FR: Make "divine experience leaves you exhausted"unambigious

[le_nerd]

Currently if one experiences god wrath what can happen is that you get a message "the divine experience leaves you exhausted" and become slowed.
All fine (except thats not in wrath descriptions I believe; certainly not in Vehumets where it happened to me) except:

We have a status of exhausted and its functionally very different from being slowed.

So I propose that we instead use any of the other messages we already have for being slowed:
Either the Wrath one "drains your vigor" or the Mummy death curse one of "You feel horribly lethargic."

[sanka]

I'm not native English, so I ask this seriously. Is it bad style in English to call something by it's name, that is, mention the word "slowed" when you are slowed?

[tedric]

Questions of writing style vary a lot from one context to another (and I assume that is true in languages other than English, too). A journalist would choose "slowed", but a novelist might want a more interesting or expressive phrase. Game design kind of straddles both approaches: Documentation (including the % screen, status indicators, etc.) should be clear and precise because it's a technical description of the game mechanics; but in-game text has the additional purpose of creating flavor and contributing to a sense of narrative -- which I assume was the motivation behind the nifty vocab words "vigor" and "lethargic" in the messages mentioned above.

[njvack]

... that said, "You feel yourself slow down" might be an appropriate message whenever the "Slow" status effect is applied to the player, for whatever reason -- in addition to whatever flavor text that explains why you're slowing.

[tedric]

Yeah, and actually "drains your vigor" to me has always implied some kind of stamina bar or action points that need to be recharged, rather than slowness. Which would be more in line with what the Exhausted status actually does...

[Quazifuji]

Yeah, and actually "drains your vigor" to me has always implied some kind of stamina bar or action points that need to be recharged, rather than slowness. Which would be more in line with what the Exhausted status actually does...

The fact that "drain" is also a status effect in DCSS makes this doubly ambiguous. I think a general policy of "flavor messages shouldn't include the name of a status effect if they don't cause that status effect" is a good one to take. "Draining your vigor" or "leaving you exhausted" may imply being slowed down in normal English, but in DCSS "drain" and "exhaust" mean specific things and shouldn't be used if that's not what's happening.

"Drain" also often has a connotation of "stealing" something in video games (i.e. if an RPG has a spell called "drain life," someone who's played a lot of RPGs probably expects it t not only damage an enemy, but heal the caster as well). This isn't particularly a concern with a god wrath message, since you certain don't expect a god to get more vigorous as a result of draining yours like you might if the message came from a normal enemy, but I think it's still worth taking into consideration.

Overall, "drain" is a world loaded with a lot of connotations in DCSS and RPGs in general that don't apply to that message, and there are other words with similar issues. Even a native English speaker could get confused about it, let alone someone who doesn't speak English as their first language, especially if video games are the main place they've heard a word (which I imagine is the case for many words for non-native English speakers who play a lot of video games in English).

[partial]

I'm not native English, so I ask this seriously. Is it bad style in English to call something by it's name, that is, mention the word "slowed" when you are slowed?

No, but from a flavor perspective it's nicer to read something like "Wrath has made you extreme lethargic." rather than "Wrath inflicted Slow status."

[treerex5]

"The divine experience leaves you feeling horribly lethargic."

[Sar]

Sleep status also exists.

[Pollen_Golem]

Messages could have a colon between flavor and technical explanation, like so, so that you don't confuse the fluff for an additional effect:
"Vehumet touches you. The divine experience tires you out: You feel yourself slow down."

[Siegurt]

I think grammatically that should be a semicolon, not a colon.

[tedric]

let's not be anal about the way we each use our own colon

[chequers]

All this bikeshedding for a one line change. You can submit a pull request for changes like this in eight steps:

1. Go to the crawl repository and search for the string:


2. Find the string


3. You need to click 'fork' in the upper-right before you can edit a file


4. Once you've forked the codebase, you can edit the file and find the line you want to change:


5. Add a description of what you changed ("subject") and why ("body")


6. Check your work


7. Create a Pull Request for the developers to review


8. Congratulations, you don't have a ten reply thread on GDD about an obscure one-line change. If the developers like the idea, they will merge it (this part can take several days).

[Rast]

Can that ^ be split out to its own thread and stickied?

[treerex5]

Stickying that would be super helpful, please do it.

[njvack]

I'm gonna let a dev/mod do that if they want to. This is a really good howto on making pull requests; I think a stickied guide might need to include stuff on how to make a good PR, such as coding conventions, and how to communicate with the dev team...

[partial]

thanks alot for that cheq