Thursday, 14th May 2020, 16:12 by sanka
I risk being ridiculous in the eyes of tealizard, and make my attempt at answering svendre seriously.
In svendre's post there is a good argument for removing the XP penalty, but it is well hidden behind completely unrelated rant. I think the actually good argument is this:
There are two cases: the XP penalty either matters or does not matter. If it matters, it leads to degenerate play because you try to steal damage from your summons. If it does not matter, than we should remove it, because it is superflous spoilery complexity.
Note that this argument has nothing to do with whether summoning is overpowered or not. It never even mentions game balance: we only need to show that this mechanic is contrary to the anti-tedium design philosophy. (It is also an old argument, I know of no counterargument, and I, too, am puzzled why the penalty still exists.)
Svendre for some reason completly confuses this argument with the debate whether summoning is overpowered or not. That's why they tries make look those who think summoning is overpowered stupid with the ridicolous paragraph about the tournament and basketball, and tries to frame their argument around the "two camps". And this layer of their post is very badly presented, beause they does not even make an attempt to understand the "other camps" position, just attempts to make fun of them.
I can not argue in the name of tealizard (or anybody else), but I am in the camp who thinks summons are overpowered and extremly tedious to use. For better or worse, I try to make an attempt to make clarify my opinion for svendre and others in their camp with one remark:
There is a clear difference between 1) the strength of a character when played reasonably well and 2) how hard it is to play the character reasonably well for a human player. This is two different kind of difficulty, and instead of mocking the others you should try to make clear that you understand this, and in which sense you use the word "overpowered". This distinction is especially important in GDD, because the design philosophy discourages balance by tedium.
With this disntiction in mind can we make some personal opinions like the following:
There are characters that are (relatively) very weak, like MuFi or NaGl, but which can be enjoyable to play. There are characters that are strong, like DrSu, but if you try to rely very strongly on your summons all game (as opposed to simply learn something else like melee quickly), you go astray. It is very annoying to play with them, not in the sense that it is hard to figure out some good tactics but in the sense that it is very tedious to actually execute this tactic.
And also the following:
Melee is week, but gives good gameplay - so humans can have an easier time to follow good tactics with a melee character.
Summons are strong, but gives poor gameplay - so humans can have a much harder time to follow good tactics with a dedicated summoner.
And also the following:
For me, for any single situation, a summoner is very strong - I usually can come up with a plan to win the encounter, and more relyably than with many other type of characters. However, consistently doing it all game is next to impossible to me. For me, summoning a lot would be a very bad way to play in a streak - I get fatigued and die. A summoner would also be very bad for turn count, because summons are not a very fast way to kill monsters. And it is disastrous for real time, because summoners needs more positioning than anybody else, and you need to take into account the movement of more creatures. Now decide yourself whether summoning is overpowered for me or not.
And last but not least:
In DCSS you need not to build "pure" characters, so there are no reason to be a "summoner" or "melee brute" etc. Unfortunately this means that there are almost no DCSS characters that would not be improved by using summons. And summons are tedious, for me the current game would be improved if you just remove almost all of them.
- For this message the author sanka has received thanks: 7
- duvessa, Jano, Kramin42, Majang, Midn8, svendre, TheMeInTeam