TheMeInTeam: I feel that you do not understand what I would like to say. It is very likely that I cannot explain myself clearly - sorry for that.
TheMeInTeam wrote: You can't actually solve for what you're saying with pure RNG though. You'd need new mechanics. Those can reasonably have RNG within them to consider, but they need agency or you necessarily lower the floor and the ceiling simultaneously.
I never talked about "pure RNG", whatever it supposed to mean. I specifically tried to explain that the aim is not to lower the win rate in arbitrary ways. I think it is a price that we should pay to reach our goal, so that if a mechanics lowers the win rate, that is NOT a problem in itself. In fact, that is an indicator that it COULD be a good mechanic. Since if it does NOT lowers the winrate, than most likely there is no challenge involved. That's why I think that the perceived problem of "shafts makes the game harder" is false: even if it is true it would NOT be a problem. The problem would be if shafts would never create interesting situations.
In other words: increasing difficulty (lowering win rate) is not a problem, and "but lowering it to 0% would be a problem" is not a counterargument. Nobody wants to do that, and everybody agrees I think that shafts are very, very, very far from achieving that.
TheMeInTeam wrote: Also, for any element of complexity added to the game, it will impact new players more than experts. The latter understand mechanics better.
I agree with it. I merely wanted to emphasize that I have no problem with designing challenges that are survivable with some luck, to give a hand to beginners. Also that's why I emphasized to create challenges on top of simple, transparent rules! So I argue anainst some internal state for shaft generation, for example.
TheMeInTeam wrote:They are *extremely* rare. I know people can get them, but for example in 565 games I've never encountered bees quite as early as D:2. Maybe it MIGHT have happened on one of my D:1 deaths, but this is a ~.5% chance or less. Even if bees kill you 60% of the time they're encountered on D:2, we're talking about a scenario less likely than the jackal pack caster death.
But that's disingenuous. In my hypothetical they're going to be there every time, and if players know that it WILL change what they pick.
I did not understand what your hypothetical example about bees always appearing on D2 has to do with anything. Nobody seems to claim that shafts kill you almost every game. We addressed the supposed problem that shafts might kill you. I argued that this is not a problem. I brought up that D2 might kill you with generating killer bees, and that I also do not see it as a problem. Both situations are so rare that it is mostly hypothetical (even if happened in some actual game), both has countermeasures just not 100% sure.
Now if in a very large number of games shafts would drop you in the middle of OOD monsters, or if D2 had killer bees every time, it would be a problem. But we did not talk about these situations.
Maybe I should have expressed myself more clearly with my bad analogy:
shafts = D2
very bad situation after a shaft = D2 generates killer bees for you.
Shafts are usually easily survivable and D2 is usually easily survivable. Very bad shafts may happen that could be very hard to survive. D2 bees may happen that could be very hard to survive. Both are very rare though, and you still have countermeasures to lower your probability of dying, even if in these bad situations it may not be close to 0 with the best play.
TheMeInTeam wrote:sanka wrote:I think those races/classes that are more likely to survive a D2 bee are laregely coincede with those that have a good chance to survive a bad shaft.
What brings you to this conclusion? Only a couple species/backgrounds can kill or escape bees, almost anything can live a shaft.
I hope that it will be more clear with my clarification above about how I meant this. I suspect that combos that have a good chance to survive D2 killer bees are largely overlap with those that have a good chance to survive a very bad landing after a shaft (not just survive any general shaft). Of course it simply means that these combos has a greater chance to survive any D2 and any shaft overall (even if in general D2 or shafts are not lethal, so the chance is big for bad combos as well).
TheMeInTeam wrote: These are not fair comps. They tend to happen thousands of times per game, enough for most common statistical scenarios to happen and wash out. You can also react to them in the interim (you don't HAVE to miscast 5x, you don't even have to attempt 5 casts). Comparing high frequency of individually low-impact dice rolls to instances where a single RNG check can influence the outcome is not valid. These things force different considerations.
It depends on the fight. Suppose you fight a monster that can kill you in two hits, but has a low chance to hit you. If it hits you once, that is only one roll, yet this one roll changed the outcome probabilities more than a usual shaft.
Similarly: some monster have multiple attacks. If each of them has a low chance to hit you, there is still a non-zero chance that all of them will hit you (before you can react), and from your perspective it is one event (singlre roll) that resulted in a bad position.
My examples may have been misleading (sorry for not being clear) because of course most fights in crawl are not like that, but fights like this still happen fairly often.