This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid


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Lair Larrikin

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Post Monday, 5th June 2017, 03:39

This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

A few moments ago I was playing a Deep Elf Fire Elementalist. I'm trying to go for atheist conduct here, so I'm taking it pretty slow. I save up gold and am able to buy a great ring, magic+9 and Dex+9. I can't proceed past D:9 without excessive risk because of cyclops and centaurs showing up a bit too often so I take it easy in lair.

I'm not totally unwise so I train stealth to 10 or so, enough to get 5 pips with my enhanced Dex. I'm not totally safe but I know it's in my power to determine whether I live or die now.

I use the staircases and carefully take care of enemies in manageable groups, using terrain and the spells in my repertoire to handle hydras and elephant packs comfortably.

Things are going well.

I decide to use the 3rd staircase on L:3 to keep shaving the numbers off a troublesome group of elephants.

Rupert is here! He screams before I have the opportunity to take any actions. I am paralyzed. Rupert is carrying a great mace that can clobber almost any paralyzed character to death with ease at this point in the game.

All I can do is press space.


At one point in time, I raised the issue that because of situations like this, there was never any reason to wear anything other than an amulet of stasis at all times while exploring. The response of the development team was to remove the amulet.

Sasuga devil's team.


I'd like to suggest that para do something reasonable like simply temporarily reducing strength and dexterity by half, and that you add a new status effect to replace old para called "stun" that renders you incapacitated for exactly 1 turn, during which the enemy can have a free attack, or move into melee range, or blink enemies to surround you or literally anything other than attack you 7 times in a row and kill you while you press space bar.
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Post Monday, 5th June 2017, 04:03

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

You know I guess it was Lair: 5

someone has informed me that I used fireball on the other staircase mistakenly before I had mapped all the staircases, which makes this exact situation preventable, but in an abstract sort of sense the core of this problem is that Rupert exists and can be woken up off screen, and then instantly kill you if you say, walk around a corner or walk around the dungeon without yelling and checking for a response every 3 steps to make sure nothing that can instantly kill you is there.

even then teleport traps exist, and bad terrain exists, and Rupert could conceivably ghost you from off screen and wander around the level without you knowing he was there, and ambush you on a staircase on level where you didn't know he was

totally preventing this runs into bizarre spoiler territory like rest for a specific number of turns just in case he might have been there

this is like Schrodinger's fault at this point
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Zot Zealot

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Post Monday, 5th June 2017, 05:19

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

That's an unfortunate death.

Regarding this part:
even then teleport traps exist, and bad terrain exists, and Rupert could conceivably ghost you from off screen and wander around the level without you knowing he was there, and ambush you on a staircase on level where you didn't know he was
totally preventing this runs into bizarre spoiler territory like rest for a specific number of turns just in case he might have been there


I advise you to read the Crawl Manual, specifically the Philosophy section:
https://github.com/crawl/crawl/blob/mas ... manual.rst
The possibility of unavoidable deaths is a larger topic in computer games. Ideally, a game like this would be really challenging and have both random layout and random course of action, yet still be winnable with perfect play. This goal seems out of reach. Thus, computer games can be soft in the sense that optimal play ensures a win. Apart from puzzles, though, this means that the game is solved from the outset; this is where the lack of a human game-master is obvious. Alternatively, they can be hard in the sense that unavoidable deaths can occur. We feel that the latter choice provides much more fun in the long run.


I don't think the problem is the paralysis spell here. The problem is that Rupert can kill players in one turn on entering LoS. Nerfing the entire paralysis spell because of the interaction between paralysis + rupert base damage + berserk seems excessive. A more targeted QoL fix may be possible.

Suggestion: monsters cannot cast spells the first turn they enter LoS. Note this only applies the first time you see a monster, so if you see Rupert, duck behind cover and then he walks back into vision, you may get 1 hit KOed.

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Post Monday, 5th June 2017, 06:03

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

isn't that just an arbitrary excuse for lack of effort and bad design

like proactive defeatism defense mechanism claiming it's impossible to design it in a way that uncontrollable lose states don't occur, when really crawl is a game with a pseudo-RNG and a limited amount of conceivable states and variations with specific unavoidable lose states being something that could easily be determined through playtesting and handled with exceptions by any truly competent designer/programmer, and to not do that is to reduce the game to some sort of inverse slot machine where you play pulling the lever repeatedly until you lose, regardless of skill

even if you take the situation of gutter-rolls putting you into crisis with a string of critical failures, you can use godly wisdom to divine that the machine is not actually capable of consistently producing critical failures by design

what I'm saying is, if this game is gonna be a randomized punitive skinner box that unpredictably punishes me by stealing my time for playing it, then I'm not gonna play it and I'll probably quit after the tournament until paralyse 1st turn instakill doesn't happen anymore, because changing the way I play the entire rest of the game to prevent it would really be unenjoyable and bizarre and spoilery and take an unrealistic amount of time when the game already takes too much time to play.

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Post Monday, 5th June 2017, 12:52

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

It's customary to post a character dump if your complaint relies on a particular death, but it seems pretty clear that this wasn't a case of unavoidable death. Looks like weak build coupled with poor noise management and bad luck.
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Post Monday, 5th June 2017, 13:59

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

And Rupert, who is actually exceptionally dangerous.

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Barkeep

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Post Monday, 5th June 2017, 15:11

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

wait until you meet nikola

More seriously, yeah, there are unavoidable deaths in Crawl, and they're frustrating. Paralysis is really frustrating; IMO this is mainly because it sucks to not have agency while you're losing.

I guess: if it's easy to make Crawl not have unwinnable states, then go ahead and do that. I think it will actually be hard. Even defining the problem is hard — what time scale are you thinking? Should there always be an action a player can take to not die in the next turn? Ten turns out? Should it be possible for any monster to OHKO any character? If so, what are the conditions where it can happen?
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Post Monday, 5th June 2017, 17:11

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

I am against paralysis (the spell) in general, because:

- Paralysis is handled well with catoblepas, in that you have a tactical way to avoid it.
- MR isn't really player-choice dependent, because it can only be increased by level and randomly found items (active choice is restricted to two gods)
- Paralysis-induced instakill sucks. It makes sense in a game with a party that tries to save each other. Without a party, it's just silly.
- All forms of paralysis have the problem of making heavy armour even better, because AC and GDR are better than EV and SH when paralysed. EV actually takes hits by a lot of mechanics (paralysis, petrify, constriction, going downstairs, invisibility, nets, webs, roots...). It sort of is countered by corrosion, but the big difference is that while corrosion is extra-scary, you can still run away from it.

One option would be to make Paralysis give you a damage resistance threshold (like "your magically stoned body can only be damaged for up to 2/3 or 3/4 of your current HP"). Another option that I would like but isn't very straightforward is giving the option of inscribing jewellery to infallibly counter once a certain spell, like paralysis. Once it's countered, your jewel explodes and is destroyed, maybe giving you a lingering aura (10-20 turns) of decreasing resistance against that spell. It's still item dependent, but much less than MR items, and it costs you a choice.
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Post Monday, 5th June 2017, 17:24

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

watertreatmentRL wrote:It's customary to post a character dump if your complaint relies on a particular death, but it seems pretty clear that this wasn't a case of unavoidable death. Looks like weak build coupled with poor noise management and bad luck.


I had good enough defenses, honestly no character is going to have good enough defenses to survive Rupert para-clobbering them by lair. The ttyrec and morgue file is available if you want to dig it out, that's how I found out I actually used fireball. Regardless, the circumstances of this specific death are anecdotal and don't really effect the core of the argument I'm making, and when you make responses with obvious logical fallacies like that it's rather disappointing, considering that I was looking for a real conversation instead.
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Barkeep

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Post Monday, 5th June 2017, 17:40

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

Wait, is the argument you're trying to make "paralysis is an unsatisfying way to die" or "the crawl devs would have an easy time eliminating unavoidable deaths if only they cared to do so"?

I think you'll find general agreement on the first argument. The second argument is silly.
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VeryAngryFelid

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Post Monday, 5th June 2017, 18:14

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

Rupert is a bad monster for paralysis because:
1) it has very high MR (100!) and thus cannot be disabled via wands/Hexes
2) it has high HD (16) and you will need luck to disable it with Meph Cloud. Also high HD means it will have easy time paralysing you.
2) it has very high HP for Lair (123)
3) it has berserk and good damage (36 with battleaxe which becomes 54 while berserking for every attack)
4) it has SInv
5) its berserk is not stopped by silence
All it means you have no choice but to either teleport (if non-Fo and non-Sp) or shaft self (if Fo) (Sp probably can run away as usual) unless you are a summoner and Rupert does not have an axe.
Now compare that to other monsters which have Paralysis and are met later in the game: vampire knight (average HP 70, HD 11, MR 80), Great orb of eyes (HP 66, HD 12, MR 120), Sphinx (HP 86, HD 16, MR 60), Ogre mage (HP 55, HD 10, MR 80).

Edit. Grinder is bad too of course
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bel

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Post Monday, 5th June 2017, 19:05

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

I have never understood why Rupert exists. Given that he exists, it's perhaps better to give him Petrify instead of Paralyse. One meaning of "petrify" is "make someone freeze due to fear", which seems thematically appropriate.

It would be nice if all instances of Paralyse were replaced by Petrify, but perhaps that's not gonna happen.

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VeryAngryFelid

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Post Monday, 5th June 2017, 22:26

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

I don't understand why any of the uniques exist, Rupert doesn't seem any worse than the rest.

There are two good hostile status effects in the game and they are paralysis and slow. Petrify, fear, mesm, weak, sap, corr, flay, poison, sticky flame, constrict, etc. are all too weak to be impactful and their only effect is to annoy you and force you to either play slower or die (and make the game harder to learn). Some of them like sleep, confuse, flash freeze, roots, and petrify are direct variants of paralysis or slow with inferior design.

Of the two, paralysis is much easier to use since slow is only good when there are no easy escape options nearby like stairs - it's mostly suited for early dungeon and not very good later (maybe it could work ok in Abyss, but Abyss is a bad branch in the first place so what does it matter). That's why paralysis is such a common monster spell. I don't think it's on too many monsters; if anything, it should be added to more monsters to replace worse status spells like petrify.

The main problems with paralysis (and slow for that matter) are that autoexplore handles corners and doors wrong, and that it is resistible by MR. The latter is trivially fixable. The former is a little harder to fix, but it's certainly possible.
Multi-book monsters are also bad but that's not the fault of paralysis. If ogre magi all had the paralysis book and didn't come with harmless spam packs, they wouldn't be so annoying. I do think paralyse - like any other status effect - is pointless on monsters that are easy to avoid, like uniques or great orbs of eyes or floating eyes, or can't back it up with significant damage, like great orbs of eyes or floating eyes.

Alternatively, if you got rid of stairs, you could replace paralysis with slow as the standard status effect. That would probably be more interesting and pleasant to play, overall. But as long as you have stairs you're stuck with paralysis. (No, some stupid kludge like making Slow prevent you from using stairs would not work.)
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Post Monday, 5th June 2017, 22:41

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

This is one of the moments when I feel that I'm playing a completely different game than duvessa.
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Post Tuesday, 6th June 2017, 00:32

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

Never walk down a different stair than the first one you used unless you absolutely have to. Rarely you might get screwed but what can you do? You're more likely to die to missing or miscasting against the first adder you meet on D:2
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Lair Larrikin

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Post Tuesday, 6th June 2017, 00:59

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

tabstorm wrote:Never walk down a different stair than the first one you used unless you absolutely have to. Rarely you might get screwed but what can you do? You're more likely to die to missing or miscasting against the first adder you meet on D:2

sure, fine. it's still dumb and spoilery and this situation isn't about staircases it's about first turn paralysis instant kills still being a thing after divinations and stasis amulets were removed.

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Post Tuesday, 6th June 2017, 01:59

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

(Mod edit: removed some quotes)
Anyway I like strong beam-targeted monster attacks but I'd support replacing all paralysis with, say, iron shot.

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Post Tuesday, 6th June 2017, 02:15

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

duvessa has an ability of saying completely ridiculous things with complete confidence, which I can never hope to match.

Unfortunately, they have not said why they consider paralysis to be superior to petrify. If every other status in the game is too weak to exist, then it's rather hard to argue.

In my opinion, petrify is superior to paralyse for the obvious reason that the player has the chance to react, and as a result these kind of threads wouldn't exist.

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Post Tuesday, 6th June 2017, 03:49

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

The ability to react, combined with the damage reduction, makes petrify too weak to actually kill characters bar some kind of extreme error like getting petrified in front of a hydra or Jorgrun with no cancellation (and even then you have a relatively good chance of surviving if you read teleportation). It's also an overcomplicated effect; very few players understand how much time they have before fully petrifying and even fewer understand how the damage reduction works.

Paralysis is much more elegant. You can't cancel it with consumables and your counterplay has to be proactive. Its effect is comparatively simple. (I wouldn't mind it keeping your EV/SH and clarifying the range of its duration, or even giving it the same duration every time).

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Post Tuesday, 6th June 2017, 04:57

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

duvessa wrote:I wouldn't mind it keeping your EV/SH and clarifying the range of its duration, or even giving it the same duration every time


You realize that you're proposing a substantial nerf to Paralysis, right? Having it keep your EV/SH is something like a 2/3 damage reduction for EV-based characters. If you, one of the most experienced (and arguably cynical) players here think that Paralysis can take a 2/3 damage nerf, then it is currently way too damn strong.

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Post Tuesday, 6th June 2017, 05:38

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

It's a large damage nerf for characters that have lots of EV and SH and are around monsters that are highly affected by those stats, yes. That hardly equates to a 2/3 damage nerf to the effect in general; my normal+ size characters rarely have enough EV to dodge 66% of melee attacks, let alone bolts.
That aside, even if it were a 99% damage nerf, you could compensate for it by increasing the duration.

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Post Tuesday, 6th June 2017, 05:58

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

I personally like the idea of paralysis cutting your defenses in half for the duration

or better yet, what if it just totally removed the skill bonus you get to AC/EV/SH, so it would only be the basic defense value and enchantment that's left to protect you.

I also like the idea of stun spell that does what paralysis does for a single turn instead of ? turns, because then you could make stun far, far more frequent and put it in places like snake pit, so that you could get stunned, then a guardian serpent would blink enemies to surround you, and any further stunning would subject you to an 8 monster gangbang for one turn

if you had to walk around hell constantly losing your defenses and having to endure full casting penalties for armor (except for the factor of your strength of course,) because of paralysis that would be fun wouldn't it

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Post Tuesday, 6th June 2017, 06:29

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

duvessa wrote:I don't understand why any of the uniques exist, Rupert doesn't seem any worse than the rest.


They exist to make game more interesting. They are allowed to be much stronger than other monsters and often require a consumable or two, also you can avoid them if you don't have those consumables.
Examples: Nikola is deadly without rElec so you either quaff a potion of resistance or carefully avoid it. You would not be able to do it if there were multiple "Nikolas" on every floor. Mennas requires haste potion and arguably something like sack of spiders. Again unacceptable to have several "Menasses" on every floor. Jorgrun requires potion of invisibility and/or flight etc. Rupert/Erolcha require a scroll of blinking and skipping the level etc.

There are two good hostile status effects in the game and they are paralysis and slow. Petrify, fear, mesm, weak, sap, corr, flay, poison, sticky flame, constrict, etc. are all too weak to be impactful and their only effect is to annoy you and force you to either play slower or die (and make the game harder to learn). Some of them like sleep, confuse, flash freeze, roots, and petrify are direct variants of paralysis or slow with inferior design.


What is so good about slow? You still keep your defenses, you still can miss 5 turns in a row without being slow, assuming 0.7 weapon attack that's basically a 3.5 turns "paralysis" or 7.5 turns "slow".
Let's have a typical fight - you are fighting in a corridor and there are other monsters behind the one you are fighting. What are good effects here?
Flayed Ghost? Great, you need invisibility or fog. Even after teleportation you will have your HP reduced.
Tormentor? Great, again you need invisibility or fog.
Mesm? I don't remember if it requires line of fire, but assuming it's not it is a good effect because you cannot just run away if you overestimated your defense and are standing adjacent to a heavy melee monster.
Now compare to current paralysis. You still ignore that monster as long as it does not have LoF, you have all the time in the world to kill it with wands of fire/acid, bolt spells, javelins of penetration, lamp of fire, airstrike or even cheap summons like sack of spider or lightning bolt. And even if it is adjacent to you, you still keep your AC so most likely it does not kill you.
The main problems with paralysis (and slow for that matter) are that autoexplore handles corners and doors wrong, and that it is resistible by MR. The latter is trivially fixable. The former is a little harder to fix, but it's certainly possible.
Multi-book monsters are also bad but that's not the fault of paralysis. If ogre magi all had the paralysis book and didn't come with harmless spam packs, they wouldn't be so annoying. I do think paralyse - like any other status effect - is pointless on monsters that are easy to avoid, like uniques or great orbs of eyes or floating eyes, or can't back it up with significant damage, like great orbs of eyes or floating eyes.


Later ITT you wrote that the spell is great because it is proactive. How are you suggesting to make it ignore MR then??? So it will depend on LoF only? LoF management is boring and repetitive, you do it all the game vs those yaktaur captains, stone giants and alike. Also it is boring to check every turn if a specific monster with paralyse has a line of fire at you (it is not obvious for some players like me).

Also later you suggested to keep EV/SH? Why? Currently heavy armour characters laugh at paralysis (I provided an example in another paralysis thread recently), being paralysed 7+ times means nothing when you have huge AC. Either keep it the way it is (so players can choose to switch to heavy armour to proactively react to branches with many paralyzers) or reduce AC to 0 too. With your suggestion many Sp's and Fe's will laugh at paralysis too.
Last edited by VeryAngryFelid on Tuesday, 6th June 2017, 06:38, edited 1 time in total.
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Post Tuesday, 6th June 2017, 06:37

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

duvessa wrote:That aside, even if it were a 99% damage nerf, you could compensate for it by increasing the duration.


Currently you have choice and can become a glass-cannon who kills monsters faster than they kill you. With these changes everyone will want as much defense as possible. Heavy armour buff again of course, what's the point of having multiple spells if you skip 10+ turns anyway and can do nothing about it because MR is ignored. I am happy that devs changed the way Floating Eyes work, let's not go in the opposite direction.
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bel

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Post Tuesday, 6th June 2017, 06:42

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

In duvessa's post, the line of reasoning, as I understand it, is that only effects which can directly kill you are good enough. This leads to the silly conclusion that almost all status effects are meaningless. It also leads to the silly conclusion that everything after Lair (or D:3 maybe) is meaningless. Most players, including good players, do not play that way, for good reason. It's like comparing a world championship chess game (which is timed) with a chess game without time limits. Of course the latter can theoretically allow all possible calculations, but that is not the game which people play.

As I said in another thread, one way to think about things meaningfully is if we do not treat "winrate" as the thing to optimize. If the only thing that matters is winning, then a very large number of things are meaningless because you can screw up in many ways and still win, because there is lots of XP and there are more than enough consumables. One can also rest to full everytime, stay near stairs, lure everything 1 on 1 and so on.

It's better to look at some measure of skill, instead of a binary measure. There is no universal method; score is rather bad at measuring skill. For instance, a 13k turn 3-rune win scores much less than a 80k turn 15-rune win. One could come up with better scoring methods. Conducts (faster wins, lower XL, challenge races or gods, score) etc. are another way.

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Post Tuesday, 6th June 2017, 06:48

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

Sorry, I still don't see how slow is more dangerous than flay for living characters or confusion for mummy. Slow does not deal any damage and allows to use scroll of blinking, right?
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Post Tuesday, 6th June 2017, 06:58

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

Oh, finally I've just taken my time to check OP morgue file.

  Code:
 17400 | Lair:5   | Noticed Rupert
 17400 | Lair:5   | Paralysed by Rupert for 7 turns
 17403 | Lair:5   | HP: 2/75 [Rupert/great mace of crushing (7)]
 17403 | Lair:5   | Demolished by Rupert


That's from full HP. I don't see how one can say that paralysis is good, proactive or needs increased duration.
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Post Tuesday, 6th June 2017, 17:14

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

Seems like there are two key points here:

1. Paralysis is good, because it can pose a real danger to any character.

Makes sense - whether you're a low-level character who found some good items, or even an overpowered character in, say, Pan, you can be put in real danger by paralysis. Though admittedly, for the latter it's usually just the irresistible giant eyeball paralysis. The inability to fight back and reduced defenses once it's taken effect means that the player is vulnerable in a way that their accumulated consumables can't protect them from. This means that the player must be cautious around those who can induce paralysis (the same way the player should be cautious around monsters who can do things like torment, or cast LCS). And if it's not avoided, the player may die, or have to pull a near-death character out of a situation that they'd normally never have allowed to happen.

2. Paralysis is bad, because it can cause an unavoidable death.

Also makes sense - challenge is good, danger is good, but unavoidable deaths are generally not a good thing. And being paralyzed prevents fighting back, and can lead to the unsatisfying, helpless "wait and watch yourself die" scenario. This makes early paralyzers an undesirable resistance-check, particularly since early paralyzers like Rupert are not only able to paralyze you the instant they come into sight, but also potentially powerful enough to kill you unaided.

Simple suggestion:

Rather than weakening the effects of paralysis (rendering it much less dangerous), or removing it from early monsters, simply take a leaf from the giant eyeball paralysis. Make it a two-turn ability, and bump up the amount of MR needed to ignore it. Players can fog, blink, teleport, cast, even run out of sight to prevent it hitting, but if they stick around to fight, it can hit them as hard as ever. This keeps it dangerous - and relevant longer, due to the higher MR needed to completely ignore it - but prevents the gear-check unavoidable death.

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Post Tuesday, 6th June 2017, 18:02

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

Shtopit wrote:- MR isn't really player-choice dependent, because it can only be increased by level and randomly found items (active choice is restricted to two gods)

Help me out here, I'm feeling stupid. Trog and who?
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Post Tuesday, 6th June 2017, 18:03

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

It strikes me as obviously true that status effects other than paralyze and arguably slow are too weak and/or too complex to have a strong enough impact to be worth inclusion in the game, where greater complexity bids up the necessary impact. Anything that can be stopped by a potion that you get like 30 of in a typical game cannot be taken seriously in my opinion. The same can be said of statuses that can be addressed easily by teleportation or stairs, like flay, mesm, and some others. The game just dumps so much stuff on you that totally solve these status situations.

Mark is an example of a status that almost works. The concept is pretty simple and it can lead to unusual gameplay. The problem is stairs just totally break it. If Mark closed off stairs and prevented teleportation, you might have something. Then you'd get complaints about how it led to an "unavoidable death," which would show it works.

edit: Trog and Ru.
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Post Tuesday, 6th June 2017, 18:29

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

watertreatmentRL wrote:It strikes me as obviously true that status effects other than paralyze and arguably slow are too weak and/or too complex to have a strong enough impact to be worth inclusion in the game, where greater complexity bids up the necessary impact. Anything that can be stopped by a potion that you get like 30 of in a typical game cannot be taken seriously in my opinion. The same can be said of statuses that can be addressed easily by teleportation or stairs, like flay, mesm, and some others. The game just dumps so much stuff on you that totally solve these status situations.

Mark is an example of a status that almost works. The concept is pretty simple and it can lead to unusual gameplay. The problem is stairs just totally break it. If Mark closed off stairs and prevented teleportation, you might have something. Then you'd get complaints about how it lead to an "unavoidable death," which would show it works.

edit: Trog and Ru.

I think you're looking at this from the wrong side, anything that forces you to use a consumable (and is potentially lethal if you don't have one) works as a status effect, if the consumable is to common, then there's just plain too many of that (those) consumables, and it's generation needs to be reduced (or perhaps the locations where it can generate need to be altered). I think that, ideally, you'd generate just enough consumables that with really good play, you'd have just enough to get you through every encounter that requires one, presuming you avoid using one where you didn't actually need it.

Also it's ok for some status effects to have an impact in one part of the game and not others, it's ok for status effect A to be a problem early, and for you to "solve" it only to be subjected to new status effect B, status effects can become non-threats just like monsters, if the problem is that A gets solved early, and we still see A late in the game, the problem is that *we keep putting a status effect that gets solved early on higher level monsters* Not that the status effect itself is bad.

I think the removal of the yellow wands (particularly teleport and haste) is a good step in balancing consumable generation against consumable need, and I think now that those particularly egregious cases are gone, we have the capacity to balance the generation more directly and in a more nuanced way.

Your argument appears to be "If the status effect doesn't have a direct and obvious chance of killing you, then it doesn't work" but can't the same be said of all things in the game, "Damage doesn't work, because monsters can't kill you in one shot, and it's totally solved by having AC, and even if you do get into dangerous territory HP wise, it's solved by healing or teleport" is more or less the same argument.

One of the things that *does* make a difference is attrition, attrition of your consumables, of your HP, of your MP, of your Piety, if you run out of something you need to survive then you die, that doesn't mean that things that do damage to your consumable numbers don't work if they don't kill you right away, it probably just means we generate too many consumables.
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Post Tuesday, 6th June 2017, 18:53

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

VeryAngryFelid wrote:Flayed Ghost? Great, you need invisibility or fog. Even after teleportation you will have your HP reduced.
Or you just murder it or retreat until flay wears off
VeryAngryFelid wrote:Tormentor? Great, again you need invisibility or fog.
Or go around a corner and let it come to you, which is often possible, or just demolish it very quickly from range

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Post Tuesday, 6th June 2017, 19:00

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

Sprucery wrote:This is one of the moments when I feel that I'm playing a completely different game than duvessa.

Duvessa plays crawl like a puzzle game. It has a solution, you have to find it. If the puzzle comes presolved, it's not only boring, it doesn't even qualify as a game. Most players treat it more as an RPG, an experience, and want our precious little characters to win.

I'm not a huge fan of paralysis, but I think you could solve most of the problems by giving it a more fixed range on duration. I think it's currently 2-7 turns? Why not just make that 3-4 turns? The high end, 7 turn paralysis is a bit too much. 2-3 turns is enough for rupert to completely kill you, so this could still happen, but it'll give you at least some chance of waking up before you die...

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Post Tuesday, 6th June 2017, 19:00

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

Shard1697 wrote:
VeryAngryFelid wrote:Flayed Ghost? Great, you need invisibility or fog. Even after teleportation you will have your HP reduced.
Or you just murder it or retreat until flay wears off
VeryAngryFelid wrote:Tormentor? Great, again you need invisibility or fog.
Or go around a corner and let it come to you, which is often possible, or just demolish it very quickly from range

All I heard here was "use statue form".

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Post Tuesday, 6th June 2017, 19:34

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

VeryAngryFelid wrote:Later ITT you wrote that the spell is great because it is proactive. How are you suggesting to make it ignore MR then??? So it will depend on LoF only? LoF management is boring and repetitive, you do it all the game vs those yaktaur captains, stone giants and alike. Also it is boring to check every turn if a specific monster with paralyse has a line of fire at you (it is not obvious for some players like me).
If paralysis instantly killed you or banished you then it would only depend on LoF. But it doesn't do that. How bad it is to get paralysed depends on your positioning and nearby monsters. Getting paralysed by an adjacent Rupert is much worse than getting paralysed by a Rupert at the edge of LoS.
VeryAngryFelid wrote:Also later you suggested to keep EV/SH? Why? Currently heavy armour characters laugh at paralysis (I provided an example in another paralysis thread recently), being paralysed 7+ times means nothing when you have huge AC. Either keep it the way it is (so players can choose to switch to heavy armour to proactively react to branches with many paralyzers) or reduce AC to 0 too. With your suggestion many Sp's and Fe's will laugh at paralysis too.
I suggest it to simplify paralysis. Fewer effects is better. If Crawl characters' defenses are so good that they laugh at losing 5 actions regardless of where they are, then Crawl combat favours the player character by too much, and that's a problem that needs to be addressed regardless of paralysis.

Slow is a good effect because it's simple, has a significant effect on combat, and it does something to stop you from just walking away from it. Being able to trivially walk away is why entropic weave falls flat on its face, for example. I acknowledged that slow becomes too weak after the early game, mostly due to stairs.


edit: I can't speak for anyone else, but as both a designer and as a player, I don't want an attrition-based Crawl. If I make a fatal mistake I want it to kill me within a minute, not kill me 2 hours later. That's why I keep railing against consumables.

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Post Tuesday, 6th June 2017, 20:12

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

I hear so often that such and such is "ok" around here. I'm not interested in what is "ok." Is that how these things are discussed by devs? "That sounds ok let's put it in"? I doubt it.

Yeah, you can have a lot of status effects that basically don't do anything most of the time and you can point to the long RPG tradition of having pointless status effects and say "that's ok." My standard is not what's "ok." I think it is good to have few status effects that work across different contexts within the game, that have straightforward rules, and that have a consistent, interesting impact. I reject any claim that there is intrinsic value in having complex or numerous effects and especially any claim along those lines that privileges existing effects just because they're there already.

About "attrition," dcss is not even close to making attrition a factor and I don't believe for a single second that there is any appetite to change that. Agree attrition is not a worthy design goal.
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Post Tuesday, 6th June 2017, 21:26

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

Nerfing paralysis seems pretty obvious - I mean, the strategic fun value of hitting spacebar until you die is not much.

If you nerf it in some general way, you might even UN-nerf the "you shrug off the repeated paralysis" bit. I mean, why allow monsters one sucker punch that can kill you, then disallow the punch when you had a choice whether to take it or not?

One way to nerf it is just to make it shorter. Cut the duration in half, see how that works out.

Another way is to allow SOME actions while paralyzed. In Nethack you're able to read scrolls while blind - they say "as you pronounce the formula on it, the scroll disappears". The same flavor might allow a paralyzed character to grate out the words on a scroll of teleport and GTFO. Or speak an invocation to his god.

Or you could add some anti-paralysis items. I'm not thinking so much stuff that permanently opposes it as things that give you immunity to ONE sucker punch. Like:

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Post Tuesday, 6th June 2017, 21:35

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

watertreatmentRL wrote:I hear so often that such and such is "ok" around here. I'm not interested in what is "ok." Is that how these things are discussed by devs? "That sounds ok let's put it in"? I doubt it.

Yeah, you can have a lot of status effects that basically don't do anything most of the time and you can point to the long RPG tradition of having pointless status effects and say "that's ok." My standard is not what's "ok." I think it is good to have few status effects that work across different contexts within the game, that have straightforward rules, and that have a consistent, interesting impact. I reject any claim that there is intrinsic value in having complex or numerous effects and especially any claim along those lines that privileges existing effects just because they're there already.

About "attrition," dcss is not even close to making attrition a factor and I don't believe for a single second that there is any appetite to change that. Agree attrition is not a worthy design goal.


When I say something is "ok" i mean "meets or exceeds acceptable criteria" You seem to be taking it to mean something like "isn't the best but it will have to do" or maybe "doesn't quite meet my standards" or something

If you think everything in crawl is below your standards, why would you be playing it, why would you not go create something entirely new that isn't "burdened" by features you don't like and don't want?

I think only having one or two specific status effects with a very limited and specific set of solutions sounds horrible and boring. One of the things that i think crawl does best is give you lots of ways out of sticky situations, so you don't always have one solution to every problem even the same problem might be b handled differently depending on what you have found, if there is only one problem and only one solution to that problem, that game gets tedious really really fast for me.

--

When i say attrition i mean *anything that does not kill you right now but might later* get hit for 1/3 your hps? That is hp attrition, it is *very short term* compared to "i had to use one of my 3 teleport scroll to avoid death, i might run out before i 'heal' my scroll supply back up"

If something lowers a number, and having that number at 0 can end your game, and that number increases over time (possibly to some maximum), i am calling that attrition.

I am not sure if you object to any sort of attrition or only those types with a longer time frame.
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Post Tuesday, 6th June 2017, 22:31

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

MainiacJoe wrote:
Shtopit wrote:- MR isn't really player-choice dependent, because it can only be increased by level and randomly found items (active choice is restricted to two gods)

Help me out here, I'm feeling stupid. Trog and who?

watertreatmentRL wrote:edit: Trog and Ru.


I was thinking Trog and Dithmenos. Trog's Hand (70 MR bonus) and Dithmenos's Shadow Form (immunity to hostile enchantments). Shadow Form goes beyond making you MR immune, because also stops malmutate and stuff that normally bypasses MR.

Ru gives you the chance to lower your MR, right? Not to pump it up.
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Post Tuesday, 6th June 2017, 23:03

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

@Siegurt: Well, you can say you meant something else all day. That's not worth arguing about.

As for my standards as compared to what appear to be your standards, I would turn that around: Why not just capitulate to my point of view? After all, if my perspective were ultimately to gain the upper hand, you would still have old versions to play with.
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Post Tuesday, 6th June 2017, 23:36

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

As a designer your job is not to create the game that you want to play. If that were the case you might as well modify it on your own and play your own fork and quit the forum because you contribute nothing.

To suggest that roguelikes are not games of attrition is absurd. The core of roguelike gameplay is having a pool of available actions to take and those actions having some sort of opportunity cost and consequences. Everything you do draws upon pooled numerical values that constantly oscillate and the full expenditure of which may result in your demise. It doesn't matter if the thing that's consumed is health or magic or consumables or time itself, it's absolutely a battle of attrition where your goal is that the enemy runs out of their absolute resources before you do, and controlling all the values you accumulate is at the heart of the game's long term strategy and immediate tactical environment.

Anything that disrupts your control over those values and forces you to burn the non-renewable resources or invent a tactical response to avoid doing so is a potentially good design element, and the only way to determine whether it is or not is actually testing it and measuring the response of the persons the game is designed for. These philosophical arguments are ultimately a waste of time and energy, and the more pragmatic solution of scientifically observing and measuring the response from players is infinitely more relevant than the designer's personal opinions.

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Post Tuesday, 6th June 2017, 23:51

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

There is a fork that embodies many of the standards and positions I promote here. There is value in developing those standards and positions, which is why I post. It's dialectical.

The older roguelike games I have played the most are characterized more by scumming and theoretically unlimited resources than by "attrition," so I don't see the argument you make here. In any case, there's nothing sacred about older games. Most of them are quite backwards, make a very poor point of comparison for crawl, and don't point a way forward except perhaps in their relation to more recent, cleaner stuff that's come along.

If we scientifically measured response from players, crawl would be a minecraft clone.
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Post Wednesday, 7th June 2017, 00:01

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

watertreatmentRL wrote:@Siegurt: Well, you can say you meant something else all day. That's not worth arguing about.

As for my standards as compared to what appear to be your standards, I would turn that around: Why not just capitulate to my point of view? After all, if my perspective were ultimately to gain the upper hand, you would still have old versions to play with.


Well, I had just assumed everyone would interpret me the way I meant to be interpreted, It appeared that my assumption about how people would interpret my statements was wrong, so I was clarifying.

There' is no "upper hand" to be gained, if two sides can't agree in an open source project, they just fork their own code and go their own way, there's not a "winner". I don't capitulate to your point of view because I think it's wrong, and I'm glad to try to convince others of my point and try to get work done towards what *I* think is a good idea. Of course you are welcome to try to do the same with your point of view and really we're both spouting ideals into the internet with almost no chance of anyone really caring what either one of us think, but to the extent that some devs read this stuff and may or may not be influenced, yes of course I want them to be convinced to work towards a game I would more enjoy playing over one that sounds less fun to me.

The point was if *everything* is really wrong with crawl, wouldn't it be easier to start over than try to adapt something that's not remotely close to your vision? I'm just *guessing* that there's stuff that's *not* wrong about crawl, or you wouldn't play it or spend any time posting on internet forums about it. I'd really like to know what you think crawl does right, as I find it easier to find a middle ground when I know what points I actually agree with someone on. I just assume that there's probably parts of crawl that we both think are good, and probably parts we both think aren't good.
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Post Wednesday, 7th June 2017, 01:48

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

watertreatmentRL wrote:If we scientifically measured response from players, crawl would be a minecraft clone.

Does your low opinion of crawl players translate into an even lower opinion of yourself, or does this come from a place of narcissism instead

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Post Wednesday, 7th June 2017, 04:47

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

duvessa wrote:edit: I can't speak for anyone else, but as both a designer and as a player, I don't want an attrition-based Crawl. If I make a fatal mistake I want it to kill me within a minute, not kill me 2 hours later. That's why I keep railing against consumables.

This is a strange argument. Whether you die 2 hours later or not depends on what you do in those 2 hours and the RNG. If there was no chance (or very little chance, depending on whatever threshold you can bear) of surviving after 2 hours, then you just type ctrl-Q at the start.

This kind of thing is done all the time in speedrunning. When one realizes that the record one is aiming for is out of reach, one just types ctrl-Q.

Consumables create options. If one thinks that there are too many of them, one can simply type ">". It will increase your score and decrease the consumables you get.
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Post Wednesday, 7th June 2017, 06:34

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

VeronicaDemononica wrote:As a designer your job is not to create the game that you want to play. If that were the case you might as well modify it on your own and play your own fork and quit the forum because you contribute nothing.
DCSS's developers are not beholden to DCSS players.

...philosophical arguments are ultimately a waste of time and energy, and the more pragmatic solution of scientifically observing and measuring the response from players is infinitely more relevant than the designer's personal opinions.

You're missing the point. Crawl's philosophy isn't an argument. It's a development principle. It's a principle you dislike, but that doesn't make it "wrong".

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Post Wednesday, 7th June 2017, 06:35

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

I have mixed feelings about "you are going to die in 2 hours". Sure, it's frustrating to play those, feeling underpowered for every floor you have access to, trying different branches and still almost dying everywhere. But if you are lucky to win, those games become very satisfying: you struggled all game and still won despite odds were not in your favor. Of course it should be some hard combo with bad loot, not MiBe.
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Post Wednesday, 7th June 2017, 06:49

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

duvessa wrote:If paralysis instantly killed you or banished you then it would only depend on LoF. But it doesn't do that. How bad it is to get paralysed depends on your positioning and nearby monsters. Getting paralysed by an adjacent Rupert is much worse than getting paralysed by a Rupert at the edge of LoS.


Do you suggest to make paralyse uncastable at close range so it can work only at range 3-5? My understanding is that player should be able to kill ANY monster with paralyse in one on one fight unless it is Ancient/ordinary Lich, otherwise it's just a gamble (even 10% chance to die in 1 on 1 fight where player can do nothing about it should not have place in crawl IMHO)

VeryAngryFelid wrote:I suggest it to simplify paralysis. Fewer effects is better. If Crawl characters' defenses are so good that they laugh at losing 5 actions regardless of where they are, then Crawl combat favours the player character by too much, and that's a problem that needs to be addressed regardless of paralysis.


I agree then. Let's reduce AC to 0 while paralyzed and see what happens. It should trigger some changes from devs hopefully.

Slow is a good effect because it's simple, has a significant effect on combat, and it does something to stop you from just walking away from it. Being able to trivially walk away is why entropic weave falls flat on its face, for example. I acknowledged that slow becomes too weak after the early game, mostly due to stairs.


Entropic weave is a bad example IMHO, it comes with fast spiders and it often makes me teleport away while already having low AC/damage due to teleport delay and corr. I agree that slow is a good effect but it does not prove that we should remove flay or corr. Fo does not care about slow, DD of Makhleb with vampiric axe does not care about slow, character with Tornado does not care about slow etc.

edit: I can't speak for anyone else, but as both a designer and as a player, I don't want an attrition-based Crawl. If I make a fatal mistake I want it to kill me within a minute, not kill me 2 hours later. That's why I keep railing against consumables.


It is not that simple. I had multiple games where I was thinking I would die soon and yet won them. And reverse situations happen too: you think you will easily win and then you get paralyzed n Zot 5 despite MR+++++ and die (not my experience but I saw such morgue).
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Post Wednesday, 7th June 2017, 07:01

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

i'm torn, in that i don't like getting paralyzed, but i do like reading complaints from players who are mad at dying...

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Post Wednesday, 7th June 2017, 07:46

Re: This paralysis stuff is getting pretty stupid

VeryAngryFelid wrote:I have mixed feelings about "you are going to die in 2 hours". Sure, it's frustrating to play those, feeling underpowered for every floor you have access to, trying different branches and still almost dying everywhere. But if you are lucky to win, those games become very satisfying: you struggled all game and still won despite odds were not in your favor. Of course it should be some hard combo with bad loot, not MiBe.

Those games are the best. I felt quite vulnerable with my HaAM of Zin in Lair rune branches, for example, and I was not at all sure that I would win that one. It felt all the better when I did.

About paralysis and other bad status effects: I think Crawl is in a pretty good place right now. The only thing I'd change is Pan lords chaos-branded melee paralysis. But I'd say even that would be ok is the chaos brand was shown with xv (currently it's not, right?).
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