duvessa wrote:if shafts aren't dangerous past early game it's because nothing is dangerous past early game; that would be a problem with past-early-game, not with shafts
While there is something to this argument, and in general many people would say once you reach a certain point in DCSS you should be able to 3 rune win, its not really the full story. The early game powercurve is incredibly impactful, radically more than anything else even after just the first few character levels. Just gaining one or two levels makes a corner ogre radically less dangerous simply due to increased HP being such a radically larger percentage increase of previous levels HP relative to later char levels. Of course this depends on species but its one of the major reasons species with increase HP are (often) considered very strong.
On the first few levels missing out on even one floor's XP is simply a radically different change in power level. Going from 2 to 5 is simply not even vaguely equivalent to going from Depths 1 to Depths 3. Many branches often have very little difference between the various floors, going one or two down is not going to radically change the tactical milieu other than the fact that something new was generated and you were put into it and more often than not a shafts puts you into a square with no monsters visible or very few visible. If you go from Lair 1 to Lair 3 there is little reason to believe you will be much worse off, of course if you get shafted to the bottom of the Lair this will change since its a special floor.
You could force people to run through Tombs instead of Zot to get the orb and run the orb through a branch of Hell, this would make the past-early-game harder to win (at least on its face I think it would). But you would still be left with the same issue that a 3 floor shaft on floor 2 is radically worse than a 3 floor shaft on Depths 1 or Lair 1 or Swamp 1, simply because the generation on those does not radically change and your overall power level has become more gradual and regular. So yes while the problem you identify does exist AND will cause this symptom. There is also another issue which will cause this symptom as well. This is rather bad.
However it is always the case that a bad shafting can force you to use a an escape option that you would otherwise not need to use. Past the early game a couple floors descent is almost never enough of a power difference to seriously scare you except in special circumstances. The only really scary part is that the shaft is essentially a random teleport and has all the same risks of a random teleport on a mostly unexplored map and it has exactly the same options of that situation which is a situation that is realatively common and part of regular gameplay anyway. And amusingly enough one of the "answers" to a bad shaft is to randomly teleport. But this is also why a floor 2 shaft is so much radically worse, because you often won't have stored up the "answers" that a bad shafting can force, you may have even found or at least ID'd a teleport scroll yet.
Now if shafts were more like getting abyssed where they put you into another branch or whatever this might be different. Like for example they don't shaft you down but shaft into a vault-like temporary side branch that is scaled to some kind of difficulty relative to where it happened.
The problem you identify is something that makes balancing out the mmm realative interestingness of shafts to be very hard, maybe even impossible, i.e. that past a certain point, barring extreme things like putting someone on the worst abyss floor, the shafts does very little because past-early-game you can handle most things. But there is a further problem with shafts, the content itself is not really designed such that there is much of a major difference between Generic floor X and generic floor X+2. Yes it gets a little harder, but not really much harder except under certain very particular circumstances (i.e. early floors or going from normal vaults to last vault floor or last swamp floor that has Lerny etc).
Even if we somehow solved the "not dangerous past early-game issue" we would still have the relative danger between floors issue. Indeed it is probably impossible to create a generalized "fair" shafting algorithm for DCSS as it stands, there are so many corner cases based on branch and floor. By "fair" I mean that being shafted 2 floors always resulted in a similar increase in "danger". The "danger" of being shafted 2 floors is so radically variable depending of various factors. If I remember right many lowest floors can't be randomly shafted to so many of the most egregiously bad cases can't occur, but even so the trend itself essentially stands and the fact that so many things need exceptions to the mechanic tends to indicate its simply a bad/awkward mechanic.
Personally I would very much prefer that shafts were essentially involuntary portals to something vault-like (but a vault designed to have options to possibly escape without fighting). Because currently, in the vast majority of cases, they are functionally really just random teleports and those already exist. The vault-like mechanic would mean you could tailor things to give an appropriate level challenge at any point on any floor. An argument against it might be if people often did not wind up going roughly back to where they were shafted but I think most people probably do, unless they are playing the sort of game where they are gonna skip a lot of stuff anyway (like trying to minimize turn count).
But I would say that a run of Hellcrawl does in fact feel dangerous for the whole run, especially if you try a minimal turn count 9 rune run. I have done a winning 18.5k turn count 9 rune run of hellcrawl (and I think 4 other sub 23k runs), in order to get this I dived through depths, zot, and the hell branch trying to find and take the first stair I could find. This run also includes an un-stairdancable bottom level of Vaults and Zot has MUCH harder creatures in it. Every time you take a stair you are doing the equivalent of a 1 floor shaft. I did this run as an Octopode, so a low starting HP species. So even in a case where past-early game is in fact dangerous, far far more dangerous than normal crawl, I was still able to cope with the equivalent of 30 1-floor shaftings ( worse really because you can't ascend stairs and rest in a previously cleared floor). And believe me a pack of Cool Robins with the Combo Robin in Zot is really damn dangerous and iirc I ran into them on that run. Running through Vestibule while carrying the orb at level 23 when you don't know which of the 4 hell branches is enabled is not trivial. This is all well and fine, but what does it prove? It basically shows that a large amount of 1 floor shafts does not actually generate enough shitty situations to exhaust the escape options you will find even when the entire play through is extremely dangerous. I believe on my 1-rune hellcrawl playthrough win (i.e. you skip all unnecessary branchs by doing only dungeon 1-15 and then immediately zone into depths then zot then hell and pick up hell run in the hell boss room) I was going into Zot before I hit level 20 and I picked up the hell rune while carrying the orb at like level 23 or something. Maybe I suck but it felt incredibly dangerous the whole way. So even missing out on massive amounts of loot ( no vaults, no extra side branch, no slime vault etc) I still had enough escape options to deal with D15+U3+E1+Z5+H7 = 30-ish total 1-floor shaftings while running through zones at a character level 5 or more less than what people often run them at all while not having the option to use stairs to go up to "safe" floors which would have saved me even more escape options. I have done bottom level vaults at like XL 17 in hellcrawl a number of times with no upstairs, it feels very dangerous to me.
Basically even in a playthrough that actually is dangerous the whole way through, once you get a modest nest egg of escape options you are almost certainly going to have what you need to deal with a bad shafting and only like 1 in 10 shaftings would even require you to use up a stored escape option with decent play, not even optimal play. I don't even vaguely try to play optimally or have any kind of good win percentage. Just decent fairly wise play. The "interestingness" of normal crawl shaftings, outside of a few corner cases, is entirely illusory. I feel very confident that Hellcrawl essentially proved this.
Thursday, 28th November 2019, 07:42 
