Idea: Distinguish stairs


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Lair Larrikin

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Post Friday, 2nd June 2017, 09:37

Idea: Distinguish stairs

OK, I wanted to see if there's any appetite for this change.

As you know, normal stairs are flagged if the other end of them is unexplored, but otherwise look exactly the same on the map. This leads to annoying situations where it's hard to remember which set of stairs go where. If you're trying to explore a level whilst evading something deadly, this can be accidentally lethal and is always tedious if you make a mistake. You could distinguish the stairs by dropping low value items so that they show up on the map (you are in a maze of twisty stairs, all alike), but that's even more tedious. So, my proposal is that stairs are clearly distinguish, either by a symbol (triangle, square, circle) or colour (red, green, blue). Thus, you can easily see that the blue down stair links to the blue up stair on the next level down. While the level is unexplored this provides no information. Once it is, it provides no information that couldn't be kept via other mechanisms.

What do people think?

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Post Friday, 2nd June 2017, 09:51

Re: Idea: Distinguish stairs

I like the idea. It sounds like it might save me from obsessively viewing the other end of the stairs every time before going up/down.

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Post Friday, 2nd June 2017, 12:23

Re: Idea: Distinguish stairs

Indeed, a good idea. Console colours are entirely trivial but there should be enough of them.

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Post Friday, 2nd June 2017, 14:31

Re: Idea: Distinguish stairs

I assume you are aware of this, but you can press [ on an up stair or ] on a down stair to see where it leads on the next level. With this proposal, I highly doubt you're memorizing the location of the A, B, and C stairs for each floor, so you still have to look at the floor you're going to to figure out where the stairs lead.

I guess it would be faster though, and you would only have to hit [ or ] one time per floor transition.

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Post Friday, 2nd June 2017, 14:44

Re: Idea: Distinguish stairs

I also like this idea, but let's go a step further. Since there are AFAIK always three stairs on a level, let's give them some *flair*. I mean, different icons and different names for each of the three standard stairways - maybe golden stairs, silver stairs, bronze stairs. Or Path of Might/Finesse/Wit, descending downward; Or "stairs marked with a sigil of a rock/paper/scissors". I dunno. Then have a little dictionary of random words for the escape hatches, no two alike. After you arrive on a floor via an escape hatch, MARK that spot with a webtile, with the explanation that "after descending the Centaur Chute, you notice a sigil of a centaur carved inobtrusively in the rock below." Ideally, you could make the stairs so visually distinctive and memorable that the player actually WOULD tend to remember where A/B/C come out, with no special effort on his part. It would actually be a pleasure rather than a burden.
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Post Friday, 2nd June 2017, 18:17

Re: Idea: Distinguish stairs

PowerOfKaishin wrote:I assume you are aware of this, but you can press [ on an up stair or ] on a down stair to see where it leads on the next level.

I have been playing for seven years and this is news to me
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Post Friday, 2nd June 2017, 19:13

Re: Idea: Distinguish stairs

The usual process--'X' to level map, '>' or '<' to cycle through stairs, ']' or '[' to peek--works for me but color/tile-coded staircases couldn't hurt.

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Post Saturday, 3rd June 2017, 04:17

Re: Idea: Distinguish stairs

What if there was only one up stair and one down stair per level, instead of three plus hatches?

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Post Saturday, 3rd June 2017, 08:59

Re: Idea: Distinguish stairs

Hmm, turning every level into L:1/U:1 seems like it would be tiring. It would be more difficult to ditch uniques.

I would not be in favour of that. I could live with 1 staircase and 1 hatch per level probably.

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Post Saturday, 3rd June 2017, 09:59

Re: Idea: Distinguish stairs

As luck would have it, you don't have to speculate about what it would be like to have only one staircase. There's an even more radical thing already available in hellcrawl: No upstairs.

Now I realize that many here think of stairs as a crucial part of "storytelling," building the game in your mind, that feel of place and space in crawl... but having to fight it out where you drop is wildly better in terms of tactical gameplay than the total silliness of going up and down stairs luring things up and down, peeking all the stairs, rotating and so on. That stuff is scumming. It's not even tactics. Disengaging, re-engaging, using and reusing and reusing the same dungeon features to trivialize every encounter is scumming. We call it "tactics" here because we haven't had a real alternative in which to ground another vocabulary. You go down and you have to fight it out, move the encounter within the normal rules of map navigation, use what you have to get through the initial rush, think about noise and all that. That's tactics. Up and down, X >>>, > < > < > -- That is not tactics.

But I don't want to go off on a rant... duvessa's comment addresses the X >>> part and some of the scumming part. Narrower thing, but still valuable. It would be a worthwhile change. I'd also say the orbrun would be a bit less milquetoast with only one up/down stair per level.

edit: A middle ground between one stair and no upstairs is hatches only, which has been discussed here in connection with the stair dancing issue.
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Post Saturday, 3rd June 2017, 19:57

Re: Idea: Distinguish stairs

watertreatmentRL wrote:As luck would have it, you don't have to speculate about what it would be like to have only one staircase. There's an even more radical thing already available in hellcrawl: No upstairs.

Now I realize that many here think of stairs as a crucial part of "storytelling," building the game in your mind, that feel of place and space in crawl... but having to fight it out where you drop is wildly better in terms of tactical gameplay than the total silliness of going up and down stairs luring things up and down, peeking all the stairs, rotating and so on. That stuff is scumming. It's not even tactics. Disengaging, re-engaging, using and reusing and reusing the same dungeon features to trivialize every encounter is scumming. We call it "tactics" here because we haven't had a real alternative in which to ground another vocabulary. You go down and you have to fight it out, move the encounter within the normal rules of map navigation, use what you have to get through the initial rush, think about noise and all that. That's tactics. Up and down, X >>>, > < > < > -- That is not tactics.

But I don't want to go off on a rant... duvessa's comment addresses the X >>> part and some of the scumming part. Narrower thing, but still valuable. It would be a worthwhile change. I'd also say the orbrun would be a bit less milquetoast with only one up/down stair per level.

edit: A middle ground between one stair and no upstairs is hatches only, which has been discussed here in connection with the stair dancing issue.


Actually we already have a definition for "scumming" that's not it, trying to redefine a word we already use is confusing. ("Scumming" is presently used to describe reloading the game from an earlier state, typically to get better results from the RNG)

Technically a "tactic" is any action you take to achieve your goal once you're aware of the situation, so < is tactics, it's just not complicated (Although it is complicated enough that novices don't understand it, often unspoiled novices will go quite some time before using stairs as a combat feature occurs to them).

Note that there's only so many dungeon features, crawl is a pretty simple game in terms of terrain, for example there's stairs, corners, corridors, sometimes some water, and thousands of combats. No matter what you do, you're going to be reusing and reusing the same dungeon features to reduce the risk inherent in combat, because crawl is a game about reducing combat risks, and there's lots of combat and not very many dungeon features. Complaining that staircases are too easy to use is a bit silly IMHO, removing stairs as the best option just pushes the "obvious best tactic" one notch further down the chain, and reduces the actual variation of available experiences by a small amount.

What stairs do provide that is unique is a convenient "stop" to the action, so you can reset fights with less tedium. If your best option is to retreat to reset the combat, then you could retreat indefinitely by walking in a circle until you have effectively reset the combat (After you've healed to full), you could also do that by going up stairs and pressing '5', which accomplishes the same thing, but with less keypresses. If you prefer walking in circles to going up staircases, then having no stairs is probably the best choice for you.

You could eliminate that possibility by removing in-combat healing (Doing so is tricky, there's not a solid delineation between 'in-combat' and not, and the fuzzy grey areas at the edges leave room for abuse) but presuming you did so, you'd be left with a game with no way to reset fights except for consumables. Which is fine, except that it would make Crawl more luck based than it is now.

You could probably fix *that* by fiddling around with the drop rates of various fight-resetting consumables, Maybe throw in some differences in combat variance to make it more regular, or change some of the critters around so that there was more regularity in what kind of fights you could expect in a given area, possibly remove identification so you have more dependable access to your consumables early, etc, etc... Depending on what exactly you did there's probably a chain of dependancies that would want to be addressed in some fashion, Or maybe you just prefer games that are more luck based, and are totally ok with that.

If you did all that, would you have a better game? I don't know, but it would be very different from DCSS, and I know I like DCSS. Maybe someone should should be able to go make a fork that does the things that they think it should and call it something else that people will want to play... oh wait... :)
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Post Saturday, 3rd June 2017, 21:49

Re: Idea: Distinguish stairs

("Scumming" is presently used to describe reloading the game from an earlier state, typically to get better results from the RNG)


No, that is "save scumming"... A subtype of more general "scumming", i.e. degenerate gameplay behavior based on actions that carry little to no risk or challenge but have variable results, repeated until the desired result is obtained.

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Post Saturday, 3rd June 2017, 22:17

Re: Idea: Distinguish stairs

yesno wrote:
("Scumming" is presently used to describe reloading the game from an earlier state, typically to get better results from the RNG)


No, that is "save scumming"... A subtype of more general "scumming", i.e. degenerate gameplay behavior based on actions that carry little to no risk or challenge but have variable results, repeated until the desired result is obtained.


Fair enough. I dont think stairs fit into that definition either (as for a given instance doing <> repeatly has some risk, and doesn't really generate randomly beneficial results.)
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Post Saturday, 3rd June 2017, 23:37

Re: Idea: Distinguish stairs

There are many rolls that go into determining the outcome of any disengage-reengage cycle. Monster movement randomization, stealth, opening rounds of combat that often determine whether another cycle is needed, among others. There is rarely any effective limit on the player's ability to scum these outcomes. With the use of stairs and rotating between multiple staircases, you can perform many iterations without using enough turns to run into any kind of "timer" issue. The only limit is the player's willingness to repeat, as usual.

For whatever reason, the mental model people seem to have for tactical scumming in crawl is this doomRL thing of finding a place to camp so that you get the first attack on monsters at range. It's odd since this gives you practically zero advantage in crawl. On the other hand constantly erasing bad engagements and unfortunate rolls using stairs is accepted as "tactics," what the optimal player does to reduce every situation to a series of 1v1 fights. You could have a food timer that targets the timescale on which the stuff I'm talking about happens instead of the doomRL-style mummy scumming timescale, but then food would actually do something and no one really wants that.

The point is, disengage-reengage scumming opportunities are greatly curtailed by dropping the player in a situation where they cannot escape upstairs and forcing them to stake out their own sphere of influence on the level rather than having it given to them via these passages to the previous level. Your tactical decisions are more diverse and carry much more weight then.
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Post Sunday, 4th June 2017, 00:20

Re: Idea: Distinguish stairs

The idea of getting rid of stairs has been done many times, from the original Rogue to the Ziggurats. And the new Tomb has something a bit similar in it. And a lot of people play Vaults:5 that way (using the hatch to avoid the mob in the middle). That said, if you get rid of the stairs, you have a bunch of homeless adventurers, shopping cart ladies who have to carry absolutely everything they can possibly imagine they might use everywhere. And that makes for a whole lot of dire dull tension, minutes of agonizing over whether you keep a stack of scrolls of summoning or hope someday your character will learn enough magic to want that extra spellbook. I don't like it. I mean, having upstairs was a main thing that made Nethack better than Rogue, a "real world" rather than a video game with a tiny memory, and I don't enjoy the notion of going the other way at all.

Now one thing Crawl *could* do to neutralize the stair advantage would be to have real time go on in other levels, at least the ones directly above and below you but perhaps the entire branch. Allow the monsters to go walk up to the stairs and come up as they please. The stairs are still a little bit of a bottleneck and you can bonk them as they come up, but if they move out of the way of the next (like they do now at doors, which they didn't before) then it takes a certain layout around the stairs to use it as a kill point.

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Post Sunday, 4th June 2017, 01:55

Re: Idea: Distinguish stairs

I have often thought that score could function as an anti-scumming (or resetting or whatever one wants to call it), because such behaviour typically involves taking more turns to achieve your goals. Stuff like dragging monsters to a good location, staying near stairs, being rested to full before every fight etc. Also, doing things through score could be a rather non-intrusive measure (you can still win with lots of resetting, but doing so kills your score).

However, I think the score formula is not very good.

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Post Sunday, 4th June 2017, 02:09

Re: Idea: Distinguish stairs

@Chicken: Yes, it's been done before many times and it's been good many times. I don't care how "real" backtracking is, it is bad. A cleared dungeon level is dead space in the game where nothing good can happen. Stair dancing, going upstairs to rest, rotating stairs as described above, running into imp and ogre spawns on the way to shops and stashed items, autotravel interruptions to eat, and on and on. That stuff is neither good nor necessary.

The issue of carrying things around because you can't go back is not a big deal. I know from playing a lot of hellcrawl. This is just one more reason it is essential to aggressively eliminate types of items that don't play a critical strategic or tactical role in the game. There's a patch out there that eliminates spellbooks as items that occupy inventory slots, by the way. Unsurprisingly, it too is good.
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Post Sunday, 4th June 2017, 03:23

Re: Idea: Distinguish stairs

Mods: I request the discussion on whether stairs should exist at all be split from the original one about making different stairs have different appearances, they are really two totally unrelated discussions.
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Post Sunday, 4th June 2017, 07:51

Re: Idea: Distinguish stairs

Stairs are bad, but I think the degree of their badness is being exaggerated in this thread. If the effect of stairs is to be able reduce any encounter to a few enemies at a time, this effect can replicated without stairs using basic luring once you've cleared some of a level. Hellcrawl is a better experience than normal crawl, but it doesn't make the tactics much more complex.

Eliminating the "stair-effect," whether or not stairs exist, seems like it would require a pretty massive redesign. I'm not sure it'd be crawl anymore. Probably more like Ziggurat-crawl, with each floor being a single tactical encounter in a small map. Even then, you'd eliminate the ability to run away from an encounter, which some people feel is an important part of crawl decision making.

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Post Sunday, 4th June 2017, 09:45

Re: Idea: Distinguish stairs

I agree it is ok to be able to reset a fight or to disengage from a dangerous monster but it should be limited in some way, it feels wrong when you can do it infinite number of times, probably vs the same monster. So I see the following limits:
1) Limit number of times specific stairs can be used with monsters in view (every stairs has its own counter). Advantage - at some point you will need to either use less comfortable stairs or stand and fight.
2) Limit number of times you can use stairs with specific monster in view (every monster has its own counter). Advantage - we will have more situations where you will have to kill "Vault Warden" (a great monster by the way) except it can be any monster and it was your fault (not just stupid RNG) for retreating too often from that monster
3) Somewhat combination of both. When you try to use upstairs second time, a random monster in your view is declared "Vault Warden" so you will need to either kill it or survive n (10-15?) turns. During third use of those upstairs you might get 1-2 "Vault Wardens" etc.

I know fun is subjective but hopefully nobody likes to manually retreat 60+ tiles in a spiral-like corridor 5+ times to the same stairs with some monsters in view like I saw in a game of one of the tournament leaders.
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Post Sunday, 4th June 2017, 10:50

Re: Idea: Distinguish stairs

Not related to the topic but I'd like to use this topic to point out that on EU keyboard "[ ]" symbols requires to press two key at same time, a thing which webtitles doesn't recognize - at least for me.
Sure, I could have macro-ed the command to anything else but I actually never used it since it was added - like 2 years or so.
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Post Sunday, 4th June 2017, 10:57

Re: Idea: Distinguish stairs

nago wrote:Not related to the topic but I'd like to use this topic to point out that on EU keyboard "[ ]" symbols requires to press two key at same time, a thing which webtitles doesn't recognize - at least for me.


Could you report this in Mantis, along with browser version and exact keyboard layout? We used to have a similar problem in local tiles in Windows, but I haven't heard it reported for webtiles before.

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Post Sunday, 4th June 2017, 14:36

Re: Idea: Distinguish stairs

all before wrote:Stairs are bad, but I think the degree of their badness is being exaggerated in this thread. If the effect of stairs is to be able reduce any encounter to a few enemies at a time, this effect can replicated without stairs using basic luring once you've cleared some of a level. Hellcrawl is a better experience than normal crawl, but it doesn't make the tactics much more complex.

Eliminating the "stair-effect," whether or not stairs exist, seems like it would require a pretty massive redesign. I'm not sure it'd be crawl anymore. Probably more like Ziggurat-crawl, with each floor being a single tactical encounter in a small map. Even then, you'd eliminate the ability to run away from an encounter, which some people feel is an important part of crawl decision making.


Taking your points in the opposite order, what's surprising about all the changes in hellcrawl is that they still add up to something strikingly similar to dcss. There is no real loss of flavor, immersiveness, or whatever. It just plays a lot faster and cleaner, with less potential to use cheesey dcss-style scumming-tactics. (From what I understand there are some changes in the works or in planning that may start to make hellcrawl more mechanically distinct, but the paradigm is still the GDD way of looking for the QoL improvement that doesn't make a difference in game balance or basic game mechanics.)

What you say about luring is true to a point, but in dcss there are few occasions indeed that require you to work from no cleared territory to cleared territory before starting in on the usual long-range luring stuff. You're pretty much talking only the d:1 entrance vault. You get that in every single floor of hellcrawl, though there are certainly freebies where no monsters generate close enough to where you drop to present a problem. Addressing the stairs problem doesn't solve everything, but it does clear the way for a next iteration of improvement. I think the next step in dealing with luring and so on has to do with level size and layout.
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Post Monday, 5th June 2017, 14:16

Re: Idea: Distinguish stairs

I really like the idea of three-flavored stair pairs.

A more visually-restrained way of doing it would be normal, spiral staircase, and split staircase.

Example of the latter: https://www.houzz.com/photos/2335675/Fl ... case-other
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Post Tuesday, 6th June 2017, 00:34

Re: Idea: Distinguish stairs

Color would be a better indicator of "different but not mechanically different."

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Post Tuesday, 6th June 2017, 07:04

Re: Idea: Distinguish stairs

roctavian wrote:Color would be a better indicator of "different but not mechanically different."


Can we please make those colors somewhat meaningful? The stairs with the least amount of adjacent tiles on upper floor might be green, next yellow and stairs with the most amount red? I would even suggest to add a command/option to use green stairs first if possible. Currently it is optimal to check all stairs in X mode to choose which one to use (for those who don't care about score).
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Post Tuesday, 6th June 2017, 18:49

Re: Idea: Distinguish stairs

yellow stairs would be really easy to confuse for lair entrance
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Post Tuesday, 6th June 2017, 22:48

Re: Idea: Distinguish stairs

If stairs carried more information, you could have a more variable number of stairs (2 to 4) and have the stair "You see here some stairs going downwards. There are 3 more on this level." It would be very good with trapdoors, for how it is now.

With fixed numbers, you could use colours to identify how many you have found: the first one always blue, the second one always red, the third one always green or yellow (yellow is better because of colour blindness, but there is competition with branch colours).
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