Vaults Vanquisher
Posts: 454
Joined: Thursday, 1st November 2018, 02:33
Shafts should not be traps
When the player is shafted, the game is imposing a challenge equivalent to going down a multi-floor escape hatch, call it a chute. Make this explicit. Generate some levels with no normal downstairs and only a multi-floor escape hatch so that the player has no choice but to take it. The player may then climb back to the level on which they took the chute to reveal hidden stairs on that level, allowing the usual autotravel mechanics.
Now you might object that sometimes the player would have been shafted before clearing a level and here that would never happen. True, but we can compensate by increasing the average depth of shafting so that the player will be at approximately the same relative disadvantage.
Experience with crawl variants in recent years confirms the devteam position that "shafts are good." Disentangling them from traps, which are bad, would also be good.
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