bel wrote:I was not talking about this as a "solution" to the stash management problem. I was just saying that it would have the effect of removing stash management. I have given my opinion on how to fix it elsewhere and won't repeat it here.
Perhaps I phrased the OP badly. I was just asking about how people feel about "non-persistent crawl" as compared to normal crawl. Would it be better/worse/more interesting/boring etc.?
Well, in large part it'd depend on how it was implemented.
If "non persistant crawl" means every level is generated freshly per the current rules each time you enter it, it'd mean that optimal behavior would probably be to scum every level for randomly generated stuff, stairs would still be "ultimate escape tools" (even more so, because you could enter a level, decide if you liked the layout, and if not, retreat see if you liked that level, and basically jump back and forth between levels scumming for an optimal level to scum for equipment until you hit the OOD timer (or longer if you wanted to)
If on the other hand you mean "That plus you don't start on an upstairs" it'd result in a lot more randomly bad situations that you had no built-in escapes from (Which would probably be better) but it'd offload the 'scumming' until you found an upstairs (or downstairs if that was the direction you wanted to go)
Yet another possibility is you might mean "There are no upstairs" in which case you really change the layout of the game entirely, you'd need to describe the actual rules you have in mind if that's your intent for me to personally have an opinion.
You could also mean "You can retreat upstairs, but levels that are generated after the first time are 'sterile' i.e. no monsters or loot" which doesn't IMHO mean it's much different than the current situation, except that you have more inventory management nightmares, as you have to save long-term useful items (like cure mutation, and spellbooks you might want in the future) in your inventory at all times.
You could also mean "Semi-sterile" in the "monsters are generated but no loot" Which means you can scum for XP but not for loot. (Also tedious)
All of those seem like lateral or downward movements in game quality to me, but that doesn't mean there's not some 'better crawl' game out there that works with non persistent levels, but I think it would require a more complex set of changes, what did you have in mind in more detail?