Proposal for an upper bound on turns taken: Zot Specters
Posted: Saturday, 11th July 2020, 19:32
I know a lot has been said about food (and its removal) already, but I need to repeat some of what's already been said to provide the necessary context for this conversation. Firstly, I agree with the position that the only function food fulfils in its current state (0.25) is preventing exploits resulting from having limitless turns. These are things like waiting thousands of turns on stairs until monsters come to LOS. These tactics are tedious and feel very scummy, if by chance any of them happened to be optimal, it would be a loss for the game as a whole.
Now, how would food look like if it was more cleanly designed for that goal alone? I imagine a scenario like this:
While this scenarios is certainly better than the current status of food. I would argue it still has significant problems:
It's unnecessarily transparent: A mechanic intended to limit a class of obscure exploits should not be part of the information that is given to most players, given that is not relevant to them. New players expect that the information given to them will be relevant.
It's a global clock, instead of a per-level one: A global clock essentially "rewards" you for finishing a dungeon level in 2000 turns instead of 3000. This might not be tactically relevant (if food is plentiful enough), but that clashes against players intuitions, which leads me to my next point...
It misuses player intuitions about food: There are many, many games where food is a scarce resource to be preserved, where hunger is a real threat. Players often come to crawl with these intuitions. We should work with player's expectations, not against them.
How do we solve these problems? Introducing: the Zot Specters.
The idea is simple: after a huge amount of time in a level, we start spawning an enemy which is unkillable, granting no xp, piety, or any other reward. The spawn rate should be constant, and, since the enemy is unkillable, they'll start accumulating in the level making it more and more dangerous. The mechanic should be obscure to most players: even playing a weak background/species combo, resting, luring, and running around, you should never encounter a Zot Specter. Once you do encounter a Zot Specter, the reason should be clear when reading its description. ("These damned souls, cursed to serve the orb for all eternity, will come after you if you spend too much time in the same part of the dungeon"). A Zot Specter can be damaged as normal, but any damage that would kill it, instead teleports it into another part of the level, avoiding feel-bad situations where a player dies after being trapped by a specter with no access blink/teleport. The specters should have a source of low but guaranteed and unavoidable damage (smite for example), so they can't be used as shields.
Now, how would food look like if it was more cleanly designed for that goal alone? I imagine a scenario like this:
- No chunks, or nutrition costs.
- Goldified rations.
- No [e]ating rations, rations automatically going down after a fixed amount of turns.
- Plenty of rations: no one starving unless they're doing something exploity
While this scenarios is certainly better than the current status of food. I would argue it still has significant problems:
It's unnecessarily transparent: A mechanic intended to limit a class of obscure exploits should not be part of the information that is given to most players, given that is not relevant to them. New players expect that the information given to them will be relevant.
It's a global clock, instead of a per-level one: A global clock essentially "rewards" you for finishing a dungeon level in 2000 turns instead of 3000. This might not be tactically relevant (if food is plentiful enough), but that clashes against players intuitions, which leads me to my next point...
It misuses player intuitions about food: There are many, many games where food is a scarce resource to be preserved, where hunger is a real threat. Players often come to crawl with these intuitions. We should work with player's expectations, not against them.
How do we solve these problems? Introducing: the Zot Specters.
The idea is simple: after a huge amount of time in a level, we start spawning an enemy which is unkillable, granting no xp, piety, or any other reward. The spawn rate should be constant, and, since the enemy is unkillable, they'll start accumulating in the level making it more and more dangerous. The mechanic should be obscure to most players: even playing a weak background/species combo, resting, luring, and running around, you should never encounter a Zot Specter. Once you do encounter a Zot Specter, the reason should be clear when reading its description. ("These damned souls, cursed to serve the orb for all eternity, will come after you if you spend too much time in the same part of the dungeon"). A Zot Specter can be damaged as normal, but any damage that would kill it, instead teleports it into another part of the level, avoiding feel-bad situations where a player dies after being trapped by a specter with no access blink/teleport. The specters should have a source of low but guaranteed and unavoidable damage (smite for example), so they can't be used as shields.