Let undead players leave ghosts

[Sandman25]

Edit: Also, I don't hate Sandman25. We disagree often, sometimes really violently, but it's not because I think he's a bad person or wish him any harm.

The same here.

[byrel]

Edit: Also, I don't hate Sandman25. We disagree often, sometimes really violently, but it's not because I think he's a bad person or wish him any harm.

All lies. You're a mod, ergo you hate Sandman, Berder, and possibly now me as well.

On topic... I would think that the easiest solution (though not 100% reliable) to intentional and nonintentional OOD ghosts is to do a level comparison. Give it some leeway, since finding an OOD ghost and having to deal with it is part of the fun. Maybe +/- 4 levels of the hero on first entering the floor. If not, the ghost doesn't spawn and is left for the first appropriately levelled character that comes through. You might need to add a mechanism for disposing of MASSIVELY OOD ghosts (like level 27 on D:3). Maybe just have speedrunners autoclear ghosts, with some rule that if the ghost is >twice the level of an incoming character, the ghost is deleted.

Edit: I don't know how ghost turnover works; if a ghost exists for the current level but wasn't loaded, and you die, do you overwrite it? I was familiar with the Nethack mechanics, but then... I was familiar with ALL the nethack mechanics. It was much more important for winning the game.

[Sandman25]

You might need to add a mechanism for disposing of MASSIVELY OOD ghosts (like level 27 on D:3).

Another solution is to postpone their generation until orb run, generating some player ghosts instead of pan lords could be fun.

[savageorange]

As I understand it, ghosts are scrubbed if they generate in your game and either you don't die or you die on any other level other than the one that contains the ghost. If a ghost generated on D8, and you retreat to D7 and die there, the ghost is gone. If a ghost generated on D8 and you avoid it and win, the ghost is gone. If a ghost is generated on D8 and you quit the game, the ghost is gone. On the other hand, if a ghost is generated on D8 and you die on that D8 to an orc pack without ever actually seeing the ghost, the ghost is saved and can be encountered again by another player.

Thanks for clarifying that. Do you know what is the logic behind "If a ghost is generated on D8 and you quit the game, the ghost is gone.". Because that seems weird and metagamey. If it only works if you haven't seen that ghost before you quit, that is less bad (can't really exploit it), but still seems rather Nethack-ish in its obscurity. I just.. don't see why we would do that.

I'm mildly horrified by the realisation that multiple ghosts can generate on a level in one game. That seems like it could potentially be much worse than getting, say, 5 uniques on the same level.

[Siegurt]

Ghosts can potentially "stack up" but the way it pretty much works is that if there's a bones file eligible to generate a ghost on a given level, then the ghost becomes part of the level, and the bones file goes away, if the player dies on the level with the ghost, it generates a bones file with *both* ghosts in it, and so on. If the player doesn't die on the level with the ghost, the bones file that gets generated doesn't have the other ghost in it. (There's like rolls and stuff in there, and some math that doesn't really matter for the purpose of this discussion)

It's not complicated, but it *is* metagame-y, but then ghosts are just generally metagame-y so I suppose that facet of them fits right in, just right along with the whole awkward ghosty thing.

Not that I mind, I actually *like* ghosts being in the game, despite how weird and out of place they feel.

[partial]

ghosts should be invincible

[KoboldLord]

Thanks for clarifying that. Do you know what is the logic behind "If a ghost is generated on D8 and you quit the game, the ghost is gone.". Because that seems weird and metagamey. If it only works if you haven't seen that ghost before you quit, that is less bad (can't really exploit it), but still seems rather Nethack-ish in its obscurity. I just.. don't see why we would do that.

I'm mildly horrified by the realisation that multiple ghosts can generate on a level in one game. That seems like it could potentially be much worse than getting, say, 5 uniques on the same level.

The logic is that this feature was implemented in an era of roguelike design where 'That's the way Nethack does it' is an argument in favor rather than against. It has stuck around because many people really like the flavor and fake interactivity is provides. It would be quite a bit of work to design a randghost mechanic to cover the same flavor in a less mechanically horrible way, and probably no dev wants to volunteer to be the one to remove an awful but inexplicably well-liked feature without replacing it.

[dpeg]

KL: You keep saying it's awful but where are the reasons? (Others provided the discussion about griefing.) Why are ghosts "mechanically horrible"? It is true that Nethack taught us a number of things how not to do them. To infer from that "Nethack has it, hence it's bad" is inquisitional. Sure enough, ghosts are meta-gamey. I did not see any reasoning why that is inherently bad (or good). Obviously, exactly this feature is part of the appeal of ghosts.

About griefing: I don't think it's a pressing problem; if it becomes one, it will be addressed. (This is similar to abuses: it becomes urgent to address them only as soon as players start exploiting them.) The suggestion to link ghost XL to player XL has already been made. Inspired by the fact that it'd be much harder to ghostly grief in a game without backtracking (such as Rogue), one could also allow ghosts only on levels that haven't been entered before. Or: ghosts are not placed at the level of death, but at the visited level with maximal absolute depth (one of them if several). And of course, ghosts themselves could be modified: take care of casting success, for example while stripping off temporary effects (brilliance etc.).

Here is one more reason why I think ghosts are pretty cool: for non-expert or new players (say those who never got a rune), of which there are many, ghosts can help increase variety, especially in online play. You see combinations that other players use, you may see new-to-you spells in action, they have their own speech.

Obviously, I am very much in favour of ghosts, even though one of my most unavoidable deaths was by a fellow-dev ghost: I open a door, the ghost casts, I die from full health. But this is a roguelike, variance is high, and it happens way too rarely to be worried. (In my opinion.)

[The argument hinted at KL that ghosts are kept because the devteam shies from conflict with the player base is almost funny.]

[KoboldLord]

I'm not sure why I need to repeat everything that's already been said about griefing. Griefing is self-evidently bad, particularly considering this is a single-player game, even if we assume that intentional griefing is rare in practice. I don't choose a single-player game because I want other people to amuse themselves by trying to disrupt my activities.

Related to the griefing problem but also distinct from it, my enjoyment of the game suffers when I suddenly get slapped in the face with a big ol' ethnic slur because one of the other users decided it would make a funny name for a character that is now a player ghost that has spawned in my game.

A typical player character is not a fun monster to fight. When I build a character, I've usually spent a lot of resources on my hp, AC, EV, and sometimes SH, and when that gets translated into a punching bag for the player to hit that means there are going to be long strings of actions where nothing happens. Shield-using monsters are rare for a reason, and similarly EV monsters are both uncommon and usually notable for that defensive quality alone. Player characters also usually have more hit points than almost all other monsters in the game, so even if the fight is utterly trivial it's going to be very long and tedious.

Player characters often also have abilities that are inappropriate to throw at the player constantly. For instance, there's really absolutely nothing an early-game player can do about a monster that spams Fireball constantly, which is why monsters in the early-game don't typically have that spell. I like to think that the devteam has carefully considered monster spell lists, and has regularly made adjustments to ensure that the playing experience is as interesting as possible, but no such careful consideration is possible for player ghosts. If a change is made to a starting spellbook, it has a possibly unwanted and possibly unpredictable knock-on effect for player ghosts when those player characters start littering the dungeon with ghosts.

Substantial numbers of backgrounds and builds basically aren't implemented for ghost purposes at all, and yet they show up anyway. If the ghost didn't happen to die with a good melee weapon or a dangerous spell list, it is not going to successfully provide a challenge, yet it will still provide absolute gobs of xp just because player characters have lots of hit points. You would probably not choose to implement as uniques a transmuter that can't change forms, an archer that does not have arrows, an artificer with a rod that it only uses as a club, and yet here they are. Maybe some of these have been fixed since I last checked; I don't check every last commit and I don't play online, so it isn't like I would have noticed. These things should never have made it into the game in the first place.

Player ghosts have an absolutely enormous variation in capabilities and danger presented, but the game disguises some pretty important data that it doesn't try to hide for any other sort of monster. If you know how, you can check the morgues to get detailed data on the player ghost's capabilities, but if you don't know how to check these out-of-game spoilers or don't wish to consult spreadsheets during game time then you are at a distinct disadvantage. Every other part of the design of the game tries to avoid forcing the player to check spoilers during play, but this one thing remains even though it has always been one of the worst offenders.

There's no argument in favor of player ghosts that wouldn't be better off replaced with randuniques that have somewhat randomized stats and abilities but do not reference player-side functionality at all. If implemented well, randuniques or randghosts would fill all the flavor and unpredictability benefits of the current player ghosts with none of the drawbacks, and it would also reduce future development maintenance because you wouldn't have to worry about blowing up player ghosts as a feature every time you add or modify a player species, background, or spell.

[Sar]

If you want to play single-player Crawl, why not play offline? Online Crawl isn't really single-player not only because of ghosts, but because there are leaderbords that you participate in regardless of whether you want it or not.

[KoboldLord]

If you want to play single-player Crawl, why not play offline? Online Crawl isn't really single-player not only because of ghosts, but because there are leaderbords that you participate in regardless of whether you want it or not.

Thanks for saying the obvious, I guess, but I kind of already did say in this thread that I play offline, so your advice isn't very helpful unless you're pre-emptively giving it to every newbie who signs into the online servers. I know not to touch the bad feature, but that doesn't make it any less a bad feature.

I'm not sure why you think the leaderboards are at all relevant.

[Sar]

I didn't know you don't play online. I'm sorry.

Online leaderbords and match recording, much like player ghosts, are a feature of online which can be theoretically used to cause grief.

[mps]

The "don't play online" objection is on point, imo. Online crawl is considerably cleaner in terms of slurs etc. than most multiuser internet services aimed at a general audience, in my experience, and I've played and/or spectated on plenty of different servers.

re: griefing, the constraints on griefing are too tight if anything. I've seen zero evidence that there is a real griefing problem.

e: by "griefing" here, I mean "ghost griefing" only.

[chequers]

The existence of bad player names is not an argument against ghosts. Ghosts could simply not show the player name to solve this problem, for instance. But I don't think there are many bad names, and there's active policing to kill such names, and the cost of a few bad names is worth the benefit of the game feeling alive.

[varsovie]

Ghosts should not appears on floors, but on special "vault" or maybe "the crypt" (am I the only one that never had any trouble going through non-random levels?).
I'd also like the game to ship with some, because the feel of a fresh install and a old version online...
Plus it's open to abuse, e.g. filling early levels with XP bags purposely, at least offline or "griefing".

I'd also like the undeads to leave a ghosts/zomby of some sort, but only if the race actually shows up as "Mountain Dwarf".

[dowan]

If player ghosts were monsters, they would have been removed a long time ago (This monster gives more XP than grinder, but because it was a hunter it is entirely non threatening. This one also gives more XP than grinder, but was a naga without spells, and thus is free XP. This one was a melee centaur with a shield, you'd better be next to a staircase or you're dead).

I don't see the link to nethack ghosts though. nethack ghosts do 0-1 damage and have about 0 chance of killing or threatening anyone, but come with a giant pile of loot.

[Sar]

Crawl ghosts are similar, but better

[KoboldLord]

If player ghosts were monsters, they would have been removed a long time ago (This monster gives more XP than grinder, but because it was a hunter it is entirely non threatening. This one also gives more XP than grinder, but was a naga without spells, and thus is free XP. This one was a melee centaur with a shield, you'd better be next to a staircase or you're dead).

I don't see the link to nethack ghosts though. nethack ghosts do 0-1 damage and have about 0 chance of killing or threatening anyone, but come with a giant pile of loot.

Sometimes Nethack ghosts are a helpless obstruction sitting on a huge stack of loot, other times Nethack ghosts are Juiblex in Minetown. Crawl ghosts are definitely less bad than Nethack ghosts, no argument there. Because Crawl ghosts are less bad, the problems with them are less obvious, but 'a little bit bad' is still bad. The examples you listed have no reason to still be in the game. Even if we keep the concept of player ghosts, there's no reason to pair up monster stats to player stats because these two sets of figures do entirely different things. Player ghosts could just be a procedurally generated monster with stats and spells scaled to depth, both loosely weighted to reinforce the idea of the species/background in question, e.g. HOFe randghost gets extra hit points and more fire spells compared to HuCj randghost.

[Sprucery]

I don't see the link to nethack ghosts though. nethack ghosts do 0-1 damage and have about 0 chance of killing or threatening anyone, but come with a giant pile of loot.

The link is just that Linley adopted many things to Crawl that were in Nethack, and ghosts were one of them.

Nethack ghosts are harmless but the killer might not be. I don't like bones files in Nethack either.

I only play offline. I don't like ghosts in Crawl because in addition to the disappointment of dying, I get a ghost that just makes me leave a level partly explored in some future game and then come back later to kill the ghost (unless it is easy to kill immediately). I guess my main point is that I just don't like that my games of Crawl affect one another. I would like them to be completely separate. I do admit that sometimes the ghosts create interesting situations and maybe the Temple is on that partly unexplored level etc. But I would much prefer randomly generated ghosts.

[dowan]

Right, I forgot nethack ghosts come with their level, enemies and all. Plus all their loot, although it's probably cursed. And yeah, the nethack ghosts have far more potential to create completely unfair situations.

To add another example of why ghosts are bad (MM'kay) I had a ghost of a warper with a shield in shoals in my game the other day. He did good damage, so I couldn't really just ignore him, because I didn't want him whacking me as I slowly trudged through the water. I was strong enough to kill him, but the thing is he'd blink constantly. I spent tons of turns chasing this idiotic ghost around trying to get some hits in, and due to the blinking he was constantly going out of LOS and ending up getting his HPs back. I couldn't just chase him down because I could end up running into a nasty pack of merfolk or something, so I had to hang by the stairs, and fight him like 50 times until I finally got a lucky streak of hits where he didn't blink away too much.

I was in no danger whatsoever, I just had to pay the price of extreme tedium and a few rations.

FR1: Remove ghosts
FR2: Failing that, remove blink from ghosts.

[njvack]

FR2: Failing that, remove blink from ghosts.

FR3: Remove butterflies from ghosts.

KL's arguments are pretty compelling to me. The concept of monsters representing player ghosts is a good one, but it's probably better design if they follow monster rules than player rules. (And we have Mara for when it's great to make a player monster anyhow.)

Again agreeing with KL, then we'd get to use a sweet player ghost name generator rather than this list of player names. I think the chance of meeting a ghost named "FAGGOTMUTILATOR" should be exactly zero.

[mps]

Well, again, empirically that chance is indistinguishable from zero....

[duvessa]

  Code:

GHOSTS_SUCK_DICK the Conjurer (L5 CeFE), slain by an iguana on D:3, with 119 points after 2805 turns and 0:10:19.

[tasonir]

I love ghosts and I wouldn't want them to be removed, but if there was enough developer interest in converting them to be entirely procedurally generated and not based off player files, that'd be fine. All the gameplay benefits remain, without a connection to other players. I prefer real player ghosts, but generated ghosts would be a close second.

If you do generate them, try to maintain the wide range of possible strength - one of the best features of ghosts is that some are considerably stronger than others, so you always have to be careful, and may very well end up in unexpected trouble. The same level of minotaur ghost should have a range of ac that is something like 10 - 30 (for say a level 15ish ghost, not too early). 30 AC isn't too hard to reach with a partially enchanted plate and some secondary armor, which a fair amount of level 15 minotaurs would have. Some will generate with lower ac, if they haven't found the plate + boots, etc, of course.

[duvessa]

If you do generate them, try to maintain the wide range of possible strength - one of the best features of ghosts is that some are considerably stronger than others, so you always have to be careful, and may very well end up in unexpected trouble.

Except that isn't a feature of ghosts at all right now, because you currently know the exact stats of all player ghosts right down to their exact max HP.

[tasonir]

If you do generate them, try to maintain the wide range of possible strength - one of the best features of ghosts is that some are considerably stronger than others, so you always have to be careful, and may very well end up in unexpected trouble.

Except that isn't a feature of ghosts at all right now, because you currently know the exact stats of all player ghosts right down to their exact max HP.

If you look them up, yes. I was basing that on my experience, and I don't look up ghost stats before hand

[scorpionwarrior]

FR2: Failing that, remove blink from ghosts.

FR3: Remove butterflies from ghosts.

KL's arguments are pretty compelling to me. The concept of monsters representing player ghosts is a good one, but it's probably better design if they follow monster rules than player rules. (And we have Mara for when it's great to make a player monster anyhow.)

Again agreeing with KL, then we'd get to use a sweet player ghost name generator rather than this list of player names. I think the chance of meeting a ghost named "FAGGOTMUTILATOR" should be exactly zero.

well sure, but your post and the irc bots and the player list has exposed that name to so many more people that encountering them as ghosts is a drop in the bucket