The Tavern

Mummies directly conflict with the game's design philosophy of anti-scumming.

1. Mummies cannot starve and thus have no hard time limit that forces them to push forward eventually.

2. Mummies cannot mutate and thus have no fear of suffering permanent bad mutations that disincentivize staying in pandemonium or abyss for extended periods of time.
It is no coincidence that the two infinite levels of the game (containing infinite XP) are home to monsters that cast malmutate; it's an anti-scumming meassure (albeit a soft one because there are a few other ways to completely ignore mutations).

These 2 circumstances mean that mummies can ignore 2 anti-scumming meassures completely and spend as much time scumming as they want.
This is obviously against the spirit of the game since anti-scumming has been defined as one of the game's design philosophies.

In fact, I would go as far and say that you are even somewhat encouraged to grind/scum as a mummy since they learn skills somewhat slowly and have many other weaknesses they somehow have to compensate.

If the game needs a challenge race, which I suppose is what mummy is supposed to be, it should be made in a way that is in line in with the game's design philosohpies that the developers of the game themselves have set.

I thus conclude that mummies should be removed to improve game health.

Sharpen your axes, please.

I am surprised you ask to remove one of the hardest species instead of fixing scumming problems directly. For example, it was suggested many times to make out of depths monsters give no XP/items. Sadly I don't remember any feedback from devs on it.

I strongly disagree with the OP. By the time mummies can reasonably get access to 'infinite XP', they've effectively won already, or are capable of it. Thus, by grinding XP they're reducing their chances of winning. Non optimal tedium isn't a problem.

Plus any character can keep scumming pan forever and not run out of food. Add necromut and they can't get mutated either. So this isn't unique to mummies.

this really. mummies are fine

Awhile back I shouted to the heavens "High Elves should be removed!"

and as it turns out, it mightve worked.

"Hey why don't we remove eating?"
Food adds something! Simply having spawns and piety decay is an insufficient mechanism to force player progression at a satisfactory rate and prevent scumming, including DoomRL style scumming for optimal combat position.

"But what about mummies?"
*special pleading*

Are you sure? All creatures after initial floor generation give no XP/items. Creatures after 2k turns or so become out of depth (still no XP/items). I am sure it can result in weak combos diving instead of playing carefully (=kiting, luring, pillar dancing, stair dancing) which is good.

I'm afraid you did, VAF.

removeely, if Crawl didn't have Mummies, we'd have to invent them. If the primary difficulty knob for the game lives in the species selection menu, we have to have a "hard" species. The answer to problem 1 is obviously to remove food, but short of that, we can remove any remaining incentives to scum, even though mummies will likely get pushed forward by piety decay and current OOD spawns anyway. The answer to problem 2 would be to significantly increase the amount of HP rot the player suffers instead of getting malmuted, but I think mutations aren't nearly the anti-scumming measure you think they are.

mummies arent actually hard mode any more than nagas are, though

Do you think the game does have one then, duvessa? I'm pretty sure mummy is meant to occupy that space, what with the apts and whatnot. If there isn't a hard mode species, there ought to be one imo.

not via race/background choice
you can, of course, come up with some terrible race+background+god combinations, that requires finding the god though
alternatively you can follow conducts or try to optimize for turncount/realtime

I hardly can imagine that species that need to eat (except for trolls maybe) can't play at extremely slow pace because of limited food supplies.
Also, try to grind D1 for XP as a mummy - you will be smashed by a manticore or cyclopus.

the correct solution is to bring back mummy death curses but only for player mummies. let n be # turns spent playing mummy characters and m be # turns spent playing all species. all characters regardless of species will have a 1/(n/m) chance each turn to be affected by a random mummy death curse. n and m are cumulative across the entire player base. thus rather than directly nerfing mummies, peer pressure and players' desire not to inconvenience others can be harnessed to discourage mummy scumming

ok a 1 in (m/n) chance but otherwise the idea is sound

1 in (m/n) is n in m

yeah but in the vernacular sparse chances are almost always phrased as a "one in ...." chance

also please note that this phrasing is specifically correct when discussing mummies:

Mummies are a painful race to play but they should remain for reasons of flavor and challenge. I don't care if they conflict with the stated design objectives or are in concord with the stated design objectives. Fun varies from player to player, and who can say what fun should be? It's best to leave the race in as a hurdle to those who want to claim mastery over the game and face a bizarre playstyle with awful apts in order to claim a meaningless supremacy.

You might not care about the design goals, but luckily the developers do.