Discussions of difficulty/skill/danger/etc in this forum are often very strange. Here's a rant about this that I've been waiting to post somewhere, I'm not sure the bottom of a duvessa cyc thread is
exactly the right place but here goes.
I think a lot of strong players who want to talk about difficulty/etc (with minmay/duvessa as probably the main exemplar, but not the only one) ignore, fail, or refuse to consider two factors:
Point 1. There's a tremendous amount of implicit knowledge, unconscious mental habits, etc that go into developing skill at a game like crawl over time. Part of what makes a player good or bad is this unconscious body of information/habits and how they apply it in the game. This is true of things like chess or go, things like playing the piano, and I don't see why it shouldn't be true of crawl. But this means that "difficult" interpreted as "difficult for me" is in many ways not useful, coming from a strong player who doesn't seem aware of the sheer amount of implicit knowledge that they have about how to play the game. Moreover, without explicit acknowledgement of it, most people don't take "difficult" to mean something different than "difficult for the person talking". If you think about what these concepts are used for in a game like chess or go where there's an in principle but unknown analytic solution to the game, they are never used like this. Rather, there are notions of "difficulty" like, for example, the decision space is very large and the causal consequences of early decisions are very far away from those decisions. Example from go:
Carpenter's square. This notion of difficulty is not egocentric because, though strong players could mitigate the difficulty, it acknowledges that it is something that everyone is going to have to put in a lot of time and effort on to gain skill, and the acquisition of that skill doesn't change anything about the difficulty. It's also not tied to the analytic solution (which I suspect is what this list is supposed to be about) -- because if you had the analytic solution to go, the whole game would be easy. E.g. in the sense that duvessa uses it, the carpenter's square would be "easy" to some players. But to talk about the carpenter's square this way is, at best, not useful, and at worst, actually quite rude (if you are one of the people who knows the carpenter's square; I'm not).
Most of the time when duvessa (not just him) says something like "X" isn't dangerous, he seems to mean, "X isn't dangerous to me", which I would contend is of fairly limited use, and not what most other people mean when they use words like this. I wish the latter would at least get acknowledged.
Point 2 Crawl has a
lot of moving parts, and situations in crawl can be very complicated. They don't have to be -- you can have a stripped down simple situation where it's just you, 1v1 with the adder in a hallway, no jackals or geckos around. This seems to be what a lot of people, duvessa included, would prefer these discussions to be about. But it's very unclear to me what a "normal" situation is like in crawl, even for a very strong player -- I suspect that for non-popcorn fights the average, if there can be such a thing, is not this ideal, because stuff happens. Probably a notion of difficulty like the one I suggested above for go/chess would be useful in crawl as well, and then if you're trying to evaluate monsters, a question is what scenarios can they generate (so howler monkeys or whatever might be quite dangerous by this metric, at least in theory).
One thing that is clear to me from observing my own play over time is that much of the unconscious knowledge I outlined in point 1 is aimed at making situations be simple, so the average changes with skill. A "normal" situation for me now is very, very different from a normal situation when I had ~2 wins, and the change between the two is gradual and hard to notice in its small increments, except when I think about this in the big picture. And I know from occasionally spectating that "normal" is yet again very different for strong players than me. One example: when strong players give advice like "just walk away", there's a
lot of skill that goes into the ability to (a) set up encounters via movement and terrain so that that is possible in the first place, and (b) pull off the walking away without getting into a messier situation. This is "easy" by some metric in that strong players can do it very consistently. But again, a lot of this skill is basically unconscious knowledge built up over practice that it's hard to be aware of applying, like the particular details of movements of your hands while you play the piano. So there's a very real sense in which "dangerous in the ideal" is not a very useful notion of danger for most people who are interested in discussing this topic, or at least not the only one. It's also not how most players will approach the notion of danger intuitively in a game like crawl.
I get that this list is probably aiming at some sort of analytic list in order of danger, which is interesting in and of itself; minmay is probably strong enough that this is not too far off for him (though even he actually acknowledges non-perfect play for himself). This post is actually a lot more interesting than most of these discussion imo. But like most of these discussions the notion of "danger" isn't going to be the default intent of the participants, and it would be better to acknowledge this from the get-go and reframe accordingly.