MainiacJoe wrote:First: does this indeed mean that I suck?
Second: When I spectate people online I am utterly amazed at how fast they are playing, even while having a conversation with me! They seem to be making decisions and pressing keys so much faster than I do or can. I have a very hard time actually following people's games. It feels like everything happens so quickly that I can’t figure out what a player did before they’re on another floor doing something else.
So maybe there are in-game habits I could stand to fix, or maybe I just play deliberately yet efficiently, and probably a bit of both. I must say, though, that my enjoyment of the game is very high even with these long game times. I didn't think about this at all until I started seeing lots of references recently to "good players ought to take 3-4 hours" and found myself utterly incapable of imagining myself ever playing that fast.
Speedruns are a product of veteran players looking for things to do. The fact that these playstyles exist doesn't imply anything about the quality of slower play. Speedrun play can be intentionally suboptimal; you sometimes make tradeoffs to do things more quickly, whether in turns or realtime. Speedruns are somewhat distinct from just playing quickly here, but the principle can still apply.
A lot of gameplay speedup can be assisted through rcfile modification. The rcfile allows for Lua scripting using a number of exposed gameplay variables, so with thoughtful modification (or just borrowing someone's rc) you can automate away as much of the game's i/o as you prefer.
If you look at the rcfiles of the players with the fastest wins, you'll often see things like:
Custom autopickup functions, to automate away realtime spent looking at floor drops.
Customized message channels, to hide flavour text that has no impact on gameplay, or to highlight text that's important.
Custom runrest_stop_message and runrest_ignore_message entries, to interrupt/ignore things that require attention (or don't) when travelling/resting.
Custom force_more_message entries, to alert the player to danger automatically.
Reduced delay settings, to ensure that the game is as responsive as it can be.
Another aspect of it is that as you've learned the game inside and out, many decisions reduce down to nondecisions that happen very quickly. Good positioning becomes automatic, recognizing danger becomes automatic, getting into dangerous situations becomes less frequent as you defuse them out of habit before things go south. You end up piloting diesel characters more quickly because you have a feel for floor danger and for when things are safer.
It's worth remembering that DCSS is a turnbased game where you have all the time in the world to choose your next move. If you reach greatplayer or greaterplayer, you'll likely find that your play has sped up considerably just from experience. If not, that's okay too, because it's fundamentally unimportant.