dpeg wrote:It seems funny now that when we made the aptitude scale coarser (from percentage based, with steps of 5 to the current -5...+5 scale) we were afraid that it might be too coarse but in reality it might be too fine still
I might have overstated slightly. Aptitudes do matter, but people tend to overestimate or overvalue their effect. In very extreme cases they clearly matter (+4 to pole-arms means a Merfolk gets good at melee with them significantly faster), and within one particular category of skills, like magic or defense [i.e., stealth/dodging/fighting/armour]), a bunch of smaller differences of the same type can definitely add up. Demonspawn's -1 across the board (or almost across the board), for instance, is by no means crippling, but unless you are playing a very specifically focused style (like berserker), their lagging behind species with better aptitudes is noticeable (though fairly minor usually).
Where aptitudes hardly matter at all, in my experience, is with (e.g.) High Elves' -2 to necromancy and -1 to summoning. On paper, this seems like a way to differentiate them from deep elves, but this is very minor in practice. It means that starting out as a necromancer with a High Elf will put you behind the curve and be a more challenging start than usual, I suppose, but otherwise it is not really meaningful. High Elves can easily branch out into necromancy, even pretty darn early in the game, with ease. Their great aptitudes in nearly everything else more than compensates. But some people still have this idea that somehow that the -2 aptitude means that getting the good necromancy spells online is going to be some huge liability, but it isn't. In practice the difference in fighting aptitude between DE and HE is much more meaningful, and nevertheless that difference is generally not as meaningful as the difference in HP growth. Is that enough of a difference? Maybe. Sometimes I feel like it is, other times it doesn't seem as though it is enough.
Although mostly the fixation on aptitudes is not something the actual design of Crawl encourages, there are a few times when the design itself suggests they matter much more than they do.
Maybe this was since corrected, but when I was playing the 10.3 version recently (because I was stuck with an old computer for a while on which the more recent version didn't work), I remembered chuckling to myself when I noticed that the "Hunter" background was greyed out as "Not Recommended" for Hill Orcs, and if you did choose HOHu, "Javelins" were the only recommended choice. I could only assume that this is because (horror of horrors!) HO have (or at least had) a -1 aptitude in crossbows, bows, and slings, and a 0 for throwing. If HOHu are still listed as "not recommended" in the game, it is tantamount to trolling newbies, because HOHu are in fact an extremely strong background, especially so if you choose something *other* than the javelins that the game recommends. (Though javs are plenty strong as a starting weapon, of course.)
(In passing, I'll add that I really don't understand what makes some people focus narrowly on DEFE as being more powerful than HEFE, and recommend the former over the latter to new players who want to try casters. FE is a fine background to get into casting, of course, but HE is a much better race for trying it, especially for newbies. I suppose DE do get sticky flame online *slightly* faster, but that's really due to their slightly faster character leveling, more so than aptitudes, and in any case you are usually talking the difference between, on average, "end of D2 or beginning of D3" for DE, and "One third to one-half of D3 explored" for HE, with variation in enemies fought and experience gained potentially having a bigger effect on this, for any given run, anyway.)