The Tavern

So when im playing webtiles do to the massive verity of different people that play and the different play styles i dont mind running in to player ghosts, they provide an interesting and varying challenge. but i tend to play the same roll over and over and running into my own ghosts get tedious and annoying. i was wondering if there is a way to prevent ghost files from being made? perhaps if i made the ghost folder read only or something?

also i didnt know where to post this so im sorry if its in the wrong spot.

I believe you can delete the bones files to kill all the ghosts locally if you wish. (At work so I can't look up the path).

Bones files are stored in the saves folder. If you installed Crawl from the .zip file, it's a folder called saves right under the main crawl folder. If you used the installer package, I think it saves it somewhere under %AppData%.

Ghosts are loaded from "bones.<location>" files found in your saves folder. Deleting these means the game has no ghosts to load.

There are plenty of in game ways to deal with ghosts too though. For instance, try playing undead races (they don't leave ghosts!). Or try playing strong ghostbuster characters, who live just to clear em out (like a necromancer, with dispel undead. Or a berserker, you can drop a brothers in arms and/or 'zerk to kill the ghosts).

(For general advice like this, you want the Dungeon Crawling Advice. Game design is for suggestions, discussions, criticism, and changes to/of game, that kind of thing. [Thread moved].)

o im fuly aware how to fight them effectivly and where the files are stored but im curious if there is a way to prevent them from being created in the first place. its a little tedious to delete them manually every time (although i suppose could write a batch file and run it after a character dies)

There isn't a setting you can use, and the folder is also used for log files and the scoreboard, so making it read only could cause other problems. A batch file would be your best bet.

Due to me playing melee characters most of the time I don't mind about my ghosts much (although they tend to overpower me in melee when I first run into them). I do believe though, that it's player-created content, thus IMHO not the game "the way it's meant to be played" so I delete my bones files after every non-undead death. Some people consider that cheating but I don't think that's the case.

I find ghosts to be a fun and ok experience in online play due to them being different people than you, but they can be very frustrating... On this tournament I got 2-shotted by one FE ghost in early D just by entering LOS and ending up two blocks away from that action alone. I didn't have my scrolls identified so a scroll of blinking could probably have saved me, but still. I know there's some high streak players who might have ran into a similar situation and made it out ok, but still... I'm not one to play in paranoid mode. The game is hard enough without these extra player-induced "screw you" moments.

How can something that is In the programming of the game possibly be "not the way it's meant to be played?"

Whenever I die with a really good character and have a heroic death, I don't delete its bones file, instead I move it to a special folder I created called "BONES". Then once I have a ton of these superghosts, I'm going to copy them all to the main folder at once, and run through the game killing every single one. Plus, I'll be able to replace them afterward, since the ghost file is automatically removed if the ghost gets used up in a game. I'm making a habit of playing multiple races and classes back and forth just for this purpose, each with a different name, and I even have backstory thought up for some of these characters. (Shin the Demigod is supposedly Schwa the Conjurer's great grandfather, but it's just a rumor!)

They call that "XP Farming".

I don't mind ghosts on later levels when I can deal with them at all. I just hate when I get pile ups on the early levels. I don't really think ghosts add much to the game at that point at all. The game has enough random silliness that can kill you without player ghosts only a couple race/class combos can even think about dealing with. This is at early levels, later on if you die from a player ghost it's probably your fault.

Would be the equivalent to a fresh install, so i wouldnt consider it cheating.

Ghosts give some good xp

Anyway, I do find them anoying some times, I mean, encountering them now and then its fun, but having first few levels with a ghost each is no fun.

Say, ive been trying to play tengu summoners, they are pretty fragile and their starting spells are not really that good. Still have to get to the lair entrance with one of them (im terrible at dealing with reduced hp). Encountering the bunch of ghost TeSu's I had been leaving behind made matters much much worse, especially since their call imp spell is a lot more powerful than the one the player can cast (might be a bug?)

Well, I've killed a bunch of ghosts online and have died by a few too and have a couple of wins to show that I can cope with them just fine, but I just think they don't add much more than they take away and especially in local. And as Pereza0 added, it's the equivalent to a fresh installation. That's exactly what I meant when I said not the game the way it should be played. It's not "vanilla" crawl imho... And they can be abused by characters with dispel undead for fast XP farming... Although it was replaced with control undead in the Necro starting book since 0.10, as far as I'm concerned, right?

My ghosts also tend to be lethal in melee only (unless draconian), so they're an annoyance which just ups the chances of screwing an already random early game.

Ah good, I'm not the only one who deletes ghosts! I find a silly backlog of them to be just irritating. I reckon there should indeed be an option to disable their generation (along with the ability to check and clear your scores at any time) with local games.

well its not that i detest ghosts, i kinda like them, but i like them with variety, and i play one class race combo excusivly till i can win with it, taking out all of my failed deep elf wizards is a pain in the ass and i dont want to do it every time.

in webtiles i dont mind finding a ghost cu they are usually different and that keeps it fun for me.

The Nethack world has a program called Hearse that will cross-ship bones files so you can get other people's dead characters to deal with. It would be really cool if someone did this for Crawl...now who's going to bell the cat?

Same here. I run the game from a batch file which deletes all my bones files because of this.

There was a suggestion in an old thread about ghosts - viewtopic.php?f=8&t=2099 - make daily bones snapshots on a server which can be downloaded. I think this would be AWESOME, and easy to implement too - just a simple cron task on the server. But unfortunately, no one cares.

Hearse definitely extended the time I still interesting in playing nethack by several months. You knew almost immediately when you'd found a bones level, because player interaction left all kinds of clues that normal level generation never did. Then you'd be creeping around carefully, examining the gutted level, wondering if there was a stash to loot, or what killed the last guy you had to watch out for. Then there was the looting! The forensic analysis aspect was almost the most interesting to me- seeing if you could tell the player's job / race / build, and carefully weeding out the cursed and dangerous items, and pocketing the rest.

Of course it had it's problems- bones could definitely unbalance a game if they were too good too early, and the late ones didn't do much but provide extra artifacts to dump in your bag of holding, And there's nothing more frustrating than getting a good character going, reaching minetown, and then finding the place covered in the corpses of a prolific save scummer, with 3 full ascension kits in the temple. I mean that just ruins it! You've either got a win you didn't earn, a frustration quit, or ignore it all and pretend minetown doesn't exist this game. All in all, getting them at the right depth and of the right quality was a little tricky.

Also- there were also people then who apparently didn't like dealing with their own ghosts either. Hearse gave you the choice between copying or cutting your bones to the server before it download more. Personally, I kind of like finishing off my old ghosts in crawl- it gives things a kind of closure.

For me, There was nothing more fun than going round as a Necromancer and casting delete undead. I loveeddd it, especially when I remembered how that char. ended in some horrible mistake. It was like killing my stupidity - very cathartic.

To bring this back into the game design arena, what if Crawl had three options:

- Local ghosts only
- Download ghosts from CAO
- No ghosts

That would be a very nice option for the game to support. Although most of the time I'd like them off, I think I'd also find ghosts more interesting from time to time if downloaded.

I'm drooling over the thought of downloadable bones files! Even though Crawl handles bones a lot differently then Nethack (I.E you don't have levels and items saved, only the char), I think that would make it all the more sensible to add. Less imbalance if you cant loot the Ultra Armor of Endgameyness from a dead ghost.

Although, I have a feeling there will be that asshole that brings up his XL27 MiBe and gets it killed on D:5.

Ghosts are just another unique, dunno why you'd want to remove one and not the other.