Changes to make Crawl harder


Although the central place for design discussion is ##crawl-dev on freenode, some may find it helpful to discuss requests and suggestions here first.

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Post Thursday, 29th January 2015, 21:45

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

DDDD wrote:
cjo wrote:However, you're coming on pretty strong here in a way that I don't think helps your case. I also think well-done nerfs improve the game for devoted players while having only modest impact on casual ones. Often it's the devoted players who know how to benefit most from any overly powerful resource. How many causal players are breezing to victory due to lantern of shadows?

I have no case. What I say is that instead of making crawl harder in the suggested ways and thus even more difficult to learn (and it's really, really very difficult to learn), making it more accessible to less intense (or more casual) players would certainly help crawl's popularity. On the other hand, offering players purely external rewards does nothing to make it a better game.


I don't think those changes make it harder to learn - most of them involve removing or simplifying stuff. Fewer things to learn about is equivalent to easier to learn. They make it harder to win, but that's a pretty different thing - you can play and learn the game without ascending just fine, and that's the thing that will draw new players in.

Being more attractive to new players doesn't necessarily strike me as a great goal to begin with - the game should be fun for experts as well and it's more fun if there are more ways to improve and become better.

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Post Thursday, 29th January 2015, 22:00

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

johlstei wrote:I don't think those changes make it harder to learn - most of them involve removing or simplifying stuff.

But taking away the ony escape option that is hudred percent reliable and that everybody understands immediately (fully controlled blinking through blink scrolls) *does* make it harder to learn, no?

Fewer things to learn about is equivalent to easier to learn.

With only uncontrolled blinks you have to learn how to improve your chances to blink to a place that is safe (like incrasing the number of safe tiles in line of sight while reducing the number of unsafe tiles). So you would have to learn even more than now to get into the game.

Being more attractive to new players doesn't necessarily strike me as a great goal to begin with - the game should be fun for experts as well and it's more fun if there are more ways to improve and become better.

Without new players, any game will die. I agree that the game should be interesting and attractive to long time players as well, but why should that entail making the game more difficult for everybody?

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Post Thursday, 29th January 2015, 22:08

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

comebackshane wrote:
On power spiral and feature creep: DCSS has always had something of a nerf culture. Starting from DCSS 0.1, features have been nerfed or removed. I think this is very healthy for any game under long-time development (and on balance, there are always more things added than removed).

I think completely removing a feature should be the last resort when all attempts to rebalance it to healthy levels fail.
Then adding a feature should be a last result as well, surely. Otherwise the number of features would increase without bound. And even with the "nerf culture" dpeg claims Crawl has, it's already doing that.
comebackshane wrote:Am I the only one who thinks that outright depriving a race who is unable to heal naturally of their (initial) means of healing is problematic?
I always assumed the whole point of DD is that it's not supposed to have unlimited healing. It's had unlimited healing for 6 years now so maybe I'm wrong, though.

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Post Thursday, 29th January 2015, 22:10

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

I suspect that the challenge, and the potential to develop the skills to overcome that challenge, is part of the thing that attracts new players to Crawl, and to roguelikes in general. There is an audience willing to try difficult games: Lemmings, Dark Souls, and Nethack are all popular despite/because of being infamously difficult.

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Post Thursday, 29th January 2015, 22:15

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

DDDD wrote:the ony escape option that is hudred percent reliable and that everybody understands immediately

That's "walking away"... well, except maybe for "everybody understands immediately" part.

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Post Thursday, 29th January 2015, 22:54

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

DDDD wrote:
cjo wrote:However, you're coming on pretty strong here in a way that I don't think helps your case. I also think well-done nerfs improve the game for devoted players while having only modest impact on casual ones. Often it's the devoted players who know how to benefit most from any overly powerful resource. How many causal players are breezing to victory due to lantern of shadows?

I have no case. What I say is that instead of making crawl harder in the suggested ways and thus even more difficult to learn (and it's really, really very difficult to learn), making it more accessible to less intense (or more casual) players would certainly help crawl's popularity. On the other hand, offering players purely external rewards does nothing to make it a better game.


Is it "really, really very difficult"? Maybe if you play offline and you don't use "spoilers," it's hard to learn. I admit, I've been interested in the game without actually playing for a long time, but when I did start playing, I won in a pretty short time, less than a month and not a huge number of games. I don't think that's an impressive feat either. I think anybody who takes time to learn from available materials and other players will be able to get a basic 3 rune win pretty quickly.

As to your point re: external rewards, whatever that means. You seem to think there's something value neutral or even bad about online interaction. I think this is totally backwards. There's great value in the existence of an online community of players in terms of evolution of the game from a development perspective, evolution of play in terms of what players know about it and what they can achieve in it, and the general richness of the experience of playing. I suppose you would respond by saying those things are "external," as in not having to do with the game itself in the strictest possible sense. But this is only true in a trivial way, almost by definition. In a broader sense, taking into account the entire breadth dcss play, including so-called "external" factors, online play is tremendously positive and those who play only offline are missing out on it -- even if they do benefit indirectly from the influence it has on development.
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Post Thursday, 29th January 2015, 22:56

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

DDDD wrote:
johlstei wrote:I don't think those changes make it harder to learn - most of them involve removing or simplifying stuff.

But taking away the ony escape option that is hudred percent reliable and that everybody understands immediately (fully controlled blinking through blink scrolls) *does* make it harder to learn, no?


It makes learning how to use uncontrolled blinks effectively more important, and maybe they will do it sooner now in the learning process, but it was always something that one should do. Either way, that isn't about difficulty to learn, it's about difficulty to survive. I'm only talking about the former, when I say learn I'm talking about game mechanics and how to use them, uncontrolled blink isn't something new to learn.
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Post Thursday, 29th January 2015, 23:01

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

duvessa wrote:I always assumed the whole point of DD is that it's not supposed to have unlimited healing. It's had unlimited healing for 6 years now so maybe I'm wrong, though.

Taking away the recharging ability (which someone already mentioned) would fix this without making DD extremely tedious (which taking away the wand would do). Or recharging could cost 5 or 10 maxMP instead of 1.
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Post Friday, 30th January 2015, 00:31

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

so then why give them the wand instead of potions? healer doesn't start with a wand of heal wounds

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Post Friday, 30th January 2015, 02:59

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

comebackshane wrote:Am I the only one who thinks that outright depriving a race who is unable to heal naturally of their (initial) means of healing is problematic? Maybe let them keep the wand but remove the recharge device ability?

Also, I don't think that crawl is too easy and it should be taken into account that many non-pros also play it.

The problem is really a different thing entirely; the problem is that DD can heal.

Of course, when attempting to implement a cannot-heal race, one runs into the problem that, whoops, said idea does not actually work at all in crawl. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the simplest one is that in general monsters are designed to be reasonably scary even 1v1. So you have to let DD heal. But then you run into the situation where a race that is designed around "no repeatable healing" in fact gets repeatable healing from a number of sources, and in fact rather than achieving the goal of "prevent resting" it does the opposite (vamp draining or vamp brand vs harmless monster; farming hp via killing lair spawns with makhleb, etc.).

From a player standpoint (the design concerns with DD are unfixable, which is one reason I don't personally care about whether they get a /hw at the start or not), I personally found it pretty obvious that minmay meant "and you can replace it with potions if you want" (it's the fact it's in wand form that's the most problematic thing) but I can see why other people wouldn't assume this is what he meant.

---

re:ctele: the fact that a "-ctele" status exists is pretty much all the argument I would personally need to support removing ctele. If it's too good to let the player have, then why does it exist?

I'm also not really a fan of cblink spell but I think that's a lot less of a problem.

---

re: feature creep and monsters:

With the specific topic of monsters, the alarming thing about new crawl monsters is that they often tend to have some new gimmick that isn't used again with other monsters. Even when these gimmicks are good (starcursed masses), the problem is that you're adding lots of new behaviours, and then you're not even re-using the good ones (which means it's pretty easy for the player to just avoid any interesting part of the gimmick by avoiding the rare monster that has the only occurrence of the gimmick). I think (credit to elliptic for suggesting this idea) that it's better to choose which gimmicks are actually good, and then use the good ones repeatedly. Then you can trim down the number of monsters considerably by pruning the ones that are still similar.

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Post Friday, 30th January 2015, 04:02

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

Give DD a "wand of curing" instead of HW. Nah, just remove his wand or give weapon skill to Felids and let Draconians wear a dragon armor of their choice.
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Post Friday, 30th January 2015, 04:44

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

so then why give them the wand instead of potions? healer doesn't start with a wand of heal wounds


I suspect two reasons:

* Item destruction: When this existed, it would have meant that your average orc wizard could knock off something like 1/5 of your healing ability in one shot, frequently.
* Theme: Flavour was a much stronger argument in general back when DD were introduced, and they were themed as being skilled artificers, who used this to overcome their lack of natural healing.

So yes, I agree there's no particularly good reason for them to have the wand as opposed to potions. But I also think that adjusting (or even removing) the device recharge ability is probably better.
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Post Friday, 30th January 2015, 07:16

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

There is a clear difference with DD starting with a wand (with no recharge ability) or potions, of course. If you get the wand you can recharge with all the scrolls you find. So you don't get infinite healing but depending on you luck of finding charging scrolls you get semi-infinite healing.

Also, if the wand would have for example 2 - 3 charges initially, you might run out of charges before finding recharging scrolls. All this boils down to how easy or hard DD is supposed to be. With wand it is easier than with potions. Personally I'm fine with whatever solution (ranging from the status quo with DD as the easiest race to a real challenge race with no wand).

I agree that it is a bit awkward that a race has a severe limitation (no natural healing) and then the limitation is mostly made moot. That said, for newbies I suspect even current DD is pretty hard.

How about giving DD a huge amount of HP and no way ever to heal (not with wands, potions, spells, vampiric, gods)? That would mean basically that maxHP=currentHP. Maybe they should be immune to torment in that case... I guess it would be very hard to balance, to make it playable but challenging...
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Post Friday, 30th January 2015, 08:14

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

How about giving DD a huge amount of HP and no way ever to heal (not with wands, potions, spells, vampiric, gods)? That would mean basically that maxHP=currentHP. Maybe they should be immune to torment in that case... I guess it would be very hard to balance, to make it playable but challenging...


There are huge variations in the amount of damage characters take (e.g. based on how many runes they want and if they have an effective way to attack at range), so it feels like this would restrict DD too much. Of course, you could argue that DD in their current state are already restricted (to a few gods) so this isn't the main problem I see with this.

Rather, it would mean that you need to pay attention to literally every fight in order to not lose HP - it would basically play like a DD of any non-healing god does now, where every HP loss has permanent consequences. With a DD*Makhleb in DD's current state, if you run across a sheep pack in lair/an orc pack in vaults/deep trolls in depths/you get the idea, you can just tab through them. The great majority of fights are like this, and having to pay attention to every one of them will make the game long and boring (especially since they still aren't actually challenging even if you are trying to minimise HP loss, you just can't hold down tab in order to skip the uninteresting parts of the game).

edit: also, the fact that you are only at risk of a long-drawn-out death due to strategical mistakes has potential for abuse, i.e. you can dive very far down the dungeon far and monsters still won't be able to kill you because you have 10000 HP or whatever. Sure, you take a lot of damage, but you also avoided a lot because you skipped so many fights. This would probably be excellent for speedrunning (even more than current DD).

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Post Friday, 30th January 2015, 16:56

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

crate wrote:
With the specific topic of monsters, the alarming thing about new crawl monsters is that they often tend to have some new gimmick that isn't used again with other monsters. Even when these gimmicks are good (starcursed masses), the problem is that you're adding lots of new behaviours, and then you're not even re-using the good ones (which means it's pretty easy for the player to just avoid any interesting part of the gimmick by avoiding the rare monster that has the only occurrence of the gimmick)


I appreciated the care shown in easing players into monster mechanics and the way those mechanics would reappear/get reinterpreted later in the dungeon. It seems like that ethos got lost with the Abyss remake.

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Post Friday, 30th January 2015, 17:05

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

Either that, or the Abyss is supposed to be unfamiliar and terrifying.

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Post Friday, 30th January 2015, 17:27

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

jejorda2 wrote:Either that, or the Abyss is supposed to be unfamiliar and terrifying.


Well, following the remake we had all kinds of monsters that weren't iterative. All the Forest refugees, the S-branch variety show, the draconians, etc

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Post Friday, 30th January 2015, 22:49

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

mps wrote:In a broader sense, taking into account the entire breadth dcss play, including so-called "external" factors, online play is tremendously positive and those who play only offline are missing out on it -- even if they do benefit indirectly from the influence it has on development.

That's only your opinion. For me, online is tremendously negative; I find it terrible that it's really *impossible* to learn play crawl well without going online and interacting with all kinds of strange people - if there were an offline way I wouldn't play online. If it suits you, good for you, but your opinion is not the only valid opinion one can have.

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Post Friday, 30th January 2015, 23:02

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

DDDD wrote:
mps wrote:In a broader sense, taking into account the entire breadth dcss play, including so-called "external" factors, online play is tremendously positive and those who play only offline are missing out on it -- even if they do benefit indirectly from the influence it has on development.

That's only your opinion. For me, online is tremendously negative; I find it terrible that it's really *impossible* to learn play crawl well without going online and interacting with all kinds of strange people - if there were an offline way I wouldn't play online. If it suits you, good for you, but your opinion is not the only valid opinion one can have.


In what way does ctrl-F'ing around the learndb constitute an interaction with a strange person? Unless you mean yourself O_O

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Post Friday, 30th January 2015, 23:11

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

you don't get it, do you? it is written by them

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Post Friday, 30th January 2015, 23:22

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

Remove GDR
It is a strange mechanic that is confusing for new players, and makes melee damage different than other sorts of damage for no reason. AC and armour skill are good on their own, and a point of AC is probably a little better than a point of EV right now anyway, so I think it can take the hit and won't make heavy armour significantly weaker in a way that harms the game.

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Post Friday, 30th January 2015, 23:43

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

DDDD wrote:
mps wrote:In a broader sense, taking into account the entire breadth dcss play, including so-called "external" factors, online play is tremendously positive and those who play only offline are missing out on it -- even if they do benefit indirectly from the influence it has on development.

That's only your opinion. For me, online is tremendously negative; I find it terrible that it's really *impossible* to learn play crawl well without going online and interacting with all kinds of strange people - if there were an offline way I wouldn't play online. If it suits you, good for you, but your opinion is not the only valid opinion one can have.


I suppose it's only my opinion that people who only play offline are missing out, but I don't think it's just a matter of opinion that online play has a positive influence on development and the general dcss experience.

I don't get this idea that you're supposed to be able to sit alone in a dark dorm room staring at a terminal emulator and learn a moderately complex game well enough to win it purely through trial and error. Where else is this a realistic model for learning anything worthwhile? Learning, like gaming, is at its best when it's a social process. If your idea in life is to learn things without ever interacting with people who already know them, you're in for a tough time. You'll end up learning fewer things and believing you know more about them than you do.
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Post Friday, 30th January 2015, 23:48

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

mps wrote:I don't get this idea that you're supposed to be able to sit alone in a dark dorm room staring at a terminal emulator and learn a moderately complex game well enough to win it purely through trial and error. Where else is this a realistic model for learning anything worthwhile?


Eh, that's how I learned Perl.

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Post Friday, 30th January 2015, 23:49

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

neil wrote:
mps wrote:I don't get this idea that you're supposed to be able to sit alone in a dark dorm room staring at a terminal emulator and learn a moderately complex game well enough to win it purely through trial and error. Where else is this a realistic model for learning anything worthwhile?


Eh, that's how I learned Perl.

You didn't answer his question. :)

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Post Saturday, 31st January 2015, 16:13

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

Gosh, it sems like crawl's difficulty is a hot issue.

Personally, I think increases to difficulty should try to be implemented in a way that is as top down as possible. By which I mean, they should affect the better players more than they should affect the less experienced players. This is already in effect for a lot of areas. Potions/wands of heal wounds are less effective as time goes on. Stairdancing is not an option for Pan/Hells/the Abyss. Controlled teleport is disabled in a bunch of places as well as during your final ascent.

Of course, implementing things this way is difficult, especially if you're just trying to remove unnecessarily fiddly/grindy mechanics. But that would be my rule of thumb with regards to having changes that could largely affect balance.

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Post Saturday, 31st January 2015, 17:33

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

duvessa wrote:Remove ring of teleportation and *Tele property
Unlimited teleport leads to grindy behaviour (because of things like water, vaults that have to be teleported into...) and makes consumable teleport awkward on top of that. Admittedly this is an unnoticeably slight difficulty increase.

Please explain what this "grindy behaviour" is supposed to be(and how people are using unlimited tele to get past terrain instead of flight, and what these 'vaults that have to be teleported into' are supposed to be), and how it makes consumable teleport "awkward", because I'm not seeing this at all. Are you just mad that people are using rings of teleport instead of teleport wands? Because that's what people would be using for their effectively-unlimited teleport if you took the ring/*tele out.

Remove teleport control and -cTele
I think the case for this is self-evident; if scrolls of blinking are really too good without -cTele, surely they should be nerfed everywhere instead of just on 2% of levels. Even if you don't change blinking this is a difficulty increase everywhere that isn't zot:5.

I don't see how this is "self-evident." Scrolls of blinking are good, and this is a problem because? They're a limited resource, especially early game, and very little of their use would change by making them semi-controlled other than removing a margin of safety against ranged attackers(if you blinked while using terrain well). Is there a reason to nerf teleport control as a whole beyond ninjaing in pan(which already got nerfed by having pan lords chase you if you don't kill them) and it being one of many solutions to the V5 ambush(which people will just replace with semi-controlled blinking away from the stairs)? If it's just those two places, can't it be more elegantly solved by making pan/V5 -ctele? I haven't seen people spam controlled teleports outside of those two areas and Hell 7s(where they save a walk back to the exit portal after grabbing the rune).

Nerf elemental invokers, probably sack of spiders
These are not nearly as egregiously insane as lantern of shadows, but they are very common and a large part why it's a no-brainer to get evocations skill on every character ever. Sack of spiders is less ridiculous than it used to be but elemental invokers are as bad as ever. I know the stacking removal was meant to nerf them, but you don't use a whole bunch of invokers in a single fight anyway. My suggestion here is to at least make them rarer, and if the stacking change stays, using an invoker should deplete all invokers of any type, instead of just all invokers of that type. I know that takes stone of tremors from basically useless to completely useless if you have any other invoker, but it's still an improvement over the status quo imo. (I know there's not a shadow of a chance of getting them removed.)

I agree that evokers are overpowered, although it's gotten a bit better with the recent changes to elemental evokers. Having every evoker in the the entire game deplete whenever you use a single one of any type is swinging too far in the opposite direction, and would basically make them useless. If they're still a problem(which I'm not entirely convinced of - a lot of people did use a bunch of evokers in a single fight!), then make them rarer. Especially sack of spiders, which seems to be more common than the elemental evokers and is easier to spam.

The other option would be to tackle the root problem of all of this - evocations skill applying to such a wide variety of powerful items, and a lot of those items still being extremely strong with 0 skill investment - but I'm not sure how to handle that gracefully.

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Post Saturday, 31st January 2015, 17:43

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

Remove item sacrifices
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Post Saturday, 31st January 2015, 18:03

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

Just so everyone is on the same page:

duvessa wrote:Remove or nerf lantern of shadows


  Code:
Remove Lantern of Shadows environmental colouring.
Sage [Wed, 28 Jan 2015 15:37:01 -0500 (12:37 -0800)]

It makes shallow and deep water look the same, turns all walls into
stone, and generally makes the environment harder to distinguish.


  Code:
Make the lantern of shadows drain MP while wielded
Chris Campbell [Wed, 28 Jan 2015 12:19:32 -0500 (17:19 +0000)]

Per crate, minmay, probably others, I've no idea who first suggested this now.
The lantern drains 1 MP per turn, and all summoned shadows go poof when either
reaching 0 MP or unwielding the lantern.
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Post Saturday, 31st January 2015, 22:07

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

Problem with making it "harder" and harder = more fun is the fact that most of theses players are the in the vast minority that beat this game up, down sideways and back and forth. The game is already very hard for the vast majority and unbeatable for a good chunk of players.

In games like let's day dark souls, the base game is already extremely hard (but still "fair) and people love it. But at some time in point of 100s of hours people will just breeze through the game after they mastered it or done everything within the game. The problem at the point is after you have the "base game" be perfect, how do you make the game "harder" without ruining the already almost perfect base game. As example of dark souls you get to play new game+ which the game is even harder, and they keep adding in a "+" every time you beat the game which then makes it harder and harder.

If crawl wants to make a difficulty change to the game then (other then obvious nerfs/buffs in the game) is to make a separate "hard" difficulty or redesign the base game for different direction. I think honestly some parts of the base game can be improved or redesigned to easier fit a "make the game more challenging" even after you mastered it.

Also what do people want to be "harder" because they are different tiers of winning, from 3 rune win all the way to a 15 rune win. Is getting a 15 rune win too easy or the first 3 runes, what are looking at here?

Examples would be:

Food as a resource: Let's be honest here despite "food" being something in the game, the vast majority of people never die to hunger unless they are completely new and it's their first few runs (or have it effect their gameplay). I have yet within my 100s of runs in crawl myself be actually in danger of dying from hunger. Hunger is basically a system to restrict the cost of people spamming magic, and even then rarely someone ever actually dies or threaten by the "hunger cost" of magic. There isn't really extreme stair-dancing, camping monsters for loot, or over grindy behavior in crawl that hunger systems are supposeto discourage. There really no "skills" (nonmagic) or other things you can do that really uses "hunger" outside of spamming magic. A large majority (People who build characters without a magic focus or very light magic focus) don't even feel the use hunger as a resource mechanic magic has. Even then why learn haste when I can just zap myself or drink a potion.

Even by as mechanic to force people to explore, crawl is already designed for you to keep going "down" and exploring move. With the removal of stuff like item destruction and making stashes not needed and stuff, there is even less reason to backtrack and camp around older floors. Unlike other roguelikes I can't do stuff like grow herbs or train my skills or whatever else that would improve by character that isn't exploring/fighting monsters, so hunger doesn't make me choose between choices since only choice is going down.

So we have something that is suppose to be an interesting mechanic that forces people to make meaningful decisions and what to do with their "time" as well as how they use their resources, regulated to background noise basically.

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Post Saturday, 31st January 2015, 22:32

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

Hunger seriously limits rods.
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Post Saturday, 31st January 2015, 23:19

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

johlstei wrote:Remove GDR
It is a strange mechanic that is confusing for new players, and makes melee damage different than other sorts of damage for no reason. AC and armour skill are good on their own, and a point of AC is probably a little better than a point of EV right now anyway, so I think it can take the hit and won't make heavy armour significantly weaker in a way that harms the game.


Instead of GDR maybe you could have a "protection range" instead of just a number for AC. AC reduces damage by roughly 1dAC, and GDR acts like a floor for AC rolls, right? Instead of having GDR be a thing that confuses people, you could just list an approximate protection range, where the floor is some f(base AC, armour skill) (similar to how GDR is currently). For instance, you may have Prot: 10-40 instead of AC: 40. This makes the "GDR" thing universal, though.
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Post Saturday, 31st January 2015, 23:25

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

I think a lot of people are mixing together "get rid of/fix abusive mechanics that trivialize games" and "make the game outright harder for everyone". It seems to me, reading over minmay's proposals in the OP, that this thread was meant to fall in the former camp.

The majority of players, even winners, don't scum teleportation or effectively use the lamp of shadows. Issues with multiple elemental evokers don't surface until you've collected quite a few of them (and if you've gotten to that point, you're capable of winning without them anyway). I'm not sure I agree with him on removing slow monsters, but I can see his argument that slow monsters are for the most part either A. a lesson in kiting that is learned exactly once B. free sources of XP without any challenge involved. I don't agree on the latter point since certain situations can end up making slow monsters tactically interesting.

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Post Sunday, 1st February 2015, 00:25

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

I would be worried about the removal of teleportation ring, if item destruction was still a thing.
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Post Sunday, 1st February 2015, 03:42

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

Also what do people want to be "harder" because they are different tiers of winning, from 3 rune win all the way to a 15 rune win. Is getting a 15 rune win too easy or the first 3 runes, what are looking at here?


I thought this was an interesting question. I'm a pretty poor player but I have a 15-rune win, a 6-rune win, and a handful of 3s. I haven't cleared all 27 floors of a ziggurat, but I've seen it done and understand how it can be done. So often I don't comment on the "state of the game" because I simply don't know enough about it, as I only have a handful of types of wins. But the point is, I do think people mean different things when they say the game isn't hard enough.

Maybe extended should just go farther? Could there be another 3-4 runes that are even harder than Hell/Pan?

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Post Monday, 2nd February 2015, 10:27

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

Remove teleport control and -cTele
-This REMOVES MOST OF THE FLAVOUR between pan and hell. For most builds I find I use distinctly different stratergies for pan and hell, this change would roll them into one.
-Removing -cTele and leaving in cBlink will significantly decrease difficulty of hell/zot5/tomb and leave us with cblink+apport as the one trick to rule them all.
-Overall I rate this a DECREASE in total game difficulty.

Remove ring of teleportation and *Tele property
-My personal experience is that injudicious use of Tele ring is one of the few ways I lose strong builds in extended game.

I do support making crawl harder, but not by shutting out tele like this. Tele could be tweaked, longer delay for example.

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Post Monday, 2nd February 2015, 21:29

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

tabstorm wrote:
johlstei wrote:Remove GDR
It is a strange mechanic that is confusing for new players, and makes melee damage different than other sorts of damage for no reason. AC and armour skill are good on their own, and a point of AC is probably a little better than a point of EV right now anyway, so I think it can take the hit and won't make heavy armour significantly weaker in a way that harms the game.


Instead of GDR maybe you could have a "protection range" instead of just a number for AC. AC reduces damage by roughly 1dAC, and GDR acts like a floor for AC rolls, right? Instead of having GDR be a thing that confuses people, you could just list an approximate protection range, where the floor is some f(base AC, armour skill) (similar to how GDR is currently). For instance, you may have Prot: 10-40 instead of AC: 40. This makes the "GDR" thing universal, though.

I like GDR for its role of ensuring that you absolutely won't get hit by a max roll of a monster. It's confusing and hard to display to players because how much damage GDR protects you from depends on your GDR/AC as well as also the monster's damage. So there isn't one protection value in general. Tabstorm's suggestion would make GDR independent of the monster's damage roll, and ensure you always saved 10 damage (with 40 ac) from melee attacks. This might make popcorn slightly more popcorn, as things with really weak attacks would have even more trouble getting over your AC, but I don't think that's a problem with GDR, it's a problem with popcorn.

About the only non-popcorn example I can think of is mobs who get multiple secondary attacks which are very weak, for example, executioners. Their 30,10,10 attacks already are pretty laughable to high AC characters, but now with 50+ ac and a bulky GDR you'd be able to reduce the 10 hits to 0 every time. Again I consider this more a flaw with executioners than with tabstorm's GDR replacement proposal.

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Post Monday, 2nd February 2015, 22:23

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

HI PURPLERED I'M LITERALLY WEEPING WITH JOY OVER THE THOUGHT THAT YOU'VE RETURNED TO CRAWL AND MIGHT BE PLAYING AGAIN.

With that out of the way, let me address what you say here:

PurpleRed wrote:Remove teleport control and -cTele
-This REMOVES MOST OF THE FLAVOUR between pan and hell. For most builds I find I use distinctly different stratergies for pan and hell, this change would roll them into one.
-Removing -cTele and leaving in cBlink will significantly decrease difficulty of hell/zot5/tomb and leave us with cblink+apport as the one trick to rule them all.
-Overall I rate this a DECREASE in total game difficulty.


For your first point, this is a difference between the Hell ends and the pan rune levels which would be lost, but I don't think this loss is problematic. A recent trunk change made the named Pan lords have a chance of appearing on each new pan level the player enters if the player has the respective rune. So while Hell and Pan might share a more similar strategy of "get to rune, kill or avoid the boss" with -cTele gone from hell, there's still some differentiation in how that plays out.

For your second point, I think if cTele and -cTele are removed, I think there would be a change to possibly both the scroll and the spell where they gave only semi-controlled blink (like how currently the spell behaves under -cTele and how the blink spell behaves with +cTele status). I think we'd change the spell at a minimum, so you'd not be able to get a fully controlled blink all the way to the rune, just enduring or cancelling the contam. Blink scrolls are very limited and might not need any change,but changing those is also a possibility.

PurpleRed wrote:Remove ring of teleportation and *Tele property
-My personal experience is that injudicious use of Tele ring is one of the few ways I lose strong builds in extended game.

I do support making crawl harder, but not by shutting out tele like this. Tele could be tweaked, longer delay for example.


The complaint about ring of tele and *tele on equipment is more about how finding the ring means you never have to worry about losing a resource that is technically finite in a 3-rune game. You're not likely to run out of sources of teleport past a certain poin in the game if you only use the wand and scrolls, but if you do find the ring you have an incentive to use it to conserve the other two slightly better forms of teleport, yet the interface for the ring is a lot worse (put on the ring, spam the ability until it works).

Losing characters to overuse of the teleport ring like you mention isn't really what the ring is about. The scrolls and wand+recharge make teleport from other sources plentiful and equally potentially fatal. I think the ring is more about having the ring identification game and access to remove curse being more interesting, but there are probably better ways we can achieve that.

I'm not sure if really support removal of the ring myself because if you do run out of any form of teleport in a game, you have an incentive to grind for more of it to complete vaults where use of teleport is ideal. It's presence doesn't seem ideal but also not particularly harmful to me.

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Post Tuesday, 3rd February 2015, 09:38

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

gammafunk wrote:HI PURPLERED I'M LITERALLY WEEPING WITH JOY OVER THE THOUGHT THAT YOU'VE RETURNED TO CRAWL AND MIGHT BE PLAYING AGAIN.


Good to see you too Gamma:). Thank you for that heart felt and completely non-sarcastic welcome. Perhaps I'll play a little, but as my HE highscore still stands, what is my motivation?

Thank you for addressing my points. However I think I need to clarify as I didn't state my case very well. This thread is suggesting a tele/blink overhaul on the grounds of making crawl harder. I do not believe this is the case for the proposed changes, even limited cblink in tomb/hell/zot will reduce difficulty much more than any increase in difficulty in pan. Therefore I assert that these changes may not be swept through under the banner of "making crawl harder".

gammafunk wrote:..if you do find the ring you have an incentive to use it to conserve the other two slightly better forms of teleport, yet the interface for the ring is a lot worse


It is true the high incentive to constantly swap rings results in slightly clunky play. Though I would list this under the general problem with 'hot swapping' rings, rather than a tele ring specific issue.

I feel the flavour difference between hell and pan is a significant issue. In my mind the -ctele is a big change to the bag of tricks needed for optimal game play on the rune vaults. But subjective I guess.

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Post Tuesday, 3rd February 2015, 09:51

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

To be fair, minmay isn't really suggesting these changes because they make crawl harder. He's suggesting them because he thinks they improve crawl, and incidentally they probably make crawl harder. But he disguised that with his original post.

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Post Tuesday, 3rd February 2015, 13:30

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

crate wrote:re:ctele: the fact that a "-ctele" status exists is pretty much all the argument I would personally need to support removing ctele. If it's too good to let the player have, then why does it exist?


I see two counterarguments to this:

1. The floors with -cTele are meant to be especially challenging, -cTele helps increase the challenge.

2. (The much better one, I think): The floors with -cTele have a different goal than most normal floors. For most players on most floors, the goal is to clear as much of the floor as you can safely for experience and items, and then find one of the three randomly distributed down staircases. For most -cTele floors, the goal is to find the rune or orb and get out with it alive, and the map layout gives clues as to where it can be found. So cTele means something different on those floors, because those floors have a specific objective that is trivialized by the ability to just cTele or cBlink to it. And I have found before that allowing cTele in Pan can sometimes trivialize the floors. My first time in Pan, I got Cerebov's rune and all of his loot without ever seeing Cerebov by just cTele-ing into the rune chamber and all of the treasure chambers one at a time. This isn't possible in most rune floors because of cTele. cTele would trivialize floors like Slime 6 or Tomb 3 in a way that it doesn't trivialize normal floors, which is why cTele is allowed to exist but -cTele does too.

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Post Thursday, 5th February 2015, 04:41

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

And now for something completely different:

How about removing Necromutation, or a major nerf? Immunity to torment + no spell (or channelling) hunger seems overpowered to me. Makes Tomb and a lot of Hell very easy, not to mention Ziggurats.
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Post Thursday, 5th February 2015, 04:57

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

bel wrote:How about removing Necromutation, or a major nerf?


The fashionable trend of thought is that Necromutation is actually terrible, so I don't think it's going to get nerfed any time soon.
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Post Thursday, 5th February 2015, 05:31

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

I think necromutation is bad from a design standpoint, but I don't think it's a problem from a power-level standpoint.

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Post Thursday, 5th February 2015, 11:43

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

Couple of observations now that I've tried some of the stuff being discussed.

cTele is a weird mechanic, but I quite like the way we get 3-tiers of blink control. The fact that we need 3 spells to be able to utilise them all trades off ok through mindspace, limited spell-levels and all that. Also a range of mana costs to blink depending on how important it is that you end up in a certain area. As blink is currently implemented, cTele is a huge element in the difficulty of most of the notorious floors. Add it to V5 and watch that become a playergrinder, remove it from slime/zot:$ and watch everyone ninja.

GDR bugs me too, I dont agree that its a mechanic unlike other damage sources, GDR works kind of like an 'impact' version of rC/F but is opaque to the player. Its the fact that its not immediately obvious how GDR scales through the armours that I find odd.

DD and their HW wand and recharge ability. This one seems to have generated the most discussion, I'm in the 'it's broken' camp. It completely trivialises the earliest part of the game and was certainly the easiest run I ever made. I wouldnt be too fond of removing their access to healing entirely at generation, since that would make them a nightmare to get off d1/2. I might lower the initial wand to 1/2 charges, increase the cost of the recharge to 2/5 mp. Removing the wand entirely rather breaks the point of their recharge ability, I wouldnt likely use it on any other wand and you may just never get one. As it is now the cost of 1 permanent mp is very little to pay when you can probably get away with at most 1 use of it before you find a recharge scroll and other healing becomes available. (while vamp drain, makhleb and such make this race even easier they dont normally come out of the box running like the wand does.) Ultimately what makes DD overpowered is damage shaving, which works always and forever. The wand just means fewer fall on their face in the early D and you cannot realistically run out of recharge lategame.
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Post Thursday, 5th February 2015, 14:18

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

Arrhythmia wrote:
bel wrote:How about removing Necromutation, or a major nerf?


The fashionable trend of thought is that Necromutation is actually terrible, so I don't think it's going to get nerfed any time soon.


Really? I basically always get it on caster types and spam channelling after every fight. Makes Pan/Hell/Tomb much easier when you don't have to worry about having your HP cut in half, or about hunger or MP.

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Post Thursday, 5th February 2015, 17:10

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

gammafunk wrote:Losing characters to overuse of the teleport ring like you mention isn't really what the ring is about. The scrolls and wand+recharge make teleport from other sources plentiful and equally potentially fatal. I think the ring is more about having the ring identification game and access to remove curse being more interesting, but there are probably better ways we can achieve that.

What if all cursed rings turned into plain rings after when you remove the curse? (plain rings could be +1ac rings)
Do cursed rings of "useful ability"(regen, rSomething etc) generate? I haven't seen many of those in my latest games at least.
This would make the curse game somewhat fun, imo.
You'd want to change ?RC to act like it does when worshipping ash though.

About DD and their earlygame, i think i've seen most players agree that races are the difficulty setting of crawl, and DD's and MiBe's are the most newbie-friendly ones.
Thus i'm strongly against the removal of HW from them. The recharging ability costing only 1mp is quite overpowered, when they can recharge the wand with ?recharging as well and can heal with god-given abilities.
as others have suggested, increasing the manacost (2-4 is enough imo) of this ability would be a good nerf to them, making it a non-infinite source of healing, and still keeping the race newbie-friendly.

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Post Thursday, 5th February 2015, 18:23

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

Give ring of teleport has a small chance to abyss you(perhaps just a random translocations miscast?).

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Post Thursday, 5th February 2015, 18:51

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

KittenzInMyCereal wrote:What if all cursed rings turned into plain rings after when you remove the curse? (plain rings could be +1ac rings)

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Post Thursday, 5th February 2015, 21:14

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

People need to keep in mind that you don't need to make the game harder overall for the sake of being harder when the game supports variety of different ways for you to win the game in varying difficulties. (How many runes do you want, combat styles, gods, race ect)

To make the game more "challenging" (not harder) for veteran players we don't need to do stuff like "nerf DD because they are kinda op" since it affects nothing in the overall game-plan since if you already won with a DD it's not like there is any achievement to winning with them again. We could do it anyway for the sake of subjective balance of a single player game, but on the other side removing abuse of items such as elemental invokers or lantern of shadows removes blatantly "OP stuff" where players cannot abuse them for easier wins but still didn't address the problem of making the game actually any more challenging for the players who ask for it.

Anyone have any idea to increase the later game challenge for a veteran player? More runes to collect? A entire new dungeon called the "overworld" when you leave the dungeon were everyone and their mothers and every kingdom is after you trying to get the orb?

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Post Thursday, 5th February 2015, 22:18

Re: Changes to make Crawl harder

I don't think new runes are the right direction - I think the idea is closer to "more tough choices per minute/turn" than "additional hard sections that make the game even longer". The game is already quite long as it is.

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