Adventures in Faster Play

[Igxfl]

I've typically been one to explore all of every level.

In an effort to reduce boredom and stupid mistakes, I just tried out faster type of playstyle, where I explored very little of each level unless looking for altars or stairs.
I got deep into Lair this way before being killed by a molten gargoyle.
It turned out to be really fun to skip a lot of dungeon and make fast progress. There were fewer fights, but they were harder, and I fell behind in XP and items much less than I would have expected.

I used a Spriggan Enchanter to make this kind of play easier and relied a lot on high stealth and abusing movement speed.
I don't know if heavy level-skipping would easily work for most characters. How viable is it for more typical characters to skip lots of levels at less-than-expert level play?

[bel]

You might want to take up turncount speedrunning. This way you have a more concrete goal rather than simply "dive down faster". You will die a lot more though.

[mps]

What you describe is standard speedrunning technique. Unfortunately, speedrunning is a little dead lately (though admittedly I'm a bit out of the loop just now). You can still see gammafunk running MiBe's on cszo now and then. You might try taking a look some time.

[daggaz]

Playing this way is wrong and an affront to everything that is Crawl. The only correct way to play is to explore every square (this includes destroying plant life in order to see hidden corners) and to kill every monster. Every single one of them. If you miss a timed vault like the ice-cave, you have failed and should immediately ctrl-q.

[tedric]

In the 0.15 tournament (http://dobrazupa.org/tournament/0.15/overview.html), I played a MiBe with the rough rule-of-thumb that I would manually explore each level just long enough to find a down-staircase -- with exceptions for avoiding unreasonable danger, finding portals or checking for multiple shops (in which cases I would use ?Mapping immediately when possible). I won, and quite unexpectedly ended up with the second-lowest turncount in the whole tourney. It wasn't true speedrunner-fast, at 31k turns, and granted that MiBe is easy mode to begin with...but I was still surprised at how easily I could skip massive chunks of most floors without ever feeling underpowered. The same concept definitely translates to other combos -- to a greater or lesser extent depending on robustness, move speed, etc. -- and probably there is no combo for which it is necessary to explore everywhere and kill everything. And in general, keeping (relatively) low(er) turncount in mind as a minor goal will teach you to think harder about how to use all of the options at your disposal; every action should be taken with an eye toward maximizing killpower and minimizing the potential that you'll need to rest or backtrack.

On the other hand, manual exploration can get quite tedious, so on less-robust characters I tend to get lazy and just use autoexplore until it stops working, then G>. In real time, this is probably only a little bit slower.

[wizzzargh]

I do this sometimes and think this approach is a reliable way to make crawl more intense. I still make stupid mistakes though, so while I'd dive for 'fun' I think even accounting for boredom it's still probably safer to explore everything.

[Wahaha]

You can also try branchless (don't enter lair, orc, vaults).

[advil]

I used a Spriggan Enchanter to make this kind of play easier and relied a lot on high stealth and abusing movement speed.
I don't know if heavy level-skipping would easily work for most characters. How viable is it for more typical characters to skip lots of levels at less-than-expert level play?

A great combo to try this with is DDBe. I don't think this combo needs too much expertise to play fast and ~50k 3 rune wins are really viable for DDBe. (I'd say 50k is a much easier target to start with than something like 30k -- I think if you are on the tournament scoreboard for speed at the end of the tourny, you can't really duck out of calling that a "true speedrun" )

[bel]

To OP. You might also want to try "crate_crawl". Short version of what to do is here.

Makes game shorter and tighter on XP, if that's what you want.

[tedric]

if you are on the tournament scoreboard for speed at the end of the tourny, you can't really duck out of calling that a "true speedrun"

Well, Bloax had the #1 fastest run that tourney at ~13K turns, which is more than 2x faster than mine, and most tourneys end up with several sub-20K runs. And I wasn't trying to "speedrun" as much as "get the inevitable MiBe win out of the way with minimal effort" -- the run could easily have been a few thousand turns faster if I'd actually been intentional about minimizing turns instead of just progressing as quickly as I felt was reasonable. Thanks though!

[MainiacJoe]

Does the OP idea retain any value for those characters who are worshipping exploration gods?

[tabstorm]

Does the OP idea retain any value for those characters who are worshipping exploration gods?

I don't know about Ely, but Ash is extremely bad early on and will take even longer to get your piety to 6*. You can do it, but it will use more turns - though you will have a much easier mid-late game.

[daggaz]

You can also try branchless (don't enter lair, orc, vaults).

or zot...

[bel]

Exploration based gods can sometimes be good even for speedrunning-type characters because you can end up exploring a fair bit of the floor, but not killing a lot of monsters (if you are a stealthy type), so gods that give piety on killing have some disadvantage. That said, Ash piety can be very finicky if you don't find enough curse scrolls, which is most of the time in early game.