The Tavern

This is stolen from Marbit's locked proposal (for good reason you naughty sausage) on having stairs connecting branch ends to the top, but only if you have the appropriate rune.

This was implemented in Skyrim and various other games (I know you're eager to say 'BUT THIS ISN'T SKYRIM', 'CRAWL TAKES NO INSPIRATION FROM ANYTHING!' - but please don't) and worked well - no one wants to traipse back through cleared levels. It involves no challenge, doesn't have any affect on the char. and absolutely everyone cntrl+g's it.

The only exception is if you used mapping on every level, ran through everything and massively ninja'd the rune. I personally don't think this should be encouraged and view it as broken behaviour - not that you should have to fight everything, but you certainly should be able to handle most things on the way back up if you can get through the bottom floor. Also, any char that manages to pull this off once, probably won't be able to successively do it if they're not getting enough XP from battlin'.

THOUGHTS AND INQUIRES?

The only exception is if you used mapping on every level, ran through everything and massively ninja'd the rune. I personally don't think this should be encouraged

Then why are you making a proposal which would encourage it?

Volteccer_Jack wrote:
The only exception is if you used mapping on every level, ran through everything and massively ninja'd the rune. I personally don't think this should be encouraged

Then why are you making a proposal which would encourage it?

Because the proposal removes tedium. Also, you can already get the rune and run to the stairs, the propossal doesn't change much.

I'm glad that someone thought that at least one of my proposals was interesting. I'm a bit sad and ashamed for the fate of my post :oops:

from now on I'll post my ideas in the generic brainstorming thread in CYC before opening any post in GDD but I'm affraid tha people there rarely say anything coherent, let alone give feedback.

Don't be ashamed, Marbit. You just have to hang around a bit more and learn about what people look for in new features.

minmay wrote:not really seeing how pressing G then pressing 1 is more tedious than pressing G and then <

In fact G< would not work with this proposal; it prefers known staircases to unknown ones.

It would also have a favorable impact on speedrunning (turncount). Might make it easier to get high scores, although with fairly normal stair placement, going up 5 floors is probably only around 200ish turns...still, with ~4-5 branches in a 3 rune speed run, it would add up.

that said I would still think it's a good feature. If you wanted to balance it out, you could just make taking the shortcut count as N number of turns.

I was more thinking it would be interesting if we had some more complex interrelationships between branches, like a Metroid-esque network of passages. Some of the Hell portals are unique in this regard...

Or if you wanna get really weird about it, the "exit tunnel" could be a really short one-corridor level which is just packed with branch-specific monsters, balanced so that it takes around the same number of turns to clear it out as it would take to walk back the long way, of course once it was cleared, you'd have a nice little branch-ending shortcut, should you need to get there and back in a hurry. Of course that seems a bit silly even to me, and I'm pretty silly.

minmay wrote:oh does that bug still exist where stairs leading out of a branch can count as unknown? thats dumb

That sounds unlikely considering that there is only one staircase out of branches now.

Or you can put this in your init/rc file:

Code:: travel_delay = -1

Does it mean I don't need to fight all those spiders in front of Spider Nest entry? Can a character dive into first found branch in Lair (let's say on L3) and then get to another Lair branch which is on L6 or even L8 without entering L4-L7?

Sandman25 wrote:Does it mean I don't need to fight all those spiders in front of Spider Nest entry? Can a character dive into first found branch in Lair (let's say on L3) and then get to another Lair branch which is on L6 or even L8 without entering L4-L7?

That's exactly what I think might be interesting. Might not be a good idea but it would be interesting.

Marbit wrote:Because the proposal removes tedium.

What tedium? It's 2 keystrokes and takes between half a second and 3-4 seconds depending on your travel_delay setting. Also, if the portal is anywhere near the rune, it's a huge buff to the ninja tactic.

I'm a bit sad and ashamed for the fate of my post from now on I'll post my ideas in the generic brainstorming thread in CYC before opening any post in GDD but I'm affraid tha people there rarely say anything coherent, let alone give feedback.

You can post your ideas in GDD just fine. There is no moderation on bad ideas! Err, don't take this the wrong way, I'm not saying your ideas are bad. Just don't be afraid that they might be. At worse, people will tell you or ignore you but we don't lock threads only because we think an idea is bad.
Your thread was locked because it contained dozens of unrelated ideas and this is something we try to avoid because it's really annoying and inefficient. Choose one idea, take the time to make a good post explaining why you think it is a good idea and make one thread.

galehar wrote:You can post your ideas in GDD just fine. There is no moderation on bad ideas! Err, don't take this the wrong way, I'm not saying your ideas are bad. Just don't be afraid that they might be. At worse, people will tell you or ignore you but we don't lock threads only because we think an idea is bad.
Your thread was locked because it contained dozens of unrelated ideas and this is something we try to avoid because it's really annoying and inefficient. Choose one idea, take the time to make a good post explaining why you think it is a good idea and make one thread.

Heh, I meant to put all my ideas in CYC before making a post in GDD. I know that the forum is free and that I can write in GDD.
I wanted to avoid making 10 different posts because I had 10 ideas, oftentimes they are just silly and I hadn't realized.
I understand the reason why the post was closed and I don't take it bad. The moderators are doing their (volunteer) job and they are doing it well.

If we want to prevent making it easier to dive a branch for the rune and escape without passing through much of the branch, the portal to the top (I don't think it should be a simple up-stair) could only open when you have the rune and have travelled through two out of three staircases on each floor. Or just some fraction of the staircases, without being picky about which floors they are on.

This is more radical:
We could also just say that each runes gives you a single-use teleport to the the start of the branch where it is found, with some additional serious cost like permanent HP loss (With a random chance of movement speed loss!) I don't know if someone would ever say, "Maybe I'll try tomb so I can teleport out of the orb chamber with that extra rune when things get hairy." Let it work from Pan and the Abyss if the cost is high enough; runes are hard to get and there are only so many of them.

Maybe runes that have been spent (either on the stair that this thread is really about or on my telporting sidetrack) no longer have the power to open the door to Zot.

EDIT:Maybe a good cost would be that all future teleports have a chance to take more turns before they execute.

Why? 'G' is a thing that exists, and it is very good at letting you skip boring travel. As several people have already said, there really is no reason at all to add something like this to crawl.

I should have been clearer:
G is great - it works well and no one says it doesn't. However, often times you get stuck on a bat/popcorn (especially if you haven't completely, completely cleared a level) and so if you're going all the way from bottom vaults to the top, you'll probably get stuck 1 or 2 times on something easy. This isn't a big deal, it's just tedium that could be avoided.

I also meant that the problem with the proposal is that it encouraged Ninja'ing the rune, and it'd need some sort of counter balance such as Mark/noisy on rune pick up, or something else to balance it out.

Bim wrote:I also meant that the problem with the proposal is that it encouraged Ninja'ing the rune, and it'd need some sort of counter balance such as Mark/noisy on rune pick up, or something else to balance it out.

The downsides far outweight the upsides. It solves an extremely minor problem (IMO non-existent) and has a balance issue.

Ok, well could this be a good time to interject the idea of not respawning popcorn? That's the most annoying thing about it, I wouldn't mind if I had to fight off a hydra or whatever, but coming across a few green rats or a bat and that stopping auto travel is extremely annoying.

Bim wrote:Ok, well could this be a good time to interject the idea of not respawning popcorn? That's the most annoying thing about it, I wouldn't mind if I had to fight off a hydra or whatever, but coming across a few green rats or a bat and that stopping auto travel is extremely annoying.

unless you are hungry (which is not rare).

Sandman25 wrote:
Bim wrote:Ok, well could this be a good time to interject the idea of not respawning popcorn? That's the most annoying thing about it, I wouldn't mind if I had to fight off a hydra or whatever, but coming across a few green rats or a bat and that stopping auto travel is extremely annoying.

unless you are hungry (which is not rare).

Agreed, but I don't think that's a good reason for having it - permafood is way too much anyway, and if it was felt to be needed to bridge the distance, you can still get corpses off high level monsters too.

Bim wrote:Ok, well could this be a good time to interject the idea of not respawning popcorn?

Well, the monster spawning formula has been rewritten already, I don't think there's much popcorn in branches.

galehar wrote:Well, the monster spawning formula has been rewritten already, I don't think there's much popcorn in branches.

The new formula intentionally replicated the old numbers fairly accurately. I don't think much at all has been actually changed in terms of what monsters and individual weightings, aside from branches that have recently had new monsters.

There's also the discussion of stopping popcorn from spawning after a time on cleared floors (e.g. making stash runs less annoying); and also removing popcorn spawns in late D and elsewhere. Also there are things that are easy to do with the mon-pick distributions that we could look out now; for instance giving branches a smoother difficulty curve, making the higher level branch end monsters start spawning thinly on earlier branch levels. In general I think a lot of the mon-pick numbers could be reviewed and improved now, luckily all the data is in one place and easy to interpret now!

What if there was a setting one could put in their settings which would not stop auto-travel for monsters below a certain threshold of danger level (I know that's a little difficult to quantify, e.x. boggarts)

I'm not sure it's practical, but I think that makes some semblance of sense.

Siegurt wrote:What if there was a setting one could put in their settings which would not stop auto-travel for monsters below a certain threshold of danger level (I know that's a little difficult to quantify, e.x. boggarts)

It would certainly be possible, but it might just be easier to prevent those spawns.

(changed topic title)

I'd definitely, definitely support a reduction of popcorn respawning/spawning later down the branches. By lair, D:1-4 monsters shouldn't be spawning in my opinion. As far as respawning goes, I'd say that only higher (for that level) monsters should rspawn

Bim wrote:(changed topic title)

I'd definitely, definitely support a reduction of popcorn respawning/spawning later down the branches. By lair, D:1-4 monsters shouldn't be spawning in my opinion. As far as respawning goes, I'd say that only higher (for that level) monsters should rspawn

If all respawns were OOD you'd feel it. Levels don't start with all that many monsters, a lot of what you normally fight are respawns.

Easy corpses can also be an important source of food and wall-of-zombies.

Speleothing wrote:Easy corpses can also be an important source of food and wall-of-zombies.

Also source of Wandering Mushrooms, piety, healing (blood for Vp, vampiric weapon for DD, chunks for Gh), mutation (Ugly Things)

Sandman25 wrote:
Speleothing wrote:Easy corpses can also be an important source of food and wall-of-zombies.

Also source of Wandering Mushrooms, piety, healing (blood for Vp, vampiric weapon for DD, chunks for Gh), mutation (Ugly Things)

All of these can be gotten from higher end monsters. I'm not talking about just having OOD respawns or anything, just not rats/goblins/ball pythons/really easy stuff after it's been 'cleared'.

So a sort of 'If over (so many turns) don't spawn below HD (depending on dungeon depth) monsters' type thing.

I never find coming across a yakpack/ugly thing mob annoying, even if I can easily burn through them - as there is some sort of challenge, but getting stopped on auto travel by a goblin/snake is just needlessly annoying.

mumra wrote:If all respawns were OOD you'd feel it. Levels don't start with all that many monsters, a lot of what you normally fight are respawns.

unless you got one of the billion vaults that populate crawl now
those generate with lots of monsters

crate wrote:
mumra wrote:If all respawns were OOD you'd feel it. Levels don't start with all that many monsters, a lot of what you normally fight are respawns.

unless you got one of the billion vaults that populate crawl now
those generate with lots of monsters

Incidentally this is one of the aspects that I like the most about how DCSS is, the countless vaults - and the Deja Vu you experience when you get the same vault at the same stage every now and then.
While a combination of o/tab make characters rather disposable - it's still quite nice that at least it's not the same old story in the same old place every game.

crate wrote:unless you got one of the billion vaults that populate crawl now
those generate with lots of monsters

Ok but what does that have to do with the comment I was replying to?

Context exists.

it's just a complaint about vaults

minmay wrote:everything, because it's about how many monsters are respawns, just like your reply

Well it didn't make any difference to the point I was making since respawns still are a significant portion of what you fight, even in a vault-heavy place like V.

crate wrote:it's just a complaint about vaults

Yeah, that was more what it sounded like

I see the point about vaults, and that a lot of what you fight is respawns, so my only suggestion would be for respawns after a certain amount of time after reaching the level (this could be moderately large to accommodate for slow play styles) it drops off any chance of getting the lowest monsters in that particular depth table.

This could have a secondary check that stops any monsters spawning which are significantly weaker than the player (I'm presuming packs of things have their own singular spawn (so an orc pack might be treated the same as one deep troll?)). Again, I'm not saying that it should be all OOD or really hard monsters, just no popcorn.

Bim wrote:This could have a secondary check that stops any monsters spawning which are significantly weaker than the player (I'm presuming packs of things have their own singular spawn (so an orc pack might be treated the same as one deep troll?)). Again, I'm not saying that it should be all OOD or really hard monsters, just no popcorn.

We can remove popcorn just by altering the monster spawn tables, I don't know if your suggested changes to spawn mechanics actually make any difference here?

mumra wrote:
Bim wrote:This could have a secondary check that stops any monsters spawning which are significantly weaker than the player (I'm presuming packs of things have their own singular spawn (so an orc pack might be treated the same as one deep troll?)). Again, I'm not saying that it should be all OOD or really hard monsters, just no popcorn.

We can remove popcorn just by altering the monster spawn tables, I don't know if your suggested changes to spawn mechanics actually make any difference here?

To be honest, altering the spawn tables to get rid of popcorn is pretty much all I mean.

My only thought/suggestion was that it could possibly be linked to time, so that the first spawns had a greater variety (with the possibility of popcorn if desirable) whilst as time went on the amount of popcorn was reduced to zero, so that you didn't get them popping up as you were backtracking/running to stash.

edit: I realise that there may still be popcorn from the initial spawning, but it'd hopefully lower it.

rip death cob

The Tavern

Proposal: Preventing popcorn spawns

Proposal: Preventing popcorn spawns

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