Rast wrote:PleasingFungus wrote:Rast wrote:Snake and Spider should be refactored to be less poison-centric, and more interesting in general
This happened to Snake in, what, 0.14?
It was a step in the right direction. It's not enough.
Honestly, those branches should probably get Hive'd.
I am happy to see that our players encourage radical cuts/nerfs, but this one will probably not happen.
In contrast with Hive, all Lair subbranches have a lot more content, and have seen much more care/work applied to them. This by itself is not a really good reason to keep some feature in the game, but perhaps it's psychologically understandable. Just to be clear, I am talking about very many monsters, many of them specific to the branches, and a truckload of vaults, and special layouts.
What this thread should be about (in my opinion), is a broader topic:
what does non-linearity mean (in roguelikes, say), and is it good for Crawl?Games like Rogue or Brogue are linear, and they fare very well with that: gameplay is tight, and that's good. Nethack has branches, and already suffers from it. (I don't know whether Crawl inherited branches from Nethack or Angband or both.) Obviously, branches are cool in various regards, but I am only concerned with gameplay: branches allow you to choose between different threats and rewards. That's a strategical choice, and hopefully interesting (one check to see whether it's interesting: will player decide differently, depending on local circumstances?). The drawback is that if the two branches pose comparable threats at the outset, then doing one will make the other one much easier afterwards.
The rune lock was a very mild attempt to address the worst part of that -- players postponing the most interesting threats (branch ends) as long as possible. With the lock, they now sometimes have to do a Lair subbranch end a bit earlier (I said it, the lock is really mild
). What is discussed in this thread is much more radical. If you follow that train of thought to its logical end, then you'll get: do away with the runes, offer some side branches, and let players decide when they think they're ready for Zot. (This is the Rogue plan, with the addition of optional branches and a safety vs score tension around them.)
I think that's too far a departure from what Crawl is. Runes are a decent concept, because they serve a a yardstick to progress (there are big differences between players who have "never got a rune", "collected a rune but didn't win", and "winners", for example). Also, the rune vaults often lead to interesting situations, and often death. Just on the Lair subbranches, I can see the following less radical ideas:
- Each game features one S-branch out of the four. (That's the current branch roulette, restricted to just a single branch.)
- Offer two branches as now, but players can only enter one. (If you enter one, the other is closed forever.) This sounds intriguing, but I am not sure this will often lead to interesting decisions: very often, the choice will be clear. Also, that approach forces us to always keep an eye on pretty strict loot & threat comparibility among the four branches (much more than now). Note that the runelock suffers from the same problem (often quite clear which rune to fetch) but that its primary goal was something different: to get players to fight one branch end a bit earlier than they'd do otherwise.
- Offer two branches as now, but entering one will change the other: it has the same amount of loot and xp (on average), but in a much more concentrated and dangerous form, e.g. monsters fully concentrated in more open branch ends. Again, the idea is not so much to aim for an interesting strategic choice (will still be quite clear which branch to attempt first), but to make the other branch more challenging afterwards.
Just to be sure: I want to keep all four S-branches; I would be very happy if the choice of runes is not clearcut (some posters indicate this is already the case); I am interested in discussing rule changes to make the various branches work better (i.e. don't become too shallow if tackled late). On the last point: there is some value in being able to overpower the opposition -- afer all, you've built that character for so long, and it's cool to reap the benefits and have it trivially crush the weaklings. There just shouldn't be too much of that.