Dungeon Master
Posts: 553
Joined: Wednesday, 22nd December 2010, 10:12
Re: What in Crawl isn't fun?
-Scrolls of paper. Have these ever actually done anything besides waste one turn near the start of the game? Does that one turn ever actually make a difference? Removing scrolls of paper would pretty much have the effect of making every ascension three turns quicker, because with scrolls of paper, all you do is pick it up, read it, drop it, and ignore it for the rest of the game. On the other hand, if there could actually be a use for blank scrolls, that would be cool.
-Spellbooks always being unidentified. Why is it that, once I've identified a book of power, all future books of power are still unidentified? Why are spellbooks the only items to behave like this? Does this actually add anything to the gameplay? Right now it's kind of silly that you have to read each and every spellbook you find, even though they may be duplicates (all this changes is that you waste a turn reading it). All books of power have the same set of spells, so once you identify one, you should identify all of them.
-Hive (as a branch) really needs to go. It would be better as a portal vault. The game wouldn't really suffer from this: there is enough food in the game that Hive isn't that important, and for players that do find a Hive portal, the food is a nice bonus but it's not enough to be a game changer.
-Being abyssed by hell effects. The abyss is easier than any of the hells, so when you do get randomly abyssed while doing the hells, it's more like the game is giving you a break than making things harder for you.
These last two are more from my own personal taste than anything:
-Centaur warriors on early dungeon levels. I encountered one on D:9 a few games ago. Normally I don't mind the occasional out of depth monster, but centaur warriors can be REALLY bad due to their ranged attacks. If you run into one this early, you only have one or two moves before you're dead (that means teleporting is too slow). I was able to survive this encounter, but only because I had meph cloud and repel missiles.
-I've never liked labyrinths. Usually they are easy, and when they aren't easy I just feel like I got unlucky with the layout. I've never felt like my own skill was being challenged when doing a labyrinth.