Saturday, 26th November 2016, 02:15 by duvessa
These situations are really just special cases of a broader problem with Crawl's skill training.
What Crawl has is essentially a "point buy" system. You get a certain number of points and you spend them between skills. Most games with point buy systems give you the points and then you can spend them however you want.
In Crawl, the points are spent as soon as they are earned, and player is required to decide where to spend the points before actually gaining the points. Furthermore, the interface for doing so is so abstracted that players aren't allowed to specify how many points to spend and in what order, which is what papilio is complaining about - if you want to limit the level of a skill (which a very reasonable thing to want to do, since ALL integer skill levels are breakpoints and many skills have even more breakpoints), you have to go back to the skill screen before any kill that might result in overtraining.
The typical defenses of Crawl's system are that:
- it allows automatic skill training (which is bullshit, because traditional point buy systems allow that just as well)
- that it reduces micromanagement (which might sound reasonable at first but is, in reality, bullshit; you just need to go back to integer skill levels and a point buy system has less micromanagement than the current system ever had, and especially less micromanagement than the current system with fractional skill levels)
- and that it's already implemented and not quite unplayably broken and would be too much work to change (which is reasonable).
- For this message the author duvessa has received thanks: 3
- Cimanyd, dracos369, VeryAngryFelid