Temple Termagant
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Although the central place for design discussion is ##crawl-dev on freenode, some may find it helpful to discuss requests and suggestions here first.
Temple Termagant
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Abyss Ambulator
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Slime Squisher
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Mines Malingerer
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Dungeon Dilettante
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duvessa wrote:God gifts depending on what you're carrying would be terrible, and I think you know it. Arranging your inventory to manipulate god gifts is not something that should be possible.
duvessa wrote:Gods give you weapons when you have 0 weapon skill and that's fine and good, gods giving you ammo when you have 0 weapon skill is fine too.
Barkeep
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Ziggurat Zagger
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Dungeon Master
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Smilin Jack wrote:Does this only apply to god gifts, or should the same logic be applied to scroll acquirement (which I understand is similar to the god gifting algorithm)? Armour acquisition when you only have a 1H melee weapon equipped tends to gift a shield, even if you have zero skill, unless you also equip a shield or 2H weapon beforehand.
I don't necessarily disagree but if there are already mechanics that incentivise inventory manipulation in the game that doesn't seem like a sound basis on which to dismiss this line of thought.
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Zot Zealot
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Implojin wrote:Remove ammo for launchers, please, or at least make it mulch at 100% and goldify it
This is one of those QoL changes that only improves the game; launcher numeric balance should be addressed separately
Slime Squisher
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duvessa wrote:If taken literally, "remove ammo for launchers" would mean that large rocks would stay, since they don't correspond to a launcher.
Zot Zealot
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Implojin wrote: duvessa wrote:
If taken literally, "remove ammo for launchers" would mean that large rocks would stay, since they don't correspond to a launcher.
Yes to all of this post. (My reason for specifying launchers above, was that javelins of penetration actually work.)
Implojin wrote:I would be interested to read any arguments for *keeping* launcher ammo -- I rather suspect its continued existence is owed to oldcrawl inertia and a disinclination to wanting to deal with any rebalancing aftermath. It certainly doesn't make for good gameplay!
Ziggurat Zagger
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Vaults Vanquisher
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Slime Squisher
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Ziggurat Zagger
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tealizard wrote:Targeted ranged abilities are bad, regardless of the flavor they're packaged in. If manual targeting takes more than one keystroke, it's not worth tagging onto a command you'll use thousands of times in a game.
The good thing about magic is that it's easy to justify removal of targeted effects. Since it's magic, it can work however you say it does. Effects and attack patterns whose "target" is determined by the position of the player with respect to monsters and/or chance would be a natural fit and could vastly improve targeted ranged spell effects. (Positional targeting also offers new ways to differentiate direct damage and hex effects.) The interface advantage of melee is its better automation, but the importance of position in melee tactics is what makes it work from a gameplay perspective.
The player has more control of an encounter at greater range, so an arbitrarily targeted ranged effect will make positioning less important and less interesting. The combination of interface hassle and boring positioning accounts for the unpopularity of ranged weapons. It's definitely true that existing proposals, implemented and otherwise, re: ranged weapons tend to focus on the issue of picking up fired ammo over and over, which is just one piece of the problem. I don't know that there's a way to make ranged weapons work that makes sense thematically and in terms of gameplay, but it seems clear to me that the main issues are shared by other forms of ranged attack.
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Ziggurat Zagger
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tealizard wrote:I said why the melee situation is more interesting: The player has less control in a melee range encounter than a longer range one. What does it mean to say you're not sure why someone thinks something when they tell you why they think it?
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Ziggurat Zagger
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tealizard wrote:? ? ?
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Ziggurat Zagger
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tealizard wrote:Well, I mean, I told you my position and you're just refusing to acknowledge it. I don't know what else to say.
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Ziggurat Zagger
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Temple Termagant
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Slime Squisher
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Snake Sneak
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Snake Sneak
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tealizard wrote:The funny thing about this argument is that the vast majority of video games do not have targeting like crawl has, yet in these games people manage to shoot things in ways that are based entirely on the player's position and it's no problem. Weird how crawl has to be exactly the way it is for anyone to want to play it.
Ziggurat Zagger
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tealizard wrote:The funny thing about this argument is that the vast majority of video games do not have targeting like crawl has, yet in these games people manage to shoot things in ways that are based entirely on the player's position and it's no problem. Weird how crawl has to be exactly the way it is for anyone to want to play it.
Snake Sneak
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Vestibule Violator
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Ziggurat Zagger
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tealizard wrote:So I did not say fully randomized targeting, though in fact crawl does have fully randomly targeted effects. I think it's really sad that having posted what I did, I have to say that.
As to my previous post, games that target entirely on the basis of the player's position are the rule more than the exception, going all the way to early examples. The fireball attack in super mario bros. and its sequels has positional targeting. Any shoot 'em up game, going back to space invaders, galaga, galaxian, centipede, and up to recent series like touhou, has position-based targeting. The Legend of Zelda had positional targeting, metroid, first person shooters have positional targeting, side scrolling shooters like the contra series do too, the bomberman series, the list goes on and on. Pretty much any projectile in a fighting game targets implicitly on the basis of position.
It's true that some more recent mouse-driven mmo and mmo-inspired games have targeting based on pointing at things in a way that is sometimes independent of the position of the player, although I would not say this is the rule either. I don't play a lot of games like this, but my impression is that even there a lot of targeting is based on the direction the player is facing, which is position.
The idea that targeting based on position necessarily drains a game of its strategic or tactical content is ridiculous on the face of it.
So then you get to whether there are other roguelike games that have taken my attitude toward targeting, i.e. that it's bad and should be minimized. Not that I know of, but I would not say that roguelike games are an extremely successful model in general or that we should feel constrained to those possibilities evident in other roguelikes. If this direction has not been pursued, though, that to me is all the more reason to consider it.
Swamp Slogger
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Siegurt wrote:2. Most attacks hit the "closest thing" (or a random thing among all the closest options)
...
2. This would technically work, but again, this turns "targeting" keystrokes into "moving around until the thing you want to hit is the one in range" keystrokes, it doesnt' actually remove any tedium, and generates a lot of awkward busywork.
Ziggurat Zagger
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stormdragon wrote:Siegurt wrote:2. Most attacks hit the "closest thing" (or a random thing among all the closest options)
...
2. This would technically work, but again, this turns "targeting" keystrokes into "moving around until the thing you want to hit is the one in range" keystrokes, it doesnt' actually remove any tedium, and generates a lot of awkward busywork.
Are you sure about this? I think most of the time, if one enemy is closer than another, there is no "trivial busywork" you can do to change that, unless you are talking about disengaging the fight entirely. I think how it would play out in practice would be:
A) For popcorn fights (most fights), you spam until everything is dead and don't care about which enemy gets shot first, so the interface is just improved.
B) For threatening fights, the presence of the closer enemy effectively "covers" the farther enemies from your ranged attacks, which can allow weak monsters to be tactically relevant - probably a good thing. You would have to decide whether to simply kill that enemy first, costing you time (and maybe MP) while the threatening enemy gets to act, or maybe use some hex tool to reduce its movement towards you and allow other enemies to overtake it (enslavement would generally be the best as it would instantly remove it from targeting and have it fight on your side, but other things like slow and confuse would help), or of course disengage.
Vaults Vanquisher
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Ziggurat Zagger
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tealizard wrote:It makes no sense to me to call combat movement busywork vs. manipulating the targeter.
Dungeon Master
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tealizard wrote:It's kind of frustrating having an argument where the opposition turns on puns and misreadings. Obviously in what I have posted position is used in the broad sense encompassing all aspects of the player state with respect to the environment and monsters, as opposed to other aspects like player stats, equipment or whatever else. I said as much in previous posts and said specifically that the direction the player is facing is part of their position. Breaking down this distinction which I do not make is pointless.
Ziggurat Zagger
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Slime Squisher
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tealizard wrote:The targeting so beloved by many in this thread does not, in fact, offer a lot of real decisions in actual play -- the situation where clever targeting is used is very much the exception.
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CanOfWorms wrote:I don't agree that the targeting in e.g. first person shooters, 3d legend of zelda games is any different from the crawl targeter; the only difference is in the execution and number of keystrokes required to achieve the same result. consider the game Superhot, which is a first person shooter with the exception that no in-game time passes while you are standing still (so targeting takes no in-game time). This is effectively the same setup as DCSS, so you can't argue that this game has no targeter, so taking this into consideration, I don't see how you can argue that other FPSes do not have a form of targeting (i.e. there is an important distinction to be made about orientation vs position)
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