Ideas for a fork

[Shtopit]

I can't code, but I sometimes think of how Crawl could be if another direction were taken. These are some things I would put into it.

1. Numbers for everything. It's probably an effect of AoE2, where pretty much anything was expressed through numbers which you could see. Health, MR, spell cost, abilities, damage ranges, weaknesses... everything would be visible to the player in the clearest possible way.
2. Micromanagement: Summoners and similar would be allowed to micromanage with the chance of shouting an order to only a category of allies or all of them or a single one, these orders, however, would each take a turn to issue. Different intelligence levels would mean different understanding of orders. High sound = high chance of orders being misheard. Different chances for orders to be ignored.
3. Half XP gained by seeing a monster, the other half by killing it personally. If an ally helps, the remaining XP is shared between you and your ally according to the percentage of damage dealt by each on the dead enemy.
4. Less floors, but larger. I'd probably cut away at least 1/3 of levels currently present in most branches. I'd also go for less random levels and more levels like the ones in the Depths, which I find beautiful. Maybe a mix, if there could be vaults inside the vaults, or many different vaults connected to create a level.
5. The number of stairways would increase and I'd do away with trapdoors.
5. An half-assed attempt at making π=3,14 rather than 4, but I don't know how it would work.
6. I hate inventory management (in every game, not just DCSS). I probably would limit the number of non weapon, non armour items.
7. All rings and amulets would have a fixed evocable property added to the status effect.
8. Randarts would likely disappear, but there would be an attempt to make more unrandarts appear and to create new ones with special abilities like the Singing Sword and such.

How would your fork be?

[vergil]

9. Abyss shaft introduced.
12. More spells!

[Sar]

Items would burn, except for those that would shatter.

[Lacuenta]

10) add mountain dwarf.

[Sprucery]

The Dungeon would have 27 levels.

[tedric]

all you players, that has no respect for dev team, when there is bad thing that are not in the game crawl, is wanting to put it back. it is stupid reintroduce.

[PleasingFungus]

Different intelligence levels would mean different understanding of orders. High sound = high chance of orders being misheard. Different chances for orders to be ignored.

Why?

If an ally helps, the remaining XP is shared between you and your ally according to the percentage of damage dealt by each on the dead enemy.

Isn't this already how things work?

[lethediver]

I would make all branches 3 floors max and the main dungeon 10. I'd also make the orb run much harder (increase demon spawns by a lot). And remove item generation from abyss and pan. And make a much tougher food clock - necromutation makes you starving when it runs out, for instance.

I'd also add a shitton of races, unrands and gods because shit is fun yo.

[Hellmonk]

1. Remove food
2. Remove poison magic
3. Remove player ghosts
4. Remove felids
5. Remove traps
6. Dungeon is 10 floors, vaults is 2 floors, crypt is zero floors, hells are 1 floor, pan is 5 floors, tomb is 1 floor
7. Revert damnation back to hellfire
8. Reduce consumable generation to 1/4 of its current rate
9. Replace scroll of blinking with scroll of disjunction
10. Remove wand of hasting, make the spell level 7
11. Rotate the lair of beasts with the desert of beasts, which is the same thing but hotter. Features some of the same enemies as lair but also has packs of camels and vultures, cactus dudes that shoot volleys of thorns and primal wave, and the occasional djinn.
12. Rename every enemy into something cooler, for example tengu warrior becomes shriketaur.
13. When you get the orb of zot a passage opens to double zot, a 5 floor branch with tough new enemies like orbs of double fire, starcursed juggernauts, caustic lernaean hydrae, radiation drakes, orb guardian captains, distortion shrikes, and slime Mennases. At the end of double zot is the double orb of double zot. It doubles your score, but gives you -tele and permanently marks you when you pick it up.

[genericpseudonym]

If an ally helps, the remaining XP is shared between you and your ally according to the percentage of damage dealt by each on the dead enemy.

Isn't this already how things work?

The difference is the part where you still get 50% xp for seeing an ogre and then walking away. He was just clarifying how it would mesh with the summon xp penalty.

[Shard1697]

Everything that is in the "will not implement" list that people repeatedly ask for anyways so that people can play it and realize it's bad

[Shtopit]

Different intelligence levels would mean different understanding of orders. High sound = high chance of orders being misheard. Different chances for orders to be ignored.

Why?

It just looks like an interesting addition to me, and it makes noise more relevant than just for sneaking. TBH, I also never understood how the orders work in DCSS.The summons never seem to do what I am telling them, if it isn't "attack this".

If an ally helps, the remaining XP is shared between you and your ally according to the percentage of damage dealt by each on the dead enemy.

Isn't this already how things work?

As said by the other poster, this goes after the 50% for having seen the enemy. However, I would allow the summons to fight outside your visual range, which means that, if for example a pack is attacking you and you hide behind a corner letting your underlings get in sight of the (e.g.) orc priests while you are staying out of it, and they kill something you haven't seen, you get 0 XP for that.

BTW, this thread isn't meant to be a way to tell devs "You are doing a bad job", it's meant to be a way to say "What I would do different".

[Doesnt]

now that joseph has stolen wiglaf's stupid hat, make him actually have a stupid hat that he drops and you can wear

playable bear race. not bearpeople or anything, just literally a bear

that's about it

[vergil]

playable bear race. not bearpeople or anything, just literally a bear

that's about it

Do you get to choose which bear (polar, black, tiamat) you would like to play, or just random at XL7?

[genericpseudonym]

now that joseph has stolen wiglaf's stupid hat, make him actually have a stupid hat that he drops and you can wear

playable bear race. not bearpeople or anything, just literally a bear

that's about it

the +4 stupid-looking hat {Int-3}.

[Shtopit]

now that joseph has stolen wiglaf's stupid hat, make him actually have a stupid hat that he drops and you can wear

playable bear race. not bearpeople or anything, just literally a bear

that's about it

the +4 stupid-looking hat {Int-3}.

Make it Int-3, SInv, so it becomes The Stupid Looking Hat.

[and into]

1.) Remove food
2.) Reduce clutter: ammo always mulches, tweak generation rates if necessary; abstract monster equipment, or make non-blue equipment drops non-guaranteed
3.) Remove deep water and lava, remove flying
4.) Traps trigger upon entering LOS, tweak generation
5.) Uniques give much more experience and/or drop better equipment
6.) Reduce avg. size of dungeon levels; continue to trim down # of levels in game, tweak experience gain if this proves too limiting on skill XP
7.) Cut down number of enemies
8.) ?Acquirement reform or removed
9.) MP not soft-capped at ~50 or w/e

[Siegurt]

[PleasingFungus]

5.) Uniques give much more experience and/or drop better equipment
9.) MP not soft-capped at ~50 or w/e

these happened a while ago

[Blomdor]

1. The player is clearly warned upon encountering any monster with a wand. It need not even be identified; just knowing that if you don't back away *now* you could be blasted would be something. This would prevent Ijyb and other creatures found very early in the game from essentially acting as the proverbial Gnome with a Wand of Death.

2. The walls around the Slime rune vault simply disappear upon TRJ's demise. This is a suggestion I only recently read on here, but it's much to my liking. Slimes don't seem to be as destructive as they once were, so their potential to eat the loot inside shouldn't be as much of a concern.

3. Hydras have a set number of heads, at a minimum of six and a maximum of perhaps twelve. "Chopping" weapons no longer sever heads. Minor buffs to HP and/or damage and/or EV, etc. may be reasonable if this is a tremendous nerf to them for some reason. The point would be to preserve the danger presented by them without requiring trolls and users of certain arbitrary weapon classes to resort to tedious weapon swapping.

4. Mimics are zapped, banished, rejected, axed, obliterated, thrown into the fire, put into the Friday night death slot, dropped into the depths of Mount Doom, cast into the sun, launched into deep space directly towards the nearest black hole, forced to read Vogon poetry, eaten by giant marauding carnivorous entities from another dimension, deposited into their vast extraplanar litterbox, and ultimately made to poof away for the very last time. Do not pass go. Do not collect 200 gold pieces.

5. Weapons and armor that are not runed, glowing, or otherwise visibly magical are never generated cursed. A perfectly average-looking dagger wielded by a kobold on D:1 will no longer randomly turn out to be -3 and suddenly stuck to you. An ordinary leather armor is an ordinary leather armor.

6. Shafts will send you no more than one floor down. If that's not randomly screwy enough, a maximum of two floors would also be an improvement. Being shafted from D:3 to D:6 is too likely to put a very weak character with few resources into a completely ridiculous situation for my tastes, all because the RNG decided to put an invisible hole somewhere.

7. Better yet, just remove traps. I've hardly noticed their existence for years, personally, aside from some hilarious early dungeon shafting incidents.

8. Limit Pan to 20 floors, with all five runes guaranteed to appear between them. Another idea I am shamelessly lifting from a recent discussion in the Game Design section, because it is a very good one.

9. Remove hungry ghosts. They need no replacement.

10. I would like to equalize the difficulty of Swamp and Shoals somewhat, but it seems as if it would be a hefty task and not one that could be easily summed up in a few sentences on this list. I would be extremely hesitant to do something that would make the game at this stage much easier, so tweaking Shoals to make it as simple as Swamp doesn't feel right. At the very least, I would remove catoblepones from Shoals (I'm not sure if they "naturally" spawn there, but Polyphemus likes to have them around), and make thorn hunters a bit more common in Swamp, to give it a fraction of something like the ranged threat one faces in the former. It's not much at all, but it would be something.

11. Dead characters stay dead, rather than returning from the grave and harassing the living with drain breath and weapons of distortion. Player ghosts would cease to exist.

I could probably think of a few other small things, but this is already becoming too long. EDIT: yep...way, way, *way* too long. Sorry, guys!

[yesno]

- 27 floors
- stairs lock behind you until you get the orb
- harder orb run
- no branches and no runes
- more portals and more kinds of portals
- some levels spawn with dungeon features and monster sets resembling current branches

thta's the basic idea ... much quicker game, prob 1/2 to 1/3 as long as current crawl

plus the obv stuff like no player ghosts, no food

xp would need recalibrating

also definitely no shafts in a variant like this

[Arrhythmia]

- Replace all flavour text with ridiculously overwrought flavour text, minimum 250 words per entry. Change nothing else.

[yesno]

- 27 floors
- stairs lock behind you until you get the orb
- harder orb run
- no branches and no runes
- more portals and more kinds of portals
- some levels spawn with dungeon features and monster sets resembling current branches

thta's the basic idea ... much quicker game, prob 1/2 to 1/3 as long as current crawl

plus the obv stuff like no player ghosts, no food

xp would need recalibrating

also definitely no shafts in a variant like this

i wonder if maybe it would be possible to implement something like this as a sprint, rather than a fork?

[jwoodward48ss]

Linesprint.

[PleasingFungus]

ultrashort crawl is a cool idea, so cool that it already exists and not many people play it

idk the moral

[yesno]

it isn't exactly well advertised, also if linesprint is "||||||||||||" sprint, that isn't at all what i was talking about ...? what is the ultra-short crawl you are talking about, pf?

[duvessa]

- Replace all flavour text with ridiculously overwrought flavour text, minimum 250 words per entry. Change nothing else.

- Replace all flavour text with ASCII porn

[Queen Cassie]

- Replace all flavour text with ridiculously overwrought flavour text, minimum 250 words per entry. Change nothing else.

- Replace all flavour text with ASCII porn

But then everything will taste like sweat and crouch odor! D:

[HardboiledGargoyle]

Probably Crawl Semi-Sprint, a fork so short it feels quite rushed. And it increases piety and XP gain, which partially counteracts the reason to make Crawl smaller in the first place. It has a whole bunch of scattered changes. Have you always wanted hell dwarves and abyssal kittens in your stone soup? Then greedo's Crawl Semi-Sprint is the fork for you!

[yesno]

yeah ... part of why i thought a sprint would be better than a fork is so that it would be consistent with crawl updates and benefit from the dev process, access player vaults, and hopefully draw more players by existing on official crawl servers

[PleasingFungus]

it isn't exactly well advertised, also if linesprint is "||||||||||||" sprint, that isn't at all what i was talking about ...? what is the ultra-short crawl you are talking about, pf?

every sprint

except arenasprint and meatsprint i guess

[yesno]

none of the sprints are anything like what i described

[Blomdor]

12. Remove the amulet of harm. I wasn't going to say it at first, but honestly. My D:1 venom mages already have enough issues doing exactly 0 damage to monsters and taking half their max HP in damage in return. It sometimes feels like just another little annoyance desperately trying to keep the item identification minigame relevant.

13. Remove the amulet of inaccuracy as well. This will give a tremendous buff to players by saving them one entire scroll of remove curse over the course of the game, so I understand if it seems like too much. I'd let it stick around on artifacts.

[genericpseudonym]

12. Remove the amulet of harm. I wasn't going to say it at first, but honestly. My D:1 venom mages already have enough issues doing exactly 0 damage to monsters and taking half their max HP in damage in return. It sometimes feels like just another little annoyance desperately trying to keep the item identification minigame relevant.

13. Remove the amulet of inaccuracy as well. This will give a tremendous buff to players by saving them one entire scroll of remove curse over the course of the game, so I understand if it seems like too much. I'd let it stick around on artifacts.

Combine inaccuracy and harm.

"Amulet of recklessness": decreases melee and spell accuracy but increases damage/spellpower

the accuracy penalty is instant but the damage slowly ramps up over time because amulet swapping is a sin

[Blomdor]

Hey, I might actually wear that thing in the mid-to-late game. I'd prefer if it didn't drain the user to red upon being unequipped as harm currently does, though, just so it wouldn't be another early-dungeon annoyance aside from possibly (or always) being cursed.

14. Remove worms. I get that they're meant to inform new players about slow, hard-hitting enemies, but those...don't really exist very often anymore. Cyclopes are still around, but they do most of their damage at range and aren't made *entirely* harmless by just walking casually away. Worms can be slowly, tediously killed by anyone with a ranged attack of some kind (including a spear on the floor) for free XP, and completely ignored by everyone else. I think they could go, honestly. Goliath beetles were zapped for a reason, right? Those were basically worms applied slightly later in the game, if I'm not mistaken. What else actually has slow movement speed plus exceptional melee damage these days?

Oh, right. Nagas. Eh...? Do they really count as "exceptional" melee dangers? Is having worms around actually relevant to anything about nagas? Not too sure about that.

EDIT: 15. Remove scrolls of random uselessness. Because they're random and useless, and don't even summon butterflies anymore.

16. Another idea lifted from smarter folks than I on here: all food takes 1 turn to eat. Eating during autoexplore is no longer interrupted for no apparent reason; this has been a recurring minor issue for me in Trunk. This is all assuming that food really, really needs to stick around for whatever reason.

[Sar]

Worms regenerate pretty fast nowadays, so skill 0 stone throwing doesn't really kill them anymore.

[Shtopit]

10 runes challenge is something of a micro crawl and I find it very cool, although it needs maintenance (fungi don't make you fall into water any more, for example, idem for swamp drake).

[yesno]

yeah there are some sprints that are cool but i'm talking about something that plays a lot like a regular game of crawl, except shorter, and with a few changes that push you to keep moving forward

[and into]

In addition:

D: 12
L: 5
O: 2
All Lair Branches: 3
V: 3
U: 3
Rotate Crypt/Elf: 3
Tomb: 3
Zot: 5
Finite Pan
Hells: 5 each

+ Remove item curses except Ash, remove strictly bad items.
+ All non-randarts identify on sight
+ Ashenzari reform (corollary of above): Ash gives free ability to bind a piece of equipment upon joining, you can pay large piety amount to unbind an item.
+ Remove stat drain, stats cannot go below 1 (through bad mutations / randarts with stat malus)
+ Remove all zealot backgrounds
+ Jiyva and Lugonu vaults are guaranteed in D1 through D9, but their altars never appear in temple (exception for corrupted Temple)
+ Simplify certain “busy” enemy packs (demonspawn, elves, draconians)
+ Prune number of enemy types in general
+ Remove Dith’s “no fire” conduct
+ Anyone except Dg can worship Yred

+ Just six wands: See https://crawl.develz.org/tavern/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=20845&p=281297
But then also: remove wands of teleportation, hasting, and heal wounds. Tweak generation of haste potions


Okay, (even) crazier stuff ahead

+ Simplify weapon class skills to fighting, melee combat, ranged combat; remove redundant weapons. Reintroduce stabbing skill.
+ Abstract away weapons/armor on most enemies (see: https://crawl.develz.org/tavern/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=20675&p=278934)
+ Remove Charms, Poison, Transmutations. Some specific spells in each category shunted off elsewhere.
+ Unarmed combat via forms is moved to a new god; trolls are revised as a UC-specific species. Claws mutation removed except for Trolls


+ Remove rings
+ Amulets are moved entirely toward being items that you do not want to swap around tactically, along lines of faith, guardian spirit.
+ All resistances moved to one pip (50% resistance), max damage of some enemy spells lowered
+ randarts do not give or remove resistances, unrands can retain resistance-giving properties


Cribbing from ToME....

Add New item type: Glyphs. Nearly all species have 3 slots, new species can play with having more or fewer. You find these as items and can use them to add their effect to your character. This destroys the glyph. Once you have all three slots filled, you can only add a new glyph by destroying an old one of your choice. Passive glyphs simply give you the effect listed, active glyphs give an ‘a’bility and have a certain number of charges associated with each type; these charges refill as you gain experience.

Passive glyphs:
Resist Fire
Resist Cold
Resist Magic
Resist Corrosion
Resist Electricity
Repel Missiles
(etc.)

Active glyphs:
Some current charm effects (e.g., swiftness, regeneration)
Some current rod effects

+ Rods removed (some of their effects survive as attack glyphs).
+ Remove or reform species, backgrounds, etc. that are made redundant or impossible by the above changes (e.g., venom mage)

EDIT: Forgot to mention with changes to weapons school, you would be able to equip a ranged and a melee weapon at the same time, but swapping any equipment (even weapon) would take multiple turns, the way armor currently works. All evocables (e.g., phial of floods) would be given a specific number of uses that can be replenished via ?recharging.

[PleasingFungus]

why shorten hells to 5 each? why not 3, or 1?

[tabstorm]

Dungeon:
- Remove branches. The game has around 20-30 floors, and the orb of zot is on the last floor. When you grab the orb, an exit appears on the last floor.
- Only downstairs will be present.
- No more eating.
- No more traps.
- To make players push forward, each level is on a timer. If you spend too long on a level, you will suffer some xom-esque effects, contam, etc.
- Runes are on special floors like DoomRL. Runes are worth extra points.
- The Temple is always on D:5 and contains all gods.
- Floors are smaller

Items:
- Reduce the number of weapon and armor types that spawn in the game. There are way too many clearly-junk items that exist only to be used early-on and then discarded.
- Remove enchant scrolls in general

Combat
- Overhaul and simplification of combat formulae. Numbers should get much smaller, so that you don't have to make things like Juggernauts to have a chance to kill a late-game player character.
- Replace GDR with a lower-bound on AC that is a function of armor skill and base AC
- Make it clear how much damage you can do with a given weapon, and use something simple like a die system.
- Add a critical-hit system like in Sil so that things like short blades can be less bad.
- Remove the min-delay system entirely.
- There should be 4 speeds - slow (0.5x), normal (1.0), fast (1.5x) and very fast (2.0x)
- Arrows always disintegrate, but many more spawn
- Don't let monsters use weapons armor or jewellery

Magic
- Reduce the number of spells in the game, but make skill have more of an effect on e.g. spell range
- Instead of a percentage-based miscast system, require a fixed amount of skill to cast a spell given your int, spellpower, and strength relative to body armor.
- Summoning and Necromancy were probably a mistake

Interface
- Display Sequell-esque monster data in xv.

That's all I have for now.

[Arrhythmia]

The game has around 20-30 floors

Perhaps.... 27??

[and into]

why shorten hells to 5 each? why not 3, or 1?

That would be fine, but then what would be the point of hell effects?

Maybe something like this would work: two very large levels for each hell, with stairs (on first floor) and rune vault (on second) guaranteed to spawn at opposite ends from stairs up? You could even guarantee teleports won't take you further along if you like ("A mysterious force pulls you back toward the Vestibule")

[Gongclonker]

When you die, the weapon in your hand absorbs your soul. Then, when you wield an ego-branded weapon of that type, you must struggle Pokemon-Trainer-style to keep control of your weapon. Failure means stumbling around or intentionally attacking yourself.

Alternately: when you die, wielded weapon goes to the Hall of Blades (bring it back) and becomes part of the pool of enemies that can spawn there.

Splash screen image:

[4Hooves2Appendages]

yeah there are some sprints that are cool but i'm talking about something that plays a lot like a regular game of crawl, except shorter, and with a few changes that push you to keep moving forward

Just regular crawl, maybe with fewer floors, that spawns {player-speed - 1} aut juggernauts in already explored tiles at a fairly high frequency. Need to trim enemies out of rune vaults. You win when you touch the orb.

[4Hooves2Appendages]

why shorten hells to 5 each? why not 3, or 1?

Seven floors isn't even really the problem. The floors are just way too large.