The Tavern

specifically, regarding fireball.

You can target a tree directly with fireball. But you can't target a wall directly with fireball. This is unexpected, and thus spoilery, because trees behave very similarly to rock walls. Since recently, trees can be lit by the explosion of a fireball, not just the center, so this is unnecessary. Lightning and disintegration can be allowed to target trees, but they can target rock walls anyway. I don't think that targeting rock walls with fireball is a good thing, because it would allow reaching very far around corners and because a wall exploding in a projected fireball looks and feels weird, so the best resolution is to forbid targeting trees directly with fireball.

The same may be true for non-monster statues, and spells similar to fireball - ignition, iceblast, orb of electrocution, etc.

Why was this CYC'ed? Or, if it wasn't CYC'ed, why is it IN CYC?

someone really hates me

Nobody moved this post, Tiktacy, though if HG would prefer it to be in GDD there's no reason it couldn't be put there.

That said, I literally don't understand the logic in the OP; it seems intuitively obvious to me that fire spells should be able to target trees, and the idea that "trees behave very similarly to rock walls" doesn't make the behavior of fireball really all that "spoilery," given that the average Crawl player probably expects that trees can be set on fire.

maybe trees should actually just be rock walls

i would support that

so often we talk about spoilery and new player experience but i think 99% of the audience of a game like dcss is probably the exact kind of player that don't mind spoilery and silly learning curves?

i have yet to see someone say "whoa i'd totally play an old school dungeon crawler but i don't like details! i especially hate setting trees on fire!"

i think setting trees on fire is fun, isn't that the point?

Sure it's fun but it's a really obscure distinction between walls and trees. They both lack most features of monsters, but trees have 1 feature in common with monsters - they can be targeted with fireball. If fireballs only smash against the surface of walls, why would they not smash against the surface of trees? And I say this having frequently considered zapping a fireball against a wall to deal with monsters in close quarters. Yeah, it is mostly just a silly bit of fun, but it is a bit of fun that is esoteric and inaccessible for no good reason. Like, if the recent change didn't happen, I bet most offline players would never have discovered that fireball is as good as lightning at setting trees on fire, since fireball did nothing if fired adjacent to a tree. I do expect fireballs to set trees on fire, and with the recent change it would happen inevitably anyway, but I don't expect fireballs to penetrate straight into trees when the explosion can only be adjacent to other terrain features. It's bit like if digging destroyed earth elementals.

What's with this recent obsession with 'spoilery' stuff anyway? I'd rather play a game where I learned something every day whenever I played rather than one that I can figure out everything from the start.

I'd rather play a game where all the rules are clear from the start but I find myself learning more about 'playing well' whenever I play.

Spoilery, in the crawl definition, is things you cannot reasonably figure out from playing the game. Crawl tries to avoid things that fit that definition of spoilery. Trees letting you target them directly is not spoilery (though I do still think they should probably not exist because they are just walls).

I also prefer to play a game that has a lot of depth in how much I can learn, but I'd rather the game be designed well enough to not require a wiki to learn it. Although this may sound completely stupid (and I do feel a little sheepish saying this), I only recently learned that trees *could* be set on fire, even though I've been playing the game for many years. The reason is that, like you said, it is intuitive that trees should be set on fire, but most beginner players don't live long enough to be able to cast fireball, not for a long time. So what do we do? We take flame tongue or throw flame and try and set trees on fire, which of course doesn't work, and so even, years later, when we can easily get to the point where we can comfortably cast fire balls, we don't even try to light trees on fire because our initial attempts with other fire spells didn't. I call that a "spoilery" detail, because it's not one likely to be found without external spoilers. If a player doesn't figure out something this basic in the first few **years** of playing a game, it is a symptom of a design problem IMHO. Or I could just be completely retarded. Yeah, that may be partly true, but it doesn't account for all of it !

Turns out that there are different types of tiles in this game.

Certain monsters shoot fire or lightning. In particular spriggan air elementalists who spawn in forest vaults. Eventually a player should see trees being lit on fire even if they don't try to do it intentionally. It can easily happen unintentionally from a player's spells and wands as well.

Why fireball spell? You can set fire it with wand of fire I guess.

Speaking about learining and intuitive, I recently learned that you need to press > if you want to fall through an shaft...

Burning trees is pretty cool and this can be made even clearer by detailing ways of destroying trees in their description and by making entry vaults such as:
an insane lightning spire or fire giant
surrounded by a ring of deep water
surrounded by a ring of humans
surrounded by trees
surrounded by translucent stone walls,
but that's beside my original point, which is: remove the distinction between targetting walls and trees. I agree with Wahaha's comment, but (Xion) the fact that you can target trees directly with the center of fireball/ignition is not something that you can figure out, ever, unless someone tells you, your fingers slip, or something like that. There's just no reason to ever expect it to work. It's like the Vampiric Draining and Freeze bug that gave you full-LOS smite-targeting if you pressed "!" while targetting. What I'm talking about is very strange and very unimportant and very uninteresting - a bad combination. And you wish for it to stay in the game?? Imagine if trees had some other invisible property, say, if missiles could actually travel straight through mangroves, like into fog (though shooting through fog is not in a good place right now); or, imagine if monsters vulnerable to an element could recieve damage from standing adjacent to clouds of that element. The game sets up expectations for how monsters and clouds interact, then inexplicably breaks them! There's no obsession here, but it's worthy of commits, so why not discussion. Anyway, for trees to be targettable with fireball, and for this information to be non-spoilery per crate's definition, either walls have to be targettable with fireball (which is especially bad with ignition since it could proc once more) or trees have to gain noticeable characteristics of monsters: a health bar, a monster's description in xv, "the tree resists", etc.

if an elephant tramples u into a tree u should take extra damage because the tree gives u splinters in your butt. exeption: races with tough skin dont get splinters and nagas dont get splinters either b/c they dont have a butt

That reminds me of this one time when I was like 5 years old and my parents took me on a road trip and we stopped for lunch in this shitty little town called Pie Town and we had a picnic lunch at a park and I wanted to go on the seesaw so I sat down but the seesaw was made of like some kind of unvarnished wood and my posterior was ensplintered with a fury

you can't lrd them or passwall them or dig them though