The Tavern

Please, remove energy randomization. I have no idea why is this feature is in the game, as it has absolutely no benefit, but a lot of drawbacks.
(I have just died on D1 against a gnoll with halberd, because it caught up me twice while retreating to a stair.)

It's not indicated anywhere in game how this feature works and all it does punish mistakes without telling players where they actually messed up. Please, just remove this.

I believe it's in the game so that it would occasionally kill you. So I think it is working as intended...

(Whether it's a good thing is another matter.)

It can save your life just as well as kill you. Like when you're running from a monster and it gets delayed a square for no apparent reason, allowing you to get to the stairs.

My understanding is that the feature is in the game to prevent "pillar dancing", that is, the hypothetically optimal, degenerate technique of getting hurt and then playing ring-around-the-rosie around a dungeon feature with a speed 1.0 monster until your HP are maxed out and you can try the fight over again.

Crawl already has a great deal of randomness in the game when it comes to damage, spell miscasts, monster generation, floor items and so on. The result is a game where it's not possible to predict what's going to happen on the next turn, only estimate its probability. I'd be interested in hearing why movement should be different.

That's a valid argument. Maybe energy randomization should only favor the player, so pillar dancing is discouraged and random deaths stop happening.

Um, if energy randomization always favored the player, it would heavily encourage pillardancing as much as possible.

At least pillar dancing would be less tedious because you could escape to the stairs...

Yes, that's another thing, if energy randomization always favored the player, it would be similar to starting with low-powered boots of running for free. The player would essentially become speed 10.1.

There is at least one of these tavern threads around already, i actually wrote a patch that removes it in response at one point, just to let people try it out.

The point of energy randomization is, as was said, to remove the determinism so as to resolve combats one way or the other, rather than leaving them perpetually in a state of limbo. Presently, if you are in danger and try to flee, you will escape (and be able to rest) or die.

Without energy randomization you are able to count on a set movement pattern that will keep you alive and kiting until you regain full hit points and can try the fight again, which is a really boring, tedious form of "always escape".

Therefore, to make it not tedious and force combats to be possible to die to, the obvious counter is to make "normal speed" critters a bit faster than the player, which would be worse for the sort of death you had, at least in terms of the chances of dying to it.

Ultimately "remove energy randomization" looks like "always die when energy randomization gives you a 50/50 chance of escaping now"

Another consideration is that in such a system, you could say with some certainty, that a given combat was unwinnable, and of course all normal melee combats would be inescapable without consumables, so lacking those (which is common in the early game) the only logical thing to do would be to quit, there would never be a thrilling lucky or risky escape, those sorts of things make crawl more entertaining, if everything is predictable, then it might be a technically better design, but it might also be less engaging.

The thing about energy randomization is that it's bullshit as long as fast player species exist. (Like, there is no "balance" reason for punishing the majority of species choices this way.) But I played Crawl long before it was introduced, and I do believe it's better than letting everyone pillar dance all the time forever.

Siegurt, you make some good points about "unwinnable" combat and inevitable deaths but I'm pretty sure "speed-10 or slower players, faster monsters" is the only way forward. There's still a lot of randomness that can be drawn upon even when a fast, dangerous enemy has closed to melee range -- whether the enemy chooses to melee or attempt a spell or use another action, whether the attack actually hits, how much damage it does, whether less-threatening enemies appear and can be maneuvered between you, etc. What's needed is more ways to draw on those chances to make thrilling, narrow escapes possible.

I'd suggest something like making Swiftness an innate ability for all species, so that you could choose between kiting near enough to stairs or a door or whatever that you can escape, or simply gaining temporary distance to attempt ranged attacks or use consumables without being bashed on. It would probably need to be gated with an Exhaustion timer, and of course you'd remove the Switfness spell (and Boots of Running). In this scenario we'd differentiate Naga by removing slow move speed and just not giving it Swiftness; Tengu would lose permaflight (or at least lose the movement boost); and if we really need to maintain Centaur and Spriggan's movement advantage they could get double the bonus/malus from Swiftness (or Ce could get that, and Sp could get innate Blink).

If you've ever watched someone who's terrible at pillar dancing, you start to realize that the way forward for this particular problem is not gratuitous randomization of basic movement mechanics. I've seen guys run bizarre pillar dancing routes that cover half of a level and what you see is that they end up picking up more buddies as they run around. The real problem is that pillar dancing in crawl is too good/easy because A.) the cycles in the layouts are too small and B.) monster spawning targets the wrong kind of behavior.

On point B, realistically, hanging around in one place for 10k turns results in insignificant benefits, but is nowhere near as tedious as manually traversing the same route over and over again to recover hp/mp or just scum energy randomization to get your tile needed to escape upstairs. The behavior that should trigger spawns is being in close proximity to a monster for a large number of turns and the spawns should be placed so that they give you trouble. Bonus points if they can always outrun you. This can easily be flavored as the pursuing monster calling for reinforcements.

What if instead of fully randomized energy, monsters just got increasingly likely to speed up the longer they chased you? "Enraged, the twelve-headed hydra picks up the pace."

This seems so simple that I'm sure it's been proposed before, but I figured I'd bring it up here.

archaeo: Yes, that would work.

Again, the problem is you can no longer run away from threatening monsters. Which means you have to camp by staircases. Which is even more tedious/problematic than the current system.

It works great on D1 though.