: 14

Views: 4021

Re: New to casters, MP issues?

You don't need to get too hung up on using summons to kill things. Worst case is half xp, land some damage on them yourself and you'll get more. It's not a big deal.

Sunday, 28th April 2019, 01:04

Forum: Dungeon Crawling Advice

Topic: New to casters, MP issues?

Replies: 14

Views: 4021

Re: New to casters, MP issues?

I would clear out some of your low level spells and use orb with servitor. Between lightning spire, orbs, cflame, and sticky flame, you should be fine. You want your servitor to use orbs, not mystic blast and similar garbage.

Sunday, 28th April 2019, 00:29

Forum: Dungeon Crawling Advice

Topic: New to casters, MP issues?

Replies: 14

Views: 4021

Re: New to casters, MP issues?

Your best spell is lightning spire and you've already used the skill points to get it working, so you should use it. You should be able to do swamp with what you have no problem.

Sunday, 28th April 2019, 00:02

Forum: Dungeon Crawling Advice

Topic: New to casters, MP issues?

Replies: 14

Views: 4021

Re: New to casters, MP issues?

His spell list is fine, he just needs to use summons.

Saturday, 27th April 2019, 23:46

Forum: Crazy Yiuf's Corner

Topic: Leo Littlebook's thread

Replies: 76

Views: 28022

Re: Leo Littlebook's thread

He answered: "Zero."

wiki -> salad shooter -> Leo Littlebook's thread.

Saturday, 27th April 2019, 12:32

Forum: Crazy Yiuf's Corner

Topic: Leo Littlebook's thread

Replies: 76

Views: 28022

Re: Leo Littlebook's thread

I mean, you can call this trolling, but I like this thread better than the other long running CYC threads people regularly post in.

Monday, 22nd April 2019, 07:47

Forum: Crazy Yiuf's Corner

Topic: What if Zot didn't have a rune lock?

Replies: 13

Views: 4645

Re: What if Zot didn't have a rune lock?

Hellcrawl has no rune locks (runes are purely for scoring) and you can play it on servers in the US, Japan, Australia, and I believe the EU, but I don't know if the x-crawl people still maintain their server. You can do a no rune, no side branch game in hellcrawl and in fact it is probably the most ...

Sunday, 21st April 2019, 08:01

Forum: Game Design Discussion

Topic: Experimental branch: two state vampires

Replies: 80

Views: 28321

Re: Experimental branch: two state vampires

Measures that would make the transition-to-regen process more automatic and less intrusive may improve matters and many reasonable possibilities exist, but a 5 turn delay does not make the transition strategic. It just makes it a costly tactical move. Whatever you have to do to start regenerating, i...

Thursday, 18th April 2019, 12:00

Forum: Dungeon Crawling Advice

Topic: Tips For Melee Naga?

Replies: 21

Views: 6428

Re: Tips For Melee Naga?

"Go with the heaviest armor" is slightly reductive. You're supposed to make maximum use of naga stealth early in the game (this applies better to the NaWn early game than the NaFi one, maybe) in order to get more poison spits off at each possible target (incredibly tedious btw). Obviously ...

Saturday, 13th April 2019, 00:12

Forum: Game Design Discussion

Topic: Cool, good, swamp rework

Replies: 19

Views: 6906

Re: Cool, good, swamp rework

As OP said, a major problem with Swamp is the layout, but it's hard for me to put my finger on what makes it so bad. As a first stab at it ⋅  Lack of variety: all levels of the swamp are qualitatively the same ⋅  Lack of straight sharp edges: without sharp edges the tactics ever...

Friday, 12th April 2019, 07:50

Forum: Game Design Discussion

Topic: Shafts - Too common now?

Replies: 159

Views: 60675

Re: Shafts - Too common now?

I was responding to the previous comment re: abyss.

Friday, 12th April 2019, 07:37

Forum: Game Design Discussion

Topic: Shafts - Too common now?

Replies: 159

Views: 60675

Re: Shafts - Too common now?

I comment on the shaft issue because the proposition that "shafts are good" is pretty central to active development and surrounding discussions. It's really weird to see people get so solidly behind dpeg's old comments on this which are really not well thought out at all. For example, he s...

Friday, 12th April 2019, 05:28

Forum: Game Design Discussion

Topic: Cool, good, swamp rework

Replies: 19

Views: 6906

Re: Cool, good, swamp rework

I would like to hear more about the badness of swamp layouts. I consider them above average, though that's not saying a lot. Flowing water that moves the player and prevents movement against the current might work, though it may be difficult to visually convey the direction of flow. You'd probably n...

Thursday, 11th April 2019, 17:43

Forum: Game Design Discussion

Topic: New Branches?

Replies: 18

Views: 5791

Re: New Branches?

"Learn 2 Code." No. The reason ideas run aground in DCSS is not lack of skilled labor. The game itself is a limited resource and that means there has to be rationing, gatekeeping, and politics. If you want to add something big or make a big change, that is the most significant limiting fac...

Thursday, 11th April 2019, 15:28

Forum: Game Design Discussion

Topic: Shafts - Too common now?

Replies: 159

Views: 60675

Re: Shafts - Too common now?

I keep coming back to this point, but looking at where the thread is going, it bears repeating: The good thing about shafts is the outcome of being shafted, namely being on a level, perhaps with depth out of the PC's comfort zone, without immediate recourse to stairs. Many complaints about shafts re...

Thursday, 11th April 2019, 08:03

Forum: Game Design Discussion

Topic: New Branches?

Replies: 18

Views: 5791

Re: New Branches?

Interesting thread. If your question is "If I make a suggestion of a new branch, can I expect to see it in a future version of DCSS?" -- All evidence points to one answer: No. If your question is "How would I best go about exploring possibilities for a new branch in crawl?" -- Al...

Tuesday, 9th April 2019, 13:08

Forum: Game Design Discussion

Topic: Simple solution to inventory problem with throwables

Replies: 21

Views: 7124

Re: Simple solution to inventory problem with throwables

It's still going to be better to keep your branded throwing shit and keeping it still costs nothing but hassle. Things like exploding tomahawks just shouldn't exist.

Tuesday, 9th April 2019, 05:59

Forum: Game Design Discussion

Topic: Shafts - Too common now?

Replies: 159

Views: 60675

Re: Shafts - Too common now?

Simply removing traps would've been a fine solution and it would be better than what they've got now. Stair-traps would make a fine replacement, but not necessary. It's not true that you have to chip away at problems to make progress. [edit: Or, I should say, it is not necessary to "overhaul&qu...

Tuesday, 9th April 2019, 05:57

Forum: Game Design Discussion

Topic: Stairs should be more interesting in rune branches

Replies: 13

Views: 3929

Re: Stairs should be more interesting in rune branches

One-way stairs are the only variation on crawl dungeon structure I've seen actually done that substantially improves the game. You can see big levels in the circus animals fork. It is extremely bad and makes the big problems in dcss even worse. Small levels with one-way stairs would be probably be a...

Tuesday, 9th April 2019, 02:32

Forum: Game Design Discussion

Topic: Shafts - Too common now?

Replies: 159

Views: 60675

Re: Shafts - Too common now?

It seems to me that recent changes to traps only alter the set of weird exploration tricks that reduce the danger of traps. That's the problem with focusing on narrow problems. It makes you think you're solving a big problem by eliminating the most annoying defect, but the progress you actually make...

Sunday, 7th April 2019, 04:55

Forum: Game Design Discussion

Topic: Shafts - Too common now?

Replies: 159

Views: 60675

Re: Shafts - Too common now?

One aspect of shafts missing from these discussions is that the danger depends on lower floors not being cleared. So if you can clear a level of 90% of its monsters while exploring only 50% of its floor space, you may get ahead by backtracking after each half-clear to autoexplore the level two or th...

Friday, 5th April 2019, 06:49

Forum: Game Design Discussion

Topic: Rework buff spells into god abilities

Replies: 18

Views: 5026

Re: Rework buff spells into god abilities

What he's saying about spaces in crawl is important. The lack of structure to crawl levels and the extreme degree of control that gives the player limits the possibilities for effects. You have to consider the virtually unlimited ability of the player to define the parameters of an encounter. It als...

Tuesday, 2nd April 2019, 09:56

Forum: Game Design Discussion

Topic: Avg number of shaft events?

Replies: 8

Views: 3751

Re: Avg number of shaft events?

Based on the description ebering gave of his estimation of the frequency of the player hitting a trap in normal play (which I'm inclined to believe more or less correctly takes into account the factors considered), I would guess the missing element is that monsters ruined traps in the previous syste...

Friday, 29th March 2019, 11:09

Forum: Game Design Discussion

Topic: engorged

Replies: 13

Views: 4989

Re: engorged

Come on, man. How about a slice of Pandemonium Pizza??? ;) :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :P :P :P :) :) :|

Thursday, 28th March 2019, 22:43

Forum: Game Design Discussion

Topic: Is this supposed to be fun?

Replies: 46

Views: 19249

Re: Is this supposed to be fun?

Making them disappear would compound the XP problem, because instead of just giving stronger characters a lot of free XP sooner a weaker character doesn't get the XP at all. It's no surprise that people defend crimson imps for being what they are (purely annoying) in terms of what they clearly are n...

Thursday, 28th March 2019, 01:53

Forum: Game Design Discussion

Topic: Is this supposed to be fun?

Replies: 46

Views: 19249

Re: Is this supposed to be fun?

The defense of game mechanics in terms of their supposed didactic virtue and its reliance on testimonials from newer players or reminiscence about having been a newer player drives me nuts. Of course a lot of people who have encountered crimson imps like 20 times will find them less tedious than som...

Sunday, 24th March 2019, 22:29

Forum: Game Design Discussion

Topic: Experimental branch: Known Traps

Replies: 97

Views: 48796

Re: Experimental branch: Known Traps

Looking at this conversation about traps triggered by exploration (or going down stairs, or opening a door, or having walls destroyed near you), the defense that it makes sense for somebody to "booby trap stairs" kinda makes you think... what if traps were actually attached to stairs? As f...

Thursday, 14th March 2019, 13:33

Forum: Dungeon Crawling Advice

Topic: What's the optimal way to use Animate Skeleton?

Replies: 6

Views: 3200

Re: What's the optimal way to use Animate Skeleton?

  Code:
.A.
.@M

 |
 v

@A.
..M

The M hits your A.

Tuesday, 12th March 2019, 02:37

Forum: Game Design Discussion

Topic: Pain brand needs rework

Replies: 10

Views: 3282

Re: Pain brand needs rework

While I see no problem with making pain brand kiku-exclusive, the claim that the way brands are represents a "design choice" is extremely overdrawn.

Monday, 11th March 2019, 13:23

Forum: Game Design Discussion

Topic: Pain brand needs rework

Replies: 10

Views: 3282

Re: Pain brand needs rework

Have to disagree. Pain brand and its association with Kiku offers a good route to mixed builds for a pretty broad cross section of combos. In a game where straightforward armored melee builds do pretty well for a similarly broad cross section of combos, that's a good thing. Coming from the other dir...

Sunday, 10th March 2019, 00:18

Forum: Game Design Discussion

Topic: Specie Proposal - Angel/Profane Servitor

Replies: 14

Views: 4499

Re: Specie Proposal - Angel/Profane Servitor

If you want to see this species happen, you or some other like-minded individual will have to code it up. I doubt it would be picked up by dcss, but there are other forks that might take it.

Thursday, 7th March 2019, 02:09

Forum: Crazy Yiuf's Corner

Topic: How to get Duvessa to thank your post

Replies: 4

Views: 2240

Re: How to get Duvessa to thank your post

It's the right take on a lot of crawl-related topics. You'll get more thanks writing sentimental comments about how you love everything about crawl, especially whatever people have said should be removed or changed, though.

Thursday, 7th March 2019, 00:43

Forum: Game Design Discussion

Topic: Vampire rework proposal

Replies: 14

Views: 5544

Re: Vampire rework proposal

That's a lot better than any other suggestion I've seen re: dcss vampires. Getting rid of the chunk interaction, less fine-grained player control of nutrition, less complex and consequential nutrition states, and little or no incentive to bank monsters would all be major improvements. edit: About ba...
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