Things in Crawl that are confusing

[HenryFlower]

Necessary preamble:

This is an observation of aspects of Crawl that are outright confusing and hard to explain and understand by the unspoiled/newbie and are not amenable to direct inspection. There may be good or valid reasons for the behavior, so observing that it is confusing does not mean that it is wrong or invalid. This is a personal and incomplete list. I'm also not attempting to solve anything: just notice.

1) Unarmed Combat skill only affects primary attack, not offhanded attack or secondary attacks from horns, tail, hooves/talons, etc. Accordingly, claw mutations are the only mutations that benefit from UC skill and are uniquely beneficial for an unarmed player; other mutations or innate attributes are of benefit only as adjunct attacks. Beastly Appendage does not give claw mutation because of its unique benefit. Unspoiled players of Mi or other species often mistakenly train UC under the thought that it will improve damage output.

2) Fighting skill improves HP. So mages improve fighting. To improve HP.

3) Spellcasting improves MP and expands spell slots. And reduces hunger. And spell success rates. So newbies raise spellcasting, because good, right? Only to get "Don't raise spellcasting so much"

4) Also: Invo and Evo raise MP. But Evo scales evocable damage but Invo is only raised to improve % success with invocations, except for Makhleb, where it also improves demon hostility and Sif where it improves channelling, and maybe Fedhas where it improves something? Or something.

5) Train weapon skill for min delay, but really not further. Except for launchers, which have a completely different and non-inspectable formula for min-delay. And throwing which don't raise much at all because it doesn't do anything. Except 8 for Trog/Oka. Except blowdarts. Oh, and raising UC is always good.

[nicolae]

1) The Crawl manual explicitly states: "Note that auxiliary attacks (such as a centaur's kick or a minotuar's headbutt) are totally unaffected by the Unarmed Combat skill!" Misspelling of "minotaur" aside, it's hardly the developers' fault if nobody reads the manual provided with the game.
2) Yes, everybody improves fighting to improve HP.
3) The manual also says "Spellcasting also helps with the power and success rate of your spells, but to a lesser extent than the more specialised magical skills," which IIRC is the main reason to raise specific schools rather than spellcasting.
4) The manual entries for Evocations and Invocations give a general idea of what they're used for. The descriptions of god abilities also already mention if they rely on Invocations and the effect Invocations has on that ability.
5) Breakpoints are indeed an issue, and I think there's work being done on removing them as much as possible.

[dck]

1- UC improves fighting with your hands and does improve the offhand punch (you can't get it at all without UC).

2- Fighting skill makes you better at fighting and thus improves HPs among other fighting related things, what's confusing about this?

3- Spc does all that, and the spell school/s of each spell improves its power.

4- Invocations makes most of the abilities of gods that let you train them better, Evocations improve evocables.

5- This one doesn't make any sense. You get more weapon damage for more weapon skill past the point of min delay so it's as "always good" as training more UC is. In fact UC training should on most UC characters stop way before 27.

I can sort of understand the first one about being confused about aux attacks being unaffected by UC, but the rest of these are just either concepts brought into crawl from some other game where "mages" don't get "fighting", lack of reading what skills do (in game) or flat out wrongly formed ideas on what appropriate weapon skill training is like.

[galehar]

Most of those things are also stated in the skill descriptions. Although some more explanations in the skill menu of tutorial and hint modes would be good.

[johlstei]

Fighters also raise spellcasting to get more spell slots. It's a mad world out there. I agree that these things are unintuitive but many of them are so finely woven throughout the game that they are hard to change without touching/breaking a lot of things. Galehar has been playing with formulae for the mindelay issue. Unarmed and ranged weapon delay/damage formulae are definitely opaque, I'm sure if you came up with an elegant way of displaying the information it would be considered.

I don't think Invo and Evo are so bad. Invo generally improves your god powers success rate/strength, that is a clear expression of it. Treat the MP as a bonus. Evo helps improve the use of magical items, though I agree that is more opaque in what that means on a per-item basis.

[coolio]

The OP is not asking why these things are the way they are, rather trying to point out that these things are not intuitive to new players.
I don't think it's at all obvious that better fighting skill mean more hp. Especially since in most RPGs hp is more often tied to character stats, not skills.

And the fact that stuff's explained in the manual is irrelevant. Nobody reads manuals. This is not the 1990's, games design has moved past the point where
people are expected to read a book to enjoy a game. It's entirely "the developers' fault" if they craft unintuitive systems that you need to spend time
studying if you wish to understand them.

[ackack]

A bit of an aside, but . . .

3) Spellcasting improves MP and expands spell slots. And reduces hunger. And spell success rates. So newbies raise spellcasting, because good, right? Only to get "Don't raise spellcasting so much"

. . . I've come back around on this and think that most people probably aren't training Spellcasting enough at the beginning. Extra MP is valuable enough early on that a couple of levels can make a noticeable difference.

[johlstei]

Would "Toughness" be a more intuitive name for fighting? I prefer fighting honestly but toughness conveys both hardiness and strength of melee attacks.

[HenryFlower]

Metapoint: my assertion is that if newbies have a problem with X, it's probably because X is confusing.

1) Fair point that it's in the manual. It's still confusing. (and new to me that offhand attacks only come with UC....)
2) The point is that mages learn fighting for HP, not to fight better.
3) The point is that spellcasting doesn't make you better at casting spells and that newbies often raise spellcasting more than experienced people think it should be raised.
4) Again, the point is that certain skills scale effects, and that sometimes that's open to inspection (e.g., success rates) and sometimes not (e.g., damage for Oklob plants), and for Invo depends on the choice of god and the exact god effect.
5) Fair point that increased skill does effect damage, but there's a utility cutoff at mindelay. And it's hard to defend throwing, much less throwing and needles.

I guess all my "x is confusing" relate to skills, which suggests that I (at least) get confused when the following is violated:

Skills should improve (at least asymptotically) the attribute named by the skill in a way that scales continuously with the skill.

So UC fails in that it does not improve unarmed combat (just punching); fighting and spellcasting improve secondary attributes, and weapon and invo skills have discontinuous utility breakpoints.

[galehar]

I don't think it's at all obvious that better fighting skill mean more hp.

True, which is why it's explained in the manual and the skill descriptions.

And the fact that stuff's explained in the manual is irrelevant. Nobody reads manuals.

Crawl is a roguelike. People can be expected to read descriptions of stuff in a roguelike. Unless you like to play clueless.

The OP talks about a lot of different stuff, so let's try to keep it focus. I think the main topic is about clarity. Arguing that unintuitive stuffs should be changed to be more intuitive without having to learn anything about the game is beyond the scope of this thread.

[nicolae]

And the fact that stuff's explained in the manual is irrelevant. Nobody reads manuals. This is not the 1990's, games design has moved past the point where people are expected to read a book to enjoy a game.

If people want to understand the game, but don't avail themselves of the resources specifically provided to assist them in doing so, it's not the developer's problem if those people end up not understanding the game. If the manual, help screens, or descriptions need to be clearer about something, then I'm all for fixing them, but if someone's problems with understanding the game arise because they can't even be bothered checking the information that comes with the game, then I have no sympathy whatsoever.

3) The point is that spellcasting doesn't make you better at casting spells

It does, though. The argument against training Spellcasting is that training the more specific spell schools would be a more efficient use of XP.

[wheals]

I don't see why UC improving auxiliary attacks is more intuitive than it not doing so. "Unarmed" doesn't mean "miscellaneous," it means "without a weapon."

[HenryFlower]

At least for me, I associate "unarmed" as "unarmed martial arts", which includes kicks, elbow strikes, knees, headbutts, etc. Too many martial arts movies, perhaps, but it's unintuitive (to me at least) that unarmed really means "striking with the hands".

BTW, I've been playing Crawl since well before DCSS (around 2002, I'd guess). I probably read the manual once back then. I've now read it again -- it's a great deal better than it was. OTOH, "in game dynamics are inspectable and easy to understand" > "user should read the manual".

I love Crawl, but it wasn't since I started reading the Tavern that any of these points were clarified for me (although I think I learned Fighting = HP on RGRM, back in the days where you had to beat up rats and such).

n = 1, but I do see many newbies called out for the same issues.

And again, throwing.

[HenryFlower]

If people want to understand the game, but don't avail themselves of the resources specifically provided to assist them in doing so, it's not the developer's problem if those people end up not understanding the game. If the manual, help screens, or descriptions need to be clearer about something, then I'm all for fixing them, but if someone's problems with understanding the game arise because they can't even be bothered checking the information that comes with the game, then I have no sympathy whatsoever.

Manuals are about understanding the basic mechanics. I can understand "RTFM" for "how do I open the inventory screen" but not for "which attacks does UC affect or not".

[nicolae]

Manuals are about understanding the basic mechanics.

Says who?

Edit: That said, the UC description in the skills help menu should probably also mention that it doesn't affect auxiliary attacks.

[1010011010]

I, for one, never bothered looking at the manual in depth or looking at skill description when I started playing. If a skill says pole arms, I expect it to increase damage output from any pole arm I use, not really a second thought about it.

It might be an idea to put the skill description at the bottom of the skills screen (for the currently selected skill) if there's space.

[Siegurt]

Well, as was mentioned we could rename 'Fighting' to 'Toughness'
and "Unarmed Combat" to "Fisticuffs"
and "Spellcasting" to perhaps "Arcane lore" or something,

would a simple rename make it more intuitive?

[and into]

I think HenryFlower raises some good points. Yes, sure—"it is in the manual." But I think part of the problem is that people do not realize that what they are doing is wrong, because they (falsely, but nonetheless) assume that, e.g., Unarmed Combat refers to all combat effects that uh... do not involve armaments. That is a mistaken assumption but not an entirely unreasonable one. Some of these assumptions may stem from having played different games that differ from Crawl philosophically, maybe that is a difficult gulf to bridge, but it is something worth keeping in mind. For a new player sitting down with Crawl, even someone who is familiar with roguelikes, there is a lot of new information to absorb and I think it would be good to consider seriously how we could make that absorption go more smoothly. Which is the issue that I take HenryFlower to be raising.

Yes, compared to Nethack, Crawl is intuitive. But if DCSS is going to set a higher bar for itself than, uh, "more intuitive than Nethack," there is still more work to be done, surely.

[dck]

  Code:

You pummel the hydra!!
You kill the hydra!
Your Good Ol' One Two skill increases to level 13!

[and into]

  Code:

You pummel the hydra!!
You kill the hydra!
Your Good Ol' One Two skill increases to level 13!

"Armour" should be renamed "Armour & Haberdashery."

[One-Eyed Jack]

  Code:

You pummel the hydra!!
You kill the hydra!
Your Good Ol' One Two skill increases to level 13!

"Armour" should be renamed "Armour & Haberdashery."

Armour skill doesn't affect the ac gained from hats or helmets.

[wheals]

It does. It should be renamed Armour & Haberdashery & Cobblering & Knitting, though.

[One-Eyed Jack]

Huh, not sure why I thought otherwise.

[BrewFall]

many mechanics in crawl are complex and poorly communicated.

[WalkerBoh]

And here I thought this was going to be a thread about golden eyes...

[Grimm]

coolio is posting again

[Cedor]

Stay focused boys.

I think we could discuss about an IHM feature. This topic shows the heavy root of the problem : understanding. Various players comes with various experience, and various ways to understand their environement. We should provide them various option to understand things (and I mean in game, forum, wiki, or bot should be discarded at this moment).

This might implie lots of code (and probably a heavy revrite of the IHM), but I think we should link descriptions with the relevants parts of the manual, and allow the player to jump to one of this specific part of the manual in the description screen. The coding part is introducing such links in the IHM, and the design part is : wich part of the manual are relevant for each description.

[BBQsauce]

This might implie lots of code (and probably a heavy revrite of the IHM), but I think we should link descriptions with the relevants parts of the manual, and allow the player to jump to one of this specific part of the manual in the description screen. The coding part is introducing such links in the IHM, and the design part is : wich part of the manual are relevant for each description.

OR remove everything that's awkward if it doesn't break anything. Informatician knows, no matter how good is the documentation ; if a system is complex to grasp, it has no chance of success. Anybody would much rather learn by himself 10-20 simple concepts over being taught 100 through documentation, would that mean missing a bit of the features a complex system would be the only to offer.

[Bloax]

The most complicated part of skills is the strategy to training them, and even that can be boiled down to a couple of sentences at most, so I don't know what awkward features you're referring to. If anything then having very concise explanations of the skills available from the skill menu (like say, by pressing ? in the menu - along with the possibility of mousing over the appropriate skill in offline tiles) might be an idea that would ease the burden of reading through the indepth information.
And I do mean concise in the sense of

  Code:

Spellcasting - Reduces spell hunger based on intelligence, grants additional spell slots and very slightly improves the general spell power and rate of success.

  Code:

Axes - Improves attack speed (down to the weapon's minimum), accuracy and (albeit slightly) damage of attacks while wielding an axe.

  Code:

Fighting - Grants a bonus to hitpoints based on character level, along with slightly improving accuracy and damage of melee attacks.

  Code:

Spell school (Conjurations) - The primary factor for spell power and rate of success of spells under the Conjurations school.
(Spells with multiple schools - eg. Fireball - Fire/Conjurations - use the average of the schools (for Fireball, Fire Magic and Conjurations) to determine their efficiency.)

[savageorange]

^ I see that learndb agrees with this

Spells with multiple schools - eg. Fireball - Fire/Conjurations - use the average of the schools (for Fireball, Fire Magic and Conjurations) to determine their efficiency.

And this is definitely confusing interface wise.. based on layout, I have expected eg Meph Cloud to be something like '50% conj, 33% pois, 17% air' and skilled based on this assumption.

Mind you, I'm not sure replacing '/' with '+' would be any better. It does imply equal weight better IMO, but it also implies additive rather than averaging behaviour.

[jwj442]

What if Spellcasting were renamed to "Spell Efficiency" or something along those lines? Then it would be clearer that the primary purpose is to reduce hunger and raise MP.

[Sar]

Well, except its primary purpose is often to get more spell slots.

[jwj442]

Yes, I forgot to include that. It still fits I think.

[dck]

Arcane Capacity.

[some12fat2move]

Armour skill doesn't affect the ac gained from hats or helmets.

It does. It should be renamed Armour & Haberdashery & Cobblering & Knitting, though.

To be perfectly factual, because armour skill multiplies base AC but not enchantment, it does affect helmets (because helmets have base ac of 1) but not hats (because hats have base ac of 0).

[coolio]

The most complicated part of skills is the strategy to training them, and even that can be boiled down to a couple of sentences at most, so I don't know what awkward features you're referring to. If anything then having very concise explanations of the skills available from the skill menu (like say, by pressing ? in the menu - along with the possibility of mousing over the appropriate skill in offline tiles) might be an idea that would ease the burden of reading through the indepth information.
And I do mean concise in the sense of

  Code:

Spellcasting - Reduces spell hunger based on intelligence, grants additional spell slots and very slightly improves the general spell power and rate of success.

  Code:

Axes - Improves attack speed (down to the weapon's minimum), accuracy and (albeit slightly) damage of attacks while wielding an axe.

  Code:

Fighting - Grants a bonus to hitpoints based on character level, along with slightly improving accuracy and damage of melee attacks.

  Code:

Spell school (Conjurations) - The primary factor for spell power and rate of success of spells under the Conjurations school.
(Spells with multiple schools - eg. Fireball - Fire/Conjurations - use the average of the schools (for Fireball, Fire Magic and Conjurations) to determine their efficiency.)

It is kinda dumb IMO that there is redundancy in the skills, e.g. both Fighting and Weapon skills give increased attack & damage. Same with spellcasting and spell schools.
And if the effect is minor, it only serves to further complicate a complicated game.

When a new player is learning what all the skills do, it's a lot less daunting to be faced with "X does A & B, Y does C & D" than with "X does A & B and a little bit C & D and Y does C & D and a little bit A & B".

Regarding the skills' naming, think of it this way:

  Code:

Grants a bonus to hitpoints based on character level, along with slightly improving accuracy and damage of melee attacks.

When reading the description, is the first thing that comes to mind "fighting" or something else? These things are subjective of course, but on the other hand some terms capture the essence of what a skill does better than others.

In my opinion, a better term for that skill could be something like "athletics" or "fitness". Or "toughness", I guess.

[TeshiAlair]

I think fitness might obliquely imply that fighting aids dodging- why not straight up Endurance for Fighting, and Wisdom for Spellcasting, wisdom being more associated with accumulated knowledge than intelligence.

[crate]

I don't know about the rest of you but I train fighting skill to hit things harder. This is actually the biggest part of the skill.

[Leafsnail]

I guess the names are pretty odd. They communicate all the minor effects that the skills have, but not the major ones (HP for fighting and spell slots for spellcasting).

I think fitness might obliquely imply that fighting aids dodging- why not straight up Endurance for Fighting, and Wisdom for Spellcasting, wisdom being more associated with accumulated knowledge than intelligence.

"Endurance" in videogames is usually a skill that combats fatigue, so that seems confusing to me. "Wisdom" is also confusing because it to me implies you'll automatically learn spells from it our something.

I don't know about the rest of you but I train fighting skill to hit things harder. This is actually the biggest part of the skill.

How important is it relative to weapon skill? As far as I can tell there's absolutely no indication anywhere.

[duvessa]

Fighting has the same effect as weapon skill on accuracy (this is actually quite important) and multiplies mainhand melee damage by 1+1d(skill level)/30, aux attack damage by 1+1d(skill level)/40. For comparison, melee weapon skill is 1+1d(skill level)/25. These stack multiplicatively with each other (and with brands!), so the effect is a bit bigger than it might intuitively sound.

[Sar]

Whoa, I had no idea Fighting enhances aux attacks.

[Leafsnail]

So in other words it's only a little bit worse than post min delay weapon skill for boosting weapon damage? Or is there something else weapon skill does that I'm forgetting.

[duvessa]

Correct. Training weapon skill more does get you better acquirements and Trog gifts, though!

[XuaXua]

The results of this thread are what I feel should have come from those "usability" reviews that were taking place when I first started playing Crawl and haven't seemed to continue since. Usability is the stance I try to take when making a suggestion. I've noticed many things in Crawl that are obtuse that require foreknowledge, or at least BETTER DOCUMENTATION.

By BETTER DOCUMENTATION, I'm not talking about giving exact numbers or even estimates; just give some information about EXISTENCE.

This game is continually developed. As developers, you know that creating undocumented side-effects is a horrible coding practice. So, I ask, why does it persist within the context of the game itself?

[XuaXua]

1) The Crawl manual explicitly states: "Note that auxiliary attacks (such as a centaur's kick or a minotuar's headbutt) are totally unaffected by the Unarmed Combat skill!" Misspelling of "minotaur" aside, it's hardly the developers' fault if nobody reads the manual provided with the game.

The manual exists on the developer wiki and can be edited by anyone with a login.

Unfortunately, it seems the skill descriptions do not.

Would "Toughness" be a more intuitive name for fighting?

+100.

I was reading this thread post by post and had the above sentence ready to type.

Manuals are about understanding the basic mechanics.

Says who?

Edit: That said, the UC description in the skills help menu should probably also mention that it doesn't affect auxiliary attacks.

A thousand times yes. CONSISTENCY aids CLARITY.

It is kinda dumb IMO that there is redundancy in the skills, e.g. both Fighting and Weapon skills give increased attack & damage. Same with spellcasting and spell schools.

I think the intent is to give something to "fall back on" when faced with insurmountable odds and the wrong weapon/spell.

Which, IMHO, rarely happens.

Long ago, I suggested removing Spellcasting as a directly-trainable skill, instead making it an invisible value based on all trained Spell Schools (there was some debate as to whether Evocations worked into that), and increasing the cost to train spell schools accordingly. As an aside in that proposal, I also suggested removing Fighting as a directly-trainable skill, instead also making it an invisible value, but based on combat skills. Conceptually, this is what it is anyway.

[galehar]

Unfortunately, it seems the skill descriptions do not.

You can submit changes to skill descriptions (or any other description) through transifex.

[TeshiAlair]

"Endurance" in videogames is usually a skill that combats fatigue, so that seems confusing to me. "Wisdom" is also confusing because it to me implies you'll automatically learn spells from it our something.

What about Constitution then? Also, I don't follow your reasoning regarding Wisdom, but I also think Spellcasting is the less confusing of the two terms anyway, since it does enable you to cast spells 1. better 2. more frequently, both of which can be inferred without much confusion.

[nicolae]

What about Constitution then?

Fighting includes both fighting ability and your HP. Renaming it to Constitution or another word suggesting physical endurance just inverts the problem, since the skill name wouldn't suggest that it also improves your fighting accuracy and damage. "Combat Fitness" is the only phrase I can think of off the top of my head that might theoretically encompass both, though it's a little clunky.