@Khalil:
As someone whose views on the matter somewhat mirror your own, I wanted to mention a couple things on the subject. I like that crawl has permadeath. It gives life meaning. It gives my crawl meaning. It makes 'survival' a laudable goal whereas in most games survival is trivial, etc. In this respect I agree with everyone in this forum. . .
. . . and then I die.
That right there? For pretty much any character of mine who gets as far as the Temple or the Lair, is just a moment of fury and frustration. Watching anywhere from two to eight hours of my day - or possibly three hours a day for a whole week - all going up in smoke. Because of -let's face it- 90% of the time my own mistakes. I mean, yes, sometimes you're dealt a super hard hand. But most the time you do something wrong - like autofight two giant spiny frogs at once while berserked instead of systematically drawing them back to a hallway because: "Fuck it, i'm strong enough, i shouldn't have to worry". Only now you've aggroed a death yak horde . . .way to go einstein. And because you're playing too fast/ not thinking clearly you try to walk away for two turns BEFORE initiating the teleport and realizing you wont run in time, etc. etc.
So I post a morgue file. I bitch about it to my friends. I complain how retarded it is that a game which can take 8-15hours to beat has no save capacity unlike, say, Mario Bros. which can be beaten in <30 minutes easily. And then, when I'm ready, I own up to the fact that it was my loss. It was my mistake, and here's how I can do better next time. Then queue up another. Over time I got better and better at getting to the "take responsibility for your mistake(s)" stage sooner, and won more often as a result.
I do believe that Stone Soup is too long a game to not be able to 'perma-save'. And I'm talking average play of an average player here, I mean, I've personally done a <2hour 3-rune MiBe before and I know that there are times out there that make that look ponderous. But then, asked the simple question: can you think of a better way to do it? I've got no answers. There is simply no way to punish a player hard enough to make death scary other than to threaten him with the loss of his progress that isn't just tedious or functionally the same as killing him.
To retread what's been said before: Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a skill game precisely because it has permadeath. If you could save anywhere anytime, it'd just be a horribly subpar, turnbased, grindy-game. For comparison I offer up Mario Bros 3 on the NES vs. the Super NES (AllStars). In the former, at least for players of my skill level, death was always a nagging concern. 1-ups were treasured. The player was legitimately threatened with loss of progress as the game progressed and this made you play harder, more carefully, and smarter. Until you learned about warp whistles
.
AllStars on the other hand - i'm not kidding here - my brother and I farmed the first world for 'P-wing' items so we could fly through the 8th world to beat the game trivially. We weren't good enough to clear that last world "legitimately" so we found a way to remove the threat, and the permanent save system was the reason we could do that. There's a beautiful quote which I no longer remember in all its eloquence that says gamers tend to be masters at finding the 'optimal' path of least resistance direction of play that will bore them the most and then doing it repeatedly. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (until you've beat the game) doesn't have one. I find this awesome.
On a completely different note, I wanted to give you an internet thumbs-up for the respectful manner in which you broached this extremely touchy subject on this board and your receptive attitude towards everyone's opinion even where you disagreed with them. I admit I hadn't expected it, and wish there was a way I could give you an internet thumbs-up for it.
-AHMAD
Tuesday, 16th April 2013, 16:03 
