The Tavern

I kind of had a random thought about what the consequences of Zot not requiring 3 runes to enter and retrieve the orb of zot. I.e., Zot could be freely entered. I'm not really making any suggestion. Mostly just theory crafting.

Pros of removing the rune lock:
It's possible to play some really interesting games where a character just tries to win by finishing Dungeon, Depths and Zot
Can help remove some of the tedium after getting the first rune.

Cons:
It may be easier to win the game by not getting a 3rd rune and instead getting two lair runes.
Pretty fundamental change to the game

Thoughts?

The game used to have no rune locks.

The way runes are set up is kind of bad, because your character generally gets stronger in the process of getting a rune. This means that if all the runes are equally difficult to get, the first rune you get will be the hardest and the remaining ones will be boring. So instead DCSS chooses to some runes substantially harder to get than others, which of course just results in the same 6 easy runes being gathered in every game, making the remaining 11 runes in abyss/hell/pan/tomb pointless in-game - as good as players are at giving them a purpose out-of-game, these runes aren't the ones that get used to unlock Zot.

Removing the rune locks (which is basically removing runes) would be a huge change for speedruns but most games would probably play about the same; Slime, Vaults:5, and Lair sub-branch endings wouldn't be visited anymore though.

Hellcrawl has no rune locks (runes are purely for scoring) and you can play it on servers in the US, Japan, Australia, and I believe the EU, but I don't know if the x-crawl people still maintain their server.

You can do a no rune, no side branch game in hellcrawl and in fact it is probably the most interesting and challenging kind of run.

edit: It doesn't have the problems duvessa describes because you can't backtrack out of branches.

I personally would really like runes to be removed. Dungeon -> Depths -> Zot sounds like a really fun game. I personally do not really understand the purpose of runes as Zot is harder than the 3 easiest runes, so playing optimally you would not enter it anyway.

I've had a few chars die in V5 that could've taken Zot but got overwhelmed there instead. Tbh this would probably just result in the same game but skipping rune floors in terms of "optimal" play

For your information, there is a fork that does exactly that.

stormdragon: Is the short crawl available on any public server? It sounds really fun but unfortunately, I only play online (and only ascii). I may try it anyway for once.

Sorry, it is not. (I haven't approached anyone regarding hosting, nor has anyone approached me.)

However, I did add compiled zips to the repository, so players don't have to compile it.

For me personally, having no rune lock wouldn't generally change anything at all. Even currently in all my 3-rune games I do Elf and Crypt for exp and loot. They prepare me for V:5 which I also always do (it's fun). After that I'm strong enough for Zot. I wouldn't like to enter Zot any less prepared.

(My first victory 20 years ago was in a version where only one rune was required and I only got that one rune. Then again, controlled teleporting in Zot was possible...)

Spurcery: I think this is exactly the point: the rune lock is completly unnecessary. All it accomplishes is to exclude interesting challenge games for those who enjoy them.

stormdragon: I do not mind compiling but I play on many machines and do not want to bother transfering save games.

You could put your crawl save/morgue folders inside a synced shared folder. You can use any of the many available solutions for this on all your machines and have them synced back and forth between your machines for offline play (as long as you let it sync before you switch machines) then your games are transferred with no work from you.

Yes, I agree. I'm in favour of removing it.

Duvessa brought up a few good points about some of the cons of removing the Zot rune lock that I didn't consider. Namely, the fact that Vaults 5 and Slime probably wouldn't be done, though I think both lair branch endings would end up being done for xp (I think all the S4 endings are less dangerous than depths).

Now replace the word "rune" with "branch".

Both problems are fixed by having the next rune or branch be significantly hard enough that it's still challenging even after all the experience you acquired. The rune lock forces you to clear the last floor of branches, rather than only the first few floors.

Removing the rune lock would give you the option of skipping rune vaults (or the whole floor), which would reduce the risk of dying trying to get the rune, but raise the risk in the next branch, due to less experience and loot. Skipping vaults:5 would happen fairly often but I think most people would probably still want to clear lair branches for loot/exp. Some characters would still clear vaults:5, and some may skip lair runes as well. This is from a 'winrate' perspective, of people trying to win; some people would of course skip all runes just as an intentional conduct as well.