Tomb Titivator
Posts: 857
Joined: Monday, 31st January 2011, 23:19
Mutations
Mutations are interesting enough to effect things like gear choices and skill progression and have a long term impact on your game.
Bad Design:
Mutations are short lived annoyances that add no interesting choices except for occasionally forcing you to wear stasis or something.
The Solution:
1. Above all, good mutations should stick with you. Things like malmutate shouldn't remove them and as such if you get a good mutation you can plan your progression around it. Things that you can cause (like potions of mutation or god effects) are perfectly fine for randomly removing good mutations but not something like an orb of fire.
2. Cure mutation should only cure a single selected mutation. The interesting choice is which bad mutation to cure (especially if you get many mutations). In the current state of things you tend to end up with no mutations at all and this is bad. Mutations should be a more prominent part of the game.
With careful play mutations basically don't exist. Is this really how it should be? Mutations should be common, and ways to manage them should be common. This would allow for more drastic mutations as well as more interesting choices. As it stands most mutations are barely even noticeable. To elaborate: a REALLY bad mutation can't exist in Crawl because ways to either suppress or remove it is too rare and the one that does is a sweeping effect that removes all interesting choices that could possibly be associated with it. The end result is a bunch of mediocre bad mutations... with even things like berserkertitis getting watered down because it's too hard to manage.