Friday, 20th February 2015, 22:56 by crate
Some clarification on the "design vs preference" thing:
I don't see how random things happening during exploration (effects like traps or like hell effects) is objectively bad design. Nowhere in crawl's design philosophy is it laid out that the player should be in control of all the situations she finds herself in, and it's in fact pretty clear that to some degree the opposite is a goal. You may disagree with it as a design decision, but I think you would have problems trying to argue it is objectively bad.
Now, the current implementation of traps has problems that are undeniably design problems. Crawl explicitly tries to avoid "grindy" behaviours; tracking which spaces your character has stepped on is precisely behaviour like this. Since traps favor tracking which spaces your character has traversed, and this contradicts a design axiom, it is objectively bad. In addition, there are ways to implement the "player steps on unknown trap" aspect of traps while completely eliminating the problem.
The difference is that in one case we find a design axiom--something that is the actual starting point for the design ideas behind crawl--and find it contradicted (and in a way that could be fixed without violating other design axioms or causing other problems, at least in theory). This is the game design problem. In the other case ("I don't think players should have permanent Xom wrath" for example) it's something that, yes, probably most players disagree with, but it's not definitively wrong. You can still argue against the latter, but you can't say that it must be changed.
(In theory, traps should be changed on the bad-design basis, but in reality the devs are people doing this pretty much as a hobby so even things that definitely contradict design principles might be overlooked.)
Not being a dev myself, and additionally since I by choice avoid ##crawl-dev (so I don't have a lot of interaction with most of the devs), there are surely times where I think something is an axiom of crawl design but then it turns out, no, it's not. But it's still a good standpoint to keep in mind, and if the basis for your argument turns out to be incorrect (I thought "never let the player miss 5 times in a row" was an axiom but it wasn't) then sometimes you have to just accept it and move on because the devs don't agree.
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Personally I'd suggest just making all actual traps pre-revealed, and then if you want to save the random-effects-while-exploring bit implement it separately. But this is a lot of work to solve a problem that is, admittedly, not that big, so I think it is unlikely to happen.
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