Friday, 6th September 2013, 17:13 by and into
I don't have a very strong feeling one way or the other, though I am on the side of not allowing it, and since the rationale for that hasn't been very well expressed so far, I'll put my two cents in.
Outside of transmuters (a very interesting and unique hybrid starting point), or Monks (who have a unique piety bonus), is it good *design* to give UC as an option for gladiators, etc.? I can see why people want to just say, "Give the player as many choices as possible, so long as it doesn't become OP or mess with other balance issues or clog up the starting screen too much." That's not an unreasonable position. But, from what I take to be the design perspective of crawl, there are problems with that.
Beginning classes in Crawl are meant to be starting points, not "kits" (in the D&D sense), and the whole structure and core mechanics of Crawl reflect this fact.
EVERY character begins the game with appendages (of some form), and the ability to train unarmed combat. It is actually one of the very few things ALL species have in common. However common it may be to run across one in the first few dungeon floors, your character does not START with a hand axe, unless you choose a particular background, and is not GUARANTEED to come across one immediately. The design intent behind class choice is to give you some starting materials, although yeah in some cases those materials are better or at least much more exotic and unique than others, and then after the fact (so to speak) you get some skills appropriate to them. (Except with Wanderers, which are a bit different.) Races with claws, on the other hand, already have something unique about them, and their option to choose UC reflects that.
So there's nothing unique introduced by having a few skill points in UC as an "option." In fact, it (however slightly) actually eliminates options, as someone starting with a spear can *immediately* train UC *or* spear. You can even train one while using the other to kill things, now that victory dancing is dead. (And I'll never stop dancing on its grave, by the way.) In this case it may be trivial and fine to add the UC option to gladiator, as I said I don't feel *that* strongly about it, but I do think it diminishes the differences between starting classes, and let's face it, the non-God straight-up melee starting classes already have a problem standing out from each other, as it is.
In fact, Monks only got that unique piety bonus because it was (rightly) felt that they otherwise lacked differentiation from fighters, gladiators, hunters, etc.
A more minor point, but one that still deserves to made, is that providing for more and more options can also (falsely) give the player the sense that all those differences in options are meaningful, and sometimes they are not. As it stands people overvalue things like aptitudes and starting skills far too much already, worrying about "wasted" skill levels, and it leads to all sorts of skewed notions regarding game play. The design of crawl itself is (mostly) not responsible for these notions, though, so much as entrenched different habits from other games with a very different design philosophy from crawl. This is a mark of crawl's success at being distinct and shouldn't be taken too lightly, even in apparently trivial matters like offering a UC option to a few class backgrounds.