Mines Malingerer
Posts: 33
Joined: Monday, 20th January 2014, 01:12
Option for adjustable dungeon complexity/gamelength
I love Crawl but always found the standard game taking quite a bit too long. The game seems to "drag" in later stages, and I found myself prone to quitting/premature ascending because of declining interest or deaths born out of tedium because of repetitive gameplay. Please don't misunderstand me here: I really DO think the game is a total blast but the abundance of dungeon-/ branch levels with the ever increasing deluge of enemies (ogre, yaktaur or draconian squads etc.) in later levels is...well...repetitive. So I tried Dungeonsprint but found it too static/limited to be a real alternative to the standard game.
I applauded the reduction of Vaults to five levels and later was thrilled by the introduction of the "depths", further shortening the main dungeon and cutting the boredom down quite a bit by adding a hefty challenge. But personally I still think the whole game lasts too long (my average game time being 8-12 hours for a win with more than 4 runes) and therefore requiring more than one evening, which is quite a hefty time investment.
Then I read about "crate crawl" and "crawl light" which specifically adressed this "problem" of mine I had with the game taking too long and was fascinated. From what I was able to gather about "Crate Crawl" it seemed to be a variant ("fork") which required the player to only get three runes (or just the silver rune, I don't quite remember). "Crawl light" on the other hand drastically reduced the number of dungeonlevels but alas changed the general gameplay by adding new schools of magic and features which I wasn't too sure about whether I'd like them. But both variants thrilled me to speculate about how a "shortened" version Crawl would play.
I wonder what the general opinion of the crawl community would be about an optional feature that would one allow to choose the "dungeon complexity" when starting a game. For a comparison: in the turn based strategy game "Civilization 4" you could choose the "speed" of a game at the start, thus allowing more/less gameturns before the game would end. All gameplay-factors would be delayed/accelerated if you chose a slower/faster gamespeed, so you could extend/reduce the actual "real" time it would take to play through a complete game according to your personal taste.
So, in Crawl terms, choosing a quicker "gamespeed" would reduce the number of dungeonlevels, but increase the XP gained from kills and emphasise more/good item drops.
Here's a proposal for an optional "quick" setting:
Dungeon: 10 levels
Depths, Orc, Elves, lair, lair branches, vaults, hells & Zot: 3 levels
Pan: 50% chance to find a "rune" level after leaving a Pan-level
I do realize that this proposal would require a MAJOR reworking of XPs gained for kills and item drops which is definitive quite difficult to implement, but why not have some brainstorming about it?
Is this doable at all, what do you guys think? And don't be too harsh on me, if this seems totally "whacky", it just came to my mind and I wanted to hear about what other players might say about this optional feature.