The Tavern

I'm not too familiar on the rules of monster vs monster attacks, when this happens, or the reason behind how it is now, or if this has been discussed before, so sorry if this is a bad question.

Anyways, i think i would like to see more monster types fight against each other. I think it would lead to more random fun situations and you could use it as an strategic advantage. Maybe you are being chased by a snake, and you lead it to a goblin nest, where the snake start attacking them, causing you to escape or just enjoying the ensuing chaos. Who does not like to see those VS videos on youtube

One idea on how to implement this would be to have each monster type / race would have a certain affinity towards other races, which would affect the likelihood of aggression towards that race when met.

EDIT: I'm aware that confused / frenzied monsters may attack each other, especially as i often play as SpEn, the Discord spell is quite powerful. I'm interested in monster vs monster attacks in their natural state.

The dungeon is a peaceful multicultural environment so everybody is against you unless you control them somehow. I don't remember if berserkered monsters attack whatever is in sight, do confused monsters something similar? Neutral or peaceful beings may attack your enemies if they get in the middle of the fight and harmed by them.

The only game where I recall some conflict like this is in Doom (and DoomRL ofc), which is strategically useful. Maybe some mindless monsters and animals could have this kind of behaviour if harmed by other beings. Would it be interesting to have any racial grudges between dungeon denizens? Even the uniques, some adventurers like you, seem to be in good terms with the inhabitants. It's just you who is the outlaw. Probably a granted conflict like that would add many lines of text and make everything messier.

I don't remember any effect in Crawl like a Nethack "ring of conflict", was ever there some hex spell which could do this? I am not keen on the hex school. If not, maybe a god could add this effect to its repertoire: Xom, Nemelex or Ru seem candidates.

Edit: yes the frenzied monsters attack whatever is in sight regarldless. The Hex 8 level Discord applies frenzy to everybody in sight. As you see, it is a difficult mechanic to get casually. I think there were needles of frenzy, not sure if removed.

Monster vs Monster sounds like a good idea in the abstract, but the reality is that it encourages incredibly tedious behavior, where you're constantly luring difficult monsters towards each other to soften them up. Hell, I could imagine a heavily armored character dragging a bunch of weaker orcs around to use as cannon fodder against passing elven mages. That would just be bad.

The mechanic works well in real-time games (the Thief series had a lot of this), but that's because a) it's immersive in a storytelling manner, which is something that Crawl does not aspire to do and b) there's the real-time threat of random projectiles, etc, something that does not come across well in a turn-based roguelike.

Maybe you could elaborate on why this would lead to tedious behaviour? I can see that if you would use monster vs monster as the ONLY tactic, but i don't think that would be the case, as only SOME monsters would attack each others. I'm not sure either why dragging a bunch of orcs as cannon fodder would be "bad", it sounds fun to me

One problem i can see, if you have a bunch of NPC's running around killing each other, so that when you enter a level, most of the monsters are already dead. Not sure how the AI works, but i would guess they are inactive if you are not on that level and limited to roam a specific area.

I think this would make the dungeon feel more dynamic, but i'm not sure if the developers would like the game to be more like a simulation. I also think it would be fun if the monsters could pickup others monster weapons etc. but that's maybe off topic for this post.

Maybe there could be a portal vault (call it Arena or something) where everybody would attack everybody. A large room with no corridors and a lot of monsters. Preferably monsters with area attacks.

The Bayley could have a small neutral attacking force.

That's what is Beogh for.