Slime Squisher
Posts: 382
Joined: Thursday, 12th April 2012, 02:07
Location: Standing right behind you...
I'm switching (sort of) to Angband + actually good Ideas(!)
1. Remove Pan and the Abyss
Crawl's "anti-scumming" is a fallacy. Any Crawler will be quick to point out that Crawl does not encourage scumming for xp, money, or items, and in fact discourages it by having OOD monsters and dungeon floors that do not generate new items and a new map whenever you return to one of its levels. However, scumming is in fact encouraged, just later in the game. If you want to even think about cleaning a Zig, you need the best goodies you can find. Alright, Zigs aren't *required*. However, Angband handles this quite nicely: you have the *option* to prevent the game from giving you any way to go back to previous levels, so you are forced to go down (seriously!). Because of the finite amount of food in the dungeon, even if the player manages to farm xp from a breeder like a louse or a worm mass, they will die from starvation (and for any smartass who is going to cite the existence of the "satisfy hunger" spell, I want them to know that it is removed in the v4 trunk build). Even if you do scum in Angband, there is a reasonable amount of danger invloved, especially on the floors with all the good exp/items. The scumming of Pan goes against the design philosophy anyway, so both Pan and the Abyss should be removed or reworked.
2. Remove Hunger or make it more important
Angband has a hunger system, but the shops trivialize it, as there is an infinite supply from the shops on the surface (this does not contradict some of the things I said in #1). Crawl's hunger system is broken, as I'm sure many will agree. Either hunger must happen much faster, or the hunger system should be removed entirely (as is sort of done in Angband), as currently the system is rather irritating. There is almost no way for an experienced player (or an inexperienced player that knows that it is possible to starve) to starve, unless they make an unplanned trip to the abyss (which will kill you anyway) or are forced by enemies into a labyrinth (the enemies will be there when you leave, so it's kind of pointless). I feel that either the removal or increase in speed of the hunger system would be an improvement, but because I dislike scum(ming), I would prefer the latter
3. Optional levels of Difficulty
I don't believe the game should be made easier, but it should be able to, if the player so desires, make it harder with a single option change. I beat DCSS for the first time less than half a year ago after I started playing a year and a half ago. I have beaten it nine times since, managing to get a three game streak, beating each game with different class/species combinations. There, in my opinion, comes a point with DCSS where you just have it (cough, cough, hyperbolic and cerebovsquire and the others who's names I can't remember). I'm not that level of good, but I've won 10 out of the last hundred something games I've played, which isn't a half bad win ratio. I feel that people who want a little of a (or a lot of a) extra challenge should be able to get it if they want, and without having to hassle with recompilations or changing configuration files.
I do not plan on quitting DCSS, or leaving this forum; on the contrary, I plan on staying on this forum, as it has one of the liveliest forum communities of any roguelike. I mean these suggestions quite seriously, but I think I'm crazy to believe that anybody will do anything with them. But yes, I do believe that they would make the game better.
Jabberwocky wrote:You came back on the forums. Everything in the corner has been worse since 11/4/12. It got better when you left, but now it's bad again.
"You cannot grasp the true form of Giygas's attack!"