The Tavern

EPIPHANY

Stairs could be themed to the Rune branch.

I want Rune Branches to feel different from the rest of the game.

PS
I have only ever beaten this game once as a Vine Stalker, after 500 hours of playing.

Could you explain your idea in more detail?

Are you proposing a mechanical change to the way stairs work in rune branches? Do you just want the staircase tiles to look different?

If you are proposing a mechanical change, how, exactly, do you want it to work? How do you think the game would be improved with your changes?


(Threads in GDD are intended for discussion of concrete changes to the game. If you have a less-developed idea, CYC is usually the place to put it.)

Well I have ideas for stairs but I don't want to be too persuasive. I am not proposing a mechanical change to the stairs. The stair tiles would have to look different because they would have an interesting side effect after you use them. The game would be improved because the stairs would be more exciting and memorable.

Okay, what kind of side effects do you think would be exciting?

In the Vault Rune branch, replace the stairs with one tiled size elevators. When an elevator goes up or down a level, steam could appear around the tile.

In mechanical terms, how would this be different to the current behaviour?

It would look different

Also, small amounts of damage would be taken due to the steam.

Could be fun for V:5 - effectively a scroll of fog as you enter a level. Possibly OP though.

Also, also, maybe taking an elevator could take lots of turns, so by the time you arrive, you could be hungry and have healed a lot. This is just one of the stair cases in a rune branch. The possibilities are huge

I like to think that if you stair dance a monster up/down with you, that you'd have missed a fight and by the time you get to the destination floor your character is missing 40hp but the monster corpses are spread around the stairs randomly. Would be kind of cruel to have the monster win the fight while you were in transit though

FR: Replace down/up stairs in The Snake Pit with snakes and ladders

IMHO that if we introduce mechanical changes to this, good and bad things should happen together, and the usefulness of good things should be greater than the loss of bad things. Since using stairs is compulsory, players will not be able to accept the damage if only damage exists.

Slime Pit: Some of the food is consumed and produces a friendly slime(Slime ate your present and recognized you as a colleague.). They can't get out of the floor.
Or, By mistake you swallowed the jelly(It's incredibly delicious! But you feel bad.). You have considerably recovered HP and MP but corroded.

Swamp: a rope of vines instead of stairs. sprigan druid(with one head hydra) offered to give you the buff(might or hast or agility or brilliance) if you gave him the gold(100-200). When the deal is concluded, he and hydra is pacified and leaves upstairs. If you refuse, you must fight.

Shoals: a ship instead of a stair. Merfolk mercenaries appear and force employment. If you refuse, you must fight. They can't get out of the floor.
Or, Your ship was caught in a storm. You got to your destination safely, but you're tired(Drain). You can see the baggage that has been washed away in the storm(gold, 1 potion, 1 scroll).

Spider's Nest: bridges of the spider's web instead of stairs. Instead of being surrounded by spiders, there is a 'Sack of spiders'(Yikes, the Sack of spiders is open.).
Or, A spider the size of a fingernail bite you. you got a good mutant.

I wonder how it would play out if there simply were no stairs and the entire set of dungeons/branches was just one giant continuous interconnected map.

One-way stairs are the only variation on crawl dungeon structure I've seen actually done that substantially improves the game. You can see big levels in the circus animals fork. It is extremely bad and makes the big problems in dcss even worse. Small levels with one-way stairs would be probably be a marginal improvement over just one-way stairs, but that route doesn't seem to have much potential for a next iteration of improvement.