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My suggestion for CF would be to spawn a "smoke cloud" on the player which will disperse if a monster walks into it or the player stays in it the subsequent turn and which ignites into the usual fire cloud after two turns. My previous suggestion was adjacent to the player in the direction ...

Looking through the notes you posted, I can only really applaud your willingness to eliminate bolt spells and some other mid-level single target projectiles. Minmay's suggestions on conjure flame and searing ray are nice, though you should not allow CF to create gaps the way it seems it can from the...

Had an idea the other day for a splash screen with a fomicid standing over its victims like in this image, but instead of preparing to murder them, he's simultaneously hitting the dab and doing the floss dance. What do you guys think?

implojin, enjoy

That's a pretty basic error, but it seems to me the thing to do would've been to delete it rather than elaborate on it and get into a chain of responses to it (including a defense of the original comment!). I will decline to comment on your general posture in this response.

"Pets, huh, didn't think of that"? Seriously?

Regeneration over time mechanics are a basic flaw in crawl, but limiting these mechanics by monster LOS doesn't get you anywhere. There are still many ways to escape LOS permanently, stairs being only the most obvious. To eliminate regeneration over time mechanics, you will need a new means of regen...

hellcrawl is so fuckin' good

The fact is random stats have such a small impact on the character, it hardly matters how they're allocated. The method of independently randomly incrementing stats with level ups according to some schedule has the advantage of high unpredictability per increment, but it creates very little variatio...

Still scratching my head about this thread. This notion that there's a problem with casting a spell at 30% fail is very original. 30% fail is double basic mp cost in hellcrawl mechanics and usually quite safe to use for dcss duration spells. People wildly overrate the danger of miscasts, especially ...

Permadarkness has one significant problem your efforts could address: There is potential value in toggling it. In general, you don't want there to be any advantage in toggling. There are other hellcrawl permacharms where you could make an argument re: toggling, but probably darkness is the biggest o...

Your methodology, at best, measures something about dcss players, not dcss itself. I'm hearing about handwaving from someone who purports to measure the difficulty of a game by looking at games from people who barely know how to play or who aren't really trying. What you are doing in asserting the v...

The implications of a new system like this in practice goes to the specifics of its design. Obviously, a lot of things would need to be adjusted.

It would be very different in that there would be no difference in cost between say the sixth and the tenth level of a skill. In particular, the cost of having 2 levels in four skills is the same as having 8 in one skill. This is in stark contrast to the current system where having a large number of...

@bel: Pretty much all formulas in crawl try to achieve reasonable (in no sense optimized) results and the specific forms they take reflect iteration within some model, whether it's dice, a numerical table, or whatever. The answer to this sort of question is a genealogy, not a clear piece of reasonin...

Crawl is not complex enough for your analogy with the relationship between basic physical law and human behavior to hold water, I think. It is certainly true that it's hard to perform explicit calculations, which is why I talk about estimates instead. The reason your results do not match the picture...

I have no idea how your comment is supposed to be responsive to mine. Regarding your theory that the ability to change ones strategy mid-game is a self-evident good, I would liken this idea to saying that Super Mario World should allow the player to have both the fire and cape suits at once. It is g...

It's true: Skill points are bad. The mechanics of stats are better in general, particularly stat growth. There is no reason skills could not work more or less the way stats do or even be literally implemented as stats. The distinction between stats and skills goes back to the removed concept of &quo...

Okay, so: 1. An argument about crawl from first principles would work from the definition of crawl, that is to say from the rules of the game, and from general principles about gameplay, usability, and so on. 2. It is true that with optimal play, difficulty quickly approaches zero, which sounds a lo...

The question is: what does the search for that flavor of crawl look like? Critical commentary is part of it in my opinion.

The idea that ranged weaponry is worse on a formicid because of tunnels strikes me as obviously wrong. Ranged weapons are fine at melee range and tunnels don't require you to fight at melee range anyway. It's true that best practices with formicid involve elaborate, excessive use of tunneling. The t...

Though bel's methods of arriving at conclusions about dcss's difficulty curve are faulty, his conclusions are in broad agreement with reasoning from the rules of the game -- i.e. the correct way to generate knowledge about crawl. This idea of using sequell data is not new and people have gone over a...

At the time identification was removed from hellcrawl, hellcrawl was still quite similar to dcss -- the only really big changes at that point were probably food and lair removal. ID removal was a major improvement at the time. Hellcrawl development was actually fairly incremental, taking on a gradua...

I have to say, the crawl as interactive fiction argument reaches new heights of creativity for this forum. It is a shame that these imaginative efforts tend to deflect criticism rather than address it. The problem with declining difficulty, especially sharply declining difficulty, is that it turns m...

This argument isn't really new. The observation that removing identification makes the early game a bit easier and that this is okay because it moves the progression of difficulty in a more normal direction goes back years on this forum. The best argument for removing identification is that you can ...

Don't enchant shields unless your other equipment is maxed and you're at a point in the game where you will not switch later. Also reflect is a bad shield brand and should not influence your decisions about what to use or how to allocated enchant scrolls. It's all about protection brand shields. My ...

If you don't have armor you want to commit to, use scrolls on boots etc. The cpa you had is fine, unclear whether you have anything better available.

Your skills are not so bad they made you lose. It would be better not to skill maces and flails past mindelay for the eveningstar and you would probably have been better off with a 2-handed weapon. Using axes is more forgiving for new players, I think. Your equipment choices look more questionable t...

@petercordia: Obviously it is impossible to balance a game around the subjective opinions and playstyle of players -- this will lead incoherent standards. That's the point of optimal play analysis, to interrogate what the best thing the player can do is and what the consequences of these possibiliti...

If you want to address this thing about number of active permacharms, you need new mechanics. That means more complex rules. If your analysis is that the issue is not important enough to justify added complexity, I completely agree with that. Otherwise, you need to bite the bullet and add new mechan...

I doubt you have ever cast dragon form at 70% fail in hellcrawl. By my calculations, that would cost about 77 mp.

I'm kind of scratching my head here. I thought the issue was having many buffs active, which this new formula does nothing to address. As hellmonk says, this makes these spells uncastable for a sizable chunk of the early game. I mean, of course the formula isn't a big deal -- if you come up with som...

d:1 works okay if you play for winrate and I'm sure the winrate play perspective is the strongest influence on its current design. It's boring and repetitive if you lose a lot of games between wins, but it tends to be pretty fair and consistently interesting if you do something like winrate play wit...

The biggest offender with the reserved system is that you can ignore the spell failure of a permabuff spell. As long as you can hit the MP cost, you get the spell active. Thus, you can can get just enough EXP to cast the spell and enjoy its benefits. Playing an Unarmed Octopode? Just get that Drago...

@sdynet: One thing you have to watch out for is the possibility that you defeat the purpose of permabuffs by imposing a cost that incentivizes toggling. For example, with spectral weapon, you might worry about AOE damage -- the damage sharing silliness was removed from hellcrawl to prevent this cons...

Good comment. If you look at dcss circa about .17, most of the classic duration/buff spells were still around. It was always possible to have 5 or so duration spells and/or summons active in any given fight without risk of being attacked or cast on by monsters while you cast your spells. You do it b...

No, the best route to getting changes made is to create new forks and move them to a more central position with the playerbase or seek out a new playerbase. The particular change under discussion here is not a dice roll. There is a longstanding position on hellcrawl-style charm mechanics and it's no...

That's not the right analysis of how the costs work, but it's pointless to relitigate the issue now.

Applying a spectral weapon-style trigger-to-summon mechanic to most spells in the summonings school is one of the main unfinished tasks in hellcrawl, in my opinion. I would suggest either setting summon limits of one for everything or having a multiple cast/sustain mechanic. I don't think there was ...

Yeah, I haven't seen this situation in a while and my recollection may well be wrong about that. As for this continued question about clouds, if the idea is to simply walk away after hexing an ooze or whatever in the corner to block other monsters, that would be a fine way to go, but spending a turn...

If machine learning + computers get good enough and someone bothers with crawl it might be possible to get an AI to near-100% winrate and make its play indistinguishable from "ideal", even if we'd still have no way to verify that. In my opinion, crawl bots could be improved a lot by makin...

My claim was that he could not expect to kill any death oozes with a wand of clouds before getting killed himself. I'm not going to read your ramble about how to wedge a wand of clouds into what is a very simple strategy: Use immolation to blow up a lot of slimes. As far as I can tell, the OP's exec...

To me, it's pretty much "little spanish flea" normally and the Benny Hill theme any time you have to pillar dance to stay alive.

It's next to the crocodile. edit: The position the OP finds himself in is interesting and raises questions I don't know the answer to: Q1: How long does it take to renounce religion? Q2: If he performs a short delay action like removing a ring, which way will the blob pursue him? I would guess it wi...

I'd say this is gg. You need to step back from the flames to avoid death from fire damage. The acid blob has tons of hp somehow, so I don't see how you can kill it. I am amazed that svendre is still talking about using a wand of clouds. You're completely, utterly wrong about this, bud. Honestly, con...

I rate your chance of survival as low. You obviously need to drink a cure potion. Since you have no way of escaping the already awake death oozes and digging will probably wake the rest of the slimes, I would say you need to kill them and that you are unlikely to do so successfully with clouds. The ...

My take is that the decision you're talking about is not that consequential. Whether you have a Mara enslave soul guy for a while should make no difference in the outcome of the game. I don't see why you couldn't kill Mara with this character, particularly if you're willing to burn a might potion to...

Learning about the gameplay and design of crawl is a totally reasonable step in developing ones own ideas about roguelike games with an eye to writing something oneself. If that's what you're doing though, make sure to approach the game critically with an eye to moving the ball forward. Also, just a...

As you gain experience, you'll realize that it's only the part of the game you call boring now that has any real interest. What interest there is in the rest of the game is mostly the novelty of getting to these places the first few times. In fact, unless you think about the game in terms of winrate...

Seriously, I don't even pay attention to MR. Just don't get paralyzed, folx.

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