The Tavern

When the zot clock was added, I remember a note saying that only the most degenerate gameplay would trigger it. However, I've almost triggered it in my normal game exploring holy pan, doing nothing crazy: just cycling between o, tab, and 5. Now I'm going to have to leave my current floor without finishing exploring it because of the zot clock. I'm not complaining, just pointing out that you can trigger the zot clock without doing anything degenerate during normal gameplay.

It also happened to me at holy pan. I had several hundred turns left when I finished (can't remember exactly, got 1 warning).

Holy Pan does seem like a significantly-longer-than-normal pan level to do with reasonable safety (and the rune is pretty annoying to ninja or get quickly), it's quite plausible to me that that specific level wasn't evaluated for Zot Clock timing (Disco Pan is the other one that I personally find takes me an abnormally long time to complete) I don't think there's any specific consideration for "weirdly long levels" but it seems logical that some levels would give you a longer-than-normal amount of time to complete (down the road, it's also plausible that we tighten up the clock by having particularly small levels give you a smaller-than-normal amount of clock time, although that might be too much of an information leak unless all clock exceptions are pre-telegraphed like holy pan and disco pan already are)

If the clock is tuned as intended, the chances of a player knowing and caring about the it before having any more useful information about the floors in question seems highly remote, if providing such information is even undesirable, which I don't see why it would be (no spoilers). I mean, if a player never gets warned by the clock, why would they care or even know about it, unless they're already seeking information online?

Except that the player can set always_show_zot and so learn how many turns s/he has as soon as s/he enters the floor.

That's not really an "except", in that all of my reasoning still applies. That just makes the thing people are unlikely to do slightly more convenient if they were to actually do it.

I may be misunderstanding your point. I understood you to be saying that there wouldn't be an information leak because players would already have seen the level was special by the time they got their first Zot warning. Which is true, but they wouldn't have seen that yet when they see the clock is higher than it usually is on level entry. (I agree the leak is likely trivial and not worth worrying about.)

Ah, yeah, that's not what I meant at all. I meant a player either having seen the levels in a previous game or having searched for more significant information about DCSS on the internet.

But, I may also have been missing Siegurt's point, if it's a question of whether or not an experienced player should be able to tell which version of pan they are in. To that, I would suggest simply displaying a message in the log when a pan rune is present so the issue would be moot.

This already happens, and on levels where such a message generates, there would be no information leak.

That sub-point was really just saying that currently when you drop on a *non message containing* level you don't have any indication of how hard it is, and *if* we generalized level-specific zot clock rules to account for levels that would be longer or shorter, you could examine the zot clock to get information which isn't generally available now, and it'd be better if we confined non-standard zot clocks to levels which already had a message of some sort announcing that they were special, or we added such a message to levels where we wanted nonstandard zot clocks (because if you can get information by examing the zot clock then it's tedious, but optimal to do so, and it's dumb to hide such information behind in such an awkward and tedious manner, so it's better to announce it if it's going to happen.)

Makes sense, except that I'm skeptical as to how connected a level's size is to its difficulty.

Disco is one of the easiest runes in the game *if* you have digging+stealth.
map: dig diagonally into the corner of the (sleeping) dancing weapns.
apport
1 step back.You're visible now from just 1 tile
apport again
grab rune and fog/blink or pog (prepared) out.

I've done it countless times.
(with some stealth ofc)