Let players fly at will without +Fly

[ololoev]

Players should have an option to fly at a cost of draining even if they don't have +Fly items. At least for formicids. Give em cockroach-like wings not suitable for continuous flying.
This and many other places may lead to player stuck after a moat of water/lava wothout !fly potions. It is usually a player's fault, but shouldn't crawl be forgivable for such a human errors?

Another suggested option was removing formicids, but I think it's not an optimal solution.

[Quazifuji]

I feel like the less nonsensical solution from a flavor standpoint, at least for deep water, is to let every race swim. Make it incredibly slow and disable any action besides movement if the player isn't flying or aquatic, so that it's basically suicidal to swim through deep water with enemies in sight (and you could have a prompt to prevent doing so accidentally), but it would at least prevent the player from ever getting stuck because of moats if they use their last teleportation consumable and end up somewhere stupid or they do something silly as a formicid.

You could do this for lava too, I guess. It doesn't make sense from a flavor standpoint, but it's not any more nonsensical than non-winged races having flying.

[Nekoatl]

I know gameplay trumps flavor, and this is a legitimate issue, but something about the proposed solutions just rubs me the wrong way. Like, it would harm the diversity between species. Players getting stuck should try to be prevented, but can we try a less drastic solution first, like maybe increasing the spawn rate of potions of flight?

[Quazifuji]

I know gameplay trumps flavor, and this is a legitimate issue, but something about the proposed solutions just rubs me the wrong way. Like, it would harm the diversity between species. Players getting stuck should try to be prevented, but can we try a less drastic solution first, like maybe increasing the spawn rate of potions of flight?

I'd say scrap potions of flight entirely, but maybe make rings of flight more common. Potions of flight can still get you stuck by doing something moderately stupid, rings of flight make it so you have to do something hilariously, colossally stupid to get stuck.

That said, I'm not sure if I find "some species can access some vaults without needing certain spells or items" a very interesting way to differentiate species anyway. Flying or aquatic races already distinguish themselves by being able to fight in/over water with no penalty without requiring any consumables or items, and I think that's much more interesting than occasionally being able to cross a moat in a vault. Personally, I'm not really a fan of vaults that are gated by a moat anyway, I don't think "these items are either basically free or impossible to get depending on your species or whether you've found a ring of flight" is very compelling. More interesting cases like vaults with ranged enemies on the other side of a moat where flight/swimming lets you take a shortcut would still be preserved with my solution because trying to swim across the moat while being pelted with ranged attacks would be suicidal.

[graemelion]

I'm somewhat nervous about the belief that the game should not allow people to get into situations that lose the game for them.

[Nekoatl]

If somebody gets stuck by using their last potion of flight to get into a that they need another potion of flight to get out of, that's on them. Shafting onto an island with no stairs is a problem that's arguably not the player's fault (although, that's arguably more of a problem with the vault than with flight, as most vaults are kind enough to provide an escape hatch or two in cut-off areas). it's true that Crawl's design philosophy explicitly allows that there will be times where the player loses through no fault of their own, but if there's an easy way to prevent some of those situations without sacrificing the chaos that makes Crawl so interesting and fun, it's worth considering.

Flight/swimming is not the most interesting species differentiation because flight is available from items, but most species that have innate swimming/flight get some special bonus when swimming/flying. Even for those that don't, it's a nice perk, particularly in cases that allow infinite swimming/flight, as that's much rare from items.

Not having access to a vault when you encounter it isn't really a problem, since you can just !annotate that the vault exists and revisit it later when you've found an appropriate item. Having access to them a bit earlier in the game isn't a big deal, but it's a nice perk. Also, having to decide whether to spend a consumable to access some other items can be a nontrivial.

I suppose allowing all races to either very slowly swim (or walk, for species that don't breathe) through deep water isn't such a bad idea, but I think there should be some additional penalty (maybe some drain per turn) for non-aquatic races swimming through deep water to avoid making it a trivial restriction after a floor is cleared (could be flavored as the consequences of unusual physical exertion). Breathless species could be exempt from just the drain to make that mutation a little more relevant without stepping on the toes of flying/aquatic species. Maybe slowly trudging through lava could be allowed with high amounts of fire damage per turn as the extra penalty.

[bel]

I'm somewhat nervous about the belief that the game should not allow people to get into situations that lose the game for them.

You might enjoy nethack. Be sure to keep a cockatrice corpse in a slot named "y".

[graemelion]

I'm somewhat nervous about the belief that the game should not allow people to get into situations that lose the game for them.

You might enjoy nethack. Be sure to keep a cockatrice corpse in a slot named "y".

Sadly, I get that joke.

But there's something different about not having food in slot y because the food might petrify you or poison you or turn you into a pig, and intentionally flying over burning hot lava to clear out a vault when you have no way back across the burning hot lava. It shouldn't need to be said that "if you get into a place that requires you burn a consumable, you might have to burn one to get out." Do we really need to warn people that lava is bad?

[bel]

I'm somewhat nervous about the belief that the game should not allow people to get into situations that lose the game for them.

You might enjoy nethack. Be sure to keep a cockatrice corpse in a slot named "y".

Sadly, I get that joke.

But there's something different about not having food in slot y because the food might petrify you or poison you or turn you into a pig, and intentionally flying over burning hot lava to clear out a vault when you have no way back across the burning hot lava. It shouldn't need to be said that "if you get into a place that requires you burn a consumable, you might have to burn one to get out." Do we really need to warn people that lava is bad?

The common thread is that it is completely on the player that they ate the cockatrice corpse. A game with halfway decent UI would make it impossible, or at least very hard.

Analogously, if one really wants such situations in crawl, the UI should warn people before they go into the vault. In my opinion, it is simply bad that the player is stuck behind a moat, ever. This is simply a stupid way to end a game.

[spudwalt]

An escape hatch seems like an easy fix for that particular vault, though it might not be applicable for others. As it is, you'd have to either miscalculate your remaining resources fairly severely to get stranded there or just get screwed over by a shaft or an escape hatch or something (which is not all that different from getting screwed by a hatch dumping you into the middle of a bunch of snarling monsters that tear you to shreds -- it just feels lame because you aren't getting actively killed by something).

I dunno about giving everything the ability to circumvent moats. As people have said, learning to manage your resources well is, I feel, a major part of Crawl. And sometimes, even if you've been having a good run otherwise, Crawl will still just drop you into a situation where you can't avoid dying (an adder heavily poisons you when you haven't found any potions of curing, you run out of ways to flee from something that's faster and stronger than you, you get thrown into the abyss and surrounded, etc).

At the very least, if we're giving non-aquatic races the ability to swim with severe penalties, make it so there's a confirm prompt before it happens so I don't kill a swamp worm or whatever, hit the movement button an extra time because I didn't notice it was dead, and then accidentally spend the next 10 turns walking into the water and getting mobbed by all the swamp worm's friends.

[ion_frigate]

It shouldn't need to be said that "if you get into a place that requires you burn a consumable, you might have to burn one to get out." Do we really need to warn people that lava is bad?

One of the problems is that there's already been an incomplete effort to make the game not have this. Many vaults with islands in deep water/lava do in fact have escape hatches, so it's not unreasonable for a player to think they all will.