Search • The Tavern

Oh, sorry, I was just trying to be polite. I am interested in and willing to entertain good controversy about my analysis. No "actually, change is impossible" arguments, please.

I am interested only in suggestions about a narrow problem because I have a number of other measures in mind that add up to a total solution to various luring issues, but I don't want to get into the specifics of them here. Layouts with no walls are a better concept than you seem to realize, but I d...

Not interested in controversy about my analysis of layouts and their impact on crawl tactics. Only interested in methods of processing existing layouts to resolve the issues I've outlined above. The simpler the method, the better.

So layouts are in the news again. Level size was mentioned in the stairs thread and size definitely matters when it comes to crawl levels. I'm not sure what the state of the art on resizing levels is, but I am aware that one of the jeremygurr forks has a level-enlarging feature (wrong direction to g...

I am somewhat unclear on what's being proposed here, but I am continually baffled that this issue, which has been under discussion for many years, remains largely unaddressed and with major confusion even in basic formulation of the problem. It's not about charms, it's about all spells with an effec...

You should probably consider the fact that the average player still never wins a game, and that catering to the handful of people who find it "too easy" is probably one of the worst possible ideas. I considered the facts and opinions contained in the quoted post some time ago (they are no...

You should consider the possibility that people really do find the game too easy and tedious as it is and want to improve it.

Historically, the position of active developers was that score and speedrunning in particular are not important design considerations. Many developers who publicly stated that position have retired though and it's always been a fairly misguided position, so maybe it's changed.

The idea of the skill system is to parallel the proficiency system of AD&D. There's nothing more to it. The only interesting questions are about its function, not its conception.

Stats shouldn't exist at all. So much of what is traditionally the role of stats is done by skills in this game, skills should just be the only thing there is. Of course, skills aren't really good either -- they are nearly as opaque and a hell of a lot more intrusive in their management. The game wo...

Stabs can kill any monster in the game by a comfortable margin.

I don't necessarily endorse the str rule of thumb (or the version stated in this thread in particular), but it's not crazy. At least historically, I believe it corresponded to a transition between two different formulas in the dodging penalty calculation. I don't know whether that's still the case, ...

lmao @ this thread, but anyway... About brogue stairs, I think it would have too many bad interactions with effects that allow the player to mass allies on the stairs or put clouds on the stairs. The only satisfactory solution so far is the hellcrawl no-upstairs approach, but maybe replacing stairs ...

Yeah, I think a wake-up period would help with the "surprise, something's tracking you" scenario. This had occurred to me, but I tend to be kind of elliptical about these things lately.

The game is played out. Anyone who's serious about learning and grinding it out can produce long streaks. This became very clear about two years ago, with lots of players turning in long streaks to rival what were previously "legendary" or whatever. People who still think winning at this g...

"onepostman," the conversation about crawl is not just about DCSS. Also, you're wrong with this talk about "the elite," but who cares.

I can't speak for implojin, but I think coming in here and saying that no prior discussion or argument about these issues exists, that no arguments or evidence have been marshalled, when this is clearly, demonstrably untrue and abundant evidence to the contrary exists in the archives of this site, f...

About using a tracking clock instead of a dungeon feature/stationary monster, it is better to constrain the player in terms of space than time (the goal should be for monsters to provide adequate constraints on time by themselves). It is easier to reason about both for the player and, crucially, the...

Right, the idea is that these monsters/dungeon features are immobile so that their interventions in combat situations are broadcast to the player and known in advance. Features that totally block retreat would also be good in my opinion, but get into more fundamental changes to dungeon structure. Th...

A few years ago, there was an experimental branch aimed at addressing luring. The concept was to randomly power up monsters that have been tracking the player for a while so that they can catch and kill the player. This turned out to be a pretty bad idea for a variety of reasons. Here's a similar bu...

@chequers: What I mean is that if you replace stairs with corridors or whatever connecting different segments (formerly levels) of a larger dungeon, you've eliminated stairdancing, but you still have the possibility of luring monsters across these connections. Regarding your proposals, hellcrawl had...

Of course, it's possible to largely remove stairs by generating levels that are segmented by rune doors, for example, you could generate 15 standard sized levels in a grid 4 times the length of traditional levels on each side with some vaults/corridors connecting them together. With some fairly stra...

Shorter.

The fact that you have done stairdancing wrong does not negate points made here about the centrality of stairdancing in high winrate crawl or any of the judgements made about its impact on crawl gameplay. About "the design of crawl," there is no coherent design to the game. It would be mor...

Will look forward to reading.

Oh, I was just referring to the comment in the other thread that used this language. I am unironically interested in whatever implojin might have said under other circumstances.

Uh, a little worried that if this thread isn't good I'm not going to get the response I'm looking for...

How about it, folks? What do you think about incentive structures in crawl?

Feel free to elaborate below if your thoughts on this matter don't fit cleanly or are not limited to one of the poll options!

I guess there's been no uptake on the option spell, but maybe a way to fill out the fire set would be to make foxfire also spawn fire guys around clouds made by cflame. That would deal with the damage scaling thing to some extent as well. edit: hell, you could make duplication of spell effects on fi...

Well, you're describing scenarios that take a lot of turns and involve crossing between dungeon levels and branches. If the number of turns it takes to do these things gets big enough, it may become possible to control them with clock mechanics. There are also possibilities for breaking up the dunge...

As long as players don't find themselves in very long corridors or large systems of corridors, players will be able to maneuver around the behavior of spells. I'd be all for total elimination of 1-tile hallways though. It's not a crazy or infeasible thing to do. As for the theory that this would add...

re: complaints about using firefox in 1-tile corridors, it would be preferable to reduce dungeon generation's use of this kind of feature.

@severen: There's no doubt that the most successful approach to shafts/stairs/level-entry taken in an actual playable version of crawl is the no-upstairs approach of hellcrawl and I tend to think this is in fact the best way forward for dcss. To my mind, with the proliferation of forks that basicall...

You can increase the variance of something that's good by randomly adding things that aren't, right? Crawl doesn't have a problem of lacking replay value by virtue of too few theoretical possibilities. It has a problem of competent play reducing most of this possibility down to the same thing. It's ...

Without shafts, you can nearly always stairdance your way into a foothold on every level. Shafts sometimes but by no means always create a situation where the player has to make that foothold with no stairs to rely on or get through a chase scenario. Both of these are very different from the easy st...

It's a common error in crawl talk to say that a given situation only occurs with bad play and therefore can be dismissed. In dcss, good play virtually guarantees nothing interesting ever happens and good play is not otherwise interesting or exciting -- the greater the player's capacity for boredom, ...

I played with foxfire a little and it felt like the damage scaling was a little weak (perhaps particularly so for early targets with nonzero AC, since it presumably applies twice now). I would suggest thinking of foxfire as a replacement for both flame tongue and throw flame, scaling both the damage...

This is like complaining that you lucked out because Grinder didn't generate in your game. Why leave it to the RNG to decide the generation of the unique? Crawl relies on randomness and simple mechanics to produce variety. Sometimes the situations will be interesting, sometimes they will not. Shaft...

It seems to me that you have no positive vision of the game beyond what it already is. You might be sad if .24 were the last stable release, but only because that is a change in the way things are in crawl, not because you have any real hope of things moving in interesting new directions. As for thi...

So, your solutions to something players dislike because it is a hit to player agency both require the game to reduce or eliminate player agency. Did I read this correctly? Of course players will be indignant whiners no matter what you do. As a designer, you owe it to the player to give it to them s...

There are two serious problems with shaft effects in dcss: The first is that they are delivered via traps, which makes players feel they should be able to avoid them, can "take the player off guard" in terms of identification or whatever early in the game, and so forth. The second and more...

Being on actual welfare is fine. Military/intelligence research is not. edit: in the interest of politeness, perhaps if these folks throw me a potential cite down the road, I can develop some moral flexibility and nuance on this point. Maybe something like Double Tap or Triple Tap: Optimal Play Anal...

Three authors from the Naval Research Laboratory. Your tax dollars at work. Four dipshits on welfare for STEM majors with theories of crawl less advanced than shitposters on a web 1.0 forum lol

Well, sounds like we're on the same page then. If there were no ally commands at all, then all ally commands would "do what the stated in-game options imply they will do in the English language, as opposed to doing other things." Now taking another look at this thread, it seems to boil dow...

Perhaps the lesson of the existing ally commands is that allies are never going to do exactly what you want and it's not realistic to change that. It's certainly true that with more fine-grained control of allies the player could do more damage in some situations than they would by default issuing n...

The suggestion that allies decline to block approaching monsters to enable ranged attacks from the player strikes me as extremely half-baked. If your allies don't block, then they will have to pursue monsters that bypass them if they are melee only, as most allies are. Nevertheless, ally AI that tri...

My justification is truth.

Actually, instantaneous ally commands would be worse.

As far as spell ideas, something to replace lightning bolt and/or shock -- you start with two arcs at low power, scaling in number like cbl with increasing power, that select nearby targets first. Each arc jumps to another target farther from the caster than the previous target and in the same gener...

It's good damage if you know what you're doing.

Search found 451 matches