goodcoolguy wrote:This thread becomes increasingly mysterious. There are many spells that allow one to reliably run away from nearly all monsters without using any consumables. Almost any spell that produces allies fits this description, for example. Indeed, one of the best spells for this purpose is a level 1 summon.
What's next? "This spell allows the player to reliably kill hostile creatures in the dungeon..."
The theme of this thread, as I see it, is "
Escapes with no drawback shouldn't exist unless they take up a consumable item slot." This would shift the burden of how many times a player can screw up and press 'undo' onto floor item generation, and away from abusing engine quirks that have historically enabled easy escapes.
The unspoken assumption is that the game would be more interesting if the ability to escape from dangerous combat situations became more rare.
Aside from Swiftness and staircases, that aforementioned thread theme also covers things like: aut manipulation gap creation techniques (energy randomization, breadswinging, etc.), monster pathing gap creation techniques (nonthreatening fast monster threat blocking/displacement when kiting, cornermove pathing being able to displace threats when dealing with groups of monsters of equal speed, delaying monsters with shallow water pathing), floor feature gap creation techniques (fighting near identified traps [perma-/teleport traps, webs, net traps]), stealthbased LOS-breaking gap creation, pathblocking gap creation techniques (summons, conjure flame, damaging clouds, etc.), status effect gap creation (mephitic cloud, ensorcelled hibernation, confuse, recite, etc.), and probably a bunch more stuff I'm forgetting to mention.
This theme can be extended to cover poorly-limited itembased gap creation (status inflicting ranged items that mulch at less than 100% [curare, nets, status needles], rechargable evoker items of gap-creating effect [wands of slow/confuse/paralyse/teleport, fan of gales, bag of beasts, sack of spiders]), and also poorly-limited godbased abilities that can be used for gap creation [summons are a big offender here].
Notably, many of these gap creation techniques lose their potency if staircase escapes are disabled. It doesn't matter how many ways you have to create gaps, if you still have to deal with the thing you're running from. Removing staircase escapes would thus rather obviously have the effect of making DCSS combat significantly more dangerous, to the point where it might require a rework of available escapes and recovery consumables to achieve a reasonable target difficulty. It's not immediately clear that this would result in better gameplay within the DCSS ruleset, but it would probably be interesting to tinker with in a branch.
As a whole, this theme of escape reduction reduces down to: "
Where do you draw the line?"
One example:
Does Controlled Blink as a level 7/8 spell run afoul of this notion of "unlimited escapes shouldn't exist without drawbacks"?
It's easy to argue that Controlled Blink as a level 8 spell in current versions has enough of a drawback in the relatively large experience sink necessary to bring it online that it should be exempt from such discussions of trivial unlimited gap creation, yet if you begin down the path of removing the simpler methods and restricting consumable escapes (while leaving Tloc alone), at some point along this theoretical line of removals the balance would eventually shift in favour of many characters going for heavy Translocations as default. Does this speak to a more fundamental problem with Tloc existing as a school? Or alternatively, does this simply represent one possible endpoint of a reductio ad absurdum that has no basis in the actual game?
Pull a hatchet job on too many features, leaving only those escapes that are proscribed from on high as okay, and you might eventually find in future versions that the game feels far too sterile. Players have already complained about feeling this effect with the loss of some spell interactions in the past (I'm thinking specifically about the reaction to the loss of sticks to snakes + inner flame at the moment, but there have been others), so you probably don't want to go too far with cutting features that have resulted in imaginative usage / emergent gameplay. Again: Where do you draw the line?
Players aren't machines that use escape features with 100% efficiency. This seems obvious, but it should probably be explicitly stated anyway. If you want a player to have the option of escaping and actually use it, you might need to throw several such options at them in the hope that they see one.
For what it's worth, my opinion is that escaping in DCSS is currently too easy for most characters once you've passed D:5 or so and have several items identified.
Particularly vulnerable starts are possibly justified in having an early reusable escape available to them, but rather than leaving these things as spells, it would probably be better to shift those early escapes over to charge-delimited item starts, with enough charges to reach D:5 or so.
edits: clarity, phrasing