Blades Runner
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Don't spawn player ghosts in portals
- For this message the author yesno has received thanks: 7
- Blomdor, duvessa, goodcoolguy, reosarevok, VeryAngryFelid, WingedEspeon, ydeve
Although the central place for design discussion is ##crawl-dev on freenode, some may find it helpful to discuss requests and suggestions here first.
Blades Runner
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tedric wrote:It's not that unusual for portals to spawn where the normal contents are too much for a character to handle, so I don't think the addition of ghosts makes a significant difference here.
In fact, one of my best portal experiences was a recent ice cave -- the two-room teleporter layout -- in which a "very dangerous" player ghost spawned with the twin ice statues in the second room. I had a thrilling little skin-of-my-teeth encounter dashing around to collect the loot and escape before I got overwhelmed. +1 would play again!
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PowerOfKaishin wrote:What you're missing is that ghosts don't replace content, they add to it. Ghosts always add difficulty,
PowerOfKaishin wrote:especially to an area where you can't even run much less stair dance.
PowerOfKaishin wrote:tedric wrote:In fact, one of my best portal experiences was a recent ice cave -- the two-room teleporter layout -- in which a "very dangerous" player ghost spawned with the twin ice statues in the second room. I had a thrilling little skin-of-my-teeth encounter dashing around to collect the loot and escape before I got overwhelmed. +1 would play again!
That's cool but not every character has the luxury of having options to get out of that and the incredibly small pool of characters that can actually fight the damn ghost are already strong enough not to need the treasure.
Blades Runner
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Blades Runner
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Ziggurat Zagger
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goodcoolguy wrote:Strongly agree with the OP. Portals are filled with ghosts on populated servers. Many players do not seem to be able to gauge the threat level in them properly or are perhaps just getting killed by other ghosts.
When you run into a ghost on a normal dungeon level, there are a lot of ways to deal with it that ultimately aren't that consequential to how the game plays out. On the other hand, if you have to back out of a portal because there's a troll ghost on the entrance, you lose a lot of loot purely by the luck of the draw. It's silly.
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tedric wrote:I'm not missing that, I'm saying it's at least not a bad thing.
Of course you can run, there's always a portal back out right by the entrance. As for stairdancing, the entire point of portals is that they offer loot only if you can overcome whatever threats are inside and escape with your life in one go. The RNG already provides a wide variety of challenges here, ghosts are just a small part of that variety.
Every character in that situation has the option of taking one step and exiting the portal. It's not like we're talking "portal ghosts = instadeath" here -- all you're losing is a bit of additional loot that you were never guaranteed to be able to collect anyway. "Give me more loot for less risk" is not a good design argument.
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yesno wrote:seeing a player ghost in a portal usually means you should just leave immediately so the ghost doesn't kill you.
tedric wrote:Yeah all of these arguments against ghosts in portals really just boil down to arguments against ghosts, period.
Blades Runner
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tedric wrote:yesno wrote:seeing a player ghost in a portal usually means you should just leave immediately so the ghost doesn't kill you.
Which is another way of saying "Give me more loot for less risk."
Vaults Vanquisher
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yesno wrote:tedric wrote:yesno wrote:seeing a player ghost in a portal usually means you should just leave immediately so the ghost doesn't kill you.
Which is another way of saying "Give me more loot for less risk."
there needs to be some latin name for this argument
Tartarus Sorceror
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Tartarus Sorceror
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tedric wrote:In fact, one of my best portal experiences was a recent ice cave -- the two-room teleporter layout -- in which a "very dangerous" player ghost spawned with the twin ice statues in the second room. I had a thrilling little skin-of-my-teeth encounter dashing around to collect the loot and escape before I got overwhelmed. +1 would play again!
Swamp Slogger
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PowerOfKaishin wrote:In any case, if ghosts are meant to be killable I want a guide on how to do so reliably. If I don't want to flee from a bailey how do I dispatch the ghost? ...
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andreas wrote:PowerOfKaishin wrote:In any case, if ghosts are meant to be killable I want a guide on how to do so reliably. If I don't want to flee from a bailey how do I dispatch the ghost? ...
I see no reason to think that a character should always be able to kill everything it comes across.
Tartarus Sorceror
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PowerOfKaishin wrote:Herein lies another problem. If something isn't killable it can be left alone and will stay asleep forever.
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dynast wrote:PowerOfKaishin wrote:Herein lies another problem. If something isn't killable it can be left alone and will stay asleep forever.
Unless it detects you, or you believe everyone should train stealth and avoid wearing heavy armor? There is also howler monkeys and alarm traps.
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