damiac wrote:Hurkyl wrote:Kramin42 wrote:For me, 2d6 doesn't tell me that much about how much damage I'm going to do. On the other hand, firing off a spell at an enemy a few times tells me exactly what I need to know. I would rather that players were encouraged to take this experimental method than forced to get their calculators out and crunch the numbers in order to play optimally.
If I see 2d6 and 2d5, I immediately know how those values relate. If I'm firing spells at enemies, it will take hundreds of attempts to have anything mildly statistically significant, and I'm quite liable to infer the wrong thing long before I get to that point and get stuck on it due to confirmation bias.
Yes, exactly this, because crawl is played by humans, who are AWFUL at statistical analysis. The idea that you should be able to figure out which of two weapons or spells is better through experience is based on the idea that humans will percieve slight differences in randomized patterns over time. In fact, people cannot do that, and instead will inject their own incorrect assumptions based on their incomplete knowledge, then various biases will only entrench the player further into their incorrect assumptions.
If the patterns are so slight they cannot be noticed, I would posit that the player should not concern him or herself with them. I would also posit that the very fact many people are not very intuitively good at processing probabilities also greatly limits the usefulness of providing people with information like, "This spell does 3d6 damage," "This other spell does 5+2d4 damage," "This spell does 1d20 damage." Especially if one of those spells ignores EV while another one checks AC twice and takes highest value.
There are unintuitive things about Crawl that are problematic, and some things which I think could/should be made transparent. But exact damage values and the like is not one of them.
Nearly every death is directly and primarily attributable to a tactical mistake. This is what it means to say that a death (even with a badly skilled dude) is avoidable. Of those relatively few instances in which bad skilling is a
significant contributing factor to a death, the bad skill management and/or gear choices were bad because they left a character too vulnerable for whatever point in the game they were at.
Maybe you disagree with the above assessment. But if not, then I think it is fair to ask what value would actually be gained by foisting this information upon players, and especially upon players who already have enough on their plate trying to really master/internalize the interface and commands and basic tactics. People who really want to know can just look the stats up online.
The actually useful information for a player is stuff like, "Is this sufficient to kill an ogre before it kills me?", and realistically, people are only going to develop a sense of that through experience, anyway.