Ann Hal wrote:Now, let's take a new-ish player who can get through D1-8/whatever just fine. They meet Kirke or Mara or Rupert or whatever for the first time and get blasted and dumped into the inventory screen. Even by reading the morgue file, they'll have virtually no information on what killed them or what they did wrong. For them to do "trial and error" on Kirke or Mara or Rupert or whatever using a different tactic will require them to replay the first several levels of Crawl over and over and over and over again.
This. This was a problem I had when I started Crawl.
Ann Hal wrote:But more importantly, replaying the first several levels over and over doesn't teach a player how they could have dealt with/avoided getting killed by Kirke or Mara or Rupert or whatever.
I would go through the same stetch over and over (D:1 to Temple, then later to the Lair, then Vaults), only to get obliterated without understanding what was happening. I would learn one piece of information about one feaure of the game, possibly two (like "blade traps can deal enough damage to one shot a spriggan" and "blade traps can appear as early as Lair"). Then i would re-do the long part that I already knew, delve into the unkown and get killed by something I met for the first time (or met in a difficult situation).
I was starting to get very annoyed to spend hours of doing the same thing just to get a few minutes of learning experience.
Ann Hal wrote:By using wizmode/save files, the same new-ish player can test different tactics against the same tough opponent and figure out a viable solution (a) without having to repeat the first several levels and (b) with the same equipment/spells/options they had at the time they met their demise.
I installed the game offline to try this out. When I faced a dangerous/new situation, I'd save and see which tactics would work and which ones would get me killed. I didn't just get past the hard part and continue, I'd re-do it a few times to see how it worked.
But it got a bit boring and easy, so I switched to only saving before going into a level so that I couldn't use knowledge of how it is set up to my advantage. And shortly after that, I switched to only saving before entering a branch, so when I died I lost all my progress and neat finds from that branch, but didn't have to re-do the beginning of the game.
Recently, I've started doing this with escape options rather than saves. I went ahead and challenged Cerebov when it wasn't actually necessary to see how I could beat him, and when I could see the fight wouldn't turn in my advantage I read a teleport scroll or drank a potion of magic to cBlink a few time ; that way I could disengage, recover, and try again with another tactic. However that only works with a character that can already easily survive almost everything even when I don't know what I'm doing ...
I did a bit of save scumming to see different possible results of drinking a bunch of mutation potion at once, or tried a variety of portals (WizLabs, Troves, Volcanoes ...) to see what layouts existed and how they worked. But it wasn't really "scumming" because I didn't chose the best result, once I had a good idea of how it worked and decided to move on, I just resumed playing normally.