Option for adjustable dungeon complexity/gamelength

[Robotron]

Hello, fellow crawlers, long time lurker here.

I love Crawl but always found the standard game taking quite a bit too long. The game seems to "drag" in later stages, and I found myself prone to quitting/premature ascending because of declining interest or deaths born out of tedium because of repetitive gameplay. Please don't misunderstand me here: I really DO think the game is a total blast but the abundance of dungeon-/ branch levels with the ever increasing deluge of enemies (ogre, yaktaur or draconian squads etc.) in later levels is...well...repetitive. So I tried Dungeonsprint but found it too static/limited to be a real alternative to the standard game.

I applauded the reduction of Vaults to five levels and later was thrilled by the introduction of the "depths", further shortening the main dungeon and cutting the boredom down quite a bit by adding a hefty challenge. But personally I still think the whole game lasts too long (my average game time being 8-12 hours for a win with more than 4 runes) and therefore requiring more than one evening, which is quite a hefty time investment.

Then I read about "crate crawl" and "crawl light" which specifically adressed this "problem" of mine I had with the game taking too long and was fascinated. From what I was able to gather about "Crate Crawl" it seemed to be a variant ("fork") which required the player to only get three runes (or just the silver rune, I don't quite remember). "Crawl light" on the other hand drastically reduced the number of dungeonlevels but alas changed the general gameplay by adding new schools of magic and features which I wasn't too sure about whether I'd like them. But both variants thrilled me to speculate about how a "shortened" version Crawl would play.

I wonder what the general opinion of the crawl community would be about an optional feature that would one allow to choose the "dungeon complexity" when starting a game. For a comparison: in the turn based strategy game "Civilization 4" you could choose the "speed" of a game at the start, thus allowing more/less gameturns before the game would end. All gameplay-factors would be delayed/accelerated if you chose a slower/faster gamespeed, so you could extend/reduce the actual "real" time it would take to play through a complete game according to your personal taste.
So, in Crawl terms, choosing a quicker "gamespeed" would reduce the number of dungeonlevels, but increase the XP gained from kills and emphasise more/good item drops.

Here's a proposal for an optional "quick" setting:
Dungeon: 10 levels
Depths, Orc, Elves, lair, lair branches, vaults, hells & Zot: 3 levels
Pan: 50% chance to find a "rune" level after leaving a Pan-level

I do realize that this proposal would require a MAJOR reworking of XPs gained for kills and item drops which is definitive quite difficult to implement, but why not have some brainstorming about it?
Is this doable at all, what do you guys think? And don't be too harsh on me, if this seems totally "whacky", it just came to my mind and I wanted to hear about what other players might say about this optional feature.

[reaver]

But personally I still think the whole game lasts too long (my average game time being 8-12 hours for a win with more than 4 runes)

Why not just mostly restrict yourself to just 3 rune games? It cuts down game length without changing anything.

stuff about crate crawl and crawl light

crate crawl is a challenge, designed to function like a win without having some of the more boring parts of the end game.

So now I play crate_crawl, where the goal is to reach d:20 as if you are playing a full crawl game, and then go leave the dungeon alive. I will probably define some actual rules for myself at some point, since the end is very arbitrary right now;

(That's from half a year ago so maybe he did make some firmer rules).

Crawl Light is a actually a programmed variant, and was built to do basically what you want. There are some new features, like the removal of the food clock, but it doesn't change too much. The "new spell schools" is just a minor rejiggering of the current spells to solve some perceived problems with the current schools. (Like poison being too good early but too poor late). I'd be more concerned about the fact that it hasn't been updated in half a year.

I wonder what the general opinion of the crawl community would be about an optional feature that would one allow to choose the "dungeon complexity" when starting a game. For a comparison: in the turn based strategy game "Civilization 4" you could choose the "speed" of a game at the start, thus allowing more/less gameturns before the game would end. All gameplay-factors would be delayed/accelerated if you chose a slower/faster gamespeed, so you could extend/reduce the actual "real" time it would take to play through a complete game according to your personal taste.
So, in Crawl terms, choosing a quicker "gamespeed" would reduce the number of dungeonlevels, but increase the XP gained from kills and emphasise more/good item drops.

Here's a proposal for an optional "quick" setting:
Dungeon: 10 levels
Depths, Orc, Elves, lair, lair branches, vaults, hells & Zot: 3 levels
Pan: 50% chance to find a "rune" level after leaving a Pan-level

I do realize that this proposal would require a MAJOR reworking of XPs gained for kills and item drops which is definitive quite difficult to implement, but why not have some brainstorming about it?
Is this doable at all, what do you guys think? And don't be too harsh on me, if this seems totally "whacky", it just came to my mind and I wanted to hear about what other players might say about this optional feature.

This is a lot of work for little gain. There would need to be a big rebalancing to make a game that shares most of what's fun about it with the main game, and then it would need to be continuously updated as the main game is updated. The only way this could happen is if somebody, mostly likely you personally, picked this up as a pet project and lead it until completion. (This is how Sprint and Zot defense were made). Changing level numbers and XP actually seems not that hard. The "more good items" thing is probably the hardest on that list.

[Klown]

I've had ideas of a 'Dungeon Crawl Minus' where you go straight through from D:1 to D:20, enter Zot like normal(no runes needed). So it'd come to 25 levels overall, double experience(or so) for monsters to make up for the 30+ lost levels, and some earlier depths for various enemies to make up for the quicker leveling early on.

But with variants like the ones mentioned above, it doesn't seem worth pursuit.

I think the main game will continue to improve on quicker 3 rune games and an improved end game for those who like lengthy games in the future, as we see with the depths & the thread about pan.

[crate]

The addition of depths actually makes crate_crawl a better variant! It's not intended to be more of a challenge than normal crawl, just to be shorter and eliminate parts of the game I don't particularly like. It's also not going to officially count as a win according to the game.

In .14 I recommend the following rules: get the silver rune then leave the dungeon, no entering depths/crypt/forest/elf, you may only enter one lair rune branch.

The benefit here compared to old crate_crawl is that there is actually a suitable final level/final challenge (and v:$ is possibly my favorite level in crawl). The drawback is that despite vaults appearing a bit earlier, you need a rune to enter it, so the total number of floors you cover is still higher than in the original version, so it's slightly longer.

[Kate]

A lot of the code related to this stuff (branches, mon-pick) was refactored and made a lot more flexible recently, and there was a patch making vault definitions handle branch changes more gracefully too. I don't really see something like this being added as an official feature any time soon, but I imagine it'd be possible to get something vaguely functional, with a bit of work.

[sanka]

Don't you think that shorten shoals/snake/swamp/spider/vaults/depths/zot to 3 levels each would help a little bit? I personally too find them too long.

For lost loot: add a little bit of loot to the lair rune vaults. For lost XP: do nothing, instead improve elf/crypt/forest etc. to make them more enjoying to play to let someone get XP there if one wants.