Lasty wrote:The reason I discourage the use of terms like melee, mage, hybrid, and caster to describe characters is that I've seen several posts by new posters (and even regulars) who saw the words being used commonly to describe characters and made bad assumptions about how they should play as a result. It's true that melee/mage/hybrid/caster are easy shorthands for shared concepts, but that's the problem, really -- sorting characters into these categories makes it harder for people to see how similar characters in these categories really are and how much of good play for each one overlaps with good play for the others.
New players are going to bring in all sorts of misconceptions in from their previous background, and I'd say the strong role-protection divide between the various classes that is common to cooperative games like D&D and WoW is more likely to be the main contributor for this specific misconception than the particular words we choose to use. They are going to have to unlearn this misconception either way, and it seems likely to me that it will be a faster and better process if we just tell them that Crawl has more fluid roles than they're used to, rather than if we are just oddly insistent that they adopt our jargon before we'll deign to treat them seriously.
Lasty wrote:Obviously, you don't have to go to the silly extreme of describing everything about your character, but is it so hard to say something like "ranged-focused light-armour HuGl^Fed" or "conjurations-focused heavy-armour HuWz^Chei" when describing a specific character, or when discussing a tactics for using a type of attack say "when using conjurations" or "when using melee" as opposed to "if you're a caster" or "if you're a melee dude"?
Those character descriptions are pretty clunky and loaded down with jargon. I don't think the broad melee/ranged/mp battery divisions are so confusing that the precision provided by extra jargon is worth the cost in clarity when it starts turning into word salad.
Obviously when you and I are talking, we can use all the jargon and we'll both have no trouble, but when I'm giving advice to a new player I'll try to use vocabulary that already means something to them, because that's kind of the point of giving advice to a new player. A MMO refugee might get exploration strategy explained in terms of managing line of sight and starting with a retreat to avoid 'drawing aggro' from more than the first orc in the pack, for instance, even though 'drawing aggro' is not actually the mechanic that Crawl uses under the hood. And if somebody just wants to chat about the awesome Dragon Punch that they got working on their latest character, I'll let them say it however they want because what is it to me, anyway?
Wednesday, 23rd July 2014, 17:31 