Ziggurat Zagger
Posts: 4478
Joined: Wednesday, 23rd October 2013, 07:56
Saturday, 2nd August 2014, 19:08
Changing game difficulty level by scaling HP
I think the difficulty level of Crawl for new players and so called regular players is just fine. However, I also think (like I guess many others) that after Lair the game is quite easy if you know what you're doing and avoid any stupid mistakes. So I understand that some people would like the game to be more challenging.
Death in Crawl is almost always caused by getting your HP reduced to zero or below. There's also starving, drowning and sinking in lava but they're pretty rare. So if the amount of max HP characters have would be reduced, the chance of death would be bigger and the game thus harder.
So I propose an rcfile option for scaling down the max HP for the whole of the game. It would only affect newly created games. The default value would be 100%, but you could change it to a smaller value, for example 50%. Then you would have 50% less HP in the game. If score is important, this could give an automatic multiplier to the score (50% hp -> 2*score, 33% HP -> 3*score etc.). Of course this scaling factor would be displayed in character dumps, so that everyone could see it.
A problem would be that this would affect early game difficulty more than late game. So maybe somehow the max HP in the later stages should be reduced more. This would require a more complicated system. Of course there could also be an optional max HP limit. Playing with a hard limit of 100 HP would surely be more challenging.
Death in Crawl is almost always caused by getting your HP reduced to zero or below. There's also starving, drowning and sinking in lava but they're pretty rare. So if the amount of max HP characters have would be reduced, the chance of death would be bigger and the game thus harder.
So I propose an rcfile option for scaling down the max HP for the whole of the game. It would only affect newly created games. The default value would be 100%, but you could change it to a smaller value, for example 50%. Then you would have 50% less HP in the game. If score is important, this could give an automatic multiplier to the score (50% hp -> 2*score, 33% HP -> 3*score etc.). Of course this scaling factor would be displayed in character dumps, so that everyone could see it.
A problem would be that this would affect early game difficulty more than late game. So maybe somehow the max HP in the later stages should be reduced more. This would require a more complicated system. Of course there could also be an optional max HP limit. Playing with a hard limit of 100 HP would surely be more challenging.
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Bloat: 17: RaRoPrPh{GuStGnCa}{ArEtZoNb}KiPaAnDrBXDBQOApDaMeAGBiOCNKAsFnFlUs{RoBoNeWi
