Monday, 8th October 2018, 15:45 by njvack
I literally can't imagine a case where a character would be casting Shatter in a lab. And then you're not guaranteed to get a lab, or that the lab would spawn this vault, and... no.
The Trog altar with the burning book is (was? Is it still here?) good because you couldn't spend a bunch of time or wasting resources trying to puzzle out how to get the book and then if you did apport the book you get a cute joke. The lab one is less good because there are lots of ways it *could* be solvable (maybe if I wait the lab walls will shift and make an opening, maybe I can tele into it, maybe I can dig it, maybe /disint, maybe... /acid? I've never tried that against translucent stone, maybe Passwall, maybe LRD, maybe Shatter, maybe Passwall/LRD/Shatter after ?brilliance, maybe Corruption, maybe the minotaur can open it for me somehow, maybe it'll open after I kill the the minotaur, maybe some of these things only have a chance of working and trying again would work).
The only things that limit a player bashing their heads against this kind of unsolvable puzzle are food, wall clock patience, and willingness to spend consumables — and remember that there are precedents for most of these mechanics somewhere in Crawl.
If power creep is not a worry, make the walls destructible/passable like regular rock. If power creep *is* a worry, stop generating these kinds of situations, find a way of signposting "there is no way to obtain these items" to the player, or have the items destroyed after a short time so players don't spend time & resources fruitlessly.
I'm not against flavor; I like it. But it's important to clearly mark what things you can interact with in the game because there are so many potential ways to interact in Crawl.
I am not a very good player. My mouth is a foul pit of LIES. KNOW THIS.
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- duvessa, PlatinumSpider, Tumalu