Status effects in Crawl


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Barkeep

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Post Friday, 12th June 2015, 21:07

Status effects in Crawl

and into wrote:But the fundamental idea is that hostile enchantments can put you in dangerous positions even on a high-level minotaur with 30 AC and 20 EV and 200+ HP, and this is definitely a good feature in the game. The question is, exactly which types of hostile enchantments are appropriate, and where, and I don't think there's an easy answer to that. (Obviously it isn't good to have too many separate effects causing feature bloat, either.)


I had more to say about this, but now the thread is in DCA, so I'll post some thoughts in a new GDD thread.

Rather than just "hostile enchantments," though, I'll talk about what we might call "status effects," some of which are irresistible, some of which are prevented by rPois, many of which are prevented by MR, and some of which are mitigated by other things.

I understand the purpose of status effects in Crawl, in general. As stated above, I see them as potentially providing a dangerous effect for characters whose basic defenses (AC, EV, and HP) are very high. There are drawbacks, however. First, there are lots of different status effects, including ones that you only see basically from one or two specific enemies, and not very often, so there is a potential issue with feature bloat and the amount of information people need to learn and then keep in mind about these statuses that rarely come up, but can be important when they do. Most of these effects require more than just the enemy causing the effect in order to be dangerous, most of them simply wear off over time, and many are counteracted by use of an item. This means that escaping and hitting five is the clear answer to these effects, and, when that is not possible, you use a consumable to take care of it. It also can encourage even more jewelry swapping for what are niche cases, but nonetheless dangerous niche cases, when they occur. This isn't necessarily a terrible thing, particularly when the status effect can make escaping more difficult. But we should perhaps be wary of how much tactical and strategic depth is actually added by all this apparent diversity, when the answer to many of these effects are quite similar in practice.

So, I think it might be a good time to look at the different status effects and consider what they add to the game, and if they could either be better differentiated and made more interesting, or else perhaps discarded.

This isn't a comprehensive list by any means, and I hope others point out other things in discussion, but here are some of my impressions of some of the "status effects" in Crawl.

Mark
As raised in the other thread, it is a bit strange that sentinels get a power boost that makes this harder to resist, but in terms of the effect itself I think it is good. Since other enemies are going to come after you, there doesn't need to be an already dangerous situation for the effect to matter—it can create tense situations on its own. At the same time, you have different ways to respond to being marked, and the actual danger level depends on situational factors that the player has to judge, and respond to accordingly. It can be counteracted with a potion of cancellation, but those aren't too common, and it also doesn't *completely* negate the effect—you still need to move after getting Marked, because enemies will still be heading to the last location where you were marked (at least, that seems to be how it works...) Overall I think this effect is well designed. It is seldom trivial, and thus rarely something you just five off, except for the rare event that you get marked by a trap or sentinel on a basically 100% cleared level.

Slow
Slow does require some existing threats around you to be dangerous, but it also makes it hard to escape. Unless you get tagged with slow by the last orc wizard standing in a pack, or something, it tends not to be a trivial thing you can just rest off. You have to think more carefully about your moves when slowed, and the ways to counteract it directly (cancellation and fast) are valuable. Putting on an amulet of stasis also cancels it, but at the cost of a very large amount of glow—basically, you are guaranteed to pick up a bad mutation.

Drain
The fact you cannot rest off drain or otherwise counteract it (except with !experience, I guess?), but must kill enemies, makes it an interesting effect. Bad drain can be really crippling, but it generally takes quite a bit of negative energy hits to get to really bad levels of drain. It doesn't directly threaten your character, but noticeably and meaningfully weakens you, and in a way that is very clear to the player—you can see exactly how much your skills have suffered. It is fairly common, but outside of some optional areas, it is not overused. This also strikes me as good design.

Hostile/Unintended teleport
Tele status should not be canceled by reading or evoking an additional teleportation effect. First, that one can even do this is very unintuitive. (I believe also you can have your own teleport canceled by a hostile teleport, if I'm not mistaken—even less intuitive!) Also, ?teleportation is really common... In the early game, maybe it would be more of an issue, but it is only later enemies that do this, so it kind of defeats the purpose. I'd recommend only letting tele be canceled by a potion of cancellation (and also =stasis, but at the cost of glow, if you like). Putting that aside, the effect itself is pretty good. How dangerous it is depends on the player's "read" of the current level, and sometimes it might even preferable to get hit with an unintended teleport—but judging the level of danger of being teleported is non-trivial, which is also what makes ?teleportation a good consumable. I think hostile teleports could actually stand to be used a bit more often as a threat.

Weak
I think only orange demons and one of those Pan demonspawn enemies do this to you. Anyway, this has never seemed that meaningful to me. It doesn't affect my ability to escape, so if I feel it makes me too weak for a particular encounter, it is mostly just an annoyance—I am unhindered in getting away, and then just rest it off, and re-engage. I'm also simply not clear on what it does, or how much it affects me. I assume it applies negative slaying (and is thus also redundant with corrosion, which is a more noticeable and meaningful effect)? I really don't know. Why don't orange demons just do some additional acid damage (with possibility of corrosion) with their reach attack, instead?

Corrosion
Corrosion doesn't hinder one's escape possibilities, but it does significantly impact one's strength and defenses, and it does so in a way that is fairly clearly marked, so you get a good sense of just how badly you are at a handicap. The fact that most acid attacks deal pretty good damage for the level when you face them also means that corrosive attacks tend to be non-trivial even if they don't affect your speed, movement, or escape potential.

Confusion
I find confuse in Crawl... well, confusing. One of the most common consumables in the game directly counteracts it, and the effect itself is problematic in terms of interface—an issue that has been "band-aided" in various ways over the course of Crawl development, so it isn't as bad as it was. Nonetheless, the amount of special warnings, and then special cases, and whatnot added for confusion should by itself indicate the fundamental flaws. For very early game, it is not a terrible status effect, because you may not have !curing identified, or not have a lot of it. By the time you reach Lair, however, you almost always have a nice stack of !curing, and confusion is mostly a nuisance. It seems that, in order to compensate for this, confusion has been made very common—frankly, overused. Though this may be controversial, I think Crawl would be a better game without confusion, or at least, no confusion outside of the early game. (Whether the player spell should be kept is a related but slightly different question.)

Poison
Poison is a form of elemental damage, and also a status effect. That's somewhat true of acid/corrosion, but corrosion has a different effect on you than "you lose more life." As a status, poison, like confusion, can be dangerous in the early game, but gets less dangerous as the game goes on—even though this fact is often obscured by the fact that poison spells later in the game are dangerous by virtue of their "up front" damage, and rPois can be valuable for mitigating that. In recent versions, the damage of poison has been better indicated, and this is an improvement. But it also (as with confusion) points to a deeper problem that has not been completely addressed. Again, the prevalence of !curing appears to have been counteracted by an overabundance of poison, which most of the time you can just rest off—since it prevents regeneration, you end up retreating, and then resting it off; in the relatively small fraction of cases when it would be too dangerous to do this, you use one your many potions of !curing. This becomes rather a chore, given how much poison is in the game.


I could say more, but this is already pretty long, so I'll leave it here, and look forward to others' thoughts.

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Slime Squisher

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Post Friday, 12th June 2015, 23:04

Re: Status effects in Crawl

On hostile teleports: I think these do have a fairly high annoyance-to-danger ratio. Outside of nasty areas like V:$ or Zot:5, they tend to either teleport you somewhere empty, or somewhere that you can easily escape from/fight your way out of. I think a good revision would be to make them iterate through a number of locations, and then pick the one with the highest tension. It'd be pretty easy to communicate to the player that something is different about this teleport by making the "Tele" status indicator bright red.

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Friday, 12th June 2015, 23:13

Re: Status effects in Crawl

How about hostile "Shaft" spell? It will be better than shafts, at least player can blame himself for not using MR item if he had any.

Dungeon Master

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Post Friday, 12th June 2015, 23:20

Re: Status effects in Crawl

ion frigate: Indeed, that comes up from time to time, and still is a very good suggestion. Random teleports may be okay for Xom's carrousel, but actual monsters should do better.

and into: Great analysis, many thanks! Do you intend to extend this to more status effects, such as Flay, Mesmerise, Constricted, Sticky Flame... there certainly are a lot of them.

On poison and confuse: I think part of the problem is that the emergency cure is too cheap: a !curing potion and an action. There are fights where you agonise over every single action, but not too many of them. Perhaps the other cost (turns) could be increased, too? Some truly rough ideas: !curing does not deal with poisoning completely, it may only reduce poison status somewhat (so more attrition on both fronts). Or being too poisoned may make you lose turns. Similarly, being confused may make you shout (instead, or in addition to an action).

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Post Friday, 12th June 2015, 23:25

Re: Status effects in Crawl

Sandman25 wrote:How about hostile "Shaft" spell? It will be better than shafts, at least player can blame himself for not using MR item if he had any.


Unless the hostile shaft spell ignored MR.

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Friday, 12th June 2015, 23:27

Re: Status effects in Crawl

A while ago I had the suggestion that status effects should be clearly divided into categories by type of source i.e. magic/physical/mental/? (perhaps with some other categories mixed in there) with the status lights coloring the status by source type, and with specific, describable rules about each category. i.e. "magic" effects are resisted by MR and removed with cancellation, "physical" effects require damage be done (so are resisted by AC) and are removed with curing, etc.

The general reception of the idea at the time was "Hm, that sounds like a good idea, now on to talking about other things" And afaict no actual code arose towards that end.

I suspect doing that would clear up a lot of the weirdness, and we could even have similar effects from different sources (i.e. physical confusion caused by a tarentella, vs magical confusion caused by a orc wizard) and as long as they obeyed the same rules it would all be relatively clear and unambiguous what there was to do about them.
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Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Saturday, 13th June 2015, 00:09

Re: Status effects in Crawl

Rast wrote:
Sandman25 wrote:How about hostile "Shaft" spell? It will be better than shafts, at least player can blame himself for not using MR item if he had any.


Unless the hostile shaft spell ignored MR.


I think it will not happen.

Crypt Cleanser

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Post Saturday, 13th June 2015, 01:28

Re: Status effects in Crawl

dpeg wrote:On poison and confuse: I think part of the problem is that the emergency cure is too cheap: a !curing potion and an action. There are fights where you agonise over every single action, but not too many of them. Perhaps the other cost (turns) could be increased, too? Some truly rough ideas: !curing does not deal with poisoning completely, it may only reduce poison status somewhat (so more attrition on both fronts). Or being too poisoned may make you lose turns. Similarly, being confused may make you shout (instead, or in addition to an action).


Personally, my vote would be to make poison and confuse less dangerous, but make !curing much less common.

My experience with poison and confusion is this: encounters with poison and confusion can fall into three different categories. Trivial (you can wait out the status effect with no risk of dying), deadly (you are extremely likely to die if you don't drink curing), or borderline (it isn't clear whether quaffing !curing is necessary or not). The deadly case isn't that uncommon, particularly for confusion, due to both the nature of the effects and the commonality of them. This necessitates !curing being fairly common, because dying due to deadly poison or confusion without being able to do anything about it is very frustrating (and the effects are fairly common early game where alternative ways of dealing with the effects are less likely to be available). But the common-ness of !curing also largely trivializes the borderline cases. Now all that's left are "this poison or confusion might be dangerous, quaff curing" or "you're safe, just rest it off". No interesting situations where you have to heavily debate whether curing is worth it or not.

If confusion and poison were made less dangerous to reduce the "you are clearly 100% guaranteed to die if you do not quaff curing" situations, but !curing were also made less common, then maybe judging whether a situation warrants quaffing curing would actually be an interesting decision to make.

This whole post ignores Rot, which can be another pretty significant drain on your curing potion supply in Tomb and Hell, but I'm personally in favor of removing Rot from Mummy Curses and Hell effects in the first place (and possibly from the game entirely).

Sar

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Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Saturday, 13th June 2015, 01:35

Re: Status effects in Crawl

Rot doesn't apply Rot anymore, instead it just reduces your maxHP a bit.
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Zot Zealot

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Post Saturday, 13th June 2015, 04:34

Re: Status effects in Crawl

Dying in early D to lethal poison after killing the adder is annoying. Why not make poison damage non-lethal?

Ziggurat Zagger

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Post Saturday, 13th June 2015, 04:41

Re: Status effects in Crawl

Because you might as well remove poison damage entirely if you do that.

Barkeep

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Post Saturday, 13th June 2015, 06:42

Re: Status effects in Crawl

Also, the slightly rarer cases where you kill the adder, and the poison brings you down to 1 health and keeps you there as you five it off, only for a hobgoblin to come round the corner and kill you with a thrown stone, would be basically just as annoying.

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