Easy/Casual Mode

[Styro]

I got tired of being one-shotted. I know it is because of my sub-optimal play and because I get bored and am not careful when mashing keys. But after 100s of deaths I get impatient and that leads to more deaths.

So I downloaded the source and created an Easy mode for myself. It is a separate menu option at the beginning (like starting the tutorial) and has a separate high score list (like Sprint mode). It gives the player +10% HP, +10% MP, and +1 to all skill aptitudes.

There were a few design goals I had in mind.
1. Have a buffer for stupidity and casual play.
2. Remove the need for tweaking skills (I can leave all skills on and still have a viable character).
3. Reduce the tedium of building up the player's skills during the early game. Since so many characters die, this became very boring. Giving +1 to aptitudes means my players build up a little quicker.
4. Reduce early-game survival dependence on lucky finds. It is always nice to find a dagger of venom, platemail, or some other great item that will make the early game easier. I am in no way trying to suggest that you have to have good loot to survive, but the HP, MP, and skill boost makes the early game a little more forgiving.
5. Still leave the game challenging. The game is still hard. 10% is not a lot in the big scheme of things. And once a skill hits 27 it cannot go higher anyway, you just reach it a little but earlier.

There is an additional side-effect that I have noticed and that is that some interesting race/background combinations become more viable with the aptitude increase.

My characters still tend to die, but they get farther on average and it is less tedious (more fun).

I called mine Easy mode, but perhaps Casual mode would be better. Is this something that is worth considering for general release? Would other people be interested in it?

I could see a possible downside that players may become too soft playing Casual mode and get used to taking chances, but maybe that is not such a big deal.

As a bit of background, I am a relatively experienced roguelike player (been playing since Rogue) and have played Crawl since the original. I have two wins with 0.10 (SpVM and HOFi) before I created my Easy mode.

[cerebovssquire]

http://crawl.aerdan.org/

Crawl Light is a release that makes many things easier by changing some stuff and reverting many nerfs to obviously overpowered things. Here is the changelog:
https://github.com/dtsund/crawl-light/b ... ngelog.txt

Just look at the buffs to the non-casting characters. These alone will have a more significant impact than your (rather minor) changes. And then of course there are things like ranged Sticky Flame (which is absolutely silly).

Also, it seems that everything is identified from the start (just fired up a game), which makes the early game much much easier - I know all enchantements monsters have, have pre-identified potions, know what is cursed and what is branded on the floor, etc.
I also just found a shop on D:2.

Sadly it's 0.8, maybe updating it is possible for someone if aerdan isn't. If we are going to have an "easy mode" (which isn't necessary) it should have more interesting implications than increases so basic.

[XuaXua]

...of course there are things like ranged Sticky Flame (which is absolutely silly)...Sadly it's 0.8...

Wasn't ranged sticky flame the standard usage of the spell till it was nerfed in... 0.9? That might just be an 0.8 aspect, rather than an easy mode aspect.

[Kate]

Light has some really interesting stuff mixed in with the kneejerk reverts and buffs, yeah. No item identification or curses, shortening of all branches, glow costs instead of a food clock have all been implemented so far. I forget what else dtsund has planned but there's a bunch of stuff, probably. I think a fork with big changes like that is a lot more interesting than just some aptitude and health tweaks, anyway (although yeah, it's based on 0.8 so I expect it's unlikely to ever be up-to-date with bug/crash fixes, interface improvements and so on).

[cerebovssquire]

Wasn't ranged sticky flame the standard usage of the spell till it was nerfed in... 0.9? That might just be an 0.8 aspect, rather than an easy mode aspect.

Uh... no? The changelog's also in my post for you to read so why ask? Ranged sticky flame is marked as a 0.8 change there so it hasn't been in since 0.7.

[Styro]

http://crawl.aerdan.org/

Crawl Light is a release that makes many things easier by changing some stuff and reverting many nerfs to obviously overpowered things. Here is the changelog:
https://github.com/dtsund/crawl-light/b ... ngelog.txt

I was not familiar with Crawl Light, but it looks the design philosophy is one that I mostly agree with. Thanks for pointing it out to me.

Things I like:
1. Game length reduction. I agree that Crawl is too long, particularly some of the branches. It just becomes repetitive (8 levels of the Lair?). I like Sprint for this reason, but I wish there was a 10 level version of Sprint with mini-vaults (a 1 level Lair, Shoals, Crypt, etc possibly holding runes).

2. The addition of the side-stepping feature from DoomRL. I think that is a great tactical feature.

3. The elemental affinity idea as a replacement for elemental magic skills where (for example) fire affinity would affect fire magic as well as things like fire wands and fire branded weapons. Evocations is removed.

4. Removal of vanilla ammo for launchers (players would have an infinite supply of non-branded ammo) to remove the tedium of ranged players building up a stack of 500 arrows to enchant. Anything that reduces meta-gamey stuff like this is good in my book.

5. Better scrolls of acquirement that give you a more refined choice in what you get.

Things I dislike:
1. I am not a fan of the smiley-frowny face for enemy HP. I prefer the bar.

2. I miss the latest interface changes and things like reaching polearms (which I consider a great tactical and interesting addition to Crawl).

3. I miss the changes to how skills are handled (no more victory dance in Crawl, etc).

4. I am not sure about the no-ID thing. It seems like a staple of the roguelike genre. On the other hand, does it add much to the game? I dunno. I just use-ID everything since I do not care about optimal play and it ends up as just an annoyance. Occasionally it ruins a character, but it is usually so early that it is not a big deal - just start over.

I hope they continue development. It looks like it could be fun.

[IronJelly]

I've never heard of Crawl Light before either, but Styro, I would definitely be in favor of adding your Casual mode to the game. subtle changes > major ones. If added, it would probably need a seperate scoreboard (do sprint/zotdef have seperate scoreboards?), but it would certainly open the game up for newer players having trouble. Maybe you could, instead of making it an additional gametype choice, make it a feature of hints mode.

[sardonica]

You can access easy/casual mode at any time already, by pressing &

[cerebovssquire]

peA = the best casual mode

[IronJelly]

There is possibly another way to make an easy mode:

What if it was a species instead of a mode. In this way, you could experience the normal game, but at the same time, it would be quickly obvious which scores were set with the Easy Mode characters.

Really. Take Humans, add +1 to all skills, give them permanent +10% MP and +10 HP mutations, and make them level slightly quicker (from 100 to 90 or something). Unlike Demigods, don't restrict their worship, and name the race Superior Humans or something, with a description stating that these are the creme of the crop humans, and are more likely to succeed.

Since the races are already known to be deliberately not balanced, it wouldn't hurt anything. You could label them as experimental or easy or something, and it would be obvious when looking at a score, that the race is SH, instead of Hu or whatever. I would also maybe argue that SH deaths don't leave ghosts, but that's just personal preference.

in this way, you don't have a seperate game mode that needs to keep up with the changes in Trunk, and you don't have to change the game.

[tasonir]

agreed, superior humans aren't really superior enough, but really it wouldn't be hard to instead just make "superior minotaurs" and buff all their magic to +1, and add another +1 to all their already high physical, and give them more hp/magic, a stat point every 2 levels, etc etc etc.

The concept could work, although I think it would mess up scoring somewhat since it's a pain to filter out results by races when you're looking at a recent win you had and you were #545 highest scoring - how many were super minotaurs? hard to say. Did super Deep Elves (same as deep elves only with +30% health instead of -20%) win 30 games or 60? Maybe just make these altered races automatically non-scoring, but without access to wizmode (unless they enable it specifically).

[KoboldLord]

Now you're just cluttering everything up.

Really, just use wizard mode. It's totally allowed.

[nrook]

Wizard mode is a fundamentally unsatisfying experience. Winning a game with Styro's "easy mode" would still be an accomplishment, though less of one than winning a regular game of Crawl; winning a game of wizard mode is obviously trivial.

I don't think I like the idea of easy mode (if only because it lowers the power of the first win, probably the greatest rush Crawl has to offer), but let's not pretend that's a real alternative.

[Patashu]

How about taking felid's 'extra life' mechanic, and adding it to every race, and calling that easy mode? You're still playing the same game, up until you die, then you get another shot.

[pratamawirya]

Wizard mode is a fundamentally unsatisfying experience. Winning a game with Styro's "easy mode" would still be an accomplishment, though less of one than winning a regular game of Crawl; winning a game of wizard mode is obviously trivial.

Well that entirely depends on how much you abuse wizard mode commands. If you give your character a free level raise and a free heal wound potion at the start, for example, the game won't be so broken afterwards. If you set all of his magic skills to 27, well....

[KoboldLord]

Wizard mode is a fundamentally unsatisfying experience. Winning a game with Styro's "easy mode" would still be an accomplishment, though less of one than winning a regular game of Crawl; winning a game of wizard mode is obviously trivial.

I don't think I like the idea of easy mode (if only because it lowers the power of the first win, probably the greatest rush Crawl has to offer), but let's not pretend that's a real alternative.

If winning in Wizard mode is unsatisfying, that's on you, not on the concept of Wizard mode. Nobody says you have to set all skills to 27 or spam acquirements until you have full resistances and 50/30/50 defenses on D1.

Granted, nobody's going to be impressed if you try bragging about winning in Wizard mode, but that's going to be a pitfall that will stigmatize 'Easy Mode' or 'Casual Mode' too. I guarantee if such a mode is implemented, within a month we'll have another new player complaining about how things are so hard, but they won't play the official Easy Mode because "It's unforgivable to play Easy Mode unless you're an elementary school kid, right?"

[dtsund]

Oh hey, I guess this is a thread I should probably post in!

(although yeah, it's based on 0.8 so I expect it's unlikely to ever be up-to-date with bug/crash fixes, interface improvements and so on).

For what it's worth, I've merged quite a lot of post-0.8 commits into the Light code. I stopped because git cherry-pick stopped cooperating, but I intend to merge a lot of the most important stuff added since as well some time prior to the 0.2 release, manually if need be.

3. The elemental affinity idea as a replacement for elemental magic skills where (for example) fire affinity would affect fire magic as well as things like fire wands and fire branded weapons. Evocations is removed.

4. Removal of vanilla ammo for launchers (players would have an infinite supply of non-branded ammo) to remove the tedium of ranged players building up a stack of 500 arrows to enchant. Anything that reduces meta-gamey stuff like this is good in my book.

Neither of these is implemented. #3 was an idea posted to the brainstorming section of the development wiki; there are aspects of the idea I dislike, and I may or may not ever decide to add it. #4 is on the to-do list.

1. I am not a fan of the smiley-frowny face for enemy HP. I prefer the bar.

This was changed because at the time of implementation, the HP bars on monsters were misleading. I brought this up in ##crawl-dev since doing that, and they've since been changed to be less misleading; I will probably revert to bars, just haven't gotten around to it.

2. I miss the latest interface changes and things like reaching polearms (which I consider a great tactical and interesting addition to Crawl).

See my response to MarvinPA; I haven't merged all that I want to.

3. I miss the changes to how skills are handled (no more victory dance in Crawl, etc).

You don't need to victory dance in Light either; the # key in the skills menu activates an autotraining mechanism to direct all incoming experience to the skills you want. It's different from SS because we more or less implemented our VD solutions at the same time. I probably will not be merging the SS changes to skills code, mostly because I'm planning on removing experience investment in skills altogether in 0.4 (this will be such a major change with such far-reaching consequences that I'm pretty much planning on structuring that release around it).

I hope they continue development. It looks like it could be fun.

Development on Light is active. I should note that Light isn't simply intended to be "easy-mode DCSS", although playing in a relatively easy mode is possible; I'm currently halfway through implementing a hard mode intended to terrify the sort of player who eats Ziggurats for breakfast. It's also got a fair number of changes meant to be orthogonal to difficulty, like the Shoals reform.

[IronJelly]

How about taking felid's 'extra life' mechanic, and adding it to every race, and calling that easy mode? You're still playing the same game, up until you die, then you get another shot.

How about if you die and were not the worshipper of a Good God, undead, or a demigod, you come back as a ghoul with all your spells and equipment that you had when you died. I mean that, it's only one extra life, and it might make some sense that you were so desperate in your quest for the orb that your restless spirit continues your quest. One could argue that it could be any of the undead races (maybe you get mummified after dying), or some new "zombie" race that acts as your old one, with permanent slowness or something.

[ebarrett]

how about lrn2play, that makes the game easier too

[IronJelly]

how about lrn2play, that makes the game easier too

Is the jerkwad attitude a part of learning to play as well?

[Grimm]

That's it. The idea has no legs and the discussion has become jejune.

edit: XuaXua wishes it to be known that lrn2play is an active lurker who watches online games of crawl and posts advice to players.