what's good flavor?

[all before]

dcss has long had a policy of removing flavor that interferes with good gameplay. I agree with this policy. But the policy can also, perhaps inadvertently, lead to the assumption that the game's flavor is extraneous at best and harmful at worst. I disagree with that assumption. Likewise, there are very few discussions of flavor on these boards, beyond bikeshedding names or complaining about removals. So, I thought I'd ask some broad questions to start a different kind of conversation about flavor: what is good flavor? what are some examples of it, in dcss or other roguelikes? how can flavor compliment good game design? what are ways dcss could improve its flavor?

[Sprucery]

I like the pizza flavours and I liked the cheese flavours as well and beef jerkies should have been replaced with cheese.

[dpeg]

These are tough questions. Some flavour I really hated to see go: Nemelex Xobeh's portable altar. Berserker's starting spears. Hydra form head mechanic culled. Toadstool spawning on random corpses. In all of these cases, there were good gameplay reasons for it; I just think they've been good flavour. Edit: also hammers for Yiuf's vault (I made the multi hammer version of Yiuf's home, so I was sad when hammers were removed).

Flavour that is in the game currently and that I really like (this is an extremely subjective notion but I think you are aware of that): among the gods, I think that Ashenzari, Beogh, Cheibriados, Gozag, Jiyva, Lugonu, Qazlal, Ru, Trog have cool flavour (one measure for this is that I can tell about them to non-Crawling friends in exciting ways -- these are gods with a storyline that's captured in gameplay rather than text descriptions). I think a number of uniques exude flavour: Sigmund, Pikel, Grinder, Dowan & Duvessa, Natasha and many more. Some artefacts have cool flavour: Gong, Maxwell's, Singing Sword (on this one I am very biased).

To me, the best flavour is when gameplay is used to convey something about the game. Some vaults are too talkative for my taste, I am not a big fan of Pan disco hall, for example. But many vaults suit me well, like many of the overflow altars (the Trog book burning one, Yredelmnul sacrifice, Xom sheep on fire and others).
I believe that adding shops to Orc end and making Slime walls acidic improved the flavour of these branches.

Then there's also in-game humour, which is fighting an uphill battle sometimes, too. I totally embrace cursed toes and death cobs and I mourned triple swords.

[majesstic]

I had to get my cursed toe operated on the other day.








It was torment.






No fungus though.

[dynast]

I think we should replace Bardiches with Triple Tridents.

[phloomp]

Vinestalkers are awesome flavor, I sort of wish there were enemy vinestalkers just for that reason.

I mostly don't like Zot's flavor. I get that it's hard, since it's supposed to be weird so it can't tie into standard tropes like the other branches, but there you are.

Harold's death is a bit grimdark for my taste.

[ydeve]

I'd like it if more Zot monsters were reflavored to be more random/weird. A lot of the monsters there feel NetHackesque: death cobs, electric golems, curse toes, etc. But that gets overpowered by the dragon theme. If draconian packs were reflavored to mad scientists, imo that would fit the theme better.

[kuniqs]

umami