Encouraging progress with a decaying dungeon

[Badjas]

I propose the following mechanic:
- The player starts at D1 with an intact dungeon.
- When the player enters a new floor of the main dungeon, depths, or zot, there is a chance that one or more down-stairs have collapsed, the later it is in the game.
- When a player enters an existing floor, there is a reduced chance that a previously working up- or downstairs has collapsed.
- As extra encouragement, decay-themed monsters could spawn (around the limited (single?) stairs) when the player is really dragging her feet.

Why?

There are reasons to encourage players to not delay. Existing mechanics include:
- Limitted available food
- Limitted consumables
- Out of depth monsters
And various negative incentives exist, mainly resulting in kiting, luring, and resting for magic a whole lot.

Playing careful is what wins games. This makes various decisions no-brainers for optimal play. By encouraging players to take more risk, by providing an advantage for speedy play, careful and slow play is disincentivized and choices open up. Dungeon decay provides a graceful clock to play against, subject to balance.

To increase the proper effect of a decaying dungeon, I also propose to default to 4 or 5 up-down stairs rather than the current 3, so that decay becomes more obvious earlier and so that there can be a more smooth transition in difficulty.

I haven't thought everything completely through yet, but perhaps the branches should not decay themselved (though take time to finish!). Also, to not punish extended-players too hard, the decay timer should run slower when in hell, pandemonium and also in the abyss.

Obivous balance issues:
- Cheibriados worshippers should not be negatively affected for decay
- Too much extra challenge for Nagas?
- Penalty for stashing and backtracking to a shop
- Penalty for god switching in temple
- Doing slime late becomes more difficult, though this change might bring a different but still reasonable balance itself.
- (more?)

Pros:
- No need for food as a timer
- Doesn't bother any existing mechanics
- Ascending becomes more meaningful
- Perhaps could replace the timers on portals for ice caves, volcano etc.

Cons:
- Species/background/god difficulty differences get amplified (in so far that difficulty must be overcome with more time intensive mechanics. A combo being "more punishing" in general shouldn't be affected.)

Implementation details:
- A collapsed stairs should still be walkable, because a player could stash items on one
- A stairs should not collapse when the player is on one. Otherwise, a player going down a level, finding herself in a bad spot, could be f*cked rather unfairly if the stairs collapsed underneath her. Taking a step away though...
- Steps specifically crumbling as the player leaves them is especially exciting.
- Preventing cases where a player can't route anymore upstairs (getting trapped in a dead end in the dungeon). Perhaps preventable with flags on stairs generated for certain vaults: "let me not be the only stairs on the map please".
- Spells could have the hunger costs removed, but perhaps also replaced by an increment on the decay timer as a cost to prevent spamming. (hurling fireballs and calling for earthquakes might just do that, huh?)

Edit: added balance issues, cons. Also added the magic word Luring

[Psieye]

The bigger balance issues would be things like stashing, shops, Slime being a lategame branch, walking back to Temple for lategame god switch, etc

I do not like this specific execution of it, even if we did resolve these issues. But the approach of "dungeon gets more hostile if you take too long" is good.

[tasonir]

Seems a bit redundant with the out of depth spawn timer, which imho is basically doing what you want. It forces you to move on before too long, and imho is pretty effective at that. One thing that could possibly be addressed is that it spawns high monsters that if you do manage to kill, you're now rewarded for being slow, and other timers (aka food) aren't fast enough to matter.

OOD timer spawns could be replaced with a set of "decaying" monsters which are meant to be very deadly for the level you're on, but since they're unique monsters, they also have far lower experience/items given. Since I think EXP is entirely stat based and you can't just make a monster "low" exp they could probably be flagged as durable summons and give zero exp?

[dowan]

Any mechanic that makes the game harder the longer you take is only going to amplify existing combo difficulty. If you play an easy combo, you get through the dungeon faster, thus the dungeon doesn't get as hard. If you're playing a difficult combo that has to take longer then the dungeon ends up even harder, snowballing against you. Spell casters also naturally tend to play slower, needing to regen MP more often, so it would be a difficulty multiplier for them too.

That isn't to say it's impossible, just that you might need to address some other issues first before this becomes workable. I don't know exactly how you make weaker combos progress at the same rate as powerful combos, or correct for it some other way, you probably wouldn't want a different timer for every single combo.

I am making the assumption that spreading the difficulty between combos further than it already is is a bad thing, which may not be an assumption everyone else has. If that's not a problem, then my objections probably don't really matter.

[jwoodward48ss]

Augh, nonono. If you're saying that a HOFi should have a more difficult time than a HOFE, nonono. The combo that you choose should only determine your initial setup and flavour - no other gameplay effects.

[Psieye]

One thing that could possibly be addressed is that it spawns high monsters that if you do manage to kill, you're now rewarded for being slow, and other timers (aka food) aren't fast enough to matter.

In other words, "make all OOD durably summoned"?

[minstrel]

Trying to tease out the premise a little here.

Are there still issues with players delaying progress that have not been addressed with OOD spawns?

So far I see the issue of "what if the player can beat the OOD spawns and get even more XP"? That seems well-addressed by making OOD spawns durably summoned.

I haven't really noticed boring but optimal strategies available to me, like stashing, that involved long wait times / repeated travel for quite a while, so I'm curious what additional ones people feel need to be addressed.

[Badjas]

I don't know if OOD spawns are enough of a threat. Unless they've been amped up lately?
They should never give XP and gold if they are a punishment mechanism, so that would be an improvement.
In that case though, it would be good for a player to recognize which monsters are OOD spawns. Simply having the flag "durably summoned" out of thin air is pretty weird but if they could be spectral or so, would be more clear.

Still, a player is welcome to wring out every last bit of time on every new floor without much of a consequence. A global difficulty timer would be an improvement. (Going by wiki data here.)
Utilizing a global difficulty timer is what brought me to the idea to remove stairs (replace with collapsed stairs as a visual indicator), which I think is a natural fit.

Regarding casters being slower... well, MP regeneration sucks but is necessary to prevent spamming. Recently MP channeling in various ways have been changed to improve user experience. Maybe base rate of MP regen should be increased so that casters can reasonably keep up? Maybe this isn't much of a problem anyway? Playtesting would be needed. Of course, altering MP mechanics is sensitive to balance issues and rambling this way is perhaps better done in CYC. I would propose though to balance improved blastering ability with "risking extra decay" and thus making mages more speedy but having an extra spam prevention method.

[VeryAngryFelid]

Global difficulty timer would be a bad way to introduce difficulty levels IMHO. MiBe and alike will still be very easy.

[Badjas]

Global difficulty timer would be a bad way to introduce difficulty levels IMHO. MiBe and alike will still be very easy.

I am not trying to make MiBe more difficult. I'm trying to persuade players to not pillar and stair dance, to not rest for full MP, and to lure less.

Mainly the luring, that's been a hot potato on this forum for a while. Difficulty timing ramp up is of course a thing to balance, because some reasonable amount of luring should exist as a tactic.

For more difficulty in general, hellcrawl is a nice experiment (with MiBe probably still the easier combo)

[dowan]

I don't know if OOD spawns are enough of a threat. Unless they've been amped up lately?
They should never give XP and gold if they are a punishment mechanism, so that would be an improvement.
In that case though, it would be good for a player to recognize which monsters are OOD spawns. Simply having the flag "durably summoned" out of thin air is pretty weird but if they could be spectral or so, would be more clear.

Still, a player is welcome to wring out every last bit of time on every new floor without much of a consequence. A global difficulty timer would be an improvement. (Going by wiki data here.)
Utilizing a global difficulty timer is what brought me to the idea to remove stairs (replace with collapsed stairs as a visual indicator), which I think is a natural fit.

Regarding casters being slower... well, MP regeneration sucks but is necessary to prevent spamming. Recently MP channeling in various ways have been changed to improve user experience. Maybe base rate of MP regen should be increased so that casters can reasonably keep up? Maybe this isn't much of a problem anyway? Playtesting would be needed. Of course, altering MP mechanics is sensitive to balance issues and rambling this way is perhaps better done in CYC. I would propose though to balance improved blastering ability with "risking extra decay" and thus making mages more speedy but having an extra spam prevention method.

Yeah, you'd definitely just try it as is first before you go trying to fix the balance, and like you say, maybe it's not a big problem after all. And if the big problem to be worked on next after fixing luring was to make characters progress through the game a bit faster, I wouldn't complain about that!