The Tavern

Please, remove the drain on XP when allies damage monsters. It's very spoilery in that a lot of people don't even know it happens or exactly how. I'm not quite sure I know exactly what happens with it anymore, there are a bunch of different exceptions for different types of allies and inconsistencies.

There are two main camps about this. One, who hate it for it not being transparent, and leading to all sorts of awful, awful tedium to try and avoid your allies to do damage at optimal times. I might get sick trying to explain all the possibilities that can crop out of trying to micro-manage to the situation. Usually this group cares about the XP lost if they understand the difficulty curve effect, and doesn't think allies are so great in the bigger picture compared to other methods of game play.

The other camp thinks the XP drain doesn't matter at all, and that stuff like summoning is so incredibly overpowered that it beats any other mode of game play for effectiveness. So, yes of course there needs to be a non-transparent penalty, because, those are good, right? <--- Hint, I'm not in this camp.

Okay, so I lied, there are more than two camps, because people feel differently about different combinations of factors, but at least can't most people agree that the lack of transparency in how it works is a good case to get rid of it? And for the people that think the XP drain is so meaningless, then you all should have no beef with getting rid of it. Who is left, oh, the people that feel summoning is so overpowered that it needs a penalty.... well, fine - whatever, just fight for some other way to weaken it if you think it's that great.

For the people who think summoners are so overpowered: go look at some tournament results and ask yourself, how come there are so many successful fighter games, berserkers, etc, but oh look the summoner starts aren't topping the charts. Go on and say it's all because of player preferences, and follow that logic that player preferences aren't based on what people can more easily win with.. go on, say it... I'm waiting.... While you're at it, make a case that tall people aren't better at basketball. I dare you!

An extremely poorly reasoned post, so much so that even addressing it in a serious way would be ridiculous, but the general idea that the XP penalty for damage dealt by allies is unnecessary and bad is correct. The problem is that the mechanics of allies break the game, both in terms of usability and balance, and that you cannot fix that by applying some other unrelated penalty. The mechanics themselves must change.

So, by your extremely valuable response here, I'll assume the rest of what you have to say isn't serious at all.

According to your previous statement, this could just be a joke? What's an example of a "specific idea" that is so much more detailed than this "general idea"? How many ways can you say that XP drain by allies is bad?

So, you're basically in the camp that allies are too powerful and needs a change to fix "balance", but of course that couldn't be construed as a penalty to the mechanic.

Where did I say anything about applying some "other unrelated penalty"? I said remove the penalty. Also, what do you mean by other unrelated? Are you suggesting that all other conceivable penalties must be unrelated? That doesn't make sense.

So, the mechanics "themselves" must be changed. Which mechanics? This is totally vague. Any change in mechanics must be anything but removing the penalty which you already implied as being "unrelated" in your previous statement is what is needed? Even when you stated yourself that it is unnecessary and bad? Isn't removing a related penalty (or is it unrelated?!) for a mechanic similar to making a change in a mechanic?

I'm having difficulty following your reasoning.
Perhaps it would have been more accurate if you had said that it sounded like I was on a rant, because I was a bit. It was still coherent, nonetheless.

It's responses like this that drove me away from this forum for a long time. Why do people do this to each other here?

What I don't understand is why people can't take their resentment of tavern and strawman arguments to the subreddit where they will be unanimously appreciated. What we have here is a video game forum where the only check on posting nonsense is social opprobrium -- there's no moderation for content, only tone. I'm sorry that some people cannot see how obnoxious the OP is and think of me as the villain. If you were the target of similar responses in the past and that's kept you away, I hope your posting has improved in the meantime.

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I risk being ridiculous in the eyes of tealizard, and make my attempt at answering svendre seriously.

In svendre's post there is a good argument for removing the XP penalty, but it is well hidden behind completely unrelated rant. I think the actually good argument is this:

There are two cases: the XP penalty either matters or does not matter. If it matters, it leads to degenerate play because you try to steal damage from your summons. If it does not matter, than we should remove it, because it is superflous spoilery complexity.

Note that this argument has nothing to do with whether summoning is overpowered or not. It never even mentions game balance: we only need to show that this mechanic is contrary to the anti-tedium design philosophy. (It is also an old argument, I know of no counterargument, and I, too, am puzzled why the penalty still exists.)

Svendre for some reason completly confuses this argument with the debate whether summoning is overpowered or not. That's why they tries make look those who think summoning is overpowered stupid with the ridicolous paragraph about the tournament and basketball, and tries to frame their argument around the "two camps". And this layer of their post is very badly presented, beause they does not even make an attempt to understand the "other camps" position, just attempts to make fun of them.

I can not argue in the name of tealizard (or anybody else), but I am in the camp who thinks summons are overpowered and extremly tedious to use. For better or worse, I try to make an attempt to make clarify my opinion for svendre and others in their camp with one remark:

There is a clear difference between 1) the strength of a character when played reasonably well and 2) how hard it is to play the character reasonably well for a human player. This is two different kind of difficulty, and instead of mocking the others you should try to make clear that you understand this, and in which sense you use the word "overpowered". This distinction is especially important in GDD, because the design philosophy discourages balance by tedium.

With this disntiction in mind can we make some personal opinions like the following:

There are characters that are (relatively) very weak, like MuFi or NaGl, but which can be enjoyable to play. There are characters that are strong, like DrSu, but if you try to rely very strongly on your summons all game (as opposed to simply learn something else like melee quickly), you go astray. It is very annoying to play with them, not in the sense that it is hard to figure out some good tactics but in the sense that it is very tedious to actually execute this tactic.

And also the following:
Melee is week, but gives good gameplay - so humans can have an easier time to follow good tactics with a melee character.
Summons are strong, but gives poor gameplay - so humans can have a much harder time to follow good tactics with a dedicated summoner.

And also the following:
For me, for any single situation, a summoner is very strong - I usually can come up with a plan to win the encounter, and more relyably than with many other type of characters. However, consistently doing it all game is next to impossible to me. For me, summoning a lot would be a very bad way to play in a streak - I get fatigued and die. A summoner would also be very bad for turn count, because summons are not a very fast way to kill monsters. And it is disastrous for real time, because summoners needs more positioning than anybody else, and you need to take into account the movement of more creatures. Now decide yourself whether summoning is overpowered for me or not.

And last but not least:
In DCSS you need not to build "pure" characters, so there are no reason to be a "summoner" or "melee brute" etc. Unfortunately this means that there are almost no DCSS characters that would not be improved by using summons. And summons are tedious, for me the current game would be improved if you just remove almost all of them.

"People" don't do this to each other here.

Tealizard does this to people here.

Please don't lump the rest of us in with that.

I completely agree with Svendre. This mechanic leads to tedious play to try to work around it. Let's ditch it.

Just to add that as it stands, the mechanic is quite obscure. I have an ongoing summoner game with some runes (so I've done a lot of summoning), and until I saw this thread I didn't realise I wasn't getting full XP for kills; there's nothing in log messages or spell descriptions as far as I see.

Because, contrary what svendre beleives, the penalty is actually not meaningful, and barely noticable if you do not know about it. Of course svendre is absolutely right that we should still remove it.

To substantiate your statement ("not meaningful"), can you please quantify for us how much experience is lost (in %) when an ally kills an enemy without our own contribution?

I am lazy to check the code, but to the best of my knowledge you get 50% of the experience.

Thanks for coming up with the right number here. 50%, as I read in a maths book recently, equals roughly half of a given entity - so if you find this "meaningless" and "barely noticeable", why not take away the just as meaningless other half of the experience on ally-kills? After all, they are doing all the killing, and if you add up the barely noticeable halves, that at least gives you a somewhat significant penalty, one that a very experienced player may even notice to some degree.

Sarcasm ends here. If I see it correctly, if you have a summoner play it totally by summons, you saddle that character with a -4 aptitude handicap on every single skill. Do you really believe this is meaningless and barely noticeable?

You seem to forgot that XP scales exponentially with the early levels (and I think about quadratic later). This would mean that you are about 1 level lower (and similarly with skills) (in the early levels) if you somehow have the patience for some challenge to kill everything just with summons.

However, in practice you won't notice this because summons are crazy strong and you can easily kill OOD monsters like uniques, two headed ogres, etc, that worth a lot of XP and that many other characters should leave behind for later. In practice you could easily end up ahead of a fighter for a while!

Later, when about any character can kill almost all monsters, the level difference could be bigger (I think about 5 levels maximum at level 27.). However, by this time this difference also matter much less, and you are also not really likely to kill everything with summons, even if you feel that you "summon a lot", because it is very tedious and your character are more likely able to kill most monsters alone.

I think that if you somehow play a "pure" summoner all game there is no point where it is weaker than a "pure" meele fighter: hence it may happen that you do not notice the XP penalty if you do not know about it and you do not have extensive experience about how high your level/skills are usually at a given point in the game. (I would not be able to play a "pure" summoner all game, I lack the patience.)

It's less of a skill xp gap than that because skill costs are modified by total experience points gained (see calc_skill_cost in skills.cc). Of course, the gaps in experience level and skill level for a 50% xp deficit are also smaller than one might expect because the cost of the next level of skill or xp increases with level.

For a very brief test example, rolling up a human summoner and killing an ettin at xl 1 entirely with allies and putting all of the skill xp into a +0 apt skill that begins at zero will take the player to level 7 and the skill to ~6.6. Killing the ettin entirely without allies under the same parameters will take the player to level 8 and the skill to ~8.5.

Naturally, there is some level of experience deficit for which "pure summoning" is no longer viable. One could tweak the numbers to reach such a level. The result would be a system that strongly encourages the sort of tedious damage micromanagement outlined in this thread, in addition to being an obvious hack for a badly balanced, unfun game mechanic.

The XP loss becomes noticable at high XL, especially when you want to do extended. (Because at that point there no longer is any exponential scaling.)
I'm of the school that there are no downsides whatsoever to (remove XP penalty + nerf summoning magic). Shadow Creatures and Mana Vipers are the 2 spells which are most guilty of being OP for characters who haven't committed to summoning otherwise.
All non-magic summoning already has a strategic cost.

See https://crawl.develz.org/tavern/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=25723

I always read posts like this as a parody of the "Well, ACTUALLY" kind of pedantically un-self-aware internet nerd.

If you're serious, tealizard, you're actively making the internet worse, but you are so unoriginal in your approach it reads as self-parody. Umm... congratulations?

What makes the internet worse is 50 million nerds popping off with nothing to say.

And you know, about the OP, this is not some new player who just doesn't know what they're talking about because it's a complex game with lots of ins and outs and everything's been discussed for years and years so that really knowing what people have been saying is a difficult undertaking. He's been around a long time and by now should know what he's talking about and have well-informed views. But that's not how it is and he has a chip on his shoulder about it, so he takes a topic that's been discussed many times and uses it as a vehicle for an obnoxious polemic against people who do know what they're talking about.

Is this the new duvessa?

The old one was wittier. But I suppose you have to take what you can these days.

Wow, okay I'll take the bait. Such nonsense is too irresistible to ignore. Let's recap:

I have a chip on my shoulder because I have ill-informed views about the game despite having a lot of experience, and because of this I'm lashing out at the all knowing entities. It's a rather interesting theory you have there. In order for this statement to ring true at all, first I must be ill-informed. This isn't demonstrated by anything you've said, so I'm calling bull so far. Secondly, this assertion implies that not only am I ill-informed, but I also believe I am ill-informed (to which you provide zero evidence). In fact you state that I have an awareness of which topics have come up before, and know enough about those topics to know that bringing them up again could be an effective way to aggravate certain all knowing individuals. If that were true, that is contrary to being ill-informed. Finally in your fantasy world, I must also be upset about being ill-informed, and me writing about wishing to see game mechanics altered must truly be just a devious plot to aggravate certain all-knowing individuals by means of said obnoxious polemic.

If I could remember more details from old psychology classes, I'm pretty sure I could identify correct terms for the egocentric behavior of redirection concerning my topic going on here. Alas, I cannot recall. I think I shall go into a blind rage over being so presently ill-informed.

Homie, if you want me to read this, you need to get to a point within the first five or six sentences.

Good afternoon, Crawl friends. I got a PM about this thread, which surprised me, since I’m not exactly an active moderator here. It’s also not abundantly clear that any other mods are available, so in the meantime, rather than handing out any punishments, I’ll be closing this thread. Any other mods, naturally, can feel free to reopen it.

Tealizard, I don’t think we’ve had the pleasure of interacting before (unless you’re a rereg of one of my old pals), but I think it’s highly likely you could stand to stop being such a huge jerk over internet posts. Thanks!