Remove Rings: rFire, rCold, rPoi, etc.

[Tiktacy]

Rings of resistance come off as bad design to me. I know they have been a staple in crawl for a long time, but I think its time to bite the bullet and get rid of them once and for all.

I really don't understand the purpose of rings giving these resistances, I've never found a ring of resist fire and though "hey cool, a ring of rF!" Even rings of teleportation make me go "oh, better use a remove curse scroll." While its far from stimulating, its at least SOMETHING. Some kind of interaction, and quite a flavorful one at that.

On top of this, they create inventory clutter and are rarely used outside of rare situations(well, rPoi is used in the poison themed branch, but I've found these places to be more enjoyable without rPoi).

Having resistances not be swappable is far more interesting in my opinion, and it makes way for potential design space based on creating more enemies that increase the importance of resistances.

As for artifact rings, I think its acceptable to maintain the status quo. After all, artifact rings are quite rare in my experience, often times only appearing on elf;$.

[Siegurt]

I disagree with everything you just said there, including and possibly especially the weird bit about elf and randart jewelry.

[adozu]

i can totally see a mummy saying "hey cool, a ring of rF!" early on

and i don't get the point of poison branches being more fun whitout rP, especially anything with swamp dragons

[ion_frigate]

Having resistances not be swappable is far more interesting in my opinion, and it makes way for potential design space based on creating more enemies that increase the importance of resistances.

This design space is already occupied by AC/EV and earth casters/melee monsters. It's one huge resistance that is not at all tactically swappable, and you spend your entire game managing the tradeoffs of two different "resistances" to this damage. Making elemental resistances non-swappable is just making every element into an overly simplified and less interesting version of Earth. There are indeed games where you work on each and every resistance on a strategic level, but that simply isn't Crawl.

[WingedEspeon]

I have had games where finding a ring of rF would have made my character very happy. I often am like "Hey, cool a ring of rF."

[phloomp]

With sufficient resetting of fights there is no such thing as a non-swappable resistance, only a tediously-swappable resistance. So if this is done then elemental resistances should be removed from armor as well.

If resistances were all in the form of mutations (maybe obtained with a "potion of fire resistance" for example, that overwrites your earlier elemental resistance mutations) then this could be nice. EDIT: or instead of mutations, just permanent intrinsics (like rmsl) which you swap by reading a scroll (to accomodate mummies). To avoid inventory clutter it could be a single "scroll of change resistance" and the player would choose the resistance they wanted.

[ydeve]

Personally, I think resistances would be better off moved to consumables with monsters rebalanced to make them dangerous but playable without the appropriate resistance. The whole point of resistance is to turn off specific threats, which currently is done at little to no cost to the player. Swapping rings in-fight, swapping armor out of fight means the game assumes that players have these resistances, or at least players assume that they should have them. And honestly, most of the time deciding what resistance to put on is pretty trivial and even free due to randarts and whatever branch you are in.

[TeshiAlair]

Easy fixes

Remove rF and rC- if you really really need those effects, they are common enough mutations and armor brands, and you also have the elemental buff rings.

Attach rNeg to magic res. ring.

Don't touch rPois because jesus christ do the lair branches need to be even more tedious?

[dynast]

Resistances are meant to be situationally different for each playthrough and not progress milestones. Its easy to confuse a "dungeon crawler" with a "loot fest" type of game.

[Veras]

Light drain or some other malus on swap may be enough to make resistance swapping not a no-brainer.

[dowan]

OOFs prove that resistances were meant to be swappable, if you want to prevent resistance swapping you have to think about WHY players swap resistances. It is tedious, and would be nice to get rid of it, but it's less tedious to swap rings than to create a new character because you didn't have the right resistances for a given situation, so you died.

Outside of OOFs, the normal 3 rune game is doable without resistances, but not comfortably, and things like a fire giant's bolt of fire can do a hell of a lot of damage if you have no rF.

Now, if a character with no resistances had the equivalent of rC+ and rF+, you could afford to make resistance rings and armor a lot more rare, and put significant penalties on swapping them. That has the upside of reducing swapping tedium and resistance management, but has the downside of making the game overall easier.

[Veras]

I wasn't insinuating that you shouldn't be able to swap at all. After all, the game is balanced around being able to swap in resistances as you mentioned. However, I think there's something to be said about not being able to trivially stack rF+++ against any fire-based monster that walks into LOS - while still allowing you to do so if you really need to, like in the OOF case! In this situation, you would tank the associated negative after making a hopefully genuine ~~choice~~ to see if it was worth doing or not.

[Leszczynek]

This thread makes me think that you guys at times run out of things to post here yet you feel compelled to fill your weekly quota anyway.

Without (that much) sarcasm - want to have permanent resistances? Go play ADOM and its corpse hunting minigame. See how interesting it is to have a goal of "eat a spider corpse" and then completely forget there's something like poison in the game.

Rings of resistance come off as bad design to me.

Is resting to full between each single fight because two simple bolt spells took out 120 of your HP, preceeded by kiting back for half of the level to make sure you fight one on one a good design?

The only issue with resistances that I see is that there's too much difference in having rF+ and no rF in comparison to, say, having rF+++ and rF++. Only the first tick truly matters except for a few pan/hell bosses and OOFs.

[Hurkyl]

Go play ADOM and its corpse hunting minigame. See how interesting it is to have a goal of "eat a spider corpse" and then completely forget there's something like poison in the game.

I don't know ADOM, but it's interesting enough in nethack. Poison in particular, has the feature that most of the things that might give you poison resistance are, well, poisonous and can do lasting damage to your strength, but conversely wandering around without resistance is quite dangerous so it's risky to put it off until you acquire it from safe corpses or get a unicorn horn to restore your strength.

And sure, you can then completely forget about poison (barring bad luck with gremlins) -- but that's fine because once you're out of the early dungeon you have other things to worry about, so the game doesn't need to have poison constantly looming over you to be a threat.

For other resistances (and other intrinsics), there is some challenge in actually obtaining and eating the necessary corpses.

I know the crawl design philosophy is to try and avoid having threats (or other things) you can "solve", but IMO, in may cases the result is to crawl's detriment.

[ydeve]

Why do people keep talking about how Nethack does things? DCSS is not Nethack. Nethack is about dungeon exploration/roleplaying and risk management. DCSS is about tactical situations and skill development. They are apples and oranges. What is good for Nethack is likely not good for Crawl and vice versa. An emphasis on roleplay and dungeon looting doesn't play to Crawl's strengths.

Spoiler: show

Corpse hunting fits well with Nethack's exploration theme and gives Nethack players a sense of progress. It doesn't do much for Nethack's tactical challenges because Nethack has next to no tactical challenges anyways. However, getting to a point where certain classes of threats get turned off in Crawl not only creates noise during fights, but it also removes the tactical situations they were meant to create.

If the situation isn't interesting in the first place, then why do we even have that kind of threat? If it makes the game better, then why give the player the option to turn it off with (next to) no drawbacks? There's no interesting choice about putting on =rF when an OOF turns the corner, even if you're already engaged with other monsters. However, if the resistance came at a cost, either strategic (consumables) or tactical (drawbacks), then the player actually has to make a potentially interesting choice.

[Sprucery]

I would like to point out that there is a cost in ring swapping (besides the small amount of time it takes): you have to remove one ring which was probably a useful ring since you were wearing it. Of course in some cases it is not a real cost (switching rF to rC when no fire attacks are around), but often it is.

[lethediver]

Id be ok with this if there was slight (very slight) buff to glowy armor spawn rate and perhaps randart jewelry.

[daggaz]

Typically you have more than enough resists in a game to trivialize all but the worst situations. Often if you are missing a key resist, even a moderate situation will end up being highly likely to kill you if you arent tediously careful.

It's a lose-lose situation from a design perspective. I would argue that elemental maluses from lacking resistance need to be lowered so that moderate situations are tough but not outright deadly (bolt spells, anyone). At the same time, remove the swappable resistance items as per OP (though I agree about leaving rPois as a ring), and lower the protective effect that having multiple ranks gives you. On the other hand, make !resistance more effective than it is now.

[duvessa]

ring swapping is cancer

it's extremely beneficial while simultaneously requiring more effort than swapping any other item slot in the game because rather than just having to remember or look at what you are currently wearing, you also have to remember or look at which finger has the worse ring on it, and the time spent on that adds up fast since its optimal to swap rings so often

the devteam has gone after armour swapping and amulet swapping, which is nice, but it'll be 100x more impactful to fix ring swapping and it seems like in the current climate there is no desire to do so (~90% of the opposition i got to removing one ring slot was on the grounds that it's a nerf to player characters and therefore bad, because dcss has never nerfed anything before, oh wait no thats not true its actually because people would rather pretend to be stupid than admit they have an emotional attachment to a terrible mechanic that they cant rationally defend). removing the rings that only exist to be swapped at least makes the situation less awful even if it doesn't fix the underlying problem, and is worth pursuing because the underlying problem will not be fixed for a long time, and when it is those rings are going away anyway

and no it is not acceptable to keep resists on artefact rings if you are going to keep 2 swappable ring slots

[Sprucery]

Solution: item types left_ring and right_ring, every ring only goes to one finger :)

[Leszczynek]

ring swapping is cancer (...)

What is your problem? You can just, you know, not swap them? You don't have to do that. Really. Nobody forces you.

You're throwing a fit because what you perceive as the most fun playstyle is not the optimal one. I've seen a few other people rising this same issue for the exact same reason, "I don't like something, therefore it should be removed". Why not approach the problem from a different angle? I bet most of the complaints would disappear if you could swap rings with one keypress rather than three + careful looking. Hell, if you only swap one slot you can just set up a few item inscriptions and key macros and boom, you swap stuff with one key. Or you could try to pressure the devs to do something about it from the UI side.

You don't see me creating threads about removing Centaurs from the game just because I consider them the definition of anti-fun as far as Crawl races go.

[Sar]

I bet if you'd make a thread about removing Centaurs, minmay (and many other people) would thank you.

[all before]

I agree with duvessa. Swapping rings is nearly never an interesting decision.

Bringing fun play and optimal play as close to coincidence as possible is one of crawl's design goals.

[amaril]

what you perceive as the most fun playstyle is not the optimal one.

There is a big difference between species/playstyle choice and the 'decision' to swap rings. Species in particular is a decision made prior to the game--you aren't punished for not choosing deep dwarf, for example, even though choosing deep dwarf [might be] the 'most optimal' choice if winning is your goal. Once you've chosen a non-deep dwarf race, the game becomes 'winning with your chosen race.'

Ring swapping, otoh, is optimal play for every character and is miserable--sure you can choose 'not to swap rings,' but this is very obviously an artificial restriction you are imposing on yourself. You could also choose to 'never retreat from monsters' or 'only press tab and o,' but at some point you aren't even playing crawl anymore. It is not unreasonable for people to want the 'core gameplay' of crawl to be more fun (even though this is subjective)/less tedious.

I wish resistance/gear choice was a strategic choice rather than an obvious (and therefore tedious) tactical one.

[dynast]

ring swapping is cancer

Any key imput that doesnt kill dudes is cancer, apparently.

it's extremely beneficial while simultaneously requiring more effort than swapping any other item slot in the game because rather than just having to remember or look at what you are currently wearing, you also have to remember or look at which finger has the worse ring on it, and the time spent on that adds up fast since its optimal to swap rings so often

Oh god, having to remember < or > is soooooo tiresome, compared to, say, remembering the 8 different keys of your evocables that you use more often than you swap rings.

the devteam has gone after armour swapping and amulet swapping, which is nice, but it'll be 100x more impactful to fix ring swapping and it seems like in the current climate there is no desire to do so (~90% of the opposition i got to removing one ring slot was on the grounds that it's a nerf to player characters and therefore bad, because dcss has never nerfed anything before, oh wait no thats not true its actually because people would rather pretend to be stupid than admit they have an emotional attachment to a terrible mechanic that they cant rationally defend).

FYI the current state of amulets(as far as optimal play goes) is "get the highest reflection amulet and drop everything else until you get a randart".

removing the rings that only exist to be swapped at least makes the situation less awful even if it doesn't fix the underlying problem, and is worth pursuing because the underlying problem will not be fixed for a long time, and when it is those rings are going away anyway

Oh you mean every ring then?

[adozu]

"Bringing fun play and optimal play as close to coincidence as possible is one of crawl's design goals."

well removing every fun but-not-optimal option would make optimal play as close to the most fun play available, surely

[dowan]

Well... removing equipment entirely would remove swapping tedium, and move optimal play closer to fun play, but obviously it would be a terrible change. Removing the ability of the player to move, and just having a line of enemies come at him would remove the tedium of luring, once again moving optimal and fun closer together, but results in a worse game.

And now that I re-read adozu's post, I see that's pretty much the point he was making, although I somehow took it as the opposite. Pretend this is just a thank. (Or an ironic snark)

[Malevolent]

Swapping rings already has a strategic choice behind it: reserving inventory space for everything you might want to swap in. Between protection from fire, cold and positive energy (up to 2x), along with something giving rPois and rElec, that's quite a lot of slots (plus the rings you might want to wear usually such as MR+ or Prot+6 or whatever, or even just see invis...). Maybe you will find a nice randart ring giving rF+ rC++ MR+ that unifies some of these resistances, but usually not, not before the late game anyway. Thus, swapping already has two disadvantages associated with it: inventory slots and the time required to swap out the rings - which might matter in a situation that suddenly and unexpectedly becomes tense, instead of a situation that you prepare for well in advance.

I consider all that sufficient. I'd also be fine with removing these rings if a better solution is proposed to replace it. But that's not exactly a trivial task.

[Sprucery]

Personally I don't feel like I'm swapping rings a lot in a typical game. Of course this is a subjective feeling.

[ydeve]

In a typical game I have good gear that covers all the resistances already. So no swapping.

In a very rare game I am missing an "important" resistance and have to play very carefully. So no swapping. (I also think these games are more interesting and have more tactical depth.)

In some games I have all the resistances in swappable gear but can't wear it all at once. So to play optimally I have to carefully look at the monsters on the screen in order to make the uninteresting command to swap rings when a dangerous monster comes out with the appropriate elemental attack. This is tedious and annoying while also adding no depth to how I play. This should go.

[dynast]

In some games I have all the resistances in swappable gear but can't wear it all at once. So to play optimally I have to carefully look at the monsters on the screen in order to make the uninteresting command to swap rings when a dangerous monster comes out with the appropriate elemental attack. This is tedious and annoying while also adding no depth to how I play. This should go.

Sure, monster variety should be just another color in the screen.

[ydeve]

In some games I have all the resistances in swappable gear but can't wear it all at once. So to play optimally I have to carefully look at the monsters on the screen in order to make the uninteresting command to swap rings when a dangerous monster comes out with the appropriate elemental attack. This is tedious and annoying while also adding no depth to how I play. This should go.

Sure, monster variety should be just another color in the screen.

I play console. They mostly are already different colors. That doesn't change the fact that they're easy to overlook and that paying tedious attention to make a no-brainer command is annoying and adds nothing to tactical depth.

[Jeremiah]

Remove wearing rings. Rings have their effect just by being in inventory. Multiple rings of the same type don't stack unless you're an octopode.

[dynast]

paying tedious attention to make a no-brainer command is annoying and adds nothing to tactical depth.

And not having to pay attention to the game adds tactical depth how again?

[amaril]

Having to pay attention to monsters is good--spells/abilities can impact your tactics in meaningful ways, as can the distortion brand in enemy hands. Any monster with a dangerous attack forces the player to react accordingly. The problem is that resistances provide an easy way to mitigate a danger, usually with little/no cost. Maybe having resists (on armour or as mutations, for example) is fine--as you progress, certain enemies become less threatening. But switching a ring to reduce danger is rarely a meaningful tactical choice.

[tabstorm]

"Bringing fun play and optimal play as close to coincidence as possible is one of crawl's design goals."

well removing every fun but-not-optimal option would make optimal play as close to the most fun play available, surely

Crawl is so intrinsically flawed that making optimal play fun is impossible.

[ion_frigate]

Remove wearing rings. Rings have their effect just by being in inventory. Multiple rings of the same type don't stack unless you're an octopode.

Larn does this. It works pretty well there, but it would be a *huge* player buff in DCSS. Perhaps if it were accompanied by making rings much, much rarer and removing them from generation in "infinite" areas of the game (definitely Pan and Abyss, and probably Zigs).

Either way, though, it makes rings an absolute no-brainer to carry. Larn gets around this problem because its inventory space is extremely limited, but trying to do that in DCSS comes with a whole host of other problems.

[bcadren]

As someone who has used Necromut for the Poison immunity and Ring of Flames for the rF++(Fe have limited slots, ok?) Yea no; making it impossible for two races to even have resistances at all is not a good move. One of the issues crawl seems to have is with the large variety of races; some of the weaker ones need to have things to be playable that also end up buffing the stronger ones, etc.

[amaril]

A change in terms of how long ring swapping takes would also work, though it would come at a cost to flavor.
edit: right now, crawl balance seems to assume that the player has access to all of the common resistances by vaults.

[ydeve]

paying tedious attention to make a no-brainer command is annoying and adds nothing to tactical depth.

And not having to pay attention to the game adds tactical depth how again?

Did you read the 3 situations I gave? Or are you just trying to argue with me? If you want to argue at least read the posts.

I clearly gave 3 different situations, one of which doesn't add depth but isn't tedious (a typical game), one of which is tedious without depth (most ring swapping), and one of which is tedious but has depth (no resistance).

[duvessa]

A change in terms of how long ring swapping takes would also work, though it would come at a cost to flavor.

I don't know about you, but in real life, it doesn't take me longer to put on a hat than it does for me to put on a ring, let alone 10 times longer. You can also already put on a ring without removing your gloves, and yet remove those gloves without removing the ring.

edit: right now, crawl balance seems to assume that the player has access to all of the common resistances by vaults.

only in the sense that crawl assumes you have access to things that you pretty much always have access to; completing the game with no resistances other than rF+ is not hard

[Hurkyl]

paying tedious attention to make a no-brainer command is annoying and adds nothing to tactical depth.

And not having to pay attention to the game adds tactical depth how again?

It doesn't. But it isn't tedious and annoying.

The presumption is that tactical depth is the rationale for having this feature. If the feature doesn't actually add tactical depth, then it needs to be removed so as to eliminate its negative consequences.

[dynast]

paying tedious attention to make a no-brainer command is annoying and adds nothing to tactical depth.

And not having to pay attention to the game adds tactical depth how again?

Did you read the 3 situations I gave? Or are you just trying to argue with me? If you want to argue at least read the posts.

I clearly gave 3 different situations, one of which doesn't add depth but isn't tedious (a typical game), one of which is tedious without depth (most ring swapping), and one of which is tedious but has depth (no resistance).

You concede that ring swapping doesnt affect your typical game so why should i care about your other 2 scenarios? OK, let me rephrase that. What does actually ADD tactical depth to your game? And the answer to that could be anything and it would be valid.

You are looking at ring swapping and not what ring actually does, thats like looking at combat and saying "combat is a no-brainer, all you do is bump into other creatures". I could explain what depth ring swapping brings but i wont because i feel it will be disregarded, thats why im devolving myself into snarky degenerative comments to only state my position.

I don't know about you, but in real life, it doesn't take me longer to put on a hat than it does for me to put on a ring, let alone 10 times longer.

*Slaps Duvessa's hat out of her head on the way out.*

[adozu]

if you have decent rings then swapping does add to tactical depth (do i want to remove my +5 ac or my +3 slay for this pip of rF? or neither?)

i can totally justify rings taking longer to swap than hats btw, we could have a "chubby finger" mutation

[HisMajestyBOB]

God forbid players should actually pay attention to their inventory and monsters in the game.
Other tedious things that force me to pay attention:
1. HP levels: forcing me to pay attention to these numbers is tedious and the optimal decision is to keep them high. Replace with a one-hit-kill system.
2. MP levels, spells: forcing me to pay attention to which spell matches with which number, how much MP I have, which spell is optimal, and what the spells do are all tedious. Remove all magic.
3. Levels: forcing me to remember how to navigate levels is tedious. Replace all level designs and branches with line sprint.

[adozu]

1) play a felid
2) of trog
3) navigate with "o" and "G" and "X>"/"X<"

tediousless crawl?

[Hurkyl]

God forbid players should actually pay attention to their inventory and monsters in the game.
Other tedious things that force me to pay attention:
1. HP levels: forcing me to pay attention to these numbers is tedious and the optimal decision is to keep them high. Replace with a one-hit-kill system.

Or, we design the user interface to offer a lot of help in this regard -- say a bar located directly where you're eyes are looking most of the time, another larger bar whose motion can, to some extent, be seen in your peripheral vision, color changes and visual bells to provide alerts, and the ability to customize the game to actually pause under certain HP-related circumstances.

And furthermore, we could design the gameplay so that your attention is usually already on the HP bar anyways, so that you don't actually pay anything beyond lack of attentiveness to other things.

In my opinion, one of crawls biggest problems is that there are too many encounters where your HP bar is irrelevant (i.e. 'popcorn'), and thus dulling the reflex to come to attention upon encounters.

[Siegurt]

paying tedious attention to make a no-brainer command is annoying and adds nothing to tactical depth.

And not having to pay attention to the game adds tactical depth how again?

It doesn't. But it isn't tedious and annoying.

The presumption is that tactical depth is the rationale for having this feature. If the feature doesn't actually add tactical depth, then it needs to be removed so as to eliminate its negative consequences.

I would argue that having to pay attention to the types of attacks that your opponents can use, and knowing what actions you can take to mitigate those types of attacks, and using those actions when you recognize them as being the best choice in that situation *is* tactical depth.

I would also argue that since the costs are minor and the situations are fairly often cut and dried that it isn't very *much* depth, particularly once you know the game, but is still *some*

I would further argue that any threat which has a possible response can be interpreted as "obvious" once you have sufficient knowledge and experience. It is *not* obvious to an unspoiled novice when ring swapping is ideal (or indeed even what rings are most useful to wear while walking around).

The question at hand is whether the tedium it generates for someone who knows the game already, is sufficiently offset by the interesting decisions presented to someone with incomplete knowledge.

[johlstei]

I'd be happy if the proposed change went in, but sheesh, there are some terrible posts in this thread.

Comedy proposal - rings are more rare, always on, take up. say, 7 inventory slots each, and disappear on drop.

[amaril]

rings are more rare, always on, take up. say, 7 inventory slots each, and disappear on drop.

You know, if your goal was to make a game where the inventory was the source of real strategic decisions, these ideas (items take up different amounts of space, no ground inventory) would not be horrible. However, crawl is definitely moving in the opposite direction, i.e. 'inventory space is not a serious constraint and is not one of the obstacles the game is designed around' --so removing the inventory altogether is a far more appealing proposal. In a similar vein, hunger could be the source of real strategic/tactical decisions in an alternate universe crawl, but it isn't, so it makes more sense to remove it.

Siegurt--good post. To me a problem with ring swapping is that a lot of the time the tactical choice you are making is relatively minor, even if it is difficult to get 'right.' Sort of like deciding which consumable to drop when you have a full inventory. "Which of these rings is better in this situation (where swapping to an elemental resist is desirable)--+6 dex or +3 ac" isn't an 'easy' decision, but it isn't a compelling one either. Often, either will do, and it is really difficult to properly assess ring value without excessively in-depth knowledge of crawl mechanics.