Rub out 'p' key.


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Pandemonium Purger

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Post Saturday, 28th November 2015, 02:32

Rub out 'p' key.

The p used to be essential because it was used for so many abilities. Now it has almost no use other than joining a god. Now, sure - it's not as bad as ADOM having a separate key for cleaning ears. Still, if you can reduce the number of keys the player has to know without needlessly complicating other commands, you should do it. Here are all the uses of the p key (that I know of) and how to replace it if necessary:

  • Tell you funny messages if you`re following nobody, or Xom.
  • Tell you your piety level in an obfuscated way, but you can just glance at the top-right corner of the screen.
  • Pray at an altar. You could just press the > button to enter it instead, like a shop. The current set-up makes it inconvenient to sacrifice orc corpses that end up on an altar.
  • Sacrifice orc corpse to Beogh. Beogh should not accept corpse sacrifices anyway, and even if he does, it's easy to move it to the abilities menu.
  • Corrupt a remove curse scroll using Ashenzari. No reason why this can't go into the abilities menu.
  • Pray to Fedhas. Fedhas prayer should be moved to aa. This is a good idea even if the p key is kept, because Fedhas prayer does considerably more than just give you piety. However, that would make Fedhas have more than 5 active abilities. Other gods have 5 or less active abilities, with the exceptions of abilities you can use only once and Elyvilon. With Elyvilon you press a and then p to place yourself under divine protection from death. So Elyvilon would not actually be affected by removing the p key as a 'prayer' command. But still would be nice to compress all repeatedly invokable powers into a-e. Maybe remove Divine Vigor? It is rather out of place with Elyvilon, whose healing and purification are restorative, not preventative and foreseeing as Divine Vigor must be. Divine protection might technically count as preventative because it prevents death, but that's totally different from getting up to a zerk-like HP buff that is better the earlier you activate it.
  • Anyway, back to Fedhas. It's a little hard to single out one Fedhas ability to map beyond a-e. But it should be reasonable to merge Growth into Evolution. Growth lets you turn fruit into plants all around you. It's not likely to change balance in any way for you to get Growth at the same time that you get Evolution. How? By changing Evolution to place a plant at a smite-targeted location, if that location is empty, at the cost of 1 fruit. You would lose the ability to quickly shield off a wide hallway with plants as you make your escape, but I don't think that's a great ability to have, and not the best use of fruit. This change is give-and-take balance-wise and worth it. Growth is mechanically inconsistent with everything else in the entire game, let alone other Fedhas abilities. The numbered ring you can get is problematic. You can re-roll it, and it's currently abusable:
    http://s-z.org/neil/git/?p=crawl.git&a= ... th+ability

For this message the author Pollen_Golem has received thanks: 6
Arrhythmia, duvessa, phloomp, Rast, Shard1697, tedric

Swamp Slogger

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Post Saturday, 28th November 2015, 19:42

Re: Rub out 'p' key.

If no one can think of something better to use 'p' for, have it open a divine abilites menu and reserve 'a' for all other abilities.

That would handle the Fedhas problem, and also make thing easier for a fire-breathing Naga of okawaru wearing a ring of invisibility and the cloak of the thief.
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Pandemonium Purger

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Post Monday, 30th November 2015, 19:29

Re: Rub out 'p' key.

That wouldn't really make things any easier for that Naga. That would just segregate the a-e abilities and the f+ abilities to 2 different menus. For no reason, you would have to go to one menu for some abilities, and another menu for others. Why not have all the abilities, divine and otherwise, on one menu, so you can see all those options? That's a good reason there's only one abilities menu. (It was probably always this way.) The 5-divine-ability limit is a solid rule of thumb by which to restrain bloated god designs.

P.S. if 'P' was remapped to 'p' it would be easier to swap jewellery, and jewellery is meant to be easily swappable.

Swamp Slogger

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Post Monday, 30th November 2015, 21:17

Re: Rub out 'p' key.

I think the P.S. qualifies as "a better use for 'p'".

That said, I like to memorize key sequences instead of actually looking at the menu, so I kind of like lots of menus.

Also if divine abilities, evocations, spells and other abilities are all on separate menus you could have each default to the last action of that type, like 'z' does. I think that would be big for divine abilities, since I usually spam one and use the others only occasionally.

Vaults Vanquisher

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Post Friday, 4th December 2015, 11:53

Re: Rub out 'p' key.

Would it be better to make praying at an alter an 'ability? much like joining Beorgh via priest, maybe reserve p for this. It's seems more intuitive than '>' since an alter isn't something you enter. It's an extra key press but you only join a religion once most games.

Edit: In addition pray should always be viable on the ability screen so new players see it immediately when first looking at abilities. Ability menus rarely get over cluttered, I think it can handle it.
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Pandemonium Purger

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Post Friday, 4th December 2015, 14:55

Re: Rub out 'p' key.

Well, > doesn't really mean 'enter', it means 'descend the stairs to another level', and it's kludged to work for shops and portals. It's better than there being an abilities button for entering a shop. The only reason that would not be as bad with altars is you use altars more rarely than shops, so you'd experience the interface screw (of pressing 'aP' or whatever) fewer times overall.

Tartarus Sorceror

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Post Saturday, 5th December 2015, 13:02

Re: Rub out 'p' key.

Replace altars with chapels so we have something to enter. Still a _ glyph, so it's just a matter of replacing the word everywhere it appears.

Lair Larrikin

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Post Thursday, 7th January 2016, 22:37

Re: Rub out 'p' key.

I believe that Phloomp was describing accidental evocations or spitting which would anger Okawaru. Why would anyone play such a combination?

Anyways, it probably makes sense to separate abilities by their requirements.
t for followers, a for hunger and breath, z and Z for MP, V and v for items (charged or static). Et c.
Or would people rather they be sorted by effect? That would be too unwieldy, methinks.
Why not sort the menus by category? Have one key access the root menu, which does double duty of listing all special actions and allow you to use it to focus on what you want. Like that other person said, once you learn the keystrokes you will not even need the menus for browsing or grazing, so really the menus serve to map out your keystrokes and as an aid to memory — also for if you switch Adventurers or they don't last long. And, with the GUI version, you have those slats under the status block for if you'd rather use the mouse cursor occasionally.
The GUI version wouldn't see much change, except maybe add a slat for Shout abilities.
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Tomb Titivator

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Post Thursday, 7th January 2016, 23:03

Re: Rub out 'p' key.

I think it's pretty clear z/Z should be reserved for spells, and I don't see anything a root menu would do besides make you press 2 buttons instead of 1 for abilities.

1010011010 wrote:Would it be better to make praying at an alter an 'ability? much like joining Beorgh via priest, maybe reserve p for this. It's seems more intuitive than '>' since an alter isn't something you enter. It's an extra key press but you only join a religion once most games.

Edit: In addition pray should always be viable on the ability screen so new players see it immediately when first looking at abilities. Ability menus rarely get over cluttered, I think it can handle it.

Indeed. It's better to have 1 mechanic for joining a god, rather than 2. Beogh conversion via priest can't be standardized with '>' because you may want to use stairs to escape from the priest. But, altar conversion can be standardized with Beogh priest conversion easily. When you stand at an altar, the god's name shows up in white letters on the status bar, and you join by pressing aY or whatever. If a priest happens to be in sight while you're at an altar, one of them takes precedence (probably the altar). Makes sense overall - god abilities are all in the abilities menu, and joining is a god ability.

Dungeon Master

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Post Saturday, 9th January 2016, 01:40

Re: Rub out 'p' key.

HbG: that last proposal does not need to pick between altar and orc priest: you can map one to aY and the other to aZ.

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