Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality


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Post Friday, 23rd May 2014, 12:03

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

crate wrote:You can instead go the other way: DoomRL games take me about an hour, which is an acceptable length.

Don't we have sprints for that?
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Post Friday, 23rd May 2014, 12:08

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

sprints aren't real crawl, which is pretty painfully obvious when you play them

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Post Friday, 23rd May 2014, 12:11

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

Sprint is not crawl. I like them, but they are a different game.

Now that said, it could happen to create two crawl variants, a longer and a shorter, when in the second simply every branch except D is halved or something. The problem with this is that I think the developers do not want to consider two games when changing balance. Sprint games are absolutely not balanced, but this is not a big problem.

It would be really nice to try it out in trunk or in an experimental branch if it is not hard to code, because I think I would like to play the shorter version much more.

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Post Friday, 23rd May 2014, 12:16

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

all before wrote:If you are a tactics-loving player, then the game becomes less interesting once most fights don't pose a serious threat of death. So the post-Lair (or so) game gets boring because you have enough options available to solve most fights without thinking too much. If you are a strategy-loving player, then as you "invest" more in building a character, you expect chances of danger to go down to compensate for the time/planning invested. You might agree that the game gets boring, but you also expect the game to become more boring on some level.

I don't think tactics and strategy are opposed, but the latter sentiment tends toiward RPG-like play, and results in a grind-y late game.

So, like I said, I disagree--if the post-Lair game needs to be reformed, the aim should be to dole out more type 3 encounters, as these are the encounters that really make you stop and think about what you're doing. That might seem cruel, but I guess in crawl cruelty and fun bear a close relation.


My problem with the strategy aspect of the second part of the game is that there isn't too much strategy anymore. Suppose you change the game that every fight is tactically interesting, as far as crawl can go. It still will not be very interesting to do 1000 of them in a row. And once your character is strong enough to win, it's a pure tactical game, without almost any strategy involved. I think that crawl is a good mix of tactics and strategy, but once the strategy part is effectively over, it should not take too much time to win.

So I can see only two possible solutions:
1. Shorten the second half of the game significantly.
2. Change the strategy involved in the second half of the game to remain interesting at least till Zot. I have no idea how to accomplish this.

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Post Friday, 23rd May 2014, 12:25

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

crate wrote:crawl's tactics are good; they're not good enough to support a four hour game without changing at all


And four hours is how long it takes someone who is actually competent at the game. To provide some anecdotal data for the kind of player that isn't, it takes me about 12-14 hours for a melee character or 22-24 hours for a caster to complete a basic 3-rune game. Crawl is a great game, but it can be hard to justify putting that much time into a game when there are so many other things competing for your attention (other games, movies, tv shows, etc.)

I realize that there will be many players who would advocate either simply getting better at the game or playing sprints instead. Unfortunately the former would take a lot of time, thus defeating the point, and the latter is just not the same as the main game, relying far more on spoilers and doing the exact right thing in order not to die instead of the freedom offered by the main game.

Fortunately, the past few versions there has been a strong tendency to reduce the amount of levels, which I fully support. Aside from reducing the overall game length, it also adds more variety since you spend less time in any given environment. As far as I'm concerned, there's still plenty that can be cut. Many levels are currently just filler between the interesting story beats. For most, if not all, branches three levels seems like a decent amount: two levels to get the feel of the place and one harder level with loot/a rune. See Elf and Tomb for examples of this.

Dungeon: currently 15 levels, could be reduced to 12 with little impact
Lair: Already pretty samey due to the monster set, it is also by far the longest remaining non-extended branch at 8 levels, making it dull as dishwater. I would reduce it to 3, or at most 4, levels.
Orcish Mines: Also has fairly low enemy variety. Can easily lose one of its 4 levels.
Lair branches: Can be taken down to 3 instead of 5 levels.
Vaults: Probably the most well-designed branch there is at the moment. Even so, it could stand to lose one or two levels.
Crypt: Three levels is plenty.
Slime: Since I doubt many people explore these levels fully, droppping three levels wouldn't matter much
The four hells: the interesting bit is the fight at the end, not the part leading up to it. Four or five levels should do.
Zot: Aside from the final level it's not all that different from Depths; three levels should get the point across just fine.

Adopting all of these modifications would reduce the length of a typical 3-rune game from 15+5+5+8+4+5+5+5 = 52 to 12+5+3+3+3+3+3+3 = 35 levels, which would significantly reduce the time required to complete a game. It would also cost quite a bit of loot and XP, so these would probably have to be increased a bit to compensate. As far as I'm concerned, however, it would result in a more varied and interesting game that you're more likely to pick up and play since it doesn't take three full work days to finish.
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Post Friday, 23rd May 2014, 12:27

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

crate wrote:sprints aren't real crawl, which is pretty painfully obvious when you play them

I think it's also pretty painfully obvious that you can't squeeze real Crawl into a one hour game.
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Post Friday, 23rd May 2014, 13:06

please stop misinterpreting me

Sprucery wrote:
crate wrote:sprints aren't real crawl, which is pretty painfully obvious when you play them

I think it's also pretty painfully obvious that you can't squeeze real Crawl into a one hour game.

See, this is why I didnt want to post in this topic to begin with ... I should've just stuck with my first instinct here and not posted at all because I don't give a fuck what other people think and I already know what I think, and not posting at least doesn't get me misinterpreted.

I was very careful to say only what I said and nothing more. Let me recap my post in this topic.
crate wrote:the real problem with crawl's length is the game is very nearly exactly the same on turn 1 as on turn 100000

crawl's tactics are good; they're not good enough to support a four hour game without changing at all


Here I say only one thing: I believe that crawl is too long.

You may notice that I give no suggestions for shortening it. There is a very good reason for this.

to be clear on a different point: I have no problems whatsoever with crawl's difficulty, other than the difficulty in having to learn what so many monsters/items/etc do (and on that subject there is apparently not going to be what I consider progress so I do not make an effort to express my opinion at length)

there are several things with crawl that I think are definitely problems but are simultaneously not things that are fixable (such as having persistent levels) ... please be aware that when I am pointing out such things it is not always (or even usually, since this is tavern and not ##crawl-dev) with the intent of seeing them changed

the particular problem of crawl being too long is one I have basically solved for myself anyway, by purposely not finishing games, so I don't even have an incentive to get the game shortened at this point
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Post Friday, 23rd May 2014, 13:13

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

Sprucery wrote:I think it's also pretty painfully obvious that you can't squeeze real Crawl into a one hour game.


This is not true. The "one hour" should refer the good/fast players of course, but this only means that you could divide the length by 4 (since good/fast players currently beat the game in about 4 hours). If you are the type who currently plays it for 12 hours, think more of it like squeeze it into 3 hours instead.

Edit: Of course I do not know crate's opinion in the subject, this is just a personal addition.

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Post Friday, 23rd May 2014, 13:18

Re: please stop misinterpreting me

crate wrote:See, this is why I didnt want to post in this topic to begin with ... I should've just stuck with my first instinct here and not posted at all because I don't give a fuck what other people think and I already know what I think, and not posting at least doesn't get me misinterpreted.


I would like you to post here, because I'm interested in your opinion whether anyone else who posts here (including me) misinterprets your post or not.

Of course only post here if you have time for discussion. Sometimes someone will misinterpret you, but others read you as well.
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Post Friday, 23rd May 2014, 15:00

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

FalconNL wrote:Dungeon: currently 15 levels, could be reduced to 12 with little impact
Lair: Already pretty samey due to the monster set, it is also by far the longest remaining non-extended branch at 8 levels, making it dull as dishwater. I would reduce it to 3, or at most 4, levels.
Orcish Mines: Also has fairly low enemy variety. Can easily lose one of its 4 levels.
Lair branches: Can be taken down to 3 instead of 5 levels.
Vaults: Probably the most well-designed branch there is at the moment. Even so, it could stand to lose one or two levels.
Crypt: Three levels is plenty.
Slime: Since I doubt many people explore these levels fully, droppping three levels wouldn't matter much
The four hells: the interesting bit is the fight at the end, not the part leading up to it. Four or five levels should do.
Zot: Aside from the final level it's not all that different from Depths; three levels should get the point across just fine.

Adopting all of these modifications would reduce the length of a typical 3-rune game from 15+5+5+8+4+5+5+5 = 52 to 12+5+3+3+3+3+3+3 = 35 levels, which would significantly reduce the time required to complete a game. It would also cost quite a bit of loot and XP, so these would probably have to be increased a bit to compensate. As far as I'm concerned, however, it would result in a more varied and interesting game that you're more likely to pick up and play since it doesn't take three full work days to finish.


THIS! Very concisely formulated and to the point. Couldn't have said it better. I'd definitely rather play two games taking six hours than one taking eight. Let's face it: shortening the dungeon is the way to go to avoid tedium, offer more incentive for replaying and minimize the chance of too much content repeating in succeeding games. Of course it's also probably one of the most complex and difficult modifications to apply but I sincerely hope, that this proposal by FalconNL will serve as a blueprint for further developments in this direction.
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Post Friday, 23rd May 2014, 15:23

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

I don't understand, if I play 4 games in 4 hours, or 1 game in 4 hours, I was still playing a game for 4 hours. Why is the number of games completed so important? If you find crawl boring, play something else.

If you've played a game for years and years and can beat it easily, you're going to have to supply some of your own challenges. For me, the longer I have a character going, the more fun it is. I regret ascending characters to get a meaningless win, I want to build up a character and accomplish as much as possible.

If the game is too easy, descend a couple levels. If you can't descend a couple of levels because it's too hard, then the game's not too easy.

I'd love to see suggestions for making the game more interesting, but "I hate the game, make there be less of it" is not a good suggestion. That's what some people seem to be saying.

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Post Friday, 23rd May 2014, 15:33

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

damiac wrote:I don't understand, if I play 4 games in 4 hours, or 1 game in 4 hours, I was still playing a game for 4 hours. Why is the number of games completed so important? If you find crawl boring, play something else.

If you've played a game for years and years and can beat it easily, you're going to have to supply some of your own challenges. For me, the longer I have a character going, the more fun it is. I regret ascending characters to get a meaningless win, I want to build up a character and accomplish as much as possible.

If the game is too easy, descend a couple levels. If you can't descend a couple of levels because it's too hard, then the game's not too easy.

I'd love to see suggestions for making the game more interesting, but "I hate the game, make there be less of it" is not a good suggestion. That's what some people seem to be saying.


The issue I believe people raise is that once you reach a moderate skill level if you approach the game as a tactical exercise where you attempt to play optimally (as I believe it is intended based on the design doc), the game after you finish Lair is SO EASY that much of it it basically becomes filler that tests nothing but mental endurance without really providing much in the way of interesting tactical situations, outside of a few battles in branch ends. You get to a point somewhere in Lair where you know the character is in principle going to win, but the prospect of slogging through most of the game is not an appealing one just for a few good floors, so you get bored and make an error.

Obviously people can avert this by self-imposed conducts, but the above situation is not something that can be considered good, which is why there is discussion about it.
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Post Friday, 23rd May 2014, 17:16

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

damiac wrote:if I play 4 games in 4 hours, or 1 game in 4 hours, I was still playing a game for 4 hours

Different race, class, god, items.

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Post Friday, 23rd May 2014, 17:28

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

damiac wrote:I don't understand, if I play 4 games in 4 hours, or 1 game in 4 hours, I was still playing a game for 4 hours. Why is the number of games completed so important? If you find crawl boring, play something else.


You are quite correct: the number of games is irrelevant, provided it is at least 1. And therein lies the problem, at least for me. I generally don't have 24 hours to dedicate to a single game in a week. And once you put it on the backburner, you quickly start to forget what you were doing and lose interest. I have a game with a HECj of Ash where I'm somewhere in Vaults, which I haven't continued in a week or two because I didn't have the time needed to get anything significant done. To use your analogy, it's not about playing four games in four hours, it's about playing one game in one hour and using the other three hours to do other stuff. For those who do wish to spend the extra time, there's always the extended game.

damiac wrote:I'd love to see suggestions for making the game more interesting, but "I hate the game, make there be less of it" is not a good suggestion. That's what some people seem to be saying.


I don't think anyone here said anything about hating the game. If I didn't enjoy the game I'd simply go play something else. It is, however, a game that requires a lot of time, quite a bit of which can be cut out without negatively affecting the play experience since there's more than a bit of filler.

Let's compare it to other media: there's a reason that only a handful of movies are more than four hours long. Not only do people not have the attention span, they have other stuff to do. Same thing for books. Even large fantasy series like A Song of Ice and Fire or Harry Potter are divided into separate books that can be finished in a reasonable amount of time. I rather doubt they would've been as popular had they been released as a single 5000+ page volume.

The basic idea that I and several others in this thread are arguing is that less is more.
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Post Friday, 23rd May 2014, 17:47

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

It's clear that people play this game for very different reasons, and have fun in very different ways. Perhaps I'm in the minority with the viewpoint that I just want to make a really powerful character and kill everything in the game, and some people just want to win the challenge of ascending with the orb, and they want to do it in one relatively short sitting.

But how do you concentrate the essence of crawl like that? Removing anything makes everything after that point harder, because you've got less resources than you would have had. I think the removal of D16-27 and replacement with depths did just that, and maybe the game needed it. But I feel the first lair rune is at just about the right challenge level right now, so eliminating anything before that point pushes it toward 'too hard' territory.

Maybe there are certain things that make the game too easy after that point. Perhaps the removal of spell haste and wand haste would help somewhat in that regard. I don't know, I find vault and depths to have plenty of tough encounters, but I really don't play super optimally. Maybe monsters after a certain depth should do something to prevent drawing them off to kill 1 by 1. For example, what if monsters kept shouting as you draw them away, so you end up drawing even more than you would have if you just fought them when you first saw them?

If the goal is simply to shorten the game, you lose some progression resolution, if you know what I mean. Maybe instead of less floors, we could have smaller floors, with XP gain boosted somewhat to compensate. That would help to fix the 'slow progression' after lair.

I think if it only took 1 hour to take a character from XL1 to XL27 the game would lose a lot of its replay value, but then, who says the game has to get you to XL27 if you go straight for the orb. If extended was necessary to get to the max level, it might give it a little relevance that it doesn't have now. And the speedrunners then have a more difficult game than they already do.

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Post Friday, 23rd May 2014, 18:10

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

It is extremely hard to balance a roguelike of Crawl's lenght, not to mention much longer ones, in a way that a) isn't completely impossible in the early game b) is challenging even in the endgame and c) provides such ways of losing characters that don't feel unfair to the player, especially after the early game.

Take TOME 4, for example. If you clear everything in it, then it's certainly even longer than Crawl. On normal difficulty, much of the endgame (and much of the early game too) is a complete cakewalk where you really don't need to use your skills even halfway optimally and there are no consumables so you can use your best skills in every battle. However, to "balance" this, TOME also has incredible (admittably rare) damage spikes that, at their worst, can oneshot a HP sack berserker even in the endgame and even on normal difficulty (the spikes just get worse if you play at higher difficulties). Taking a crystal spear in your face with max damage from an ancient lich in Crawl is a walk in the park compered to that.

The above example is a pretty bad way of balancing an overly long game. The longer the game the more you have invested time in it and the more you feel frustrated if the game just abruptly ends, especially if you didn't even have a chance to react. A roguelike game ends when your HP drops below zero no matter how long you have stayed above zero HP until it happens. Also, the longer the game, the more time the player has had to gather all the super gear and escape/healing options/consumables he/she will ever need, which complicates balancing even further.

So, in the endgame, you end up having a character that probably has way too many consumables he/she will ever need and a way to escape from/neutralize pretty much anything the RNG throws against him/her. I have already explained why adding (more) damage spikes is bad. Also, just flat out reducing the number of consumables (or loot) could have a negative effect on the early - early midgame without improving the late game that much (you would still have godly equipment and spells in the end).

So, summa summarum, if the game feels overly long, then I don't think there are any magic tricks to make the endgame as balanced/challenging as the early game in Crawl while still fulfilling the conditions laid out in the first paragraph -apart from making the game shorter that is- and succeeding in making the game shorter is no easy feat itself.

(However, please note that many players do enjoy the feeling of playing a powerful character and get all the runes and whatnot, I was talking about game balance and actual challenges).

EDIT. Typos.
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Post Friday, 23rd May 2014, 18:30

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

damiac wrote:It's clear that people play this game for very different reasons, and have fun in very different ways. Perhaps I'm in the minority with the viewpoint that I just want to make a really powerful character and kill everything in the game, and some people just want to win the challenge of ascending with the orb, and they want to do it in one relatively short sitting.

But how do you concentrate the essence of crawl like that? Removing anything makes everything after that point harder, because you've got less resources than you would have had. I think the removal of D16-27 and replacement with depths did just that, and maybe the game needed it. But I feel the first lair rune is at just about the right challenge level right now, so eliminating anything before that point pushes it toward 'too hard' territory.

Maybe there are certain things that make the game too easy after that point. Perhaps the removal of spell haste and wand haste would help somewhat in that regard. I don't know, I find vault and depths to have plenty of tough encounters, but I really don't play super optimally. Maybe monsters after a certain depth should do something to prevent drawing them off to kill 1 by 1. For example, what if monsters kept shouting as you draw them away, so you end up drawing even more than you would have if you just fought them when you first saw them?

If the goal is simply to shorten the game, you lose some progression resolution, if you know what I mean. Maybe instead of less floors, we could have smaller floors, with XP gain boosted somewhat to compensate. That would help to fix the 'slow progression' after lair.

I think if it only took 1 hour to take a character from XL1 to XL27 the game would lose a lot of its replay value, but then, who says the game has to get you to XL27 if you go straight for the orb. If extended was necessary to get to the max level, it might give it a little relevance that it doesn't have now. And the speedrunners then have a more difficult game than they already do.


It dosen't really have anything to do with having haste or not, plenty of my games will use Haste 0 times in Vaults for instance. Even if you don't draw enemies off one by one, you will still win most encounters unless you take on a really bad group of enemies as the midgame is just that easy. As I said before the issue is that past Lair the player character is far more powerful than almost every enemy encountered that is not extremely OOD, and will effortlessly win any 1v1 encounter. There are also plenty of packs of filler enemies that don't really do anything, but even moderately dangerous encounters against several enemies will be very easily won with very elementary tactics - just don't get surrounded, don't let yourself get summon spammed or missile spammed too much, know your resist checks. Once you have memorized what the enemies do, you have to make really large errors in threat assessment to die, unless you play intentionally weak characters or simply be too lazy/bored to react in a proper way. It's not that you can play optimally and have the game be very easy, its that you can play very far from optimality and still have the game be easy.

So I would not agree with the statement that the first Lair rune is the right difficulty, or that there are tactically interesting Vaults floors that aren't V:5. I think the Lair runes could stand to be a little harder still. In Vaults, what interesting situations are there, really? They are basically all centered around convokers. Even if a convoker spawns a bunch of enemies on you, on V:1-4 you will probably still be OK, it can easily be stopped with curare needles or maybe a para wand. Mark also creates some difficulties but you won't really see it if you have at least MR3 and there are a number of easy responses to it. For me.. most of vaults is just tabtabtabtabtab CONVOKER tabtab SENTINEL tabtab.

Even if the game was shorter it would not resolve the XP curve issue: it would just be a shorter slog, but still a slog.

Like I said before, I personally don't really care if this is the case since I just like killing shit and getting items. But if you are going by Crawl's design doc and accepting the proposition that crawl is trying to create tactically interesting situations and that it is a tactical roguelike.. once you reach some level of ability it does not deliver in this regard for most of the game.
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Post Friday, 23rd May 2014, 19:58

Re: please stop misinterpreting me

crate wrote:there are several things with crawl that I think are definitely problems but are simultaneously not things that are fixable (such as having persistent levels) ...


Pretty much off-topic, but I'd be interested to know why you think this in particular is a problem.

I came to Crawl after playing Angband (and variants) and in my opinion, persistent levels is the biggest single way in which Crawl is superior to Angband (and variants.)

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Post Friday, 23rd May 2014, 20:40

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

damiac wrote:Perhaps I'm in the minority with the viewpoint that I just want to make a really powerful character and kill everything in the game, and some people just want to win the challenge of ascending with the orb, and they want to do it in one relatively short sitting.


You're hardly the only one. My first two wins were with DE Wizards who could hungerlessly cast fire storm. A while ago I had a MiDK of Yred where I pretty much steamrolled everything with my army of undead. Being powerful is fun. But the experience of being powerful is completely unrelated to how long it takes to get there. Let's take Lair for example. In its current incarnation you're likely to face something in the order of eight packs of green rats. I don't know about you, but after the first three or so I feel it has been sufficiently proven that I can kill a pack of green rats. Fighting the other five doesn't make me feel more powerful; it feels like busywork.

damiac wrote:But how do you concentrate the essence of crawl like that? Removing anything makes everything after that point harder, because you've got less resources than you would have had. I think the removal of D16-27 and replacement with depths did just that, and maybe the game needed it. But I feel the first lair rune is at just about the right challenge level right now, so eliminating anything before that point pushes it toward 'too hard' territory.


Resources come in two forms: XP and items. The XP problem is easily solved, since it's just a matter of tuning some numbers. Let's go back to the green rat pack example. Eight packs of on average ten rats at 13 XP per rat totals 1040 XP. If by reducing Lair's length you only face three packs, all that needs to be done is increase the XP per rat to 35 and you've got 3*10*35 = 1050 XP, leaving you just as powerful as you would be now.

As for items: aside from simply increasing the item spawn rate (double the items over half the floors gives you the same amount of items in all), there are a few more points to consider: fewer floors mean fewer encounters, which in turn means fewer chances for something to go wrong, which reduces the rate at which you use consumables. Secondly, the only part of the game where there's a shortage of items is until around the end of Lair, and even then it's often more often due to not having identified the potions and scrolls you're carrying rather than not having them at all. From the midgame onwards the amount of times I have to travel back to my stash to drop all the crap I've collected outnumbers the times I'm lacking some basic consumable at least 50:1, to the point where I'm even stashing blink scrolls because I have so many.

Perhaps an idea would be to reduce item spawn rate while increasing the average quality of items as you go deeper into the dungeon. Let's face it: nobody is going to pick up that +0 robe or +1, +1 hand axe in Depths:3. Might as well not spawn them to begin with. This has the side benefit of removing a bunch of stash interaction for people like me who don't want to let that wand of slowing just lie there for a monster to pick up.

damiac wrote:If the goal is simply to shorten the game, you lose some progression resolution, if you know what I mean. Maybe instead of less floors, we could have smaller floors, with XP gain boosted somewhat to compensate. That would help to fix the 'slow progression' after lair.


Smaller floors would achieve the same effect, though that would introduce additional concerns that simply removing floors does not. For example, it nerfs teleport scrolls, makes it harder to evade uniques you're not yet ready to handle and would require tweaking all the level generation scripts. Personally I don't see much practical difference between fewer and smaller floors, so why not choose the one that's far less effort?

damiac wrote:I think if it only took 1 hour to take a character from XL1 to XL27 the game would lose a lot of its replay value, but then, who says the game has to get you to XL27 if you go straight for the orb. If extended was necessary to get to the max level, it might give it a little relevance that it doesn't have now. And the speedrunners then have a more difficult game than they already do.


Agreed, there are no reasons aside from historical ones (which have been abandoned in other areas as well, such as the length of the Dungeon) why a 3-rune game should get you (close) to level 27. Level 18 or so seems just fine (though in that case I would advocate making Zot easier so that players with delusions of mediocrity such as myself have a shot at beating it). The other levels can be gotten in extended. It's not like ascending once you've gotten all the runes is anything other than a complete cakewalk now, so there's no need to take extended characters into account when setting the difficulty of Zot:5. (Off-topic idea: scale orb run difficulty based on amount of gathered runes).
Wins: DEWz^Veh (4 runes), DEWz^Veh (15 runes), DEWz^Sif (3 runes), HOBe^Trog (3 runes), MiDK^Yred (3 runes), DECj^Sif (4 runes), GrBe^Trog (3 runes), DECj^Vehu (3 runes), MiFi^Wu Jian (3 runes), DEFE^Veh (3 runes), DEFE^Veh (15 runes)

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Post Friday, 23rd May 2014, 23:27

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

OP wrote:
it primarily becomes a game of mental stamina

Pretty much every good competitive game and/or sport played at it's highest level is a game of mental stamina, I think you are chasing an impossible dream here. It sounds like you would have a lot more fun playing JRPGs (I don't mean that as a slight, I know people are sensitive around here). Or better yet, Japanese roguelikes like Shiren the Wanderer sound right up your alley, damage isn't random and there's a ton of interesting tactics and strategies
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Post Saturday, 24th May 2014, 06:29

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

@OP: After reading that through the entirety, I tried to draw a corollary to other games. And when I consider almost any game, most fall in a similar zone. There is a large section of the game that would be falling in to that first group. Hordes and hordes of nonthreatening enemies from lobos to goombas, etc. And then every so often there are a few fights that actually challenge you. And while most other games lack the permadeath that Crawl does, the basic tenants are undeniably similar. There are very few games that I can think of which have had success trying to have a highly attrition based singleplayer experience. And those that do are usually attrition over a span of an hour or two, not a prolonged experience.

tl;dr if you don't enjoy the game, don't play it.

tabstorm wrote:The issue I believe people raise is that once you reach a moderate skill level if you approach the game as a tactical exercise where you attempt to play optimally (as I believe it is intended based on the design doc), the game after you finish Lair is SO EASY that much of it it basically becomes filler that tests nothing but mental endurance without really providing much in the way of interesting tactical situations, outside of a few battles in branch ends. You get to a point somewhere in Lair where you know the character is in principle going to win, but the prospect of slogging through most of the game is not an appealing one just for a few good floors, so you get bored and make an error.

Obviously people can avert this by self-imposed conducts, but the above situation is not something that can be considered good, which is why there is discussion about it.


I had to respond to this in particular because it echoes the same sentiment. If I were to start up a game I was extremely experienced at, like Super Mario 3 for example, I know from the opening game screen that I am going to win the game. And everything after that is just going through the motions. Slogging through most of the game. Unless I get bored and make an error. This is again how most games go, when you've practiced something for a long time, it tends to get easier. And the fact that this is only an issue for those extremely proficient and well practiced does lend evidence that is isn't actually a problem. Since the larger audience as a whole does not have this experience. If you consider only the early game fun, then only play the early game. Get through the lair, call it a win, then scrap the character and start again.

tl;dr if you don't enjoy the game, don't play it.

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Post Saturday, 24th May 2014, 10:19

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

A big difference, though, is that is that if I'm playing Super Mario World, I remember where the challenging parts are: I don't need to be hyper-aware the entire game to be able to give these places the focus they need. And even if I forget a few times, I have enough lives to make up for it.

And this is typical.

It's even like this in the sports analogy; football is broken up into a series of short plays. Hockey players are only active less than a minute at a time, on average, with longer breaks in-between.

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Post Saturday, 24th May 2014, 11:38

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

NessOnett wrote:And while most other games lack the permadeath that Crawl does, the basic tenants are undeniably similar.

The balance issues regarding roguelike with permadeath as opposed to some PlayStation action game with infinite lives (or Super Mario too) are usually very very different. If you read the OP, or my post, you should have gotten a picture of why this is so.

NessOnett wrote: tl;dr if you don't enjoy the game, don't play it.

This is GDD so where at least a small minority of people is trying to improve the game by giving suggestion and sharing their concerns. "tl:dr whatever" sentiments are probably better served somewhere else.

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Post Saturday, 24th May 2014, 13:40

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

Removing anything makes everything after that point harder, because you've got less resources than you would have had. I think the removal of D16-27 and replacement with depths did just that, and maybe the game needed it.

Depths didn't remove anything, it made the game longer. Average endgame XL is the same as ever. What it did (along with runelock) is consolidate XP into the lategame. So mid-game characters are noticeably weaker than they used to be, while lategame characters are unchanged. Almost as if it's intentional for the game to get easier as you get closer to the Orb.

A big difference, though, is that is that if I'm playing Super Mario World, I remember where the challenging parts are: I don't need to be hyper-aware the entire game to be able to give these places the focus they need. And even if I forget a few times, I have enough lives to make up for it.

That's called "pacing". Pacing is the reason it is good to have trivial fights.

But uh, the fact that you need to be "hyper-aware" is most definitely a good thing (and testing endurance is the logical conclusion). Detecting trouble early and evaluating situations correctly is the most dynamic and interesting challenge Crawl provides, the only advantage that high damage variance provides IMO, and the main reason I play Crawl. In purely mechanical terms something like Shiren or Sil is clearly better.

Since the larger audience as a whole does not have this experience.

"The larger audience as a whole" is always experiencing everything for the first time. But you don't see Die Hard 1 coming out in theatres every year. Even if I didn't think it was a flawed argument, it is a pretty silly point to be making about a game that is expected to be played many times before you are even competent.

The balance issues regarding roguelike with permadeath as opposed to some PlayStation action game with infinite lives (or Super Mario too) are usually very very different.

Assuming you're trying to make a quality game, no they're not.

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Post Saturday, 24th May 2014, 15:30

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

TheDefiniteArticle wrote:
A big difference, though, is that is that if I'm playing Super Mario World, I remember where the challenging parts are: I don't need to be hyper-aware the entire game to be able to give these places the focus they need. And even if I forget a few times, I have enough lives to make up for it.

That's called "pacing". Pacing is the reason it is good to have trivial fights.

That's not quite right. Pacing is the reason it's good to have a stretch of the game be trivial, and to be known to be trivial.

A trivial fight at a point in time where you can't take a moment to decompress -- e.g. because trouble could come around the corner any moment -- is exactly the opposite of the kind of pacing you are advocating here.

(adding a "force_more" every time a never seen before monster comes into view doubled the quality of my gameplay experience for this very reason, although unfortunately it doesn't cover all cases of this problem)

TheDefiniteArticle wrote:
The balance issues regarding roguelike with permadeath as opposed to some PlayStation action game with infinite lives (or Super Mario too) are usually very very different.

Assuming you're trying to make a quality game, no they're not.

I cannot fathom how someone could fail to see the difference.

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Post Saturday, 24th May 2014, 17:06

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

TheDefiniteArticle wrote:
Since the larger audience as a whole does not have this experience.

"The larger audience as a whole" is always experiencing everything for the first time. But you don't see Die Hard 1 coming out in theatres every year. Even if I didn't think it was a flawed argument, it is a pretty silly point to be making about a game that is expected to be played many times before you are even competent.

Larger audence as a whole was referring to 99% of the people who play this game(Not those who haven't played it yet, which aren't an audience at all, so I'm confused how you made that leap(. Those who have somewhere between 1 and 5OOO hours of game time logged. The game is balanced for them in terms of the lategame. It is only the super elite 1% who have ascended several dozen if not hundreds of times that are arguing the game to be chopped in half. And those people honestly don't matter in terms of proper gameplay. If it can be engaging for so long, it shouldn't matter that certain aspects feel stilted after you've done them hundreds of times, because that is the end result of nearly all singleplayer experiences.

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Post Saturday, 24th May 2014, 17:15

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

there are 3 crawl accounts with over 5000 hours of playtime and none of them are posting in this thread

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Post Saturday, 24th May 2014, 23:22

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

Mankeli wrote:
NessOnett wrote: tl;dr if you don't enjoy the game, don't play it.

This is GDD so where at least a small minority of people is trying to improve the game by giving suggestion and sharing their concerns. "tl:dr whatever" sentiments are probably better served somewhere else.


No, this is not a group of people trying to improve the game. This is a group of people saying: "We are the 1%, and we have mastered this game, so we want to completely cut the game in half and redesign it from scratch so that it is more conducive to our extremely negligible minority and screws over the game for over 99% of players."

It is not suggesting improvements. It is trying to tailor the game to only them, and fuck all to everyone else.

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Post Saturday, 24th May 2014, 23:25

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

Mankeli wrote:
NessOnett wrote:And while most other games lack the permadeath that Crawl does, the basic tenants are undeniably similar.

The balance issues regarding roguelike with permadeath as opposed to some PlayStation action game with infinite lives (or Super Mario too) are usually very very different. If you read the OP, or my post, you should have gotten a picture of why this is so.

No, this is true for ALL games. You can take any game, any roguelike, any permadeath game. None of them have high tensions for prolonged periods of time. There is always a mass of easily dispatched enemies. If there isn't, you get player frustration and burnout. This is something you learn in game design 1O1, if you've ever actually taken a class on making games. It's not just PS1 era action games.

Mankeli wrote:
NessOnett wrote: tl;dr if you don't enjoy the game, don't play it.

This is GDD so where at least a small minority of people is trying to improve the game by giving suggestion and sharing their concerns. "tl:dr whatever" sentiments are probably better served somewhere else.

No, this is not a group of people trying to improve the game. This is a group of people saying: "We are the 1%, and we have mastered this game, so we want to completely cut the game in half and redesign it from scratch so that it is more conducive to our extremely negligible minority and screws over the game for over 99% of players."

It is not suggesting improvements. It is trying to tailor the game to only them, and fuck all to everyone else.
Last edited by NessOnett on Sunday, 25th May 2014, 01:03, edited 1 time in total.
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Post Saturday, 24th May 2014, 23:34

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

NessOnett wrote:No, this is true for ALL games. You can take any game, any roguelike, any permadeath game. None of them have high tensions for prolonged periods of time.


Counterpoint: Brogue.

Second Counterpoint: Chess.

Third Counterpoint: Hockey.
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Post Saturday, 24th May 2014, 23:40

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

TheDefiniteArticle wrote:Depths didn't remove anything, it made the game longer.


I still do not believe this. We should look at the stats though I guess.

NessOnett wrote:The game is balanced for them in terms of the lategame. It is only the super elite 1% who have ascended several dozen if not hundreds of times that are arguing the game to be chopped in half.


I said myself that the fact that the game "only" has replay value for a hundred wins or whatever isn't a real problem, but you don't have to be an elite player to start to think that the game is at least somewhat too long. I'd say after two or three wins the mid-late game was already losing some luster for me.

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Post Sunday, 25th May 2014, 01:04

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

Arrhythmia wrote:
NessOnett wrote:No, this is true for ALL games. You can take any game, any roguelike, any permadeath game. None of them have high tensions for prolonged periods of time.


Counterpoint: Brogue.

Second Counterpoint: Chess.

Third Counterpoint: Hockey.

The caveat was single player. Those are also short experiences. And Brogue did not have that mentality.
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Post Sunday, 25th May 2014, 01:13

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

NessOnett wrote:
Arrhythmia wrote:
NessOnett wrote:No, this is true for ALL games. You can take any game, any roguelike, any permadeath game. None of them have high tensions for prolonged periods of time.


Counterpoint: Brogue.

Second Counterpoint: Chess.

Third Counterpoint: Hockey.

The caveat was single player. Those are also short experiences. And Brogue did not have that mentality.


Counterpoint: Riven: The Sequel to Myst.

Second Counterpoint: La-Mulana.

Third Counterpoint: LSD: Dream Emulator
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Post Sunday, 25th May 2014, 03:24

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

The first two games you named do not have tension for a prolonged period of time (haven't played the third thing). Neither does Brogue. Maybe you misunderstand what high tension means. Regardless, what NessOnett said about game design is correct. Single player games should have a lower base tension with regular tension increases to not burn out the player and to maintain interest. This is not true of ALL games like NessOnett said, but I would argue that the ones for which this isn't true aren't fun to play for more than a few minutes. I'm making an appeal to authority by saying that this is an idea that is accepted in game design. You're free to disagree, and I won't defend this because I don't feel like it and this isn't the place for it.
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Post Sunday, 25th May 2014, 04:12

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

These assertions that games shouldn't be tense lest people not play them are baffling. People enjoy tense situations; I enjoy them! Roller-coasters make money, No Country For Old Men is a stunning movie, Amnesia, The Dark Descent, reached incredible cultural saturation not long ago. Knowing that I can spend two tense hours watching Eraserhead only makes me want to watch it more. The same is true of games; that I can find my five CD's of Riven and re-enter that world that I'm almost certain was built from paranoia transmuted into code, or that I can double-click brogue.exe and send another pitiful scavenger to his horribly inevitable death against monsters ten times as strong as him, all of these are things I enjoy, and would very much like to keep in games, single- or multi-player, long or short.
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Post Sunday, 25th May 2014, 04:38

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

the cool thing about crawl is that if you want low tension you can get it by not pressing keys

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Post Sunday, 25th May 2014, 04:46

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

The argument is about "high tension for prolonged periods of time". Taking the roller-coaster example, which one do you think is better: 1. A 3 minute long roller-coaster with ups and downs. 2. A 3 minute long roller coaster that is a straight no breaks ride down.

Amnesia, despite being famous for high-tension moments, has plenty of relatively low-tension moments (basically the part after a high tension moment and before the build up to the next high tension moment). This isn't an argument about tension, it's about appropriate fluctuations in tension.

To keep this on topic: In Crawl the problem for a good player is made up of a few factors.
- For a good player, the majority of encounters are boring which leads to low attention. This is a low tension situation.
- A dangerous situation can occur unexpectedly (random generation is a big factor here). This means that there is little build-up, little time to react.
The player therefore has to always pay attention, even during low tension situations that don't deserve it. This is exhausting and not a good thing. This is what is other posters meant by "test of mental stamina". Most games are not exactly "tests of mental stamina" because even if they do require a lot of mental attention, they require this mental attention during situations that actually deserve mental attention.
An abstract improvement to Crawl would be to make difficult situations more obvious in advance while not making it easier to deal with them. And also reduce the time between difficult situations because right now the player gets bored because of too long low tension moments.

duvessa wrote:the cool thing about crawl is that if you want low tension you can get it by not pressing keys

That's not exactly what is meant by tension. Not pressing keys doesn't lower the tension of the situation in the same way that it doesn't lower Xom tension. And the problem is too much low tension anyway (that still demands high attention if you want to keep playing).

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Post Sunday, 25th May 2014, 05:10

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

Wahaha wrote:To keep this on topic: In Crawl the problem for a good player is made up of a few factors.
- For a good player, the majority of encounters are boring which leads to low attention. This is a low tension situation.
- A dangerous situation can occur unexpectedly (random generation is a big factor here). This means that there is little build-up, little time to react.
The player therefore has to always pay attention, even during low tension situations that don't deserve it. This is exhausting and not a good thing. This is what is other posters meant by "test of mental stamina". Most games are not exactly "tests of mental stamina" because even if they do require a lot of mental attention, they require this mental attention during situations that actually deserve mental attention.
An abstract improvement to Crawl would be to make difficult situations more obvious in advance while not making it easier to deal with them. And also reduce the time between difficult situations because right now the player gets bored because of too long low tension moments.


I think this is nicely summarized.

I think the rune branch endings are a great example of high tension that the player knows is coming. Knowing the branch end is going to be hard doesn't stop it from being hard - though it does give you a chance to stock up consumables and prep equipment. If I die in a rune branch, I usually die having fun - as compared to dying because I slacked off and didn't lure enough goblins.

On another topic, "shorter" and "harder" have become a bit conflated in this thread. I for one do not want Crawl to become harder - I think it is plenty hard enough already. But I would love it to be shorter. Not too short - I want a certain amount of time to savor the game. But right now it really runs long for my taste. Different people enjoy the game in different ways. One thing I really enjoy is "getting stuff," with "stuff" being strongly biased toward spells. I find cool spellbooks, but then it takes so long to master the spells that I get impatient. It takes more RL time to get there than I want it to.

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Post Wednesday, 28th May 2014, 21:25

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

What about increasing the number of things that are consumable?

How about giving weapons and armor a durability which decreases each time they are used (hit by something, for armor, or used to hit something or cast a spell with, for weapons), and making ways to raise durability extremely rare. That way, if you're using your cool sword of swiftness and lightning and vampirism, or your staff of increase spell damage and mana regen to mow down that herd of Yaks, each Yak and other lesser monster you kill will use up some of the life of your premium equipment, making it less likely to be available when you really need it, leading you to use subpar equipment with lesser monsters, making those fights more dangerous and interesting.
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Post Wednesday, 28th May 2014, 21:54

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

That would be a huge difficulty increase for new players. It's already hard enough teaching new players to use their consumables rather than hoard it. I'm not so sure the artificial increase in excitement is worth the tedium it'd add for experienced players.
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Post Wednesday, 28th May 2014, 22:21

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

Orzbrain wrote:How about giving weapons and armor a durability which decreases each time they are used (hit by something, for armor, or used to hit something or cast a spell with, for weapons), and making ways to raise durability extremely rare. That way, if you're using your cool sword of swiftness and lightning and vampirism, or your staff of increase spell damage and mana regen to mow down that herd of Yaks, each Yak and other lesser monster you kill will use up some of the life of your premium equipment, making it less likely to be available when you really need it, leading you to use subpar equipment with lesser monsters, making those fights more dangerous and interesting.


Is this literally making all enemies into jellies and reverting the corrosion change?
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Post Wednesday, 28th May 2014, 23:19

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

Orzbrain wrote:What about increasing the number of things that are consumable?

How about giving weapons and armor a durability which decreases each time they are used (hit by something, for armor, or used to hit something or cast a spell with, for weapons), and making ways to raise durability extremely rare. That way, if you're using your cool sword of swiftness and lightning and vampirism, or your staff of increase spell damage and mana regen to mow down that herd of Yaks, each Yak and other lesser monster you kill will use up some of the life of your premium equipment, making it less likely to be available when you really need it, leading you to use subpar equipment with lesser monsters, making those fights more dangerous and interesting.

Given item destruction just got removed in trunk, this kind of change is never ever going to happen in Crawl.

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Post Thursday, 29th May 2014, 06:16

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

Arrhythmia wrote:These assertions that games shouldn't be tense lest people not play them are baffling. People enjoy tense situations; I enjoy them! Roller-coasters make money, No Country For Old Men is a stunning movie, Amnesia, The Dark Descent, reached incredible cultural saturation not long ago. Knowing that I can spend two tense hours watching Eraserhead only makes me want to watch it more. The same is true of games; that I can find my five CD's of Riven and re-enter that world that I'm almost certain was built from paranoia transmuted into code, or that I can double-click brogue.exe and send another pitiful scavenger to his horribly inevitable death against monsters ten times as strong as him, all of these are things I enjoy, and would very much like to keep in games, single- or multi-player, long or short.


The first term you used was "Roller Coaster". Which is the whole point. For highs to be high, there need to be lows. For every fast fall there must be a slow climb. For every drop to matter, there must be a conscious lead up. There are no roller coasters that start you at the top, drop in a straight line, and then end. Not any highly successful ones anyways. Even those like "Superman" whose claim to fame are big drops have the long climb before that drop, and a lot of other parts to the ride after that.

No Country for Old Men had a lot of lead up. A lot of relaxed moments. There were tense moments sure, but they were broken up by other things. And that's the point. You need other things. There needs to be highs and lows, rises and falls, else the highs don't actually hold any meaning without the lows to reference them against.

Lots of horror games have this problem. Amnesia didn't because it knew how to temper it. But look at Outlast. It tried to stay high tension from beginning to end, and most(maybe not all, but most( players ended up getting frustrated, and not caring about the faux tension anymore. They got more annoyed by the constant pressure rather than scared by it. And it led to a lot of people just running through the latter half of the game with wanton disregard because there were no 'safe' moments to emphasize that the scary ones were supposed to be scary. Because that's not how the human brain works.

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Brannock

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Post Thursday, 29th May 2014, 06:22

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

There are no roller coasters that start you at the top, drop in a straight line, and then end.

You're right, that's called skydiving.

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Post Thursday, 29th May 2014, 11:20

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

Ok, it seems this thread is probably heading to the Yiufland soon but I've feel I have to write something anyways to correct, what I consider to be, pretty horribly bad misuderstandings here. I actually regret answering already but here we go.

NessOnett wrote: No, this is not a group of people trying to improve the game. This is a group of people saying: "We are the 1%, and we have mastered this game, so we want to completely cut the game in half and redesign it from scratch so that it is more conducive to our extremely negligible minority and screws over the game for over 99% of players."

It is not suggesting improvements. It is trying to tailor the game to only them, and fuck all to everyone else.

You should probably note how I didn't actually make any suggestions regarding the shortening the length of the game and neither did crate. I actually think I wrote very clearly what I meant so I don't bother repeating it again. Also the fact that the very early game is harder than the rest of the game is probably true for all players, not just for the experienced players. So yeah, great job, Aunt Sally in the house!

NessOnett wrote: No, this is true for ALL games. You can take any game, any roguelike, any permadeath game. None of them have high tensions for prolonged periods of time. There is always a mass of easily dispatched enemies. If there isn't, you get player frustration and burnout. This is something you learn in game design 1O1, if you've ever actually taken a class on making games. It's not just PS1 era action games.


NessOnett wrote: The first term you used was "Roller Coaster". Which is the whole point. For highs to be high, there need to be lows. For every fast fall there must be a slow climb. For every drop to matter, there must be a conscious lead up. There are no roller coasters that start you at the top, drop in a straight line, and then end. Not any highly successful ones anyways. Even those like "Superman" whose claim to fame are big drops have the long climb before that drop, and a lot of other parts to the ride after that.

I'm pretty sure that originally this thread wasn't about "highs and lows" - And I know that my posts most certainly weren't. The whole freaking point was, that after the early game, the game is one big low maybe excluding some branch ends and zot:5 in terms of actual character threatening challenges! This is very different from arguing whether or not it's bad that I have to kill two rats before a challenging situation comes along: It's about the mid-late game being one big rat hunt in this regard. This is very different than arguing that it's nice to watch movies on a rollercoaster or whatever.

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Post Thursday, 29th May 2014, 16:50

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

FWIW I find the early game very easy (and very short) and I find that I die or have problems more frequently once I've passed the lair or orc. My experience contradicts your statement about the mid-game being nonthreatening for everyone, I may be the exception to the rule rather than the general case though.
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Post Thursday, 29th May 2014, 17:29

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

I do think that the early game is harder in the sense of requiring more attention, care, and caution, and in being more likely to present incredibly threatening situations, but the late game has many traps for inattention and hubris. As it happens, I have negative resistance to both, so I tend to do worse in the late game than I should, but I tend to do fairly well up until the end of Dungeon (except on particularly challenging starts).

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Post Thursday, 29th May 2014, 17:36

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

Siegurt wrote:FWIW I find the early game very easy (and very short) and I find that I die or have problems more frequently once I've passed the lair or orc. My experience contradicts your statement about the mid-game being nonthreatening for everyone, I may be the exception to the rule rather than the general case though.


Jesus I'm glad to see someone saying this, I was beginning to think I must be insane if people keep saying the early game is so much harder than the rest of the game, because it doesn't match my experience at all.

What I would say is the chance of unavoidable deaths is much higher in the early game, for example, autoexploring into LOS of a couple orc priests on D3 or something. So I could see why for a very good player, the early game is 'harder' because being very good at the game doesn't help if there's no action you could take not to die.

Also, statistically more people die early in the game, but that's easily explained by the fact that if you suck at the game, you're going to die somewhere. You get chances to die on D1, D2, D3, D4, etc... before you get a chance to die in Zot. Since you're going to die the first time tabbing into an enemy doesn't kill it first, it's likely that's going to happen early on.

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Post Thursday, 29th May 2014, 17:38

if you find early game easy you're playing powerful starts
how strong your race/class is matters much less as you go through the game

naturally mibe "early game" will be quite easy, but I don't think that I would say that that makes "early game" easy for all characters; in contrast, later parts of the game are honestly pretty similar difficulty for a large majority of races and obviously background barely matters at all

  Code:
<Sequell> 677 games for crate (!boring): 156x D:$, 75x D:3, 69x D:4, 65x D:2, 59x D:1, 32x D:5, 25x D:6, 20x D:7, 19x D:8, 15x D:9, [...]
<Sequell> crate (!boring) has reached Lair in 259 of 677 attempts: 38.25701624815362 %
<Sequell> 156/259 milestones for crate (br.enter=lair !boring): N=156/259 (60.23%)

(the last one there is how often I win after reaching lair)

You can look at very nearly any good player and you'll see a similar pattern: pre-lair is dramatically more deadly, even after you account for the fact that fewer characters make it that far.

(incidentally, the greatplayers nick as a whole is much like my personal stats: 18% lairratio, 36% of characters who enter lair win)

The exceptions I was able to find seem to be exclusively players who play not just to win but to get high scores; this style of play is of course going to be much more deadly late-game.

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Post Thursday, 29th May 2014, 17:45

Re: Tedium and the Illusion of Lethality

http://crawl.akrasiac.org/scoring/killers.html

Kobold, hobgoblin, gnoll, orc priest, orc wizard, ogre, Sigmund, adder, orc, jackal, goblin, orc warrior...

I don't tend to lose characters to those monsters after the early game (player ghosts can be dangerous later for sure).

(Of course, because bad/new players don't necessarily get out of the early game at all before they get to know the game and hence have 0 % chance to even meet the later game threats, this list isn't as convincing as an argument as one might think. Also, there are shifts in difficulty between versions etc. Still, I think this list holds some explanatory power).
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