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@non dev team: if you had a time machine

PostPosted: Friday, 24th February 2017, 13:20
by lethediver
For players, not devs: If you could change anything in DCSS that's currently not possible due to scope or other reasons, what would it be?

There. Now we can talk without the elitists ridiculing us for the crime of having an opinion.

Re: @non dev team: if you had a time machine

PostPosted: Friday, 24th February 2017, 13:35
by ZipZipskins
See also: all of CYC, all of GDD, 25% of DCA

Re: @non dev team: if you had a time machine

PostPosted: Friday, 24th February 2017, 14:28
by MainiacJoe
I would like to die less often.

Re: @non dev team: if you had a time machine

PostPosted: Friday, 24th February 2017, 15:16
by rjrrt
I'm a dev, but I too would like to die less often. Wait, I'm not a dev. Damn it, I posted under the wrong topic.

Re: @non dev team: if you had a time machine

PostPosted: Friday, 24th February 2017, 15:50
by Doesnt
Remove spell hunger

Re: @non dev team: if you had a time machine

PostPosted: Friday, 24th February 2017, 16:04
by mikee
This could have been a really good thread, but I wish you'd just stopped after the first line. Does everything have to be about whatever chip somebody has on their shoulder because duvessa was sarcastic to them once?

Re: @non dev team: if you had a time machine

PostPosted: Friday, 24th February 2017, 20:40
by Rast
"once"

Re: @non dev team: if you had a time machine

PostPosted: Friday, 24th February 2017, 22:58
by Dingbat
If I had a time machine I'd go back and slap myself with a rainbow trout while shouting "play better, dammit!"

Re: @non dev team: if you had a time machine

PostPosted: Friday, 24th February 2017, 23:43
by pubby
go back in time to prevent anime from being born

Re: @non dev team: if you had a time machine

PostPosted: Saturday, 25th February 2017, 02:10
by tabstorm
Serious answer:

Eating:
- Get rid of eating. It doesn't accomplish the goals it is supposed to, and you can just have a hard turncount clock instead with less interference in gameplay. A seriously tight food clock is too high-variance for my tastes.

Weapons:
- Mostly do away with the attack delay system as the means by which characters gain more power. Reduce the number of weapon types so that there are fewer throwaway weapons and the game throws less garbage at you.
- Mostly do away with the (6-skill) weapon skill system.
- Mostly do away with the enchantment system.

The function of the current system seems to be to make at least 80% of the weapons that drop useless due to being outside your chosen skill. Presumably, the reason for this is that it's possible for weapons to drop that by pure chance are vastly better than what you have right now (e,g, The Glaive of Overpoweredness {Speed, rF++ MR+ dex+3 sInv}). Switching to such weapons would be an absolute no-brainer, and a single weapon drop can be a huge swing in your win probability. For instance, in a melee turncount speedrun, success is ALL about finding a good weapon. Reducing weapon and armor variance would make your victory more contingent on your play than on choosing the right weapon skill or on happening to find a good artefact.

Armor:
- Change the current ac/ev display to protection[x-y] and EV
- Mostly do away with armor enchantment
- Homogenization of armor numbers (less +10 plates floating around)
- Better balancing of armor types so that light armor isn't crap.

Similar motivations to the above, wrt. armor drops massively swinging the game in your favor. This change to protection is a lot simpler than GDR while achieving the same effect.

Combat:
- Somehow make ranged not melee at a distance while not being overpowered
- Simpler or more intuitive formulas
- Smaller numbers to reduce things like 130HP LCS's being needed to punch through AC
- More consequences for being surrounded by enemies like melee or evasion penalties
- Better AI for enemies
- No more monsters using weapons and armor, special flags, etc.
A pack of decently powerful enemies can do a lot if you can't easily escape them.
Monsters using weapons and armor introduces confusion in just how much damage they can do. There's also the weirdness with monster attack delay that I don't fully understand. If they don't "wield" things, it's easier to know what exactly the monster can do to you. It also does away with things like having to xv or use that key that I forgot to check for reachers in console, or check for enemies with crossbows, or whatever, that is easily visible in tiles. I am lazy.

Spells:
- Reduce the number of spells
- No more Conj/X to soak up experience
- Get rid of the spell failure + miscast system, replace it with a binary check: With this armor and your strength, you need X skill in magic to cast spell Y
- Bring back Charms, allow them to stay on forever once cast, but putting on armor that would be too heavy causes disruption that turns off the Charm
- Allow transmutations to stay on forever
I like Charms and Transmutations but the percent-failure system invites degenerate gameplay - you can't let the spells stay on forever when people can game the fail rate by taking their armor off.

Dungeon:
- Smaller sized floors to mitigate excessive kiting
- Adjust difficulty curve so that there is less reliance on the "You have to avoid this unkillable in the early dungeon" model, while also reducing the "Now you are the unkillable!" mid-late game problems.
- Complete linearity without upstairs, place runes on doomrl-style special floors
- Runes are optional for winning but increase the difficulty of enemy spawns creating a rank system so that an all-runer is meaningfully difficult and not a grind through endless hellfire and torment
Let's admit it: Most of the action in Crawl is in special runevault ends past the early game.
Also, I think it's desirable to mitigate excessive kiting in some way, but it's not as if you want to get to the point where repositioning is forbidden. Hellcrawl achieves this by making piety decay so fast that you can't afford to rest or lure much but I don't really like it...

Other:
- Greatly reduce the availability of escape consumables
Everything is a whole lot harder when you don't have 15 teleports, 5 blinks and 7 Fears on you.