The Tavern

xp makes your character get stronger in RPG games

crawlnoob wrote:a lot of careful thought goes into things like exactly how many milliseconds there are between when the player pushes the jump button, and when Mario actually jumps

As far as I know, in every official Mario game it's "a few as the hardware will allow". It doesn't take much thought to understand that adding artificial latency to jumps in a platform game is a terrible idea.

Why are you complaining about mummies and vampires, but not other species? Most characters end up with way more rations than they can handle, what's to stop them from doing this?

EDIT: I also think that the number of people who do this is probably low enough that it's not worth a massive overhaul to fix, especially since even with the ability to engage the monsters that start awake on staircases, mummies and vampires are probably still worse than the generic strong species.

Completionism?

Also, if you can deal with a monster safely, it's better to do it, rather than wait and maybe meet it at a time (running up stairs from something dangerous, or the orb run) when it could cause you problems.

Shtopit wrote:Playing locally, you get to watch the whole trip, although there probably is a setting to have it work like in web.

Adding "explore_delay = X" to "misc.txt" will change the delay to X milliseconds. Setting 0 or -1 seems to make it significantly faster but still doesn't work like in the web version.

Because monsters break autoexplore/autotravel, which is super annoying.

I always feel like discussions like this want to bring the game closer and closer to simply being a randomized sequence of tactical encounters gradually increasing in difficulty. No, I'm not saying nothing should ever be removed, but the "simulationist" aspects of a game should not be discounted out of hand either. In particular, this

mrob wrote:
crawlnoob wrote:a lot of careful thought goes into things like exactly how many milliseconds there are between when the player pushes the jump button, and when Mario actually jumps

As far as I know, in every official Mario game it's "a few as the hardware will allow". It doesn't take much thought to understand that adding artificial latency to jumps in a platform game is a terrible idea.

betrays the attitude that plagues a lot of tavern players. OF COURSE they add artificial latency to jumps*. The character needs to be shown actually, you know, jumping. That means there will be an animation that shows them bending their knees and releasing. That takes a few milliseconds. And crawlnoob is absolutely right that a lot of thought goes into things like that, because ergonomic touches like that make for a more fluid and enjoyable playing experience. For big commercial titles, that means more money. So of course a lot of thought goes into it.

No, Crawl doesn't need to be designed around simluationist elements, but acting like they can just be discarded is a really annoying and off-putting attitude. When mummies could wait around for millions of turns to enter Lair at XL27 (a la the infamous stabwound game), that was a problem. Now, they can wait around for thousands of turns to get, what, a couple percent more experience? I hardly think it's worth destroying a major part of their flavor just for that.

* Evidence if you don't believe me: Jump delays in Super Smash Bros Melee; a frame is 1/60 of a second, so the delays range from 1/20 to 1/10 of a second, with the unfortunate exception of Bowser (Fighting Wire Frames are not playable). Three to six frames is not really considered punishable, as evidenced by the fact that two of the 5-/6-frame jumpers, Falco and Ganondorf, are actually considered to have excellent short-hop fast-falls (a basic attack involving a jump). Point being, those delays are neither there for hardware reasons nor competitive ones. They're there so the characters can have a sensible jumping animation instead of launching off like a weird little rocket.

First of all, most importantly, Ganondorf's SHFFL isn't excellent or even very good.

Jumpsquat is in the Smash games so that you can input the two different jump heights with only one button. Platformers that have a single jump height, or that let you choose your jump height during the jump (e.g. most Mario and Sonic games) rarely have jumpsquat.
Mario Bros, Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, Super Mario Odyssey - none of these games have jumpsquat frames whatsoever.

Many modern online games (including the Smash games after Melee) do have artifical input latency to reduce the perception of lag in online play, however.

Jumpsquat is in the Smash games so that

it is traditional for fighting games to have jump startup frames, and also traditional for platformers to control jump height with button press duration. smash just combines these.

duvessa wrote:1. Mummies and vampires can now spend a virtually unlimited amount of time to wait for monsters to come to them, instead of having to explore the level. In particular, you probably want to start each level by waiting for a very long time so that all the wandering monsters reach your position on the upstairs; once you've dealt with those, clearing the rest of the level's monsters becomes much safer. ("The DoomRL problem")
2. Mummies and vampires can now spend a virtually unlimited amount of time to ensure that they have killed all the monsters on a level. Since monsters can move, there is no guarantee that fully exploring the level has found all the monsters. Therefore, you want to continue wandering the level after "finishing" it to make sure you've killed every single monster, in order to get the most XP and items.
3. Mummies and vampires can now spend a virtually unlimited amount of time waiting on one level for monsters on another level to stop tracking them ("mummystabbing", although they at least do not fall asleep anymore).

Piety decay does not solve this since you don't always have a god. (And even if you do it's probably Gozag because Gozag is brokenly overpowered, and Gozag doesn't have piety decay lol)

You could mostly fix 2. by removing XP rewards and item drops from monsters, but that wouldn't help with the other problems.

Pardon me the GDD-inappropriate argument, but while all of this is true, a better solution is to exercise your judgement and not let an abstract dedication to "optimal behaviour" get in the way of your enjoyment, since enjoyment is (hopefully) why you're playing a videogame in the first place instead of partaking in a useful activity where "optimal behaviour" and the benefits it might bring have actual value.
A.K.A. "the punishment for pudding farming is pudding farming".

duvessa wrote:This has probably come up already in IRC or something but with post-level-generation spawns removed it is absolutely vital for every species to have a clock. Therefore, Mu/Vp need to either be removed or made susceptible to starvation.

What if experience from monster has decay (half-life)?
After 500 monster actions every additional 500 monster actions halves the experience given by the death of it.
Sleeping monster takes no actions.
Applies maybe only when player is on that level.
Is it possible to have a counter for each monster's actions?

asdu wrote:enjoyment is (hopefully) why you're playing a videogame in the first place

For me at least difficulty makes a game fun. Ideally i am forced to use whatever options the game provides me in order to succeed. With a good set of rules "using whatever options the game provides" becomes situational, creative, and skill-testing. A bad set of rules has 'loopholes' or behaviors that trivialize the difficulty of the game and once learned can be abused over and over again without counter. This behavior is scumming, and the game's rules should not accommodate it. For me a game is significantly less fun if scumming is possible and I know that I am gimping myself to an arbitrary and variable degree in order to cut down on the boring repetitive parts of the game.

amaril wrote:
asdu wrote:enjoyment is (hopefully) why you're playing a videogame in the first place
For me at least difficulty makes a game fun. Ideally i am forced to use whatever options the game provides me in order to succeed. With a good set of rules "using whatever options the game provides" becomes situational, creative, and skill-testing. A bad set of rules has 'loopholes' or behaviors that trivialize the difficulty of the game and once learned can be abused over and over again without counter. This behavior is scumming, and the game's rules should not accommodate it. For me a game is significantly less fun if scumming is possible and I know that I am gimping myself to an arbitrary and variable degree in order to cut down on the boring repetitive parts of the game.

I don't think you can eliminate the "tedium vs reward" dynamic from this kind of game without turning it into a different kind of game (do it to Crawl and what you end up with is Desktop Dungeons). It's a matter of how much of it you can tolerate before it bothers you. Personally, I'm fairly sure that almost nothing would change for me if this game lacked a food clock or OOD spawns or anything else meant to prod me forward. I guess my neuroses lie elsewhere.

The Tavern

remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)

Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)

Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)

Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)

Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)

Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)

Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)

Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)

Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)

Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)

Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)

Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)

Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)

Re: remove mummies and vampires (or let them starve)